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. — Mary Ann

Layoffs up in H1 2022

In 2021, fintech startups were the top recipients of venture capital globally, accounting for about 21% of dollars raised with $131.5 billion across 4,969 deals. So far in 2022, fintech startups are earning another, less favorable distinction — accounting for the third largest number of layoffs, by percentage, globally.

As of July 1, some 3,709 employees — excluding crypto companies — have been laid off across 41 “layoff events” in the second quarter of 2022, according to an analysis by Roger Lee of Layoffs.fyi. For context, that is 3,709 out of 36,861 startup employees laid off overall during Q2, meaning that fintech accounted for 10.1% of the total. Based on that categorization, the fintech space ranked third behind food and transportation, respectively. However, the site classified companies such as Better.com in the "Real Estate" category. So if you include that company's layoffs — which amounted to some 3,000 in the first quarter of 2022 — the fintech numbers inch up even higher and fintech becomes the category that saw the most layoffs by percentage — 15.4% — in the first half of 2022.

Notably, in all of 2020, 8,715 employees in fintech were laid off. And there are surely far more fintechs around today than there were back then. In 2020, fintech trailed behind the transportation and travel categories when it came to layoffs as percentage of the total, Lee told TechCrunch via email.