Author: azeeadmin

French startup Lydia is better known as the dominant app for peer-to-peer payments. But the company has been adding more features, such as a debit card, account aggregation, donations, money pots and more. This week, the company is adding savings accounts thanks to a partnership with French fintech startup Cashbee.

If you aren’t familiar with Cashbee, the company lets you open savings accounts through a mobile app. After connecting your bank account with Cashbee, you can transfer money back and forth between your bank account and a savings account.

Right now, Cashbee partners with My Money Bank for the savings accounts. Cashbee doesn’t keep your money, it just acts as a middle person between your bank account and My Money Bank. With those savings accounts, users can expect an interest rate of 0.6% after an introductory rate of 2% for a few months.

Lydia basically offers the same terms and conditions with a few differences. Instead of earning 2% interest for the first three months, Lydia users only earn more interests during the first two months.

The other big difference is that Lydia asks you to put at least €1,000 on your savings account when you open it. If you go through Cashbee’s app, you only have to put €10 or more. But users can do whatever they want after that when it comes to putting some money aside and withdrawing money from the savings account.

But the fact that Cashbee is seamlessly integrated in Lydia is interesting. It’s going to expose Cashbee to a lot more users as Lydia has more than 5 million users. It’s also an important features if Lydia wants to become a financial super app.

This savings feature competes with Livret A, the most prevailing savings account in France. Everybody can open a Livret A in a retail bank. You get an interest rate of 0.5% net of taxes. On paper, 0.6% is better than 0.5%. But Cashbee’s savings accounts aren’t net of taxes.

If you’re a student and don’t pay any taxes, that’s a better deal. But many people pay 30% in taxes on accrued interests, which means that you end up earning 0.42% in interests net of taxes with a Cashbee account.

But it’s hard to beat the simplicity of Lydia’s solution here. For instance, you can save up to €1,000,000 on your savings account while the Livret A is limited to €22,950. In other words, if you’re already using Lydia to send, receive and spend money, you might want to check out those savings accounts.

Now that we have your attention, know this: prices go up tonight on passes to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising. If you’re an early-stage founder (pre-seed through Series A), don’t miss this chance to save $100 on our two-day virtual event dedicated to helping you build a stronger startup. It’s one of the best investments you’ll ever make.

It’s Now O’clock: Buy your pass here before the sale expires tonight at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

Why should you attend TC Early Stage 2021? Chloe Leaaetoa, the founder of Socicraft and an Early Stage 2020 attendee, explains.

What you learn at Early Stage is so much better than the random information you find on YouTube. You get to interact with industry experts and ask them specific questions. It’s like a mini bootcamp, and you’re going to walk away with a lot of knowledge.

What can you expect at Early Stage 2021? The first day is packed with presentations designed to help you learn (or deepen your knowledge of) essential startup skills — product fit, growth marketing, fundraising and a whole bunch more. We’ve tapped some of the best startup ecosystem experts who will not only impart their wisdom, but they’ll also take and answer your questions.

Check out the event agenda and our roster of speakers.

We’re talking an interactive experience — from which you’ll take away tips and advice that you can implement in your business now when you need it most. Case in point, again from Chloe Leaaetoa:

Sequoia Capital’s session, Start with Your Customer, looked at the benefits of storytelling and creating customer personas. I took the idea to my team, and we identified seven different user types for our product, and we’ve implemented storytelling to help onboard new customers. That one session alone has transformed my business.

Day two is all about the TC Early-Stage Pitch-Off. Tune in and watch as 10 early-stage founders bring the heat. Each team will deliver a five-minute pitch front of TC editors, global investors, press and hundreds of attendees. After each team pitches, they’ll engage in a five-minute Q&A with our panel of top VC judges.

You’ll learn so much by watching those pitches and hearing the VC’s questions. It’s a great way to improve your own pitch deck. And if notetaking is not your forte, don’t stress. All sessions, including the pitch-off, will be available courtesy of video-on-demand.

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising takes place July 8-9, but you have just hours left before the early bird flies south and the prices head north. It’s now o’clock — beat the deadline and register here before 11:59 p.m. (PT) tonight.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 – Marketing & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The U.S. insurance technology market is hot, and has been for years now. Back in early 2020, to pick an example, TechCrunch reported on a wave of funding events among domestic insurtech marketplaces. Those companies have since gone on to raise hundreds of millions of dollars more.

And after a long period of incubation, we’ve seen neo-insurance players from the U.S. like Root and MetroMile go public. Hippo is working to join the cohort.

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The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. 

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

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So from the perspective of venture capital activity, startup growth, and exits, insurtech is proving itself in the States. Even if growth remains the name of the game in insurance tech and profits are often scarce.

What about other markets? The recent Wefox round caught The Exchange’s eye. A $650 million insurtech round would have commanded our attention regardless of its location. But to see a European insurance technology startup raise that amount of cash made us wonder if there’s as much money present for the EU market’s insurtech startups as we’ve seen here in the U.S.

After all, with business-focused neo-insurance provider Embroker raising a big round this week in the United States, to pick an example, it seems that attacking the massive and antiquated insurance market is good startup sport. Why wouldn’t that concept apply to Europe?

To find out more, we got in touch with a number of VCs from Europe to hear their perspectives on what’s happening on the ground, including folks from Accel, Astorya.vc and Insurtech Gateway. To ground us, we collated the biggest recent rounds from the EU insurance technology market. Let’s go!

A quick note on insurtech exits

Venture capitalists and startup founders get paid when they generate an exit. Lately, exits in the space have featured a number of IPOs.

The older a startup gets, the more it has to deal with public-market investors. Crossover funds and the like make their appearance before unicorns go public. And then former startups have to pitch not the venture capital market, but the public markets. It’s a different game.

That’s the impression that The Exchange got chatting with the CEO of Root, Alex Timm, this earnings cycle. He noted that public tech-focused investors don’t always grok the insurance elements of his business, while insurance investors don’t always grok the tech side of Root.

It’s been just under two years since I reviewed the WF-1000XM3, and in that time, Sony’s earbuds never stopped being the reference point for high-end earbuds. Seriously, I reviewed a new pair like a month ago and still made the customary reference.

That’s a rarity in these days of the yearly upgrade cycle. And that goes double for the wireless earbud space. It already felt crowded when Sony entered it in earnest in mid-2019, and things have only gotten worse on that front. But the M3s were a breath of fresh air. With so many companies competing for the middle and low end of the spectrum, Sony dropped something truly premium.

Six months before the AirPods Pro arrived, the M3 hit the market with excellent sound and noise canceling. The latter has, of course, become standardized across the category, but when Sony brought it, it was nearly unheard of. In spite of the headphones’ warm reception, however, the company’s waited two years to deliver a proper follow-up. Understandable, I suppose. Improving on very good is difficult.

I’m happy to report that the WF-1000XM4 is worth the wait. Sony’s great at high-end headphones, and these are no exception. The new buds represent an improvement over their predecessors in a number of ways. Unfortunately, they’re priced to match. If you thought the M3’s were steep at $230, I’ve got some bad news for you, friend. The new ones run an additional $50.

The upshot is that new headphones means a price drop on the older units. A quick search shows them for around $178 from a number of places, putting them more in line with standard earbud pricing. At $30 more than the AirPods Pro, Sony’s really leaning into the premium end of the spectrum. If anyone has the resources and scale to keeping pricing down, it’s Sony.

Are the WF-1000XM4s worth the price? It’s a fairly subjective question, of course. What I can definitely say is that they’re among the best-sounding pairs of earbuds you can buy. I’m still not convinced that anyone can truly duplicate the over-ear headphone experience in a pair of buds — the form factor is just too limited for now. But there are definitely advantages to going with buds — namely portability and on these unspeakably hot summer days, a chance to let your ears breathe.

Buds are, of course, better suited to fitness, as well. Though if you’re specifically looking for a pair to work out in, these probably shouldn’t be your first choice. I mean, they’re IPX4 water resistant, which is plenty good for sweat, but these are more of a long plane ride or sitting at your desk and really enjoying the hell out of a jazz record kind of earbuds.

In part, because they’re big. Granted, they’re a fair bit smaller than their predecessors, and moving from a paddle design to placing the components above the ear canal is a net benefit, but they’re still a bit too large for a long run. And while this is one of those things that vary dramatically from person to person, I found that the buds tended to cause ear pain after wearing them for extended stretches. I found the pressure relieved a bit when I swapped the medium foam tips for a small (I’m a medium in virtually all variety of earbud tips), though the small were much worse at forming a seal in my ears — a necessity to really take advantage of the active noise canceling. And even still, the eventual dull pain was not non-existent.

It is also worth noting that I’ve had less than spectacular experiences with foam tips. They tend to be more prone to wear and tear than silicone and have a habit of getting a bit gnarly in the earwax department (look, this job isn’t always pretty). Though I understand why high-end manufacturers go this route, from a comfort perspective.

Also, hey, kudos to Sony for going with sustainable paper packaging. It’s not much to look at, but how often do you really look at the package your electronics came in? Anything that’s even slightly better for the planet is a net positive in my book. And besides, the charging case looks great.

It’s significantly smaller than the W3’s. These are a helluva lot more pocketable. It’s an understated matte black, albeit with a pretty loud white Sony logo on top. The magnets are strong and the buds snap into the case with authority — they’ll also attach to each other. A thin LED strip directly below the lid glows green or red, depending on charge. The case is wide enough to sit upright, so the USB-C port is located around the back — or you can charge it up wirelessly with a Qi pad.

Interestingly, the stated charging time is the same as the M3s, though the numbers have been shifted around. With the originals, you got six hours on the buds and another 18 from the case. Here it’s eight hours on the buds and 16 on the case. So, a full day, either way, but I certainly prefer the two added hours on the actual earbuds.

The buds themselves are a bit flashier than the case. The design features two intersecting circles, the upper most of which is designed to lie flush with the ear. The outside is accented with a metal microphone, with a second, flush microphone up top.

The sound of the buds is really excellent. It’s got the kind of instrument separation that opens up new details on familiar songs you missed with inferior buds. The default balance is terrific, as well. Sony doesn’t lean to heavily into the bass because it doesn’t have to. The headphones sound terrific across a wide range of music varieties, as well as podcasts.

The noise-canceling is, once again, industry leading. A simple tap on the left earbud cycles between ANC and ambient noise, and the difference is like night and day. I was really impressed by the sounds it was capable of blocking, including my extremely loud vegetable juicer. I was also impressed by the buds’ Bluetooth range.

With earbuds, it’s true that you often get what you pay for. That’s certainly the case here. Sony’s once again managed to set the bar for high-end buds with the WF-1000XM4.

 

Last week, Apple announced it wanted employees to return to the Cupertino campus starting in September for three days a week. Some employees who had grown used to the flexibility of working at home pushed back.

Prior to the pandemic with few exceptions, most employees went into an office most days, but when COVID hit in March 2020 and workers were forced home, employers quickly learned that their staff could be productive even when they weren’t sitting in the same building. Now it seems it will be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.

Finding that right balance between fully remote and however a given company defines hybrid — like Apple some days in the office and some days at home — is never going to be easy and there will never be a one size fits all answer. In fact, it’s probably going to be fluid moving forward.

Just to show how different companies are approaching this, we asked five other large technology companies besides Apple to see how they were treating the return to the office, and each was looking at some form of hybrid work:

• Google is taking at a similar approach to Apple with three days in the office and two days at home. “We’ll move to a hybrid work week where most Googlers spend approximately three days in the office and two days wherever they work best. Since in-office time will be focused on collaboration, your product areas and functions will help decide which days teams will come together in the office. There will also be roles that may need to be on site more than three days a week due to the nature of the work,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet wrote in a recent blog post.
• Salesforce is giving employees a broad set of choices depending on their role. Most employees can work at home most of the time, and can come into the office 1-3 days a week to collaborate with colleagues, meet with customers or for presentations. Others who don’t live near an office can be fully remote and those who choose, or whose job to require will be office-based, coming in 4-5 days a week.
• Facebook is expanding remote work telling employees, “As of June 15, Facebook will open up remote work to all levels across the company, and anyone whose role can be done remotely can request remote work,” the company wrote to employees.
• Microsoft is leaving it up to managers, but most roles are going to be remote at least part of the time. As they told employees in an announcement recently, “We recognize that some employees are required to be onsite and some roles and businesses are better suited for working away from the worksite than others. However, for most roles, we view working from home part of the time (less than 50%) as now standard – assuming manager and team alignment.”
• Amazon originally was looking at a policy of mostly in-office, but it announced this week that it had decided to offer employees a more flexible work schedule. “Our new baseline will be three days a week in the office (with the specific days being determined by your leadership team), leaving you flexibility to work remotely up to two days a week,” the company wrote in a message to employees.

The larger tech companies are offering most employees some level of flexibility to decide when to come into the office, but how do startups look at work as we move toward post-pandemic? Most startups I speak to don’t foresee an office-centric approach with many taking a remote-first approach. Andreessen Horowitz recently surveyed 226 startups in its portfolio and found that two-thirds of portfolio companies are looking at a similar hybrid approach as their larger counterparts. In fact, 87 were thinking about 1-2 days a week with 64 looking at no office at all, only gathering for company offsites. By contrast just 18 said that they wouldn’t allow any work from home.

Dion Hinchcliffe, an analyst at Constellation Research, who has been studying distributed work for many years says that tech companies will be more likely to embrace flexible work models now that they have seen how it works during the pandemic.

“Most tech companies will maintain some degree of flexibility when returning to the office, especially since it is popular with many of their workers. Plus the worries about productivity loss have turned out to be largely unfounded,” he said. But he emphasized that this would not be true for every company.

“Certain companies, especially ones that believe they have a lot of IP to protect or operate in other sensitive types of work will be more reluctant to allow work to continue from home,” he said. This in spite of the fact that many of these companies have been doing just that for the last 15 months. Going hybrid as Apple has only muddles that argument further.

“It definitely includes Apple, which has long been well known for discouraging work from home. Their new policy of three days a week in-office probably makes them feel a bit more secure, but does not really accomplish it,” Hinchcliffe said.

Of course companies can set policies, but it doesn’t mean they won’t run into employee objections. Apple certainly learned that. Workers appear to want to be the ones choosing where to work, not their employers, and it could very well be a competitive advantage to offer work from home options, especially in a tight labor market where the power appears to be shifting to employees.

It should be interesting to see where this all goes, and how much power employees have to push their companies to their more flexible working ideal. For now, most companies will have a far larger degree of flexibility than existed pre-pandemic, but certainly not everyone wants people working from home all the time forever, and companies will need to decide what works best for them and their employees.

The war for talent in the tech world can be brutal — and so, it turns out, can the war between platforms that help companies source it. In the latest developement, Toptal — a marketplace for filling engineering and other tech roles with freelance, remote workers — has filed a lawsuit against direct competitor Andela and several of its employees, alleging the theft of trade secrets in pursuit of “a perfect clone of its business”, according to the complaint. All of the Andela employees previously worked at Toptal.

Toptal’s lawsuit, filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York and embedded below, alleges that the employees reneged on confidentiality, non-solicitation and non-compete agreements with Toptal. Toptal also alleges interference with contract, unfair competition and misappropriation of trade secrets.

While both Toptal and Andela have built businesses around the idea of remote freelancers filling tech jobs — a concept that has increased in profile and acceptance as people shifted to remote work during the pandemic — the pair only emerged as very direct competitors in the last year or so.

Toptal was co-founded by CEO Taso Du Val in 2010, and since then it has grown to become one of the world’s most popular on-demand talent networks. The company matches skilled tech personnel like engineers, software developers, designers, finance experts and product managers to clients across the globe. According to company data, it currently serves over 1,000 clients in more than 10 countries.

Andela, on the other hand, only recently turned to using a similar approach. Founded in 2014 in Lagos, Andela’s original business model was based on building physical hubs to source, vet, train and house talent across the continent. It did this in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda.

However, Andela struggled with scaling and operating that business model, and in 2019 it laid off 400 developers. Early last year as the pandemic took hold, it laid off a further 135 employees. However this time around it did so with a strategy pivot in mind: after testing satellite models in Egypt and Ghana, the talent company decided to go forego physical hubs completely and go remote, first across Africa in 2020 and globally this year.

“We thought, ‘What if we accelerated [the African remote network] and just enabled applicants from anywhere?’ Because it was always the plan to become a global company. That was clear, but the timing was the question,” Andela CEO Jeremy Johnson told TechCrunch in April.

Yet Toptal believes Andela’s choice to scrap its hubs and source remote talent from everywhere was specifically to replicate Toptal’s business model — and success.

“Until recently, Andela operated an outsourcing operation focused on in-person, on-site hubs in Africa,” Toptal notes in the complaint. “Over the course of the past year, Andela has moved away from its prior focus on in-person hubs situated in Africa and is engaging in a barely disguised attempt to become a clone of Toptal.”

Toptal claims that for Andela to pull off a “perfect clone of its business,” it poached key Toptal employees to exploit their knowledge, and that the ex-employees knowingly breached their confidentiality and non-solicitation obligations to Toptal.

Companies often try to uncover each other’s trade secrets by poaching, and many blatantly copy a competitor and do so without repercussions. On top of this, these two are hardly the only two places to for tech talent to connect with remote freelance job opportunities. Others include Fiverr, Malt, Freelancer.com, LinkedIn, Turing, Upwork and many more.

In a global economy with an estimated 1 billion so-called knowledge workers, and with freelancers accounting for some 35% of the world’s workforce, it’s a pretty gigantic market, which you could alternately look at as a major opportunity, but also a ripe field for many players with multiple permutations of the marketplace concept.

So why is Toptal crying foul play? The company says its ex-employees have not only revealed Toptal’s trade secrets and confidential information to compete unfairly but are also poaching additional Toptal personnel, clients and the talent that Toptal matches and sources to clients.

The ex-employees cited by Toptal include Sachin Bhagwata, vice president of enterprise; Martin Chikilian, head of talent operations; Courtney Machi, vice president of product; and Alvaro Oliveira, executive vice president of talent operations. Toptal says three additional former employees in non-executive roles breached express covenants not to compete in their agreements with Toptal.

While some of the allegations focus on the expertise of the employees, one of the trade secret allegations more directly references Toptal’s technology.

Toptal claims Machi tapped into her extensive knowledge of Toptal’s “proprietary software platform” and used that to help transform Andela “from a group of outsourcing hubs situated in various African locations into a fully remote, global company like Toptal.”

Asked to comment on the suit, Johnson at Andela said he believes Toptal is suing Andela for being competitive.

“With regards to the situation overall, I can say that frivolous lawsuits are the price of doing anything that matters,” he told TechCrunch in an email. “And this is the kind of baseless bullying and fear tactics that make employees want to leave in the first place. We will defend ourselves and our colleagues vigorously.”

Toptal has an unconventional story for a company that started only a decade ago. It is one of the few companies in the Valley that doesn’t issue stock options to its investors or employees. Even Du Val’s co-founder, Breanden Beneschott, was ousted from the company without any shares, according to an article from The Information.

How did it pull this off? In 2012, Toptal raised a $1.4 million seed via convertible notes and investors were entitled to 15% of the company, according to The Information article.

But there was one condition: Toptal had to raise more money.

However, the company hasn’t needed to secure additional capital because of its profitability and growing revenue ($200 million annually as of 2018, per The Information). So investors are stuck in limbo — as are employees who joined hoping that the company would raise money down the line so their stock options would convert.

The Information story strikes a distinct note of resentment, noting that some employees felt “tricked out of stock in a company that Du Val has said publicly is worth more than $1 billion.”

Given that situation, TechCrunch asked Du Val if he thought it played any role in employee departures, and ex-employee relations.

“The issuance of stock options does not excuse theft of trade secrets,” he replied. “Also, there are more than 800 full-time people at Toptal [but] the complaint names seven individual defendants.”

The full complaint is embedded below.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We’re closing our survey soon, so this is your last chance (probably) to get your voice heard!

Despite it being a short week, as always, it was a busy, busy time. We had Grace on the dials today, and Danny, Natasha, and Alex making chit-chat about the tech world. As with every week this year, we had to cut and cut and cut to get the show down to size. Here’s what made it in in the end:

• Medium saw more employees depart the company after CEO Ev Williams published a ‘culture memo.’ While the Medium memo doesn’t wholly ban politics, some allege that the undertone of the statement, timed weeks after a failed unionization attempt, created an unsafe environment. A week later, Natasha covered another controversy, this time at Y Combinator. We riff on the takeaway, and what this story looks like three months from now.
• The issue of company culture is attracting companies. Or more precisely startups, with Blendoor dropping a new report this week that TechCrunch covered, and Vault raising $8.2 million to provide a software solution to aid employees in reporting misconduct.
• On the funding round beat, we explored ChartHop’s new $35 million round that Danny had many thoughts about, fake-chicken nuggets startup Nuggs raising $50 million, and Faculty’s latest deal that will help power its vision for the future of male grooming. We also got into Lifted’s elder-care focused round, a startup in the larger healthtech beat that Natasha is giving some of her attention to.
• And we wrapped with the ExtraHop exit. We spent a minute trying to figure out why the company was valued at $900 million in its exit. The number, while large, felt light based on what we knew about the company.

Thanks for hopping along with us this week and every week. Quick programming note: Natasha will take Alex’s spot on the Monday show for next week since he’s out, so be nice, and send her stuff to mention.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

Volkswagen says more than 3.3 million customers had their information exposed after one of its vendors left a cache of customer data unsecured on the internet.

The car maker said in a letter that the vendor, used by Volkswagen, its subsidiary Audi, and authorized dealers in the U.S. and Canada, left the customer data spanning 2014 to 2019 unprotected over a two-year window between August 2019 and May 2021.

The data, which Volkswagen said was gathered for sales and marketing, contained personal information about customers and prospective buyers, including their name, postal and email addresses, and phone number.

But more than 90,000 customers across the U.S. and Canada also had more sensitive data exposed, including information relating to loan eligibility. The letter said most of the sensitive data was driver’s license numbers, but that a “small” number of records also included a customer’s date of birth and Social Security numbers.

Volkswagen did not name the vendor, and a company spokesperson did not immediately comment.

It’s the latest security incident involving driver’s license numbers in recent months. Insurance giants Metromile and Geico admitted earlier this year that their quote forms had been abused by scammers trying to obtain driver’s license numbers. Several other car insurance companies have also reported similar incidents involving the theft of driver’s license numbers. Geico said it was likely an effort by scammers to file and cash fraudulent unemployment benefits in another person’s name.

Volkswagen’s letter, however, did not say if the company had evidence that the data exposed by the vendor was misused.

 

Well this is big. The UK’s competition regulator looks set to get an emergency brake that will allow it to stop Google ending support for third party cookies, a technology that’s currently used for targeting online ads, if it believes competition would be harmed by the depreciation going ahead.

The development follows an investigation opened by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) into Google’s self-styled ‘Privacy Sandbox’ earlier this year.

The regulator will have the power to order a standstill of at least 60 days on any move by Google to remove support for cookies from Chrome if it accepts a set of legally binding commitments the latter has offered — and which the regulator has today issued a notification of intention to accept.

The CMA could also reopen a fuller investigation if it’s not happy with how things are looking at the point it orders any standstill to stop Google crushing tracking cookies.

It follows that the watchdog could also block Google’s wider ‘Privacy Sandbox’ technology transition entirely — if it decides the shift cannot be done in a way that doesn’t harm competition. However the CMA said today it takes the “provisional” view that the set of commitments Google has offered will address competition concerns related to its proposals.

It’s now opened a consultation to see if the industry agrees — with the feedback line open until July 8.

Commenting in a statement, Andrea Coscelli, the CMA’s chief executive, said:

“The emergence of tech giants such as Google has presented competition authorities around the world with new challenges that require a new approach.

“That’s why the CMA is taking a leading role in setting out how we can work with the most powerful tech firms to shape their behaviour and protect competition to the benefit of consumers.

“If accepted, the commitments we have obtained from Google become legally binding, promoting competition in digital markets, helping to protect the ability of online publishers to raise money through advertising and safeguarding users’ privacy.”

In a blog post sketching what it’s pledged — under three broad headlines of ‘Consultation and collaboration’; ‘No data advertising advantage for Google products’; and ‘No self-preferencing’ — Google writes that if the CMA accepts its commitments it will “apply them globally”, making the UK’s intervention potentially hugely significant.

It’s perhaps one slightly unexpected twist of Brexit that it’s put the UK in a position to be taking key decisions about the rules for global digital advertising. (The European Union is also working on new rules for how platform giants can operate but the CMA’s intervention on Privacy Sandbox does not yet have a direct equivalent in Brussels.)

That Google is choosing to offer to turn a UK competition intervention into a global commitment is itself very interesting. It may be there in part as an added sweetener — nudging the CMA to accept the offer so it can feel like a global standard setter.

At the same time, businesses do love operational certainty. So if Google can hash out a set of rules that are accepted by one (fairly) major market, because they’ve been co-designed with national oversight bodies, and then scale those rules everywhere it may create a shortcut path to avoiding any more regulator-enforced bumps in the future.

So Google may see this as a smoother path toward the sought for transition for its adtech business to a post-cookie future. Of course it also wants to avoid being ordered to stop entirely.

More broadly, engaging with the fast-paced UK regulator could be a strategy for Google to try to surf over the political deadlocks and risks which can characterize discussions on digital regulation in other markets (especially its home turf of the U.S. — where there has been a growing drumbeat of calls to break up tech giants; and where Google specifically now faces a number of antitrust investigations).

The outcome it may be hoping for is being able to point to regulator-stamped ‘compliance’ — in order that it can claim it as evidence there’s no need for its ad empire to be broken up.

Google’s offering of commitments also signifies that regulators who move fastest to tackle the power of tech giants will be the ones helping to define and set the standards and conditions that apply for web users everywhere. At least unless or until any more radical interventions rain down on big tech.

What is Privacy Sandbox?

Privacy Sandbox is a complex stack of interlocking technology proposals for replacing current ad tracking methods (which are widely seen as horrible for user privacy) with alternative infrastructure that Google claims will be better for individual privacy and also still allow the adtech and publishing industries to generate (it claims much the same) revenue by targeting ads at cohorts of web users — who will be put into ‘interest buckets’ based on what they look at online.

The full details of the proposals (which include components like FLoCs, aka Google’s proposed new ad ID based on federated learning of cohorts; and Fledge/Turtledove, Google’s suggested new ad delivery technology) have not yet been set in stone.

Nonetheless, Google announced in January 2020 that it intended to end support for third party cookies within two years — so that rather nippy timeframe has likely concentrated opposition, with pushback coming from the adtech industry and publishers concerned it will have a major impact on their ad revenues when individual-level ad targeting goes away.

The CMA began to look into Google’s planned depreciating of tracking cookies after complaints that the transition away from tracking cookies to a new infrastructure of Google’s devising will merely increase Google’s market power — by locking down third parties’ ability to track Internet users for ad targeting while leaving Google with a high dimension view of what people get up to online as a result of its expansive access to first party data (gleaned through its dominance for consumer web services).

The executive summary of today’s CMA notice lists its concerns that without proper regulatory oversight Privacy Sandbox might:

At the same time, privacy concerns around the ad tracking and targeting of Internet users are undoubtedly putting pressure on Google to retool Chrome — given that other web browsers have been stepping up efforts to protect their users from online surveillance by doing stuff like blocking trackers for years.

Web users hate creepy ads — which is why they’ve been turning to ad blockers in droves. Numerous major data scandals have also increased awareness of privacy and security. And — in Europe and elsewhere — digital privacy regulations have been toughened up or introduced in recent years. So the line of ‘what’s acceptable’ for ad businesses to do online has been shifting.

The key issue is how privacy and competition regulation interacts — and potentially conflicts — with the very salient risk that ill-thought through and overly blunt competition interventions could essentially lock in privacy abuses of web users as a result of a legacy of weak enforcement around online privacy, which allowed for rampant, consent-less ad tracking and targeting of Internet users to develop and thrive in the first place.

Poor privacy enforcement coupled with banhammer-wielding competition regulators does not look like a good recipe for protecting web users’ rights.

However there is cautious reason for optimism here.

Last month the CMA and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued a joint statement in which they discussed the importance of having competition and data protection in digital markets — citing the CMA’s Google Privacy Sandbox probe as a good example of a case that requires nuanced joint working.

Or, as they put it then: “The CMA and the ICO are working collaboratively in their engagement with Google and other market participants to build a common understanding of Google’s proposals, and to ensure that both privacy and competition concerns can be addressed as the proposals are developed in more detail.”

Although the ICO’s record on enforcement against rights-trampling adtech is, well, non-existent.

So its preference for regulatory inaction in the face of adtech industry lobbying should off-set any quantum of optimism derived from the bald fact of the UK’s privacy and competition regulators’ ‘joint working’. (The CMA, by contrast, has been very active in the digital space since gaining, post-Brexit, wider powers to pursue investigations. And in recent years took a deep dive look at competition in the digital ad market, so it’s armed with plenty of knowledge. It is also in the process of configuring a new unit that will oversee a pro-competition regime which the UK explicitly wants to clip the wings of big tech.)

What has Google committed to?

The CMA writes that Google has made “substantial and wide-ranging” commitments vis-a-vis Privacy Sandbox — which it says include:

• A commitment to develop and implement the proposals in a way that avoids distortions to competition and the imposition of unfair terms on Chrome users. This includes a commitment to involve the CMA and the ICO in the development of the Proposals to ensure this objective is met.
• Increased transparency from Google on how and when the proposals will be taken forward and on what basis they will be assessed. This includes a commitment to publicly disclose the results of tests of the effectiveness of alternative technologies.
• Substantial limits on how Google will use and combine individual user data for the purposes of digital advertising after the removal of third-party cookies.
• A commitment that Google will not discriminate against its rivals in favour of its own advertising and ad-tech businesses when designing or operating the alternatives to third-party cookies.
• A standstill period of at least 60 days before Google proceeds with the removal of third party cookies giving the CMA the opportunity, if any outstanding concerns cannot be resolved with Google, to reopen its investigation and, if necessary, impose any interim measures necessary to avoid harm to competition.

Google also writes that: “Throughout this process, we will engage the CMA and the industry in an open, constructive and continuous dialogue. This includes proactively informing both the CMA and the wider ecosystem of timelines, changes and tests during the development of the Privacy Sandbox proposals, building on our transparent approach to date.”

“We will work with the CMA to resolve concerns and develop agreed parameters for the testing of new proposals, while the CMA will be getting direct input from the ICO,” it adds.

Google’s commitments cover a number of areas directly related to competition — such as self-preferencing, non-discrimination, and stipulations that it will not combine user data from specific sources that might give it an advantage vs third parties.

However privacy is also being explicitly baked into the competition consideration, here, per the CMA — which writes that the commitments will [emphasis ours]:

An ICO spokeswoman was also keen to point out that one of the first commitments obtained from Google under the CMA’s intervention “focuses on privacy and data protection”.

In a statement, the data watchdog added:

“The commitments obtained mark a significant moment in the assessment of the Privacy Sandbox proposals. They demonstrate that consumer rights in digital markets are best protected when competition and privacy are considered together.

“As we outlined in our recent joint statement with the CMA, we believe consumers benefit when their data is used lawfully and responsibly, and digital innovation and competition are supported. We are continuing to build upon our positive and close relationship with the CMA, to ensure that consumer interests are protected as we assess the proposals.”

This development in the CMA’s investigation raises plenty of questions, large and small — most pressingly over the future of key web infrastructure and what the changes being hashed out here between Google and UK regulators might mean for Internet users everywhere.

The really big issue is whether ‘co-design’ with oversight bodies is the best way to fix the market power imbalance flowing from a single tech giant being able to combine massive dominance in consumer digital services with duopoly dominance in adtech.

Others would say that breaking up Google’s consumer tech and Google’s adtech is the only way to fix the abuse — and eveything else is just fiddling while Rome burns.

Google, for instance, is still in charge of proposing the changes itself — regardless of how much pre-implementation consultation and tweaking goes on. It’s still steering the ship and there are plenty of people who believe that’s not an acceptable governance model for the open web.

But, for now at least, the CMA wants to try to fiddle.

It should be noted that, in parallel, the UK government and CMA are speccing out a wider pro-competition regime that could result in deeper interventions into how Google and other platform giants operate in the future.

For now, though, Google is probably feeling pretty happy for the opportunity to work with UK regulators. If it can pull oversight bodies deep down in the detail of the changes it wants to make that’s likely a far more comfortable spot for Mountain View vs being served with an order to break its business up — something the CMA has previously taken feedback on.

Google has been contacted with questions on its Privacy Sandbox commitments.

Bangalore-based neobank Open is in advanced stages of talks to raise about $100 million, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Temasek, the Singaporean government’s sovereign wealth fund, and General Atlantic are positioning to co-lead the Series C financing round, which values the Indian startup at pre-money $600 million, the sources told TechCrunch, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. Open was valued at about $150 million in its Series B funding round two years ago.

Existing investor Tiger Global, PayPal, which shuttered its domestic operations in the world’s second largest internet market early this year, as well as Google and Amazon are in talks to participate in the new round, the sources said.

Indian news outlet Economic Times first reported about the size of the imminent round and identified Google and Amazon as probable investors earlier this week. The round hasn’t closed yet so terms may change and not all investors may end up backing Open. The startup’s founder and chief executive Anish Achuthan declined to comment.

Open operates as a neobank that offers nearly all the features of a bank with additional tools to serve the needs of businesses. The startup offers its clients services such as automated account, payment gateway, credit cards, automated bookkeeping, cash flow management, and tax and compliance management solutions.

Realizing the opportunity that they can’t tap the entire market, several banks in India have in recent years started to collaborate with fintech startups to expand their reach in the South Asian nation.

“Banks are doing their best to defend their turf by focusing on several fronts – eco system building (led by HDFC Bank), open approach to fintech partnerships (led by ICICI Bank), overall digital experience as an acquisition tool (led by Kotak and Axis) etc. But [they] continue to play catchup as they lack the focus/ expertise in each channel (Banking super apps and APIs are fast becoming hygiene). Fintech revenues are already ~10% of private banks’ fee income, but could grow >3x in the next 3 years,” wrote analysts at Bank of America in a report late last year.

“Banks no doubt want to own the pipe and relationships, but are unlikely to succeed except in very specific segments,” they added.

In recent months, however, some banks have begun to reevaluate their engagement strategy with neobanks, Indian news and analysis publication the CapTable reported last month.