Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. Let’s goooo! — Mary Ann

Last week was a true roller-coaster ride in the world of fintech. It felt like for every funding round that I covered, I also reported on a layoff. Real estate tech companies Redfin and Compass combined let go of over 900 workers while Notarize and Wealthsimple conducted staff cuts of their own. In the contradictory world that is the startup scene, proptech HomeLight raised a $60 million extension and acquired another startup.

Meanwhile, insurtech Sana also raised $60 million and says it doubled its valuation. But the biggest news of the week — which some might say shook the fintech world — was that decacorn Brex revealed that it will no longer serve small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). TechCrunch dug into the news in three separate pieces, and I’m going to get into some of the background around it all here. So, don’t go anywhere.

Brex cuts off SMBs

Three months after announcing it would make a big push into software and enterprise, fintech giant Brex confirmed that it is apparently abandoning a segment it started out to serve — small- to medium-sized businesses.

Now initially there was some confusion as to what that meant. SMBs like brick-and-mortar businesses? SMBs as in startups? I talked with Brex CEO and co-founder Henrique Dubugras to get some clarity. What he told me may not have been as comforting to some of our readers as the company might have hoped.