Last week, MoneyLion, a digital challenger bank, merged with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s trading debut has been characterized as a flop, with the company’s stock price dipping 30% in a few days.

Why should we care?
A 28% drop of the SPAC sector since February has left some industry watchers wondering whether similar companies seeking to go public via SPACs will face a similar fate. MoneyLion offers a suite of banking services, and just prior to its public debut, it rolled out crypto trading. The crypto launch, however, did not move the price of the shares. The co-mingling of crypto and SPACs is generating some skepticism among industry watchers: “They’re getting hit with a double-whammy of focus,” one analyst was quoted as saying. “SPACs are under the microscope, but so is crypto. So imagine being a crypto-SPAC.” MoneyLion says it generated $76M of adjusted revenue in 2020, finishing the year on a $102M adjusted revenue run-rate in the fourth quarter 2020. The company forecasts adjusted revenue for 2021 of $144M, representing year-over-year growth of approximately 88%.