Hence Global Corporate Venturing has already published the early agenda for the 10th GCV Symposium but there has also been a number of big continental deals, including Tink, a Sweden-based open banking platform, raising €90m ($99.8m) from Poste Italiane, Italy’s largest financial services network, and local banks’ corporate venturing units, such as ABN Amro Ventures and BNP Paribas’ Opera Tech Ventures
Having launched over the past year in Belgium, Austria, the UK, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy, Tink told TechCrunch it was live in 12 European markets and connects to more than 2,500 banks that reach more than 250 million bank customers across Europe, such as NatWest, ABN Amro, BNP Paribas Fortis, Nordea and SEB.
Impressive, and rapid, growth in tricky markets but investors have probably more than half an eye on last week’s massive $5.3bn exit for US-based fintech Plaid to Visa as a peer comparison to Tink.
Whether or when Europe-based corporate venture-backed peers reach those sorts of exits levels – rather than just whether the amount of money going into them is massive – is key to further unlocking Europe’s improvement in the innovation capital ecosystem.
