eToro postpones plans to go public via SPAC to the 4th quarter, citing regulatory delay

• eToro is postponing its plans to go public to the fourth quarter, citing regulatory delays.
• The company first announced its plans to list in March through a $10.4 billion merger with Betsy Cohen's FinTech V SPAC.
• The Robinhood rival has been looking to expand in the US, a region that accounts for only 12% of its users.

Online trading platform eToro is postponing its plans to go public via blank check merger to the fourth quarter - slightly later than its initial plans to debut during the third - citing regulatory delays.

The platform told Insider via email that it has already filed its F-4 publicly and is in the final stages of comments from the US Securities and Exchange Commission. F-4 is a type of SEC filing that mandates foreign issuers to register certain securities.

Once approved, SPAC shareholders need to vote on the transaction, which takes 20 days, and then a few more days to finalize, eToro said.

"Given this timeline and where we are today, we wanted to be transparent with the market that a Q3 closing was no longer possible," eToro told Insider. "We have been working closely with the SEC since before we publicly announced the transaction and continue to do so."

Financial News was first to report.

The company first announced its plans to list in March through a $10.4 billion merger with Betsy Cohen's FinTech V SPAC.

The brokerage, which competes with apps like Robinhood, has been looking to expand in the US, a region that accounts for only 12% of its users. As of the second quarter of 2021, most of eToro's customers are in Europe, comprising 68%, followed by the Asia Pacific region at 15%.

"We are committed to expanding our crypto offering," Yoni Assia, eToro CEO and cofounder, told Insider in August. "We're very excited about the outsized growth that we're seeing in America."

In the second quarter of 2021, crypto assets drove 73% of eToro's total trading commissions compared with 7% in the same period last year.

SPACs, shell companies that list with the aim of merging with private companies and taking them public, have exploded in popularity, and year-to-date SPAC issuance has far outpaced full year 2020 totals.