Despite fintech winter, Raisin allows employees to work from home abroad and pays for their accommodation. The company has rented a villa in Greece over the winter, where up to ten colleagues can set up their laptops simultaneously.
The German fintech CM Equity offers fintechs a platform for crypto trading. In 2021, founder Michael Kott made decent business with it - and rewarded himself with an unusually high bonus of €7.5 million.
Expect a lot and pay well: The Berlin fintech mainly looks for techies. With seven years of professional experience or more, they can expect a six-figure salary. Certainly, Trade Republic also laid off numerous employees last year but still hires promising people. The startup, founded in 2015 by Christian Hecker, Thomas Pischke, and Marco Cancellieri, closed a Series C financing round of €250 million in 2022 at a valuation of almost five billion euros.
Valor PayTech has hired "payments veterans" Riaz Ladha and Eric Kirk to lead its new strategic payments business unit. Ladha joins Valor as senior vice president of integrated payments and strategy. He will be responsible for leading the Card-Not-Present (CNP) business unit.
Amsterdam-based payment service provider Mollie will appoint its current Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Koen Koeppen, as its new CEO. Koeppen will replace Mollie's current CEO, Shane Happach, who is leaving the company after about two years to take on a new role in Asia.
Peter Thiel is one of the most controversial investors in Silicon Valley. The circumstances of his sudden exit from Bitcoin are unlikely to change that. Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by the German-born billionaire, earned around $1.8 billion in recent years by exiting the crypto market promptly, according to the Financial Times. The San Francisco-based fund pulled out of the market before the crash. Founders Fund had been invested in cryptocurrencies for almost eight years, making its first investments in Bitcoin in 2014.
Spiros Margaris acquired more than 127,000 followers on Twitter as a payment tech advisor and keynote speaker on insurtech, artificial intelligence, and fintech.
The New York Attorney General Letitia James filed charges against Celsius Network founder Alex Mashinsky, alleging that he defrauded investors out of billions of dollars in digital currency by hiding the weak health of his now-bankrupt cryptocurrency lending platform. Mashinsky continued to promote Celsius as a safe alternative to banks and paid up to 17% interest on deposits while hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in losses in risky investments, according to the lawsuit.
The most spectacular fraud in German economic history is the Wirecard bankruptcy. The main defendant is former CEO, Markus Braun. On the other hand, one of the prominent masterminds of the scandal, Jan Marsalek, is living comfortably in Russia.
