News Comments Today’s main news: OnDeck prices $225M securitization. Prosper is looking for new whole loan contributors for securitizations. Funding Circle lends 123M GBP to businesses in March. Funding Circle SME considers new equity raise. Ant Financial to raise $9B. Today’s main analysis: Competition among lenders worth $27K to borrowers last week. The grad degrees that deliver more debt than […]
OnDeck Capital prices $225M securitization. AT: “It’s good to see OnDeck getting back in the game. I also think 2018 is shaping up to be the year of securitizations, which had a good year last year. It could shape up to be better this year.”
Prosper seeks new whole loan contributors for securitizations. AT: “As the big online lenders–like OnDeck, Prosper, and SoFi–continue to roll out securitizations, we could very well see new entrants in the alt lending securitization market in 2018.”
The grad degrees that deliver more debt than income. AT: “This is very interesting. Optometrists pay the more of their income to student loans than dentists, lawyers, scientists, engineers, and nurses. Actually, more than anyone. However, veterinarians have the highest median loan balance as a percentage of annual income. This is a must-read for lenders that offer student loans for graduate study, and for specialist loans based on professions.”
OnDeck announced today that it has priced $225 million initial principal amount of Series 2018-1 Fixed Rate Asset-Backed Notes (the “Notes”) in a private securitization transaction. The Notes, which will be issued in four classes, were priced with a weighted average fixed interest rate of 3.75% per annum. It is expected that DBRS, Inc., in satisfaction of one of the closing conditions, will rate the Notes at closing. The anticipated DBRS rating for the Class A Notes would be the highest rating ever for a class of notes in an asset-backed securitization of small business loans in the online lending industry.
The Notes will be issued by OnDeck Asset Securitization Trust II LLC (the “Issuer”), a wholly-owned subsidiary of OnDeck. The Notes will be secured by and payable from a revolving pool of OnDeck small business loans. The Issuer will be the sole obligor of the Notes; the Notes will not be obligations of or guaranteed by OnDeck or any of its other subsidiaries. OnDeck will act as the servicer of the loans securing the Notes.
The net proceeds from the Notes offering will be used by the Issuer together with other available funds to optionally prepay in full a prior notes issuance (the “Old Notes”) that had a weighted average interest rate of 4.7% at December 31, 2017.
Prosper will continue to issue ABS from its long standing PMIT shelf, but is looking for new whole loan contributors for its securitizations as it eyes the end of a loan consortium agreement inked last February.
Prosper’s securitizations will retain the multi-seller deal format, in which whole loan investors contribute collateral to the securitizations, said three people speaking with GlobalCapital on the sidelines at the LendIt Fintech USA 2018 event in San Francisco.
Former Twitter chief operating officer Anthony Noto just finished his first month on the job as CEO of SoFi, the “unicorn” financial services company whose former CEO was booted late last year after allegations of sexual misconduct.
Axios spoke to Noto about the new job, growth plans, recruitment and that long-rumored IPO. The quick read:
He had always wanted to be a CEO, and felt he had accomplished what he set out to do at Twitter.
He believes SoFi is a cultural reclamation project, but that the core business is strong.
SoFi wants to launch a membership-type credit card.
The firm has no plans to either IPO or fundraise in 2018.
On joining SoFi as CEO, after stops at Twitter and Goldman Sachs:
“This opportunity leverages all of my professional background as a tech person, as a consumer-facing person and from a financial industry perspective.
“A reckoning is coming. The US is ground zero.There is a 37 trillion dollar shortfall in the retirement sector. This is coming and we cant just think we have 32 years to solve this problem.”
Omer Ismail, Chief Commercial Officer of Marcus:
“Since we launched 18 months ago we have done $3 billion in loans and we have $20 billion in deposits and about 500,000 in customers.”
Max Levchin, CEO and founder of Affirm:
“There are 10 to 15 million people in this country who need money and can probably borrow responsibly yet they end up at payday lending.”
Jay Farner, CEO of Quicken Loans:
“If a mortgage can be done in 10 [days] a personal loan can be done in 1 [day]”
Coming off one of the worst months in recent memory, March saw big declines in the public equity markets. The SCP SMB Index was the least impacted, retreating 4.1% compared to all other major indices, which declined more than 5% during the month.
The SCP SMB Index declined 4.1% in March. The S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Dow Jones all experienced losses during the month of 5.1%,5.2%, and 6.1%, respectively.
Returns since inception (indexed at Jan 4, 2016)
Since the inception of the SCP SMB Index in January 4, 2016 (where 100% is no change), here are the returns through March 29, 2018:
We calculate the Mortgage Rate Competition Index weekly as the median spread between the lowest and highest APR offered by lenders in our marketplace. By calculating this spread, we hope to show consumers how much they stand to save by comparing rates during the lending shopping process.
Purchase loans
Across all purchase loan applications on LendingTree for the week ending April 8, the index was 0.59, up 0.03 from the previous week.
How big of a deal is it to nab a mortgage rate that’s 0.59% lower than the competition? Over 30 years, that could translate to $27,339 in savings on a $300,000 loan (see Mortgage Savings Tracker graphic below).
Refinances
The index was wider in the refinance market at 0.65, up from 0.63 the prior week.
Borrowers shopping for refi loans could have saved $30,329 by shopping for the lowest rate.
Credible’s analysis of student loan debt levels and salaries across 16 graduate school majors shows that the most important consideration isn’t how much debt you’ll take on to obtain an advanced degree — or how much you’ll earn after graduation — but achieving the right balance between the two.
Key highlights
A Credible analysis of more than 91,000 graduate degree holders with student loans found significant debt and income differences across 16 graduate degree majors.
Dentists, optometrists, and veterinarians tend to have student loan debt that’s the most out of balance with their earnings soon after graduation.
Even years out of school, optometrists, veterinarians, physician assistants, dentists and pharmacists devote more than 10 percent of their monthly income to their student loan payments.
Computer scientists, MBA holders, people with masters in finance degrees (not MBA) and nurses allocate the smallest proportion of their monthly earnings to pay down their student loan debt (between 6.4 and 7.1 percent).
AutoGravity, a FinTech pioneer that empowers car shoppers to buy and finance any new or used car in minutes from their smartphone, today announced a partnership with Westbon, the first lending platform for international students in the U.S. Through this unique partnership, Westbon financing options are now accessible to international students who use AutoGravity to finance their vehicle in the United States.
Finitive LLC (www.finitive.com), a financial technology platform providing institutional investors with direct access to alternative lending investments, announced today the launch of its zero-fee platform.
Finitive, which commenced operations in August 2017, has received commitments for transactions with an aggregate capacity of $1.3 billion. Several asset managers and banks have committed capital for transactions in the consumer, renewable energy and commercial real estate lending sectors.
Lend Core Inc., parent company to NSR Invest and LendingRobot, announced today the close of its first external financing round with FinSight Ventures. The investment will help the company expand its investor outreach, accelerate product development and strategic partnerships. FinSight Ventures General Partner, Alexey Garyunov, and Investment Director, Maxim Nazarov, will join Lend Core’s Board of Directors.
The company’s core technologies drive innovation through interactive analytics, custom modeling, algorithmic investing, order execution, portfolio management, and transparency through blockchain application.
One blockchain startup, Alchemy, is using the technology to create a peer-to-peer (P2P) lending system that ensures transparency and guarantees security to its participants.
Alchemy works by matching lenders and borrowers for the requested amount of capital. Because of the instant, global, and secure peer-to-peer interactions that blockchain facilitates, costs of service are kept incredibly low. Interest rates are kept as close to a free market determination as possible, ensuring a fair consumer experience that often eludes customers of big banks.
Quovo, a data platform that provides connectivity to consumer financial accounts, announced today at LendIt Fintech USA, new products that equip lenders with insights to streamline and improve key processes in the lending value chain, adding to Quovo’s ability to assist with underwriting, funding, and ongoing servicing workflows.
Income + Expense analyzes and summarizes recurring and irregular income and expense streams, creating a fuller picture of cash flow in linked accounts. Balance Estimator uses historical cash flows to predict future account balances up to 30 days in advance, giving loan servicers a key perspective on when customers can most
effectively meet their payment obligations.
Income + Expense and Balance Estimator provide valuable cash-flow-based insights that can be combined with Quovo’s core data products—such as Aggregation and Authentication—to create end-to-end solutions for lending, from the first loan application to the last servicing event.
MoneyLion today announced that it will be expanding its popular MoneyLion Plus membership with a full suite of checking and savings capabilities. With these additions, the new MoneyLion Plus membership will provide a comprehensive banking option for anyone with access to a smartphone, becoming the one and only financial membership consumers need to build wealth, improve credit and manage day-to-day spending.
DebtBench: We are creating an Open Banking marketplace structure where business borrowers can connect and gain access to capital at lower rates, in far less time, than they would by going to a brick-and mortar institution. According to our estimates, banks, credit cards and other lending institutions generate $870B+ each year in fees and interest from over $3.2 trillion in lending activity. The interest rate spreads gained by financial institutions can be minimized.
Intrinio, a fintech company providing access to over 200 financial data feeds, will be releasing their API v2 this quarter.
Intrinio’s API v2 is built on the OpenAPI specification, which is a community-driven, open source, standardized API spec within the OpenAPI Initiative (OAI), a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. This allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of a service without requiring access to source code, additional documentation, or inspection of network traffic.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is getting ready to release its position on a proposed charter for online lenders and other FinTech companies in the next three months.
An Aite Group study finding has the answer. More than 75 percent of 22- to 49-year-old consumers are interested in this kind of advice and guidance around reducing debt, achieving savings goals, and tracking their finances, as well as optimizing their overall financial health.
Companies like the Lending Club, make it easy for you to apply for small business loans online. You can receive several thousand dollars towards your business expenses.
Although many people turn to credit cards to help them build credit, there are other tools individuals can use to improve their credit scores. Since some people have trouble managing credit card debt and do not want to pay high-interest rates, they often turn to alternatives to help them build a solid credit history. Here are a few of those alternatives.
Loans to Help Build Credit
Some banks and credit unions will offer their members what are known as credit builder loans. The goal is to pay off the loan before the maturity date.
Peer-to-Peer Lending
Instead of going through a traditional financial institution, borrowers can apply for loans offered by individual investors. Known as peer-to-peer loans, consumers can apply using a reputable P2P lending website or service. The loans typically offer reasonable interest rates, and this type of financing is completely legitimate.
The company announced in its monthly review that in March it provided 1,831 businesses with access to finance and created 4,670 jobs (directly and indirectly) via its platform.
Funding Circle lent over £701m from September 2017 to March 2018 and more than 10,500 small businesses accessed finance through the platform in the same period.
THE FUNDING Circle SME Income Fund is considering a potential equity raise as it assesses its growth options.
Any issue of shares or sale from treasury would be priced at NAV plus a premium to cover all issue costs, the fund said in a stock exchange announcement on Monday.
NatWest has added invoice finance platform MarketInvoice to its Capital Connections panel, which helps SMEs unable to borrow from banks get access to alternative sources of money.
Liberis, the London-based fintech that provides finance for small businesses, has raised £57.5 million in new funding to help support the company’s growth. The alternative finance provider makes loans against a company’s future credit and debit card sales.
The majority of the new capital being raised by Liberis is debt, which in turn will enable it to issue more loans. The facility is being provided by British Business Investments (the commercial arm of the tax payer-funded British Business Bank), Paragon Bank, and BCI Finance.
In addition, Blenheim Chalcot has made an equity investment into Liberis. The so-called “digital venture builder” also previously backed Clearscore, the credit scoring startup recently acquired by Experian.
■ Peer-to-peer lending is becoming popular in low interest times, but it’s controversial
Peer-to-peer remains controversial, especially since the government approved a new type of Isa, the Innovative Finance Isa (Ifisa), in April 2016 that allows customers to receive income from the peer-to-peer loans they make free of tax.
There are many questions you will need to ask before lending your cash. Here are some of the most important:
What returns can I really get?
When faced with the best-buy rate on an instant access current account (around 1.3 per cent according to Moneyfacts), or on a five-year, fixed- rate bond (2.75 per cent), it’s hard not to find the headline rate you would receive from a peer-to-peer lending site very attractive.
Is the platform a member of a reputable association?
The Peer-to-Peer Finance Association is the main trade body, though not all companies involved are members. Check membership at p2pfa.org.uk. Robert Pettigrew, director of the association, says: ‘Investors should understand the nature and level of risk to which they are exposed, so that they can ensure that it is commensurate with their individual risk appetite.
Ant Financial Services Group, carved out of his e-commerce giant Alibaba Group HoldingLtd.BABA -0.52%seven years ago, is preparing to raise $9 billion in a private funding round, according to people familiar with the matter. That ups a previous fundraising target of $5 billion.
Ant, which owns popular mobile payments network Alipay and is one of China’s largest non-bank lenders, is currently in talks with potential investors and demand for its shares has so far been strong, the people familiar said.
The latest funding round could value Ant at close to $150 billion, according to the people, making it by far the world’s largest unicorn—a term used to describe private companies valued at over $1 billion.
“Fintech is playing animportant role in China. Given the demands for consumer finance are not yet fully satisfied and credit system is not perfect, financial technology has a golden development opportunity in China, which leads the world in data mining and processing capabilitiesin the mobile Internet market.” said Simon Cheng, President of X Financial, a leading fintech company in China at LendIt USA recently.
The popularity of blockchain technology has grown over the last several years as the hype surrounding the cryptocurrency market has thrived. Nearly every industry is currently exploring options on how they can use this disruptive technology to make a difference in the market. Its impact on various sectors has attracted big technology companies like Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM). They ventured into distributed ledger technology architecture to augment their existing businesses while simultaneously trying to exploit emerging opportunities in the industry.
Over the last two decades, the financial services sector has experienced a major technological shake-up, with emerging industries like fintech playing a vital role. PayPal Inc. (NASDAQ:PYPL) disrupted the payments industry by introducing online methods of payment. While some said credit cards and checks would be phased out in due time, they are still crucial products. It remains to be seen how long they will last, though.
On the other hand, peer-to-peer lending platforms like LendingClub Corp. (NYSE:LC) and Zorpa reinvented lending and, in the process, sparked debates on whether they could eventually overtake traditional lending in the credit market. Nothing of the sort has come to pass, yet. In fact, after peaking in the first half of the current decade, peer-to-peer lending may have started to experience a slowdown in growth.
In this article, we explore two areas that have attracted significant interest by FinTech innovators:
Marketplace lenders (MPLs) that are disrupting traditional credit-underwriting models with lower overhead, higher transparency, faster loan approval and higher returns on capital.
Blockchain-based supply chains with the potential to disrupt entrenched payments and credit processes by managing the physical and financial flows associated with commerce. In addition, we discuss approaches to IT spending and innovation that banks can take in response.
Ezira will utilize the delegated proof of stake decentralized consensus algorithm used by Bitshares, EOS, and Steem. Ezira will operate on a new public blockchain, will provide a flagship user application, and a multi-token circular economic model. It will have a fairer token distribution and will share drop 10% of the EZIRA asset onto the cryptocurrency community.
The Ezira network will offer users access to a suite of cryptocurrency and social media features during its release.
Content Rewards
Users will receive content rewards for posting according to the number of votes and views that each post receives. Once per day, a content reward payment will be distributed according to the stake weight of the accounts that upvoted and viewed the content.
Ezira Cryptocurrencies
Payments using Ezira currencies will have zero transaction fees and will receive confirmation within the 3 second block time. Users send EziraCoin to a stealth address and send payments using a ring signature, and use ring confidential transactions to conceal the payment amount.
Decentralized Exchange
Users will be able to use peer to peer lending to earn interest by lending their funds to other users, based on collateral, independent verification processes, and established creditworthiness.
Last year Prospa passed a milestone of providing more than A$500m ($385m) in loans to 12,000 businesses.
The company offers loans of between A$5,000 and A$250,000, over a term of three to 24 months, with no security required for amounts of up to A$100,000. Its platform enables business owners to apply within 10 minutes, receive approval on the same day and funding within 24 hours.
Annual interest rates on Prospa loans vary depending on risk but typically start at roughly 12 per cent and stretch into the mid-20s.
Prospa’s growth has been supported by venture capital backers, with AirTree leading a A$25m funding round last year that valued Prospa at A$235m. The funds enabled the lender to boost its staff to 165, build a direct distribution channel and sign up 7,000 intermediary partners.
New survey results from US technology firm Oracle suggest Australians are less open, compared with consumers in other large economies, to engaging with the fintech revolution.
The survey, released on Wednesday, shows only 6.25 per cent of Australians regularly use a “fintech” bank, compared with 10 per cent in the United States, 12 per cent in Britain, and 40.5 per cent in India.
Despite a growing number of digital “robo advisers”, 9.75 per cent of local respondents said they used fintech wealth advisers services frequently, compared with 16 per cent in Britain and 21.5 per cent in United States.
P2P lending firm Faircent.com will soon be opening its API platform for developers. The move will enable new fintech entrants and offline businesses to leverage the company’s technological infrastructure to build new digital lending products, as well as to integrate existing solutions into their offerings.
Faircent.com’s technology stack offers a wide range of solutions pertaining to online lending such as borrower and lender verification, credit evaluation and underwriting, and payment collection and recovery, among others.
Loanzen, a peer to peer business loan marketplace startup, has raised an undisclosed amount of sum from Kae Capital. The Bengaluru-based digital lending platform had earlier raised an undisclosed seed funding from Angels through TracxnSyndicate.
The fintech firm will deploy fresh funds to expand operations. It also holds NBFC licence by RBI.
Fintech firms have exploded onto the financial scene in Singapore and other mature markets in Asia in recent times. Focusing on disruptive technologies like peer-to-peer lending, affordable digital payment solutions, and more accurate risk analysis among other things, these startups are winning over customers by replacing the service delivery model used by traditional banks with user-friendly technologies.
Fintech Companies Are Changing the Process of Loan Offtake
Have you ever heard about Crowdo, Capital Springboard, FundedHere, or MoolahSense? These are peer-to-peer online lending sites through which you can raise funds by sharing your story. These crowdfunding sites are revolutionising the alternative lending space through disintermediation, cost optimisation, quicker delivery, and technology modernisation.
Players like Skolafund provide deserving students a chance to get funded by potential funders for pursuing education in an affordable manner. They can match profiles and ensure that the right student meets the right funder.
SMEs, often ignored by traditional banking channels, have found their go-to source for funds. Crowd Genie, which started in 2016, is helping SMEs get loans through crowdfunding.
After witnessing the 2011 Egyptian revolution, former journalist Ahmed Moor decided to launch Liwwa, a peer-to-peer funding platform that would address the MENA region’s $240bn SME funding gap by lending money to growing businesses.
Together with co-founder and CTO Samer Atiani (former senior software developer at New York-based online retailer Etsy), Moor has managed to lend over $8m to SMEs across the region since the establishment of the Amman-based firm in 2013.
News Comments Today’s main news: RateSetter enrolls 5K IFISA accounts in first month. OnDeck makes CFO transition. Augmentum set to IPO. TD Auto Finance, AutoGravity partner. Ranger Direct arbitration proceedings come to a halt. Investly secures 500K GBP through Seedrs. Today’s main analysis: A visualization of America’s personal loans. Today’s thought-provoking articles: UBS banned from sponsoring Hong Kong IPOs. China’s credit […]
America’s personal loans visualized. AT: “Interestingly, the average loan amount Americans take to the grave with them is almost the same as the average loan amount of LendingClub subprime personal loans. I’m not sure what this is saying, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t saying there is any causative effect between the two.”
TD Auto Finance partners with AutoGravity. AT: “AutoGravity continues to expand its footprint. This is another example of a partnership that will benefit both parties, and I’m still looking forward to AutoGravity continuing to expand. They’re doing great things.”
OnDeck today announced that the Company will appoint Kenneth (Ken) A. Brause as its Chief Financial Officer effective March 26, 2018, as part of a mutually agreed upon transition process between the Company and current Chief Financial Officer, Howard Katzenberg. Katzenberg will serve as an advisor to OnDeck until April 13, 2018, working closely with Brause to facilitate a smooth transition.
Consider this: The average personal loan given out by loan giant Lending Club is for $15,000 given to a person with a sub-700 credit score and an income of $6,000 per month.
According to Experian, 73% of Americans die with an average debt balance of $61,554. This – on average – includes mortgage, credit card, auto, personal, and student loans. The average personal loan Americans take to the grave is $14,793.
That data is below and the results are fascinating and even daunting, especially for the apparent 73% of Americans who have a monthly payment to make. Read it and weep. Or make some payments.
Lending Club offers personal loans of up to $40,000. But that doesn’t mean everyone is asking for that much. Not does it mean that Lending Club is offering that much.
Interest rates are largely determined by credit score, but the average rate given out ranges from 12-14% with a peak high point in the 2013-2014 timeframe.
TD Auto Finance (TDAF), a subsidiary of TD Bank, America’s Most Convenient Bank, today announced a partnership with AutoGravity, a fintech provider modernizing the way consumers buy and finance automobiles. Through this partnership, indirect financing offers through TDAF will be made available to qualified auto buyers using AutoGravity’s digital platform to search for and finance their next vehicle from the convenience of their desktop or mobile device.
Santander Consumer USA Holdings Inc. (NYSE: SC) today announced it has reached an agreement with automotive technology leader AutoGravity to streamline and simplify the car-buying process for consumers. Through this agreement, Santander Consumer USA’s indirect finance offers will be available to AutoGravity customers nationwide through the AutoGravity mobile app.
BBVA Compass, the U.S. subsidiary of the global financial services group BBVA, now offers near instantaneous decisioning and potential same day funding for both customers and non-customers with the footprint wide1 opening of the fully digital BBVA Compass Express Personal Loan.
With the Express Personal Loan, customers and prospects can consolidate debt or fund large purchases with a low-interest personal loan that provides near instantaneous decisioning. Applicants with a BBVA Compass checking account can get same day funding upon loan approval. The loan, which represents months of effort across the entirety of the bank, underscores BBVA Compass’ drive to digital transformation and achieving excellence in customer experience.
I recently caught up with the company’s chief information officer Bradley Strock, who has been in his role for three and a half years. We discussed PayPal’s transformation into a more customer-centric company, giving customers more choices of funding vehicles. We also covered how PayPal has successfully navigated the shift to mobile finance, resulting in a 50 percent increase in mobile payment volume in 2017.
In January of this year, Strock joined the ranks of board-level CIOs, as he commenced a directorship with $700 million revenue Elevate Credit, Inc., which provides online credit solutions to non-prime consumers, typically defined as those with credit scores of less than 700.
Peter High: Could you provide an overview of your role as CIO of PayPal?
Brad Strock: Most people are probably familiar with PayPal. We operate in over 200 markets around the globe. We are on a mission to democratize money and have had a great deal of success over the last couple of years. 2017 has been a great year in particular.
FinFit, a U.S.-based fintech that provides more than 80,000 American companies with a financial wellness benefit platform, announced on Monday the closing of a $35 million senior credit facility with Ares Management. The company stated it has the ability to increase the senior credit facility to $70 million and this capital raise follows a $16 million investment from Bison Capital Partners. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods was the exclusive financial advisor for the senior credit facility.
Retail banks are missing out on $15 billion in global revenue thanks to a gender gap in access to checking and savings accounts.
A BNY Mellon report published last week in collaboration with the UN, cites flaws in design and marketing that make financial products less accessible to women than they are to men.
The report identifies gender gaps on other products; financial institutions are missing out on another $7 billion in credit card revenue, $14 billion in personal loans and $4 billion in housing, the report says.
Numerated Growth Technologies, the online lending software startup that started life as an incubator within Eastern Bank, announced Monday it has two new clients, Franklin Synergy and MidFirst Bank.
These two additions bring the number of bank clients Numerated Software has landed to seven.
Fundbox Announces New Credit And Payments Solution To Bring $ 4.5 Trillion SMB2B Transactions Into 21st Century (Fundbox email), Rated: A
Today Fundboxannounced the launch of Fundbox Pay, a new payment and credit solution servicing the $4.5 trillion small business-to-business (SMB2B) transactional market in the U.S. By addressing SMB’s lack of credit access and by facilitating credit payments between buyers and sellers, Fundbox Pay provides the 21st-century infrastructure to unlock the trapped value in the SMB2B economy.
Caliber Home Loans, Inc. (“Caliber”) today announced the launch of a new mobile platform. Featuring three mobile phone apps customized for three user groups – borrowers, the Caliber sales force and their business associates – all users receive real-time information and the ability to respond from virtually anywhere. Caliber processes data from all three apps on the back end, which enables efficient and effective communication across the loan process.
When Home Invest entered the picture, that’s when. Home Invest allows you to run your next renovation from your laptop only, never having to walk your rental investment property.
The company’s investment objective is to generate capital growth over the long term through investment in a focused portfolio of fast-growing and/or high potential private financial services technology businesses based predominantly in the UK and wider Europe.
Ranger Direct Lending Fund PLC said on Monday Princeton Alternative Income Fund LP and Princeton Alternative Funding LLC filed voluntary petitions of bankruptcy last Friday, after arbitration proceedings following a provisional take over of a loan portfolio.
The company said that it was “disappointed” the bankruptcy filing has stopped the first phase of the arbitration, but believes Princeton’s portfolio will be investigated and the investments the fund has made will be compensated.
Upstart challengers continue to lead the way in the UK’s open banking space, as API specialist TrueLayer integrates with Starling to enable businesses to access customer account data.
The Starling tie-up means that the bank’s customers can now share their data to use products created by these developers – including income verification tools, lending products and collated financial dashboards. The partners stress that account information will only be accessible when a customer chooses to use a new product and actively agrees to share their information through an explicit consent.
HSBC will launch a new app that centralises information about customers’ accounts — even those held with rival lenders — as early as next month, becoming the first major UK bank to take advantage of new regulations designed to boost competition and make it easier to switch providers.
The bank has set a target of the first week of May to release the “Connected Money” app, but Stuart Haire, HSBC’s UK head of retail banking and wealth management, told the Financial Times that he was hoping to make it widely available by mid-April.
The RM Secured Direct Lending fund is looking to raise new capital through the issuance of new C shares and Zero Preference shares, according to regulatory filings.
Launched back in December 2016 raising £50.6m, the fund has raised another £30m through a C share issue in October 2017 but its managers have said on several occasions that the strategy can be scaled up significantly. The fund has clocked up a 4.2 per cent dividend pay out last year beating its 4 per cent target.
On Thursday, U.K. personal finance app Emma — which just launched in beta in December — announced a data-sharing agreement with challenger bank Starling Bank. It’s the second such agreement this year after a similar one with challenger bank Monzo in January.
The company’s two key revenue streams are based off interactions with customer data: referral fees from product recommendations and revenue from future financial products it could launch, including premium features within the app, he added.
The Next Gen: Investors and Savers report by P2P lending platform ArchOver has revealed that two-thirds of UK adults (67%) would call themselves ‘savers’ rather than ‘investors’.
The survey of 2,000 UK adults found that the average saver puts aside £191 a month.
Just under two-thirds of savers (66%) maintained a ‘rainy day fund’, while financing a new car or a holiday (29%) or paying for retirement (27%) were the other main reasons for saving.
The majority of savers (83%) used traditional savings accounts to build their nest eggs, followed by Isas (43%) and pension funds (33%).
Swiss banking giant UBS is reportedly banned in Hong Kong from sponsoring initial public offerings (IPOs), reports in Financial Times said Friday (March 9).
The publication cited UBS’s annual report, which revealed the 18-month ban from the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission. The regulator also fined UBS $119 million following an investigation into its sponsorship of IPOs for companies listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
According to reports, the ban comes two years after UBS warned it was also facing a suspension of corporate advisory services in Hong Kong. The bank also faced an investigation in Belgium in 2016 for money laundering allegations.
China Rapid Finance is one of thousands of private online micro-lending companies in China which, in recent years, have filled a critical gap in the country’s economy by extending credit to members of the lower and lower-middle classes, who traditionally have not had access to borrowing under the state-owned banking system.
Proponents of the payday and peer-to-peer loans offered by these companies assert that they offer borrowers upward financial mobility and the opportunity to achieve the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle. But the rapid proliferation of lending companies in an unregulated market has also led to widespread over-borrowing and a spate of predatory debt collection practices. More and more borrowers began to default on loans, and financial analysts and government regulators both worried that a growing debt bubble at the basement rungs of the Chinese economy might threaten the general stability of the country’s financial system.
Estonian peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform Investly has successfully secured its initial £500,000 funding target through Seedrs. The equity crowdfunding round has so far attracted more than 375 investors.
CryptoLoan is a smart lending product offering Bitcoin-secured online loans that will allow Bitcoin investors to enjoy the value of crypto assets without selling them. The new product initially will be available for Swedish residents only, but the company is planning to open registration for other European countries shortly.
In the first phase of product development, CryptoLoan will offer online loans with Bitcoin collateral only to Swedish residents, but company development plans include expanding to other European markets shortly as well as enriching the list of accepted collateral with adding other cryptocurrencies. Customers from other European countries are welcome to sign up for news and get an exclusive opportunity to be the first to try the product as soon as it is available in the particular country.
The use of non-traditional data to churn out credit scores is now expanding beyond the underbanked and unbanked to reach even well-banked individuals who already have a credit score. This pool of data, which is used to discover patterns of users’ repayment behaviour based on their mobile phone and social media usage, is playing an increasingly important role in Asia alongside traditional credit scores.
Based on studies that have drawn a correlation between mobile phone usage and repayment rates, algorithms have been created to predict an individual’s potential for defaults. LenddoEFL is one of the pioneers in this field. It started its operations in the Philippines in 2011 before expanding to other countries with large underbanked populations such as Mexico and Colombia.
Mark Mackenzie, managing director for Asia-Pacific at LenddoEFL, says the company will be announcing a partnership in Malaysia in mid-2018, although he is reluctant to disclose more details.
As pointed out by impact investment firm Omidyar Network in its 2016 Big data, small credit report, it is estimated that individual consumer data production will reach 35 billion terabytes by 2020 — some 44 times the data produced in 2009. It also highlighted a few reports that had observed more than 30 companies globally that are already creating credit scorecards using non-traditional data.
The report, Financial Inclusion in the Digital Age, was launched today during Money20/20 Asia in Singapore.
Over two billion unbanked adults in the world, representing 38 percent of all adults globally, do not have access to basic financial services and another 57 percent have basic accounts, but do not have access to diversified investments, low-cost payments systems, core household and business insurance, or credit. Financial Inclusion in the Digital Age explores some of the central frictions that prevent greater financial inclusion and financial well-being, and associated technological innovations that are fostering creative new approaches to mitigating these frictions for individuals and small businesses globally.
Most recently, he founded Celsius, the consumer credit blockchain-based startup.
The Celsius opportunity
Celsius gives its members the opportunity to use the coins they currently hold as collateral. With the Celsius Wallet, users can secure loans in dollars whenever they want by offering up their cryptocurrency as collateral. In the future, consumers will also be able to lend their crypto to others and earn interest in the process.
ApplePay is forecast to facilitate US$200 billion in payments by 2021 and already handles US$50 billion annually. Meanwhile, Amazon is preparing to cut the ribbon on its first chequing account feature by partnering with JP Morgan, a leading US bank.
According to the Australian Financial Review, 84% of millennials would consider banking with a tech giant like Google or Apple. This indicates that the average consumer puts more trust in their search engine provider than their internationally-recognised regulated Tier 1 banking institution, which only reaffirms the scale of the problem banks are now facing.
News Comments Today’s main news: Revolut breaks even, prepares for global expansion. RateSetter finances divorces. Which Isas pay 6% or more. Half of all employers offer financial advice. CoAssets increases revenue by 471% in half a year. Today’s main analysis: Do Americans really want a bank branch? Today’s thought-provoking articles: Ron Suber, Godfather of Fintech. Unscrupulous banks fueled the rise […]
Half of employers offer financial advice. AT: “I didn’t realize it was so high, but the interesting part of this is that the number is expected to increase. Will this be the new way to retain workers?”
Do Americans really want a bank branch? AT: “I’m quite surprised by this. It’s likely a Baby Boomer vs. Millennial thing. Baby Boomers, the second largest living generation, and probably many Gen Xers, likely want bank branches. My guess is, the majority of Millennials don’t. I’d expect this number to decrease over time as Baby Boomer’s die out and younger generations grow into adulthood.”
One possible cause of an employee’s poor attitude is that he or she has looming debts or is attempting to climb out of a credit score canyon. Workers facing these challenges are often unable to completely focus on their job responsibilities. It’s no surprise that constant stress over meeting financial obligations leads to a loss of focus and time dedicated to work obligations. And because employees work for paychecks that go toward their debts, it makes sense that they begin to associate the two.
Consumers need access to credit, and bank-fintech partnerships are one way to meet their needs. Indeed, bank-fintech partnerships are good for both consumers and banks.
As I noted, consumers benefit because banks can use fintech to deliver safer, more transparent, lower-cost and more convenient financial products and services over the internet and mobile devices.
Banks benefit because fintech companies can leverage big data and technology, offering the infrastructure banks need to serve and welcome more people into the financial system.
An excellent example of community banks using fintech to compete with the Wall Street banks is Radius Bank, a $1-billion asset institution in Boston, which according to news reports is establishing “long-term relationships” with fintech providers, and is finding them to be “mutually beneficial.”
The Fed released the minutes of the January FOMC meeting and provided a bullish outlook to the economy with upside risks due to tax reform. The committee indicated that they were on track to raise interest rates in the March meeting, and market participants are expecting 3 rate hikes in 2018.
Meritize, a Frisco, Texas-based student lending platform, raised $6.8M in seed funding.
Colchis Capital, Chicago Ventures and Cube Financial Holdings led the investment round with participation from ECMC, College Loan Corporation, University Ventures, City Light Capital, PC Squared and Meritize management.
“In my view, [Lending Club’s] underlying problem is that they don’t have alignment of interest between their stakeholders,” Tavares said. “At LendingPoint, we have a different approach. We look at it really as a balance sheet model, which means that we put everything on our books. We use our own equity. We leverage other investors’ capital, but we’re not an origination platform…Lending Club’s model primarily is that they have to continue feeding the beast, so to speak, in order to continue making their revenues. They don’t have inventory to continue generating assets or to monetize going forward. That’s a significant shortcoming in their model,” he said.
About 8,000 small business loans are denied every day in this country, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve. It’s a story Alicia Villanueva knows all too well.
So in 1992, Weaver founded Opportunity Fund, launched with a consortium of 15 banks. But although the San Jose-based non-profit works with traditional lenders, its business practices are a bit different. Weaver says Opportunity Fund delves into an applicant’s financial picture and character. And since it lends to people with bad or non-existent credit, a granted loan comes with an automatic offer of hands-on financial management support, and a hefty dose of financial responsibility.
Today, Opportunity Fund loans about $5 to $7 million a month to small business owners in California and 13 other states. The money comes from business and private donations. An average loan can range from $2,600 to $250,000. Under Weaver’s leadership, 6,200 businesses have received loans.
Opportunity Fund, along with other partners like Lending Club, is set to expand into other parts of the U.S. later this year.
Lending automation company CUneXuspublished some impressive growth stats today. Here’s a quick overview of a few of the California-based company’s success metrics:
Grew from 45 FI clients to 72 over the course of one year, from 2016 to 2017, a 60% year-over-year increase
Reaches more than 6.5 million potential end consumers across the U.S.
Averaging more than $6 million in new loan requests per day
Generated more than 140,000 loans totaling more than $2.5 billion with its 1-click borrowing solution
These and other FI clients have reported that CUneXus has helped contribute to their own success, including:
Today, in addition to teaming up with development companies, many investors are using technology solutions to research options remotely. Here are the three trending ways technology is revolutionizing how new investors step into the real estate market space.
Mobile apps like Vacation Rentals by Owner (VRBO) and Airbnb have become popular and more people are now looking to invest in such short-term rentals.
Big data is now a critical offering for the public, and the real estate niche is looking for ways of gathering and presenting the information for driving purchase behavior.
Following the success of the customer-centric applications, it’s clear to see that the industry holds a huge potential if technology is leveraged to bring in new investors. Real estate is the largest global economy asset with figures hinting at $217 trillion – surpassing the world’s GDP of $80 trillion! This is a clear indicator that there is a huge potential for financial freedom creating entrepreneurs looking to tap into the real estate market.
The New York Federal Reserve has published a staff report pertaining to “The Role of Technology in Mortgage Lending”.
While still relatively small, this segment of onlien lending has grown annually by 30% from $34 billion of total originations in 2010 or 2% of the market, to $161 billion in 2016 or 8% of the market.
The Fed research finds that Fintech lenders reduce mortgage processing time by about 10 days, or 20% of the average processing time.
Additionally, default rates tank by a whopping 25% indicating the credit process is superior to the antiquated analog method of traditional banks.
According to research conducted by Novantas, 60% of Americans said they would rather open a new checking account in person at a bank branch than on a phone, tablet or desktop computer. Reinforcing this finding is the reality that most consumers still only use digital channels for the most basic banking functions, such as checking account balances and transferring funds. For more complicated issues, like problems with an account or advice, most consumers prefer human contact.
The reliance on branches in North America is almost double other countries, where better digital offerings have been introduced. In fact, according to Novantas, 75% of consumers in Australia report visiting the branch less than once per month, or even less! The UK is very similar while, interestingly, only about half of US consumers exhibit the same behavior.
The banking industry has seen the closure of 1,700 branches in the 12 months ending in June 2017 – the largest one-year decline on record. Capital One Financial Corp. has cut 32% of its branches from mid-2012 to mid-2017, while SunTrust Banks Inc. cut 22% and Regions Financial Corp. has cut 12%.
Working with financial technology startup AutoGravity, U.S Bank created a new platform on USBank.com that provides a simplified, streamlined loan application process for users that typically takes just minutes to receive a loan decision.
Car buyers using the new U.S. Bank tool simply:
1) Pick their car and select a dealership online
2) Apply for a pre-approval for a U.S. Bank loan online
3) Close the loan at the dealership and drive off in their new car
Total commercial and industrial loans extended by U.S. banks were up just 1% from a year earlier on Feb. 7, according to weekly Federal Reserve data. For the month of January, C&I loans were down an annualized 10.8% compared to December, according to calculations by Keefe, Bruyette and Woods.
Asked how demand for loans has changed over the past three months from large and medium-sized firms, 84% said it was “about the same” or “somewhat stronger,” while just 16% said it was “moderately weaker.” For small firms with annual sales of less than $50 million, 88% of bankers said loan demand was about the same or better, while only 12% said it was weaker.
On Wednesday, Greenlight Financial Technology — the creator of a smart debit card for kids, teens, and college students — closed $16 million in a Series A funding round. Its investors went beyond your traditional venture capital firm, including a disparate coalition of financial services bigwigs like SunTrust Bank and Ally Financial as well as the Amazon Alexa Fund, among other VCs. Greenlight, whose mission is to help strengthen financial literacy among kids and give parents a platform to raise “financially smart kids,” will use the new funds to develop its products.
That coalition of Greenlight partners signals a renewed understanding of the reality of most Americans’ financial lives — 57 percent of Americans are financially unhealthy according to the Center for Financial Services Innovation — by legacy financial services companies coming to terms with the fact that they need to be in the business of financial health in order to keep customer relationships in tact over the long term.
CashPlease is an innovative new short-term, small-dollar loan solution that allows credit unions to implement a consumer loan product efficiently and compliantly. Here’s how:
Attorney General Mark Herring announced today that his office has reached a settlement with eight affiliated online lenders and debt collectors to resolve allegations that the companies offered unlawful open-ended credit plan loans and engaged in unlawful debt collection practices including contacting borrowers’ employers and implementing wage garnishments. As a result of the settlement, borrowers will receive nearly $150,000 in restitution and forgiven debt.
The settlement includes the following key terms relating to loans made by the lenders during the period from January 2015 through June 19, 2017:
The Lenders agree to refund all interest and fees paid by consumers in excess of 12% of the loan amount, totaling approximately $85,000;
The Lenders agree to forgive all outstanding remaining debt of Virginia consumers, totaling over $63,000;
The Lenders agree to a permanent injunction against consumer lending activity in Virginia;
The Debt Collectors agree to a permanent injunction against all debt collection activity in Virginia;
The Lenders agree to pay $10,000 in civil penalties and $10,000 in attorneys’ fees;
The Debt Collectors agree to pay $75,000 in civil penalties and $10,000 in attorneys’ fees.
The companies include six lenders (Field Asset Service Team, LLC; VIM Holdings, LLC; MR Capital Group, LLC; Nascent Holdings, LLC; B Financial, LLC; and DTS Capital, LLC, collectively “the Lenders”) and two debt collectors (Bradley Goldberg & Miller, LLC and U Solutions Group, LLC, “the Debt Collectors”) that acted in concert to provide and collect open-end credit plan loans made over the Internet to Virginia consumers.
The Lenders offered open-end credit plan loans and imposed “service fees” as high as $160 per month. The Debt Collectors then emailed consumers in an effort to collect on these loans and contacted the consumers’ employers to implement wage assignments and collect money directly from the consumers’ paychecks.
The ‘big three’ peer-to-peer lender has been offering a family finance product for a number of months, whereby individuals can apply for a loan to pay for their divorce litigation.
The P2P platform offers personal loans ranging from £500 to £35,000, with terms between one year and five years, according to its website. Borrower rates range from 3.9 per cent to 29.9 per cent.
Now it emerges that one bank was actively working against small businesses in its greed-fuelled quest for profits and bonuses. RBS has been exposed for making up fees, imposing punishingly high interest rates, acquiring equity and property from failed businesses – and pocketing huge bonuses off the back of it.
As a result, it is alternative lenders that are now the go-to for independent businesses in need of assistance when it comes to growth. Take, for example, the business cash advance, which is sometimes referred to as a merchant cash advance. This funding can be from as little as £500 up to £300,000 and is advanced to the business against future credit and debit card turnover.
Last week, Ratesetter launched an Isa paying a top rate of 5.8%, while yesterday (24 February), Easyjet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou launched an tax-free account aiming to pay 4.05% per year.
Other innovative finance Isas are currently paying returns as high as 16% a year.
Zopa is currently paying between 4% and 4.6%. Zopa primarily lends to individuals, Ratesetter lends to both individuals and businesses whereas Funding Circle lends exclusively to small businesses. The latter’s innovative finance Isa is only available to existing customers, but is projecting an annual return of 7.5%.
EASYMONEY, part of Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou’s ‘easy’ family of brands, has launched in the UK with an Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA) offering a target rate of 4.05 per cent a year.
Augmentum Fintech, which is preparing to float next month, has unveiled plans to issue a target of 100 million ordinary shares at a price of £1 each, with a maximum issue size of 125 million shares.
The FCA’s new webpage contains its ideas for a global sandbox [14.02.02]. Its current sandbox only allows firms to test their ideas in the UK.
It highlights three areas:
addressing “pre-identified challenges” in areas known for “regulatory problems that cross jurisdictional boundaries” e.g. AML and KYC on-boarding.;
enabling firms wishing to expand in different markets to “bring their ideas to market more quickly and easily, creating more effective competition.” The FCA asks for firms who could benefit from testing out their ideas in a number of markets to get in touch; and
policy and regulatory challenges – the FCA suggests the sandbox could be used to convene “joint events and papers on emerging trends and challenges” using the experiences of the range of firms and regulators taking part to develop “consistent approaches”.
British inflation will outstrip gains in house prices this year and next, particularly in the capital, as uncertainty over Brexit and weak consumer spending power hits demand, a Reuters poll found on Friday.
Next year, house prices will rise 0.9 percent in London and 2.0 nationally, still both below the 2.1 percent expected inflation rate. In 2020, London prices will increase 2.0 percent and by 2.3 percent nationally.
“Quite simply, with loan-to-income ratios for first time buyers sitting at around four times, average salaries of 33,000 pounds ($46,000), and your average flat in London costing over 500,000 pounds, it’s extremely difficult to see how London can be viewed as anything but very expensive,” LendInvest’s Lockhart said.
Hang Seng Bank plans to expand the use of fintech to mobile banking services and is also toying with the idea of incorporating facial recognition, after initial success with iPhone X, to allow customers to withdraw cash from its ATMs across the city, according to its chief executive.
The global facial recognition market is forecast to be worth US$6.5 billion by 2021, up from US$2.3 billion in 2016, according to estimates from research company Technavio.
Klarna Bank AB has announce the appointment of Niklas Savander to the Board of Directors with effect from Thursday 22nd of February 2018. Niklas Savander will replace Niklas Adalberth.
Revolut said Monday that it had broken even for the first time in December, and that its monthly transaction volume surged to $1.5 billion, an increase of over 700 percent in the last 12 months.
The start-up has signed up a total of 1.5 million users to its mobile app, up 50 percent from a figure it achieved in November.
The 10-K filing referred to cryptocurrencies, without naming any specific one, three times under a subsection titled “Risk Factors” and described three different ways in which they could pose problems for the bank’s business.
The first reference was under geopolitical risks, with the bank talking about international money-laundering.
The third reference was along similar lines, with BoA saying: “The widespread adoption of new technologies, including internet services, cryptocurrencies and payment systems, could require substantial expenditures to modify or adapt our existing products and services as we grow and develop our internet banking and mobile banking channel strategies in addition to remote connectivity solutions,” adding it “might not be successful in developing or introducing” competing products at lower prices.
Spotcap today announced Vishal Uppal as the winner ofthe Fintech Scholarship 2017. The first of its kind in Australia, the scholarship awards one aspiring graduate with an interest in fintech $10,000 towards the cost of their tuition.
P2P lending, on the other hand, is a completely tech-driven investment, which gives a net annualised return of 18-22 per cent to lenders, who start earning their principal and interest back from the very first month. The returns are higher because you can lend directly to the borrower and the intermediary costs are drastically reduced.
A majority of investors on these platforms are salaried professionals aged between 20 and 35 years looking for additional sources of income.
On Faircent.com lenders can invest as low as ₹750 per loan size or choose tech-enabled processes like auto-invest to save time. These features are a major attraction for millennials and, in fact, according to the last Research and Analytics report on P2P lending published by Faircent.com, 64 per cent of lenders are below 35 years of age.
A growing number of millennials are also opting for investments into commercial real estate, as opposed to investments into residential properties made by their parents.
Commercial real estate: better yields for better financial security
Leases on these properties are usually taken out for multiple years by blue-chip companies, thus ensuring that steady rental income is assured for a specific duration of time. With India’s rise as a prominent international business destination, the sector is also witnessing remarkable growth; the country’s 537 million square feet of rent-generating commercial real estate inventory is currently estimated to be worth nearly $70 billion.
How technology is enabling millennials to make high-value real estate investments
The investments can start as low as Rs 5 lakh, making the entire process extremely affordable for millennial buyers whilst also allowing them to make multiple investments to diversify their portfolio, increase rental incomes, and minimise risk. Average rental returns to the tune of 7%-8% are quite common, while the overall returns can be as high as 22%.
India is projected to become the youngest country in the world by 2020, with a median age of 29.
BigWin Infotech, a government recognized fintech startup has appointed Suneel Mohnot a the Director on its board.
BigWin Infotech is a self-funded startup who has recently forayed into P2P lending business through its solely owned market place PaisaDukan.com post revised RBI guidelines for NBFC-P2P and one of the strong contenders for NBFC-P2P license.
CoAssets Limited (“CoAssets” or the “Group”) (ASX: CA8), a leading crowdfunding platform and Fintech lender specialising in facilitating funding for businesses reported its financial and operating results for the half year ended 31 December 2017, together with an update on the Group’s growth and capital strategy to the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) on 22 February 2018.
Total reported revenue increased by 471% from S$446,040 in 2016 to S$2,547,554 in 2017. Group’s profits in year 2017 was S$2,046,013, from a loss of S$3,899,325 in 2016. This increase in profits was due to business activities as well as investment gains. Operating expenses decreased from S$3,570,287 in 2016 to S$2,577,013 in 2017. This represents about S$1million or 28% in cost savings. Registered investor base reached 433,805 as at 31 December 2017. This represents an 88.17% increase from 30 June 2017.
Singapore — CoAssets Pte Ltd (“CAPL”)
After receiving the Capital Market Services (CMS) licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in June 2017, the company crowdfunded more than S$5.11million worth of deals from 1 July 2017 to 31 December 2017.
Singapore — CoAssets International Pte Ltd (“CAI”)
The company disbursed more than S$6.65million worth of loans over the last 6-months, with its loan book growing to more than S$16.21million as at 31 December 2017.
China — CoAssets China
This represents the Group’s fastest growing market, achieving remarkable growth in registered user base of more than 117% (from 173,000 to more than 375,000 members) from 1 July 2017 to 31 December 2017. The CoAssets platform in China funded more than RMB28.15million (S$5.94million) worth of crowdfunding projects over the last 6-months in 2017.
Hong Kong — Fintech Pte Ltd
In April 2017, the Group acquired Fintech Pte Ltd, an online corporate cash management platform called “PiggieBank ” in Hong Kong. Since then, PiggieBank has successfully managed funds flow of more than S$21. 39million as at 9 February 2018.
Hong Kong — Brighten Finance Limited (“BFL”)
As at 31 December 2017, BFL’s loan book was worth HK$36.91million (S$6.27million).
English First, an English Education Institute signed a joint venture with KoinWorks – a Indonesian Peer to Peer Lending Platform – that serves investments and online loans without collateral for various productive loans.
Key areas of the financial services that are most likely to be affected by blockchain include transfers, payment and lending. We have seen different start-ups such as OneFi, Inspire, Upstart, and Funding Circle, playing critical roles in peer- to -peer lending and services to individuals.
The closest we have seen so far is what VoguePay, a leading online payment start-up, has done.
It recently launched a multi-currency payment platform to enable businesses to send and receive payment from local and international customers, allowing merchants to accept payment in dollars, Euros, Rands, Cedis, Naira and Bitcoin payment.
The average Nigerian bank pays about five per cent interest rate on fixed deposits while requesting for two-digit interest rates on loans from customers. Economically, this does not make much sense because the margin is too wide when compared to what they offer for holding customers’ fund. Many people are tired of the highly monopolistic nature of banking.
News Comments Today’s main news: Spreads narrow on SoFi’s SCLP 2018-1 consumer loan ABS. DiversyFund raises $1M. Ranger Direct Lending sees arbitration delay. Klarna partners with Maplin. BNI Europa partners with Funding Circle on German SME lending. Western Union opens tech center in India. Today’s main analysis: Banco Popular reboots Eloan. Today’s thought-provoking articles: Marketplace Lending Association executive director’s testimony […]
Goldman acquires Final. AT: “It was probably more cost-effective to purchase an already-experienced team to do what Goldman wants to do rather than build the team in-house. Final’s team is ready to start engineering. Hiring an entire division to build from the ground up would take time and money. In today’s business environment, legacy institutions cannot afford to risk falling behind the innovators. Goldman is consistently showing that it can compete, and will compete, with alternative lenders. They are a contender, and now they’re expanding.”
BNI Europa using Funding Circle to fund German SEM loans. AT: “Another great partnership. What both the Klarna-Maplin and this partnership signify is that EU and UK alternative lenders and traditional financial institutions can still work together post-Brexit.”
Strong demand and higher credit enhancement allowed Social Finance to offer lower spreads on its first consumer loan securitization of the year, even after upsizing the deal to $850 million from $650 million originally.
Four tranches of rated were issued, resulting in an advance rate of 91%, according to a person familiar with the transaction. The amount of overcollateralization in the deal will gradually build from 9% to 16%.
Two senior tranches of notes rated AA + by KBRA were issued. The Class A-1 tranche, which has a shorter expected life, pays 50 basis points over the Eurodollar synthetic forward curve, in from 57 basis points on the comparable tranche of the previous transaction. The Class A-2 tranche pays 75 basis points over the interpolated swaps curve, in from 90 basis points on the previous deal.
The company, more commonly known by its acronym SoFi, laid off a “small percentage of our employment base” at the office next to the Healdsburg Plaza, said spokesman Jim Prosser. He declined to state an exact number.
DiversyFund, the only vertically-integrated crowdfunding platform for alternative investments such as private market real estate, announces today that it has surpassed its $1 million Series A financing goal, as investors flock to the innovative platform that is using technology to disrupt alternative investing.
DiversyFund also plans on entering the crypto-currency space by launching an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) as part of its financing plan. An ICO will make it easier for crypto-currency users to invest in DiversyFund and own a crypto-currency that is uniquely backed by institutional-grade real estate assets.
As the Chairman and Ranking Member know, fintech – and marketplace lending in particular – is no longer just an idea or a possibility, it is now a proven solution to a long-standing problem – the lack of access to a wide range of affordable credit options for tens of millions of working Americans, recent graduates, and millions of small businesses. This industry is effectively serving the broad American “middle class” that remains our engine for economic growth and prosperity. It is also bringing greater democracy to investment in credit – providing investment opportunities once only available to the wealthiest or largest institutional investors in society. MPPs are delivering new, beneficial products to consumers, in locations that many banks no longer can serve; and increasing needed competition in key markets.
This Subcommittee and the full Committee can build on its previous work to make that happen with the following:
Awareness: Hearings like this one are pivotal to making more Americans aware of the financial services MPPs have to offer.
Reaching the Underserved: MPPs are reaching communities that have traditionally been unbanked and underbanked.
Opportunities for Congress: There are a series of bipartisan bills that MLA encourages Congress to take up and pass as soon as possible, including the Protecting Consumers’ Access to Credit Act of 2017 and the IRS Data Verification Modernization Act of 2017.
Goldman Sachs has agreed acquire Final, an Oakland-based credit card startup, the bank confirmed to Fast Company on Monday. The new talent will help fuel the big bank’s expanding consumer efforts.
With Final, Goldman gains about a dozen engineers and product managers with experience building a consumer finance product from scratch. When they arrive at Goldman in the spring, they will join a growing roster of consumer-oriented employees, all part of the bank’s new Consumer and Commercial Banking division.
Wealthfront, the California investing startup with $10.5 billion under management, announced Monday a new feature to help users with the home-buying process.
Drawing on data from real estate database Redfin, the feature allows people to explore housing costs in neighborhoods across the US. It also shows them whether or not a certain home purchase is affordable and how it might impact other financial goals.
RealtyShares is a middle market real estate investment platform that uses technology to more efficiently source and underwrite real estate transactions within the $250 billion per annum middle market segment. RealtyShares provides an online capital-opportunity link between its network of individual and institutional investors and pre-vetted real estate operators.
Petralia said existing customers have been asking for larger credit lines.
The small-business lender has been growing quickly: In three years revenue growth has jumped 979%. It provided 250,000 loans in 2017 and has lent out $4 billion overall.
Kabbage worked with its partner, Celtic Bank, to develop the bigger line of credit.
The lending process for the new line will still take 10 minutes, with no human intervention, she said. The lowest loan rate will be 6% of the loan amount in a six month period or 12% in a 12-month period.
Consumers looking to purchase a Nissan can now access personalized retail and lease preapproval offers through digital credit shopping on their smartphones. Nissan Motor Acceptance Corporation (NMAC) today announced it is joining the mobile-first AutoGravity automotive shopping and financing platform. Through this collaboration, consumers will be able to select any Nissan vehicle and see finance offers from NMAC within minutes on their mobile device.
The AutoGravity app guides automotive shoppers through an intuitive four-step digital retail process:
Select any make and model of any new or used car available in the United States.
Browse thousands of cars by trim, color, body type and other attributes. The platform shows the closest dealers and inventory based on vehicle preference and geo-location.
Search for financing with smartphone simplicity. Users can scan their driver’s license and connect to social media to quickly pre-fill the application.
Receive up to four personalized preapproval finance offers in minutes and complete the purchase or lease at the dealership selected by the consumer.
Courts are distorting credit markets in a way that hurts Main Street small businesses, and Congress now has an opportunity to fix it.
The Madden decision undermined the legal doctrine known as “valid when made,” which has been a cornerstone of banking law for over 100 years.
In fact, a joint study by professors from Columbia, Fordham and Stanford Law schools found that “after Madden, loans to borrowers with FICO scores below 644 virtually disappeared.”
Despite the uptick in online loan securitizations, only a small handful of deals have been backed by small business loans due to the fragmented nature of the industry. This makes it challenging to aggregate data for securitizations, speakers said at the conference on Tuesday.
eSecLending has updated its securities lending best practice guide to reflect the rise of US non-cash collateral, term trading, and peer-to-peer lending, along with the rising costs of indemnification.
The financial services provider’s third edition, available from today, aims to help market stay current on developments in order to optimise their programmes for both risk and return in the modern market landscape.
The guide outlines the fact that non-cash collateral is becoming more prevalent for US-domiciled lenders as some borrowers prefer to offer non-cash for balance sheet reasons.
As digitization has revolutionized financial services, new online and mobile tools have made financial advice and planning services more accessible to everyone. Now, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) promise to deliver a second big bang to the wealth management universe, making it even easier for consumers to assess their financial health, make investing decisions and plan for long-term goals – on their own and in their own time.
In accordance with the terms of RiverNorth Marketplace Lending Corporation’s 5.875% Series A Term Preferred Stock (“Series A Preferred Stock”) (NYSE: RMPL), the Board of Directors of RiverNorth Capital Marketplace Lending Corporation has declared a Series A Preferred Stock cash dividend for the first quarter of 2018 of $0.4488 per share of Series A Preferred Stock.
The following dates apply to the dividend declared:
QCash Financial, a provider of automated, cloud-based, small-dollar lending technology, today announced that it is partnering with I.H. Mississippi Valley Credit Union (IHMVCU) to offer short-term, small-dollar pay loan alternatives to credit union members through its QCash product.
Using QCash Financial’s product suite, IHMVCU can offer an affordable lending option to members who otherwise might rely on costly services like traditional payday loans to cover unexpected expenses.
Community radio station KOPN announced the station will use profits from its online store to make loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world. The station will utilize a technology platform from online lender Kiva.org, a nonprofit founded in 2005 and based out of San Francisco. Items in the online store include mugs, sweatshirts, hats, and tote bags.
Guaranteed Rate, one of the largest retail mortgage lenders in the nation, was named a Best Overall Online Lender and a Best FHA Mortgage Lender for Refinance by the popular personal finance news site NerdWallet. NerdWallet’s Best-of Awards Program recognizes industry-leading options for consumers across a variety of financial products. As part of providing consumers with clear and objective recommendations for all their financial decisions, NerdWallet evaluated dozens of financial products across multiple product categories to identify the best options of the year.
FinTech will drive the finance industry – In fact, around 40% of Americans haven’t stepped foot in a bank or credit union in the last six months (Bankrate Financial Security Index survey), which isn’t surprising since the number of actual branches has dropped considerably in the past 10-15 years.
Blockchain technology will become mainstream
More mobile technology – The trend in mobile usage within banking is expected to continue to rise over the next year– it’s predicted that by 2019, mobile banking and payments will reach a staggering $92 billion.
The New Year rally in Ranger Direct Lending (RDL) shares has come to an abrupt halt after the listed loan fund, which is backed by fund manager Mark Barnett, said arbitration to settle the legal dispute between it and Princeton Alternative Finance had been extended by around two months.
The £119 million investment trust has been locked in an argument with Princeton, a New Jersey-based investment fund in which it is the leading investor, over its exposure to Argon Credit, a US peer-to-peer lending platform that collapsed in December 2016.
Uncertainty over the exposure to Argon – which represents 14% of its £217 million net assets – and doubts over the due diligence by its adviser Ranger Alternative Management (RAM) have hobbled the shares. They fell over 23% last year but had rallied since the end of December when they hit a record low discount of 32% below net asset value. From 704p at the start of the year they recovered to 767p last week but have dropped 4% or 31p today after yesterday’s announcement. Although still wide, the discount has narrowed to just under 13%.
Relx, the UK-listed information and analytics group formerly known as Reed Elsevier, has struck its biggest deal in a decade with the £580m purchase of ThreatMetrix, an online identify verification business.
ThreatMetrix has one of “largest repositories of online digital identities”, according to UBS analysts, and has built a database containing 1.4bn unique online digital identities from 4.5bn devices in 185 countries.
in particular, the UK’s peer-to-peer lending platforms are now crying out for new customers.
Today, however, more than 30 lending platforms, including all the large small business lenders, offer their own IFISA or are on the verge of launching a product. For investors, moreover, the returns available from these schemes looks very attractive: annual yields of 10 per cent or more in some cases look phenomenal when set against the backdrop of bank and building society accounts typically paying less than 0.5 per cent a year, even if there is a risk of losses on IFISAs if borrowers default.
Augmentum Capital, the venture group backed by Lord Rothschild, is planning to list a financial technology investment fund in what would be one of the sector’s biggest initial public offerings in a decade.
It is understood to be applying for admission to London’s main market in March and will seek to raise up to £125m with the sale of new shares.
The level of risk facing China’s financial system could be higher than was seen in the United States before the global crash, according to a former Chinese finance minister.
“China’s ratio of M2 [a broad measure of money supply] to gross domestic product has surpassed 200 per cent, which is more than twice that of the United States, yet the average Shanghai interbank offered rate is 4.09 per cent, far higher than the 1.1 per cent in the US.”
According to official figures, the M2 money supply at the end of December was 167.68 trillion yuan (S$34.75 trillion), or 203 per cent of China’s nominal GDP in 2017.
Senmiao Technology, an early-stage Chinese marketplace for peer-to-peer lending, announced terms for its IPO on Tuesday.
The Chengdu, China-based company plans to raise $14 million by offering 3.3 million shares at a price range of $4.00 to $4.50. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Senmiao Technology would command a market value of $109 million.
Today, leading payments provider Klarna has announced a partnership with Maplin – the UK’s number one specialist technology retailer. Maplin customers will now be able to use Klarna’s Pay later and Slice It services, allowing them to order online and receive the very latest Smart Home tech, security/CCTV products, top quality drones and so on, and then pay for them either at a later date or spread the cost over time.
Pay later enables online and mobile Maplin customers making purchases of £200 or less to receive their products and pay for them 30 days later, with no interest or fees.
The Portuguese online bank Banco BNI Europa and Funding Circle have entered into a strategic partnership to support the growth of small and medium-sized businesses in Germany.
Investment will support the funding needs of c. 600 companies and thereby help to create c. 1,500 new jobs
Banco Popular is relaunching E-loan (it dropped the hyphen from the name) to serve as its “fintech arm,” a stand-alone brand offering solely digital products.
Launched in 1997, Eloan re-enters a market where fintechs now account for over 30% of personal loan originations, according to TransUnion. The brand will compete for clients alongside well-financed upstarts like LendingClub as well as new offerings from banks such as Marcus from Goldman Sachs.
Spendesk, a fintech solution that helps businesses manage their spending, has raised an €8 million Series A round led by Index Ventures, with participation from existing investors. The funds will be used to accelerate product development and expand across Europe.
Three Dutch banks, ABN Amro, ING and Rabobank, suffered a series of DDoS attacks last weekend (27 and 28 January).
During the attack, internet banking, mobile banking, its website and Ideal were unavailable or extremely slow on 27 January from around 8pm to 12.15am CET and on 28 January from 12pm to 2pm CET and after 7pm CET.
According to the World Bank’s Global Findex report, nearly 2 billion adults and 160 million small businesses from all over the world do not have bank accounts. Efforts to approach them to traditional financial institutions have not been enough, limiting their economic growth potential.
Only 14% of adults living in the Middle East hold a bank account, opposed to the 94% of citizens from first world western countries that do. Developing regions with underserved communities such as India and sub-Saharan Africa comprise, when combined, nearly 32% of the world’s unbanked and underbanked population.
As a response to this issue, Nassim Benzekri and his team developed CHECQIT, an Ethereum-based, decentralized, peer-to-peer lending platform that allows users to grow their collaterals against a fast-guaranteed loan.
Finastra has acquired Olfa Soft SA and its cutting edge FX e-trading platform for banks and financial institutions. The move enables Finastra to deliver a unique end-to-end real-time eFX trading solution for banks’ treasury departments, covering distribution, position-keeping, post-trade and payments.
Cross-border payments company Western Union is opening a technology center in India, which will focus on biometrics, machine learning, and robotics, the company announced yesterday.
The center, located in Pune, Maharashtra, will have over 1,000 employees all focused on building these “innovative digital and retail customer experiences globally,” the company said in a press release.
Rubique, a marketplace lending platform for individuals and SMBs, entered into a strategic partnership with OptaCredit, an Artificial Intelligence-powered, data-driven online lending platform focused on providing unsecured credit to salaried professionals across India.
With its Online PLUS technology led model and proprietary matchmaking algorithm, Rubique will enlist the company on its online marketplace for applicants to avail viable loan products from OptaCredit’s offerings.
RBI’s much awaited official guidelines for Peer to Peer (P2P) lending platforms to bring them into the ambit of non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) is set to boost online lending. It is fast emerging as an investment option for retail lenders. The NBFC-P2Ps will act as an intermediary to provide an online platform to lenders and borrowers to transact on mutually agreeable terms. RBI has defined P2P lending as a form of crowdfunding that entails issuing unsecured loans to borrowers via an online portal in its 2016, ‘Consultation Paper on Peer to Peer Lending’. However, P2P lending is different from other crowdfunding activities in being a purely debt product, in which multiple lenders fund borrowers as personal loans or small business loans. Most of the P2P platforms in India such as IndiaMoneyMart curate their borrowers after conducting KYC checks, credit assessment, and due diligence before listing them on their loan exchanges.
On the positives, the regulation has made P2P lending platforms accountable to furnish credit repayment/non-repayment information to all 4 credit bureaus, thereby increasing transparency in the credit rating system. The credit rating agencies have records on about 150 million population but P2P lending platforms are also going to bring customers hitherto relying on private money lenders. This presents a huge opportunity to close the credit information gap. It will also reward sub-prime borrowers with a better credit score for showing improvement in loan repayment behaviour.
As many first time or retail borrowers take loans from money lenders or payday companies which charge interest as high as 5% to 20% per month, P2P platforms like IndiaMoneyMart are bridging the gap by making credit not only accessible but affordable. Bangalore-based IT consultant, Tanmay Thorat* (name changed) was paying over 300% interest to payday loan companies and approached IndiaMoneyMart for a small ticket size loan of INR 1 Lakh secured at rate of 13% annualized interest in March 2016required to settle his credit card debt and pay rent deposit.
The expectation from the Union Budget 2018 is immense in the BFSI segment, especially after RBI regulation. Experts hope that essential financial services will have GST rates revised from 18% to 5% or nil.
Most importantly, the fund of funds for startups (FFS) has begun to take shape with as much as Rs 1,100 crore being disbursed to SIDBI for allocation to venture funds. As of September 15, 2017, 17 venture funds have raised Rs 605 crore from SIDBI and as many as 72 startups have received about Rs 318 crore funds. The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) has also recently announced that this number will be increased to Rs 2,400 crore by the end of the next fiscal.
For instance, the startup space has reportedly seen a decline of 53 percent in seed funding and 25 percent in venture funds in 2017.
Listed below are four suggestions for Budget 2018.
Allow a lower MHP for servicing short-term needs of MSMEs
Raise rate caps under MUDRA scheme: The RBI currently has capped the final rate that can be charged above the refinance rate offered by MUDRA at 3% for banks, 6% for NBFCs and 10%-12% for MFIs, depending on portfolio size. Since most of the new lenders incur high opex, this cap should be increased in the Budget 2018 to 10-12% in line with MFIs, for loans up to Rs 5 lakhs, and 8-10% for loans from Rs 5-25 lakh value.
Extend the SIDBI net
Make P2P platforms more attractive: A cap of 5% of net worth for lenders and a maximum individual loan amount of Rs 25 lakh for the borrowers would make these platforms attractive for both lender and borrower.
Expand access to MSMEs
Introduce PSU Banks turndown program
Raise eKYC-based lending limit: The cap for lending through OTP based eKYC should be increased from Rs 60,000 to Rs 5 lakh.
Tokyo-based Lancers, which operates a crowdsourcing platform under the same name, has closed a JPY 1 billion ($9.2 million) round from Tokyo-listed enterprises Persol Holdings and Shinsei Bank.
The investment sees Lancers concluding business partnership contracts with both companies concurrently and will also see it commence its new financing business targeting freelance workers, which the company claims comprise 17 per cent, or 11.22 million workers of Japan’s entire working population.
The addition of Shinsei Bank as an investor will see Lancers, Persol and Shinsei collaborate to develop and provide a new loan service to individual workers who need equipment investment or education/training upon starting a new business.
Tokyo-based property crowdfunding portal Crowd Realty has closed its Series A round at JPY 580 million ($5.2 million) from Tokyo-listed Mitsubishi Estate, Shinsei Corporate Investment, Shinsei Bank, and Mizuho Capital, based on an account from The Bridge.
The Series A round saw two tranches: a follow-on investment of JPY 230 million subsequent to a JPY 350 million investment from Mitsubishi Tokyo UFJ Bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and Kabu.com Securities.
In a notice issued on its website on Monday, SSC said that the market now had companies operating in fintech, including cryptocurrency, initial coin offering, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending and blockchain. These were new products that had not been regulated, SSC said, thus posing high risks.
News Comments Today’s main news: SoFi hires Noto to be CEO. StreetShares secures $23M in equity to reach military, veteran market. Zopa fills positions for bank launch. Dianrong raises $70M. Yirendai signs onto Internet Finance Industry Credit Information Sharing Platform. Tera Funding sets Korean fundraising record. Today’s main analysis: FT Partners publishes 2017 InsurTech Almanac (a must-read). Today’s thought-provoking articles: […]
SoFi hires Anthony Noto. AT: “This is good news for SoFi, and appears to be a solid career move for Noto, who has quite the pedigree. We’re anxious to see how he brings his experience to the table and how it will impact SoFi’s future.”
SoFi’s new CEO has IPO experience. AT: “This could prove to be valuable as SoFi has had to put its plans for an IPO on hold amid its recent scandal involving former CEO Mike Cagney.”
FT Partners publishes 2017 InsurTech Alamanac. AT: “A must-read report. The insurtech industry is growing and is poised to grow into one of the largest tech industries on the planet.”
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) drops investigation. AT: “The focus of this article implies there is an improper Mulvaney connection to the lender, but this move actually represents the change in direction for the CFPB under the Trump Administration–as does Mulvaney’s appointment.”
In Noto, SoFi has chosen a fast-rising executive in the tech industry. Noto, 49, was one of the most respected bankers at Goldman Sachs before becoming the chief financial officer of the National Football League and then Twitter.
Shares of Twitter slid on Tuesday morning after the online lending startup SoFi announced that Anthony Noto, Twitter’s chief operating officer, will be joining the company as its new CEO, effective March 1.
Twitter has suffered from several departures of key executives in the past two years as the company struggles to bring value to shareholders.
Noto, who worked on technology, media and telecom deals at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. before joining Twitter in 2014, brings to the job a background in tech and finance. Beyond Twitter’s nascent revival, his turnaround abilities are largely untested. But given his history of taking companies public — including Twitter — a SoFi IPO is very much a possibility, according to people familiar with the situation. Furthermore, they say, it’ll be nice to have an adult in the room after all the recent turmoil.
SoFi Wealth, launched last year and harbored ambitions to quickly manage $100 million in assets, Bloomberg News reported in October. It grew slowly until last quarter, when it tripled its assets from September to $42.3 million as of Jan. 18, spokesman Jim Prosser said. The average account holds about $4,300. Other digital wealth startups have north of $10 billion under management.
2017 was a very active year for the InsurTech sector globally, with the most financings ever (over 200) and more than $2 billion in financing volume
While the total announced financing dollar volume for 2017 was lower than in the prior two years, when excluding rounds over $50 million, the volume reached a record high of approximately $1.3 billion
Of the four largest financings this year, two were in the Online Health Insurance space (Bright Health and Clover Health), one was in the Telematics space (Nauto) and one was in Online P&C Insurance (Lemonade)
2017 also featured another wave of mid-range to larger financing rounds for InsurTech companies founded in the last several years, including Next Insurance’s $35 mm Series A, The Zebra’s $40 mm Series B, Health IQ’s $35 mm Series C, PolicyGenius’ $30 mm Series C and Trov’s $45 mm Series D
Europe had significant increases in financing activity, the largest out of any region this year — financing volume and deal count both grew by more than 2x; the region also recorded its largest InsurTech financing ever: BIMA’s $107 million raise led by Allianz X, which was the fifth largest financing globally in 2017
Among the cohort of InsurTech companies founded since 2010, this year marked two milestones:
First IPO: China-based ZhongAn (SEHK:6060) raised approximately $1.5 billion
Largest acquisition: Guidewire acquired Cyence for $275 million
Hippo, the California-based insurtech company that is transforming home insurance for savvy homeowners, announced on Monday it secured $25 million in Series B funding round, which was led by Comcast Ventures and Fifth Wall. The investment comes less than two weeks after Hippo announced it formed a strategic partnership with Spinnaker Insurance Company.
OnDeck (NYSE:ONDK), the leader in online lending for small business, will report its fourth quarter and full year 2017 financial results on Tuesday, February 13, at approximately 7:00 a.m. EST. The company will host a conference call to discuss the results at 8:00 a.m. EST that same day.
The conference call will be webcast live on the company’s Investor Relations website or listeners can access the call toll free by dialing (833) 227-5836 for calls within the U.S., or by dialing (647) 689-4063 for international calls. The Conference ID passcode is 5468078.
StreetShares Secures $ 23 Million Equity Funding to Scale for the Military and Veteran Market (StreetShares Email), Rated: AAA
StreetShares, Inc., the leading small business funding and government contract financing company serving the military and veteran market, announced today it has completed its Series B funding round, raising $23 million in fresh equity capital. The Series B round was led by a $20 million investment from Rotunda Capital Partners, LLC, and included an additional $3 million from existing investors, including veteran-focused venture firm, Stony Lonesome Group.
AutoGravity, a California-based Fintech on a mission to transform car shopping and financing, announced last week it surpassed $2 billion in finance amount requested in 2017.
Honolulu-based Central Pacific Financial Corp. has appointed Christopher Lutes as director of the boards of CPF and Central Pacific Bank.
Lutes has been the chief financial officer of Elevate Credit Inc. and its predecessor company, which specializes in tech-enabled online credit solutions, since 2007.
LD Holdings Group, LLC, parent company of loanDepot, the nation’s second largest non-bank consumer lender, today announced continued expansion beyond its profitable mortgage and personal loan businesses. In Q1, a newly formed venture, mello Home, will connect pre-approved homebuyers with verified real estate agents in their local market, and help consumers find and hire home improvement and other pros.
That’s the idea behind Bond Navigator, a cloud-based digital marketplace for advisers to find and evaluate municipal bonds, that launched Tuesday from startup 280 CapMarkets.
Amazon has already tapped the securitization markets as part of a plan to shift the risk of its business lending programme off its balance sheet.
Amazon has stated in previous quarterly reports that it intends to transfer more of the risk of its seller financing programme to third parties.
Similarly, PayPal has expressed interest in funding its credit portfolio through third parties, including bank lending, securitization, private equity and sovereign wealth funds, although the company told GlobalCapital in August that this would unlikely be a near term project.
Many financial services companies, both startups and incumbents, talk about the importance of customers’ financial education but how they integrate it into their own offerings often manifests as no more than a dedicated content marketing section or blog. Acorns itself has an online magazine called Grow that features news, financial how-tos and interviews with celebrities like Kevin Durant, Ian Kahn and Tony Robbins.
For personal banking customers of First Bank, the largest community bank headquartered in North Carolina, transferring money to family and friends is now as simple as hitting “Cent.”
On January 22, First Bank launched Cent, its new quick-money transfer tool, allowing personal banking users of the bank’s mobile banking application to send money to anyone, anytime, anywhere in the U.S., regardless of if the recipient banks with First Bank or not. And there are no fees.
There is no doubt marketplace lending, by offering speed and flexibility not historically seen in traditional banking, has done its part to foster the “do it yourself” (DIY) era.
Peer-to-peer lending has become one of the most important sources of online financing. Unfortunately, there are some shadowy operators out there, using Facebook Messenger and other less traditional avenues to hook in victims.
The scam works like this: You’ll be contacted out of the blue and offered peer-to-peer financing, then asked to pay an arrangement fee or fork out for background checks. You’ll never see the promised cash and you could lose quite a bit of money, as well as data that can be used for identity theft.
4. The credit repair scam
Most young businesses have an inadequate credit score. It’s a simple fact of life. However, there are plenty of predators out there who’ll be keen to convince you that they have the expertise and tools to transform your score—in return for a hefty fee, of course.
5. The loan broker scam
Loan brokers exist to identify the right products for your business, make introductions to lenders, and prepare the paperwork to ensure a smooth process. There are plenty of legitimate and professional brokers, who get paid a commission from lenders for arranging loans; unfortunately, there are also quite a few sharks, who charge upfront fees for the same service.
Online and Alternative Investing Will Remain Strong: The amount of investors using online investing and alternative options will continue to remain strong, especially for both Baby Boomer and Millennial investors. Online investing exposes investors to a larger number of companies driving innovation, and, many online investors are starting to realize an ROI from their online investing activities. In spring 2017, the number of people who lived in a household that used an online investing/stock trading service within the last 12 months amounted to 15.79 million.
LendingTree®, the nation’s leading online loan marketplace, today released its quarterly list of the top customer-rated lenders on its network based on actual customer reviews for the fourth quarter of 2017. The list features the top lenders in multiple loan product categories, including Mortgages, Personal Loans, Business Loans and Auto Loans, all of which are included in LendingTree’s online loan marketplace.
Payday lending can be a useful service. A two-week loan of $500 at 400 percent annualized interest can make sense if, say, you need to fix your truck to get to work. Unfortunately, the industry has long made much of its money by trapping customers in a series of consecutive loans that can end up costing many times the amount borrowed. A patchwork of state laws has done little to combat such practices.
Payday lender World Acceptance Corporation announced in a press releaseMonday that it received a letter from the CFPB stating that the financial watchdog had closed its nearly four-year investigation into the company’s marketing and lending practices. The company, which is headquartered in South Carolina, has given at least $4,500 in campaign donations to Mulvaney, who represented South Carolina in the House for six years before becoming President Donald Trump’s budget director last year.
Sorry, boomers, but the world of banking and insurance isn’t so interested in you anymore. You’re getting too old to buy insurance and too conservative with your investments. And your time horizons are too short to be very profitable to the investment world. The financial services industry is aiming at millennials now.
–Six in 10 millennials are hesitant to discuss their situation with friends because they are embarrassed that they make less money or are ashamed of poor financial decision in their past.
–Only 12 percent of millennials feel very prepared for their financial future.
–Only one-third of millennials feel like they make enough to pay for bills and also save for the future.
Money360, a technology-enabled direct lender specializing in commercial real estate loans, today announced that effective immediately, Todd Ruppert, former CEO and president of T. Rowe Price Global Investment Services, has joined the company’s Board of Advisors.
According to a report by WalletHub, young people struggle with low credit scores partially because they don’t have the time behind them to establish wealth and experience.
Set Up Automatic Payments
Get A Low-Limit Credit Card – Charging small items to a credit card and then paying it off in full every month builds credit in no time. You can find offers for these at creditcards.com and similar sites, with many offering cards with a $300 limit or so.
Piggyback Off Of Others First – By becoming an authorized user on someone’s credit card, you can start building credit from their payments.
Build A Credit History – It is not uncommon to get a 0% or 2% auto loan these days, and this way of building credit history is brilliant.
P2P lender Zopa has begun building the executive team for the launch of its new challenger bank later this year, appointing a CFO, chief risk officer and chief customer officer.
Chief financial officer Steve Hulme joins from Tandem Money where he was CFO for the last two years. Before Tandem, Hulme served as CFO for PayPal’s global credit business and as CFO for Capital One’s UK and Canadian business.
He will be joined by former TSB man Phillip Dransfield as chief risk officer. Dransfield has a 20-year track record in risk management taking in two of the counttry’s largest high street banks.
The left-field appointment of chief marketing officer goes to Clare Gambardella from health and fitness brand Virgin Active.
Major banks are scrambling fast to not only comply with the regulation by opening up their APIs, but are also looking to leverage the new open landscape to separate themselves from their competitors and avoid being bitten by these fintech startups.
Take HSBC UK, which has proved itself to be an early mover when it comes to PSD2 by announcing a new beta app which will allow customers to see all of their accounts on one screen, even if they are with a rival bank.
However, UK challenger banks like Monzo and Starling, as well as some other fintech startups listed below, have been working towards the idea of open banking for some time now.
Monzo
According to a blog post by Simon Vans-Colina, an engineer at Monzo, the new API, which they are calling the AIS API, “will be made available to particular companies, that have been granted authorisation as AISPs.
Iwoca
As CEO Christoph Rieche explained to our sister site Techworld, real-time access to customers’ transactional data, which the banks have traditionally held onto for current accounts, is very valuable to his company.
Chip
“In a utopia consumers can start to grant affordability criteria to a lender, provide transaction data to a savings mechanism like Chip, or income data to a mortgage lender,” he said. “You can choose exactly which data you want which third parties to access, so it puts control into the customer’s hands.”
TrueLayer
Founder Francesco Simoneschi likes to compare TrueLayer to Twilio or Stripe, two companies that provide simple, secure and regulated access to core infrastructure (be it telco networks or payments infrastructure, respectively) through a core API.
So TrueLayer sits between the new breed of fintech companies looking to deliver value from newly opened customer financial data, and underlying banking infrastructure, charging a small fee for access to the API.
Emma
Cofounder Edoardo Moreni wrote in a blog post at the time: “Emma is currently building the banking app for millennials (iOS and Android), a mobile-only solution that helps consumers avoid overdrafts, find and cancel subscriptions, track debt and save money.
Research among 200 SMEs by recruitment specialist Tindall Perry found while 74 per cent of finance directors describe their knowledge of alternative finance as average or above, only a quarter suggested that they were comfortable with accessing crowdfunding, with P2P lending also scoring less than 50 per cent.
In contrast, 85 per cent of companies said that they understood how best to access asset-based lending, while invoice finance, trade finance and venture capital all saw a positive response rate of between 55 and 75 per cent.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the global elite in the Swiss ski resort, she said: “We have far fewer tools to deal with any event that happens.” Richards predicted an upset could occur “somewhere where none of us are looking”, and highlighted peer-to-peer lending as an example.
Current financial conditions have echoes of the pre-crisis era, according to Jes Staley, chief executive of Barclays, speaking at the same event. While he said he believes banks are much less of a threat to stability than a decade ago, he warned that current benign conditions may not last.
Dianrong today announced additional Series D round funding of US$70 million that was led by ORIX Asia Capital Limited, a wholly-owned investment vehicle of ORIX Corporation, and included CLSA, the overseas platform of CITIC Securities, China’s largest investment bank, which in turn is a part of CITIC Group, one of China’s largest conglomerates.
Orix Corp has invested $60 million in peer-to-peer lending platform Dianrong, in what is the Japanese financial firm’s first investment in a Chinese fintech venture as it looks to tap into the fast-expanding sector, sources said.
Yirendai Ltd. (NYSE: YRD) (“Yirendai” or the “Company”), a fintech company in China, announced today that it has connected to the Internet Finance Industry Credit Information Sharing Platform (“the Platform”) established by the National Internet Finance Association of China (“NIFA”). The Platform was established to serve as an industry wide credit data sharing database in aims of reducing credit risk, improving the credit environment and promoting the healthy development of the internet finance industry. Currently, all leading online lending platforms are required to upload their operating credit data to the Platform’s database and members can only make manual inquiries on the Platform through its webpage. Yirendai has been selected by NIFA to participate in a pilot project to enable automatic queries and the Company expects to launch an automated query function in its system shortly.
Payments company GoCardless Ltd., which employs 170 people in London, will open a Paris office in February, said chief product and technology officer Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas. Online lender LendInvest Ltd. said it will make a “concerted effort” to hire additional engineers in London this year, while Salesforce.com Inc.-backed software company Anaplan Inc. says hiring engineering talent is its current priority.
Faes said about 30 to 40 percent of its hires come from major financial institutions, adding that 100 percent of the team’s small risk and compliance team came from banks. For MarketInvoice Ltd., another British online lender, about three-quarters of its 85 employees — roughly a third of which are software engineers and data scientists — came from a large corporate in the financial services or accountancy space, said CEO and co-founder Anil Stocker.
Europe’s fintech industry, which includes challenger banks and online-only lenders, has rapidly expanded over the past 10 years. Traditional financial institutions have faced intense competition as a result, with former Barclays Plc CEO Antony Jenkins saying in July last year that banks could face obsolescence in five to 15 years.
According to a report published in September last year by Innovate Finance and Magister Advisers, VCs poured around $8bn into fintech startups and early stage companies across the continent between 2010 and 2017 and over the course of that period, deal sizes rose significantly. In London – generally considered to be Europe’s Fintech Hub – figures published in January by London and Partners found that the UK’s fintech sector attracted £1.24bn in 2017 alone.
Established in 2006, the Amsterdam-based company is currently valued at around $2.3bn and has has built a portfolio of more than 4,000 clients, including Netflix, Facebook, Uber and Spotify, plus retailers such as River Island and Superdry.
Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain platform contributed by IBM and provides plug-and-play modular blockchain components. You can see the commit history visualization of fabric project. Fabric runs chaincode which is comparable to Ethereum’s smart contracts. The consensus protocol is pluggable.
Transaction Flow Let’s see how nodes work together to execute a transaction. For now, let’s assume that the chaincode is already installed on the Peers.
Step 1: Transaction requests are proposed by a client. The client must be connected to the required number of peers according to the endorsement policy. A proposed Transaction is forwarded to Peers for Endorsement.
Step 2: Each endorsing peer simulates and validates the transaction. Peers reply with their Endorsement and certificate if they agree that the transaction is permitted.
Step 3: The client receives results from different Peers and can thus verify agreement among the Peers. Upon verification, the client forwards the transaction to the OS.
Step 4: Determining a well-ordered sequence of transactions is the task of the Ordering Service (OS). The OS generates transaction blocks containing validated transactions in the order they are deemed to have occurred, writes them to the ledger and then broadcasts them to all peers that a new set of blocks are now available on the ledger.
All well and good but, in a move that I am fairly sure was carefully orchestrated by the banking community, nearly all of the mainstream media greeted the launch of Open Banking with fear and scaremongering.
Nevertheless, the FinTech community are far more advocates of the new regime:
Note that to find the positive spin on Open Banking, I’ve had to seek out more business or niche news channels than the doomsayers of the mainstream consumer media.
GLOBAL fintech group Longfin Corp is planning to make its Ziddu cryptocurrency smart contracts available for peer-to-peer lending.
Ziddu.com provides smart contracts which are available on cryptocurrency Ethereum’s blockchain and can be used as alternative finance solutions within trade finance and FX markets, without the need for a middleman or underwriter.
Currently, there are over 2 billion people worldwide who find it difficult to access traditional banking services, often because they are new to the country or do not qualify for credit. I, too, was one of those people. When I arrived in the UK, I didn’t have a proof of address and credit history required to open a bank account, and just like many others in a similar position, I was left in a ridiculous catch-22 situation. I needed a bank account to get a job and a place to live but, in order to get a bank account, I was required to have a place to live and a job.
Monese is laying the foundation of how banks will work in the future by bringing the accessibility and convenience to levels that weren’t possible just a few short years ago. You can now bank locally in 20 different countries, in a matter of a few minutes — all you need is a mobile phone and your passport. You can literally open an account in your home country or an international IBAN in another country whilst standing in a supermarket queue.
Over 270,000 people have signed up to Monese and every day 1,000 more are joining us.
Fresh from the success of a well-received ICO that raised $10 million, blockchain start up Karma has now announced open access to its peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform via the use of its native KRM token, which also began trading on CoinLink exchange on January 11th, 2018.
NeoGrowth Credit, a lending startup focused at SMEs has secured Rs 300 crore of equity funding from LeapFrog Investments, and existing investors like Aspada Investment Company and Quona Capital through Accion Frontier Inclusion Fund, reports The Economic Times. The report adds that as part of the investment, LeapFrog’s partner Michael Fernandes will join NeoGrowth’s board.
Tera Funding, a real estate P2P lending company in Korea, announced that it has secured KRW10bn (approx. US$9.3M) through its series A funding round from Woori Bank, Atinum Investment, SBI Investment and Premier Partners on 8 January 2018.
It is the largest single series A investment for Korean P2P lending start-ups, and this comes as a pleasant surprise for the industry as such decision to invest in Tera Funding was made after a thorough due diligence amid general public’s increasing worries about the industry with rising defaults and arrears mainly incurred by late-comers who take riskier approach.
Having said that, the advent of cutting-edge technologies is pushing banks to change the way they operate. While they have been able to survive many revolutions in the past, they cannot remain aloof to blockchain, one of 21st century’s biggest revolutions.
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News Comments Today’s main news: VPC Specialty Lending Drops Prosper Loans.Best Egg to broaden services in 2018.Faircent raises $4M.RoboCash updates loan origination process.Tyro to launch new SME solutions. Today’s main analysis: China leads Asia’s IPO boom. Today’s thought-provoking articles: Can Lending Club grow by 20% in 2018?Blockchain could transform these major industries.APAC online lending is […]
Banks will likely benefit from softer regulatory tones. AT: “No doubt. But the big question is, how will these softer regulatory tones affect alternative lenders. It will be okay for banks to benefit as long as the alt lending sector also benefits.”
VPC Specialty Lending sells Prosper loans. AT: “This is likely a move to optimize its portfolio. Prosper, like OnDeck and Lending Club, have not done well this year compared to previous years.”
China
China leads Asia in IPO boom. AT: Not really news, but it’s interesting to see where Chinese companies are going public. The big winner is the New York Stock Exchange. But Shanghai and NASDAQ are also looking good with Hong Kong hanging in there.”
More customers are using Klarna at POS. AT: “I’m prepared for the big Affirm-Klarna clash. Retail financing is going to be bigger than credit cards, maybe not in 2018 but in the near future.”
Most new entrants have also found it hard to build scale. Lending Club’s top line may grow by 20 percent in 2018, according to Reuters data, but that will take it only to $800 million. Even online student lender Earnest, which largely avoided industry potholes, has struggled. In October it sold itself to old-school servicer Navient for $155 million – less than half its value in a 2015 funding round.
Marketplace lender Best Egg will move towards financing consumer purchases, including homes, as it looks to expand in 2018, the company told Bank Innovation.
If I can know my monthly cost for Amazon Prime before I sign a contract, why can’t I know my monthly cost for a car payment before going to the dealership? If I can see movie options before I go to the theater, why can’t I see my financing options before I sign a 5-year loan contract? Being empowered with concrete choices would make both budgeting and buying a car that much easier and help to save hours on the financing process. So, using my personal experiences from childhood to fuel my passion, I co-founded AutoGravity in October of 2015.
Our goal at AutoGravity was to make car financing as easy as watching a movie on Netflix, streaming an album off Spotify or buying a book from Amazon. So, we demystified the process by making it accessible to everyone – empowering them through our app on their smartphone.
Financial institutions also could face challenges in the near future as a result of technology-driven competition and long-term impacts from the recently approved tax reforms.
Marsico expects banks to increase automation of certain support-center processes over the next year. Artificial intelligence, for example, could handle some of the work that goes into processing loans, as well as tasks like verifying the authenticity of checks submitted through mobile deposit apps.
One study predicts banks throughout the world will increase their tech budgets by 4.1 percent in 2018.
Most consumers still don’t know they are not required to accept their bank’s overdraft protection service, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ latest consumer finance project.
Before the law was changed in 2010, banks automatically enrolled consumers in overdraft protection. If consumers made purchases that overdrew their accounts, the banks covered the expense and then assessed an overdraft fee, which often cost as much as $35.
Since the law changed, consumers must opt-in to this coverage — banks cannot automatically enroll them. Thaddeus King, officer of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ consumer finance project, says it’s clear consumers don’t understand that overdraft protection is not only costly, but unnecessary.
In September a survey found that an estimated eight million consumers have opted-in, primarily because they thought they had to. Two-thirds of consumers who agreed to pay the overdraft fees were unaware it was optional.
The rising influence of digital and banking-specific technology — so-called fintech — is “really changing how banks themselves will organize their own recruitment functions,” O’Sullivan told CNBC.
VPC Specialty Lending Investments PLC on Wednesday said it sold its Prosper marketplace loans and was able to immediately reinvest substantially all of the proceeds into new investments.
The loans sold represented around 4.1% of VPC’s net asset value as at the end of October, and it expects the hit to net asset value from the sale to be around 0.56%.
Asian companies raised $79.14 billion through initial public offerings as of Dec. 18, up 10% from 2016, data from Dealogic shows. The sum represents 42% of the global tally, which surged 41% on the year to $194.8 billion.
Shanghai, the world’s second largest economy saw a total of 409 companies tapping $31.61 billion from the market, up 30% compared with last year. Of the country’s total funds raised, 56% was from Shanghai, making it Asia’s top IPO destination.
Source: Nikkei Asian Review
Hong Kong saw total funds raised fall 34% to $14.08 billion this year, despite a 24% jump in volume.
Alibaba-backed online lender Qudian, for instance, saw its New York-listed shares tumble 55% after it debuted in October. Its peer LexinFintech Holdings, backed by JD.com, on Dec. 14 slashed its fundraising target by 76% to $120 million.
Latvia-based European peer to peer lender Robo.Cash, a young platform that is less than a year old, has provided an update on loan origination progress. According to the P2P lender, RoboCash attracted € 2.5 million of investments in pay day lending (PDL) loans in 2017. Robo.Cash launched its platform in Latvia in February 2017.
Robo.cash said the current average sum of investments is € 2.900 per investor with over 1,500 investors from 28 EU-countries have joined Robo.cash in 10 months. The site says investors may be separated as follows:Germany (50,5%), Spain (7,2%), the Czech Republic (6,1%), Austria (4,6%), Latvia (3,9%), Portugal (3,6%), the United Kingdom (3,3%), Netherlands (2,7%), Lithuania (2,3%), Estonia (1,6%).
The Swedish e-commerce company signed 500 online retailers for its new service, which allows consumers to buy products now and pay for them later.
And the company’s North American operations signed on a new CEO, Jim Lofgren, replacing central Ohio native Brian Billingsley, who recently was named chief revenue officer for Dallas-based payment-service company Modo.
“We serve more than 70,000 merchants over 18 markets, and our data in the U.S. market is really very similar to other markets,” Lofgren said recently. “We’re making a very significant impact for our merchants.”
The European Commission is to present draft legislation early next year to remove administrative hurdles to the cross-border operation of crowdfunding sites and online peer-to-peer lending services. It says the initiative will ensure that EU companies can grow and compete.
European fintech successes include TransferWise, the Estonian-developed foreign exchange company, and France’s PayPlug, which makes it easier for sole traders to accept credit card payments.
LoanBook, a Spanish marketplace lending platform, having easily surpassed its initial £650,000 last week is, is heading toward the home stretch having raised over £721,200 for 6.40% equity with the help of more than 253 Crowdcubeinvestors. £340,000 of this investment sum comes from current shareholders, local Business Angels and Family Offices. Funding will be used to continue LoanBook’s platform growth and development.
It’s a modern story of an ancient fairytale castle: a crowdfunding effort online has raised 1.6 million euros (S$2.55 million) to restore a chateau in western France.
Around 25,000 people from 115 countries have become shareholders in the chateau de La Mothe-Chandeniers which has turrets, a moat and an elderly owner who had not maintained it.
Swiss bank UBS and UK-based Barclays are both experimenting with blockchain as a way to expedite back office functions and settlement, which some in the banking industry say could cut up to $20B in middleman costs.
2. PAYMENTS AND MONEY TRANSFERS
Abra, another blockchain-enabled mobile wallet and payments startup, was recently integrated into the payments ecosystem of American Express: through a new feature, customers will be able to fund their Abra wallets using an eligible American Express Card.
3. CYBERSECURITY
Other potential applications include using blockchain to provide massive scale data authentication: for example, using its blockchain-enabled KSI (Keyless Signature Infrastructure), cybersecurity startup Guardtime tags and verifies data transactions for cryptographic assurance of their integrity and authenticity.
11. STOCK TRADING
Partnerships with existing trading networks and exchanges will help blockchain take off in the space. Blockchain startup Chain (which is also mentioned below) is a leader on that front: the company helped orchestrate a live blockchain integration that successfully connected Nasdaq’s stock exchange and Citi’s banking infrastructure.
12. REAL ESTATE
Tech startup Ubitquity offers a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) blockchain platform for financial, title, and mortgage companies. The company is currently working with Land Records Bureau in Brazil, among other stealth clients, to input property information and record documents through the blockchain.
13. INSURANCE
LenderBot is a micro-insurance proof of concept for the sharing economy that demonstrates the potential for blockchain applications and services in the industry. LenderBot, which allows people to enroll in customized micro-insurance by chatting through Facebook Messenger, enables blockchain to serve as the third-party in the contract between individuals as they exchange high-value items through the sharing economy.
28. CREDIT HISTORIES
Lenders minimize the risk posed by loans or lines of credit to small businesses by evaluating their histories using business credit reports. These third-party reports — issued companies such as Dun & Bradstreet — are inaccessible to the small business owners (beyond the basic profile information they provide to the credit bureau). This can make business owners feel like credit bureaus have all the power over loan terms, even though the credit bureau may be assessing outdated or inaccurate information to determine their reports.
Lumeno.us is one startup using blockchain technology to make business credit reports more accurate, transparent, and shareable. Lumeno.us normalizes semi-structured financial data using a proprietary application of collaborative tagging and advanced analytics. From there, it provides business owners the tools to share their data in order to get a loan, find trusted partners, or manage a portfolio or network.
30. CROWDFUNDING
Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), in which companies sell cryptocurrency-backed tokens in their companies in the same manner as a publicly-traded company sells stock, are another example of blockchain-powered crowdfunding — startups such as OpenLedgermake that possible. Individuals may soon invest in real estate using “crypto crowdfunding,” as well: Singapore-based Real Estate Asset Ledger (REAL) intends to use blockchain technology to inject greater liquidity and transparency into real estate investing.
Imagine, you are trying to make an investment somewhere in the World and you want to be face to face with your investment advisor without leaving your own office or room?
What is different about telepresence is that you can be telepresent through someone else instead of being even present through video conferencing or other methods.
I the financial sector, companies are using telepresence to connect their customers with their loan officers, investment advisors, and other employees to discuss all the requirements and provide solutions without actually the presence of the customer as well as the financial organization at the same place.
Australian fintech and challenger bank Tyro is set to launch a new set of financial solutions for small to medium enterprises (SMEs). Founded in 2001, Tyro describes itself as Australia’s largest independent EFTPOS provider, focusing on smaller to medium enterprises. The company states it is now has a license from APRA to offer banking products and deposits with its platform are government guaranteed. The company currently has 20,000 customers and has $42.2 billion in transaction.
The research paints a clear picture of trends currently taking place in Australia and New Zealand, where $348.37 million and $267.77 million respectively has been issued through online financing options (through 2015). These statistics are notable since 2012, with a growth rate of 653% between 2013 – 2015.
Various small business loans lenders currently offer funding to Australian clients from $5,000-$400,000 (depending on the industry lender). Australian small business loans lenders such as prospa, Capify, Sail, and Spotcap dominate the market.
Faircent raised $4 million (Rs 25 crore) in early-stage funding led a Belgium-based impact investor Incofin Investment Management, Rajat Gandhi, co-founder of Faircent, told BloombergQuint over the phone.
Rajiv Ranjan, a former Infoscion along with Ambar Kasliwal, a Mumbai-based Chartered Accountant, has launched a fully-owned P2P lending marketplace platform.
Called PaisaDukan.com, it is a part of BigWin Infotech, a government recognised start-up and it aims to start operations from January 2018, company officials said. The startup is among a few who have applied for an NBFC ((non-banking financial company)-peer-to-peer (P2P) licence after RBI’s revised guidelines.
Private equity and venture capital firms, which sat on huge money piles and waited on the side lines looking for the right opportunities, caught on to the excitement and loosened their purse strings to record a four-fold jump in investments to $1.84 billion in 2017 from $447 million, showed provisional data from VCCEdge, the data and analysis platform of News Corp VCCircle.
While seed and angel investments accounted for 43% of the total number of deals at 32, growth- and late-stage deals, besides private transactions and venture debt accounted for the rest.
While banks are fighting a bitter turf war with fintech startups to retain their share of business, private sector lender RBL Bank has seen value in strategic partnerships. The bank is growing its advances book by almost half annually, driven largely by partnerships with non-banking finance companies (NBFC) and tech startups.
While startups such as MoneyTap, BookMyShow are helping the bank acquire customers for its credit products, even its tie-up with one of the most prominent NBFCs Bajaj FinservBSE -0.14 % is helping the bank get customers who were never eligible for a credit card previously.
Investors need to position their personal finances in a manner that will enable them to gain from developments in the future. Book profits in the mid- and small-cap space: Mid- and small-cap funds’ strong performance streak continued in 2017 (category average return: 47.19 per cent year-to-date). As valuations of growth stocks shot up, investors turned to value picks. …
With the advent of robo-advisors, where advice is provided at low- or no cost over the internet, questions are being raised as to the future of qualified financial advisors. Is my job becoming obsolete?
A qualified and trusted advisor is able to spot potentially poor financial decisions and gently advise against this course of action. A robo-advisor could never be such a friend in need.
News Comments Today’s main news: Credible raises $50M in Australian IPO. Kabbage considers IPO. Blockchain project gives New York homeless a digital identity. Funding Circle surpasses $5B global lending, $1B to U.S. businesses. RateSetter publishes 2016-17 accounts. Starling Bank gets full FCA, PRA approval. N26 launches premium debit card, partners with WeWork. Revolut rolls out bitcoin services. Vietnam gets first P2P lending platform. IOU […]
7 fastest-growing personal finance apps of all time. AT: “If you read just one article today, this should be it. CB Insights delves into the fastest-growing personal finance apps including Robinhood, Mint, Check, Level Money, and others and illustrates–better than any case study ever can–how you can grow your own alt lending company. Learn what to do before, during, and after launch by studying these companies.”
Starling Bank gets full FCA, PRA approval. AT: “Huge news. Congratulations. This could be the first step to making digital-only banks legitimate in the UK, and it could be the first step to helping them gain real traction elsewhere in the world–first in Europe, then Asia, and the U.S.”
Credible launches IPO and raises $50M. AT: “This is a huge move, but I wonder why they chose Australia as opposed to the U.S. Ron Suber’s comments provide a clue.”
According to FT Partners, the FinTech market saw a record 412 financial deals during the third quarter of 2017. One of the largest deals in the quarter involved a $250 million investment by Softbank (OTCPK:SFTBY) in billion-dollar unicorn Kabbage (Private:KBGE).
As we near year’s end, we’re excited to announce that LendingClub has closed its third self-sponsored securitization. The $330 million transaction saw immediate traction and has further increased access to consumer credit for the stable and scalable pool of investor capital in the liquid Asset-Backed Securities (ABS) investor market.
Of note, with 48 total securitization investors this year, over two-thirds 34 are new to LendingClub, including insurance companies, hedge funds, a bank and a pension fund.
Ninety-two million millennials will soon be in what Goldman Sachs calls their “prime spending years.” In aggregate, they command $1.3 trillion in annual spending.
(Bankrate found 83% of millennials don’t think they’ll ever retire: they simply “don’t think they’ll have the money” to do so.)
Source: CB Insights
For three of the tools we looked at — Mint, Level Money, and Check — we studied how their product evolved all the way up to their acquisition (by Intuit, Capital One, and Intuit, respectively).
Source: CB Insights
What follows are the results of our analysis — six secrets to success in the world of personal finance management.
1. Use pre-launch marketing to build both trust and hype
Mint had by far the most significant growth in its valuation — from $0 to $170M in just two years.
Source: CB Insights
2. Making the first experience valuable
Keeping users around is hard: according to Localytics, the average mobile app loses 80% of its users within just three days of download.
The best apps retain about 70% of users after three days. The next-best retain about 60%.
A few minutes later, Therrien’s phone buzzed. It was the same guy. He gave his name as Charles Cartwright and said Therrien owed $700 on a payday loan. But Therrien knew he didn’t owe anyone anything. Suspecting a scam, he told Cartwright just what he thought of his scare tactics.
Therrien had been caught up in a fraud known as phantom debt, where millions of Americans are hassled to pay back money they don’t owe. The concept is centuries old: Inmates of a New York debtors’ prison joked about it as early as 1800, in a newspaper they published called Forlorn Hope. But systematic schemes to collect on fake debts started only about five years ago. It begins when someone scoops up troves of personal information that are available cheaply online—old loan applications, long-expired obligations, data from hacked accounts—and reformats it to look like a list of debts. Then they make deals with unscrupulous collectors who will demand repayment of the fictitious bills. Their targets are often poor and likely to already be getting confusing calls about other loans. The harassment usually doesn’t work, but some marks are convinced that because the collectors know so much, the debt must be real.
The problem is as simple as it is intractable. In 2012 a call center in India was busted for making 8 million calls in eight months to collect made-up bills. The Federal Trade Commission has since broken up at least 13 similar scams.
Three thousand homeless people in New York are about to receive a special holiday gift: a free smartphone that allows them to manage their digital identity, access shelters and food pantries, and make use of financial services.
Life Wireless is distributing the phones, starting in the Bronx. The service groups create the blockchain identities for individuals. Once on the system, they can then open an account, receive money, and track their activity.
Blockchain for Change has raised more than $500,000 in a seed round, but it’s also planning a public initial coin offering where it hopes to raise up to $50 million. It generates revenue by charging fees to users at a rate of $3 per month.
More than Google, Apple, or Facebook, there’s one company that CEOs and public company execs are talking about the most. We analyzed earnings call transcripts to identify the new king of technology.
Amazon has been mentioned nearly 3000 times in the last year. That’s more than Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft combined.
Global Debt Registry (GDR), the asset certainty company, today announced its membership to The Wall Street Blockchain Alliance (WSBA).
WSBA is an industry non-profit trade association created for financial market professionals, by financial market professionals. The alliance engages market participants, regulators, policymakers and technology innovators to advocate the adoption of blockchain’s distributed ledger technology.
Discover has announced that transactions made with Apple’s new Apple Pay Cash card will leverage the Discover Network.
The card is part of the new Apple Pay functionality, which allows U.S. customers to quickly, easily and securely send and receive money among friends and family. When Apple customers receive money on a supported device, the money is added to their new Apple Pay Cash card. They can use the money instantly to pay someone or to make purchases using Apple Pay in stores, apps and on the web.
One of America’s biggest payday lenders is launching on the stock market with a $620m valuation, cashing in on mounting hopes that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress will ease regulatory restrictions on the sector.
Curo Group, which targets “underbanked” consumers and is behind WageDayAdvance in the UK as well as Speedy Cash in the US, begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.
Shares in the private equity-backed company were priced on Wednesday evening at $14 per share, according to Bloomberg data.
Recently, a Manhattan federal jury convicted Richard Moseley Sr., the head of an online network of payday lenders and loan servicers, on charges of wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and Truth in Lending Act, among other counts.
Moseley was convicted due to his leadership role over a vast and complicated system of interrelated companies that collected over $220 million from more than 600,000 borrowers and deceived regulators in the process. Convincing state and federal regulators and even his own lawyers that his companies were based offshore and not bound by U.S. law, Moseley coordinated a network of lenders and loan servicers that routinely misled both consumers and regulators.
Instamotor, the free online used car marketplace, announced today that its customers can now apply for and receive financing for vehicles on its platform.
An estimated 54% of used car buyers need financing according to Experian. By working with leading direct-to-consumer automotive lenders, Instamotor will become one of the few true automotive marketplaces to enable its users to shop for a used car and secure the financing more than half of them will need, all conveniently integrated in one place.
Loans enabled through Instamotor will be available to consumers with FICO scores as low as 500, which are people who commonly have trouble receiving optimal loan terms through traditional financing methods. Also, the application is optimized to be completed entirely in the comfort of one’s home rather than in a dealership office or credit union.
Marketplace lending platform Lendio, recently announced its has opened its new franchise located in Nashville, Tennessee. Lendio revealed that its franchise program makes accessing business loans easy by helping small business owners skip the legwork of looking for a small business loan.
Marqeta, the open API payment card issuing platform, and Progressive Leasing, a virtual lease-to-own company and a division of Aaron’s, Inc., today announced a technology partnership that will enhance the checkout process for Progressive Leasing customers.
As one of the largest players in the lease-to-own industry, Progressive Leasing sought a partner who could support their needs today and provide innovative solutions to help build their future payment checkout roadmap. Through the partnership, Marqeta will enable Progressive Leasing to issue virtual cards at the point of sale and work with them to create additional innovative payment offerings.
With the partnership, Marqeta will enable Progressive Leasing to take advantage of a wide range of modern features, including virtual card issuance, tokenization, and its patent-pending Just-in-Time (JIT) Funding, allowing Progressive Leasing to authorize and reconcile transactions in real time.
To those unfamiliar with real estate crowdfunding, the Fair-Haired Dumbbell development in Portland may be just the kind of wacky, esoteric project one envisions when imagining what happens when strangers pool funds online, crossing Kickstarter with construction. A pair of six-story towers connected by a skybridge, the commercial project does in fact resemble a hand weight, with an ostentatious, colorful Italianate pattern sprawled across the facade for extra impact.
Funded in part by investors who pooled money via the Crowdstreet crowdfunding platform, the building, located in a former industrial neighborhood called Burnside Bridgehead, is also open for business and looking for tenants. It’s the city’s first crowdfunded building, and a sign that the growing world of real estate crowdfunding has developed and matured since a 2012 change in investment regulations made these platforms possible.
While reliable numbers about this growing and fragmented market prove difficult to come by, research firm Massolution estimated the global market for real estate crowdfunding surpassed $3.5 billion in 2016.
More than $3 billion has been raised through so-called initial coin offerings so far in 2017.
That wait-and-see stance looks to evolve into much more action in 2018, suggest those who’ve either spoken with the Securities and Exchange Commission or otherwise have a vested interest in its rulings. (The SEC isn’t commenting publicly on its specific plans.)
Just Friday, a new division of the agency that’s focused on ICOs filed charges against an outfit called PlexCoin that reportedly raised $15 million from thousands of investors by promising a 1,354 percent return in 29 days or less.
A row has erupted over credit scoring after the head of FICO, the company whose metric underpins trillions of dollars in lending decisions in the US, hit out at some lenders for supplying customers with a rival measure he dismissed as “Fako”.
The group that supplies lenders with the rival assessment, VantageScore, hit back, saying Mr Lansing was spreading “misinformation aimed at discrediting FICO’s only real competitor”.
The spat points to the opacity of credit scoring, a crucial part of America’s consumer finance economy that is in the spotlight after the huge data loss at the credit reporting company Equifax.
Tips for Reducing College Costs (Earnest Email), Rated: B
Roostify, a provider of automated mortgage transaction technology, today announced that it has signed an agreement with Black Knight, Inc. (NYSE:BKI) to integrate its platform with Black Knight’s LoanSphere Empower loan origination system (LOS). The integration will enable Empower users to add further efficiency and transparency to the loan origination process – from application to closing.
Envestnet | Yodlee(NYSE: ENV) today announced the members of the newest Envestnet | Yodlee Incubator class.
The members of the 2017–2018 Envestnet | Yodlee Incubator class are:
Amplifunds helps donors find non-profits that match their interests and performance expectations.
Datasine turns transactional data into psychometric insights, allowing banks to better serve their customers.
Golden helps families care for their senior parents’ financial health, wealth and security.
Peanut Butter offers a cloud-based software to help employers attract college-educated talent by managing student loan assistance programs.
Starbutter AI makes text and voice chat Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents that help consumers pick financial products like credit cards and mortgages.
Stessa enables property owners to manage, track, and communicate performance of their real estate assets.
Tangello improves home affordability by bridging the gap between renting and buying and offering a flexible, lower cost, and quicker way to finance homes, directly from mobile devices.
Veryfi provides mobile-first bookkeeping software that empowers business owners by automating the tedious parts of accounting through AI and machine learning.
AutoGravity has announced the appointment of Sheng Wang as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to drive the company’s global engineering efforts. Wang joins AutoGravity’s executive team with responsibility for leading product and engineering to deliver a trustworthy and innovative car buying experience that empowers the consumer.
Prior to her appointment as CTO, Wang led AutoGravity product development as the company’s first Director of Product, building cross-functional teams to develop and launch the award-winning AutoGravity platform, as well as branded platforms for Volkswagen Credit and Kia Motors Finance. Wang joined AutoGravity with more than fifteen years of leadership experience in the technology industry and an uncompromising dedication to building dynamic teams and high-impact products that people love.
QCash Financial, a Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO) providing automated, cloud-based small-dollar lending technology for financial institutions, announced that it was selected as the winner of Financial Times Future of Fintech Innovation Award.
The FT Future of Fintech awards recognize pioneering companies able to demonstrate innovative ideas capable of creating lasting change in the financial services sector on a global scale. Financial Times offers an Innovation Award for newer Fintech companies that are bringing out novel solutions. QCash Financial was awarded the Innovation Award.
Funding Circle today announced that investors have lent more than $5 billion globally to small businesses through the Funding Circle platform. This has supported a network of 40,000 businesses across the UK, USA, Germany and the Netherlands and helped to create more than 100,000 new jobs.*
Today’s news follows a record November for Funding Circle globally with the business facilitating more than $260 million of lending, including $175 million in the UK (£130m), $70 million in the US and $15 million in Continental Europe (€14.5m). Together this has helped thousands of business owners to access fast, transparent finance to grow their businesses, and will lead to an estimated 7,500 new jobs.
With US businesses now having accessed more than $1 billion in funding through the platform, Funding Circle becomes the first lending platform anywhere in the world to have facilitated more than $1 billion across two markets.
On Wednesday, UK peer-to-peer lending platform RateSetter released its accounts for the year ending on March 31, 2017. The online lender reported that revenues were £23.7m, up 38 percent from 2015-16; loans under management grew by 23 percent, from £581m to £714m; the number of active lenders grew by 36 percent from 31,036 to 42,049; and, over the same period, the number of active borrowers grew 27 percent from 161,000 to 204,000.
RateSetter booked a pre-tax loss of £23.3 million in the year to March 2017, compared to a £5.3 million in the previous year. The company operates a peer-to-peer platform that matches retail investors with individuals looking to borrow money.
Operating losses were £9.2 million last year but the figure was pushed higher by a one-off write-down relating to a loan the platform made to Adpod Limited, an advertising business RateSetter lent £12 million. ‘A resilient business’
RateSetter’s accounts also show that revenue rose by 38% to £23.7 million. Loans under management rose by 23% to £714 million. The number of active lenders on the platform rose by 36% to 42,049 and the number of borrowers rose by 27% to 204,000.
A goodwill impairment pushed pre-tax losses for RateSetter down to £23m in the year ending March 2017, despite revenue growth of 38% to £23.7m.
The company, which launched a consumer vehicle and commercial assets HP offer this year, saw a rise of 36% in the number of lenders and 27% of borrowers. However, operating losses of £9.2m were further weighed down by a £14.1m goodwill impairment on a loan to advertising company Adpop.
In 2015 Vehicle Trading Group, a company operating in motor finance for consumers and dealerships, used a wholesale facility from RateSetter to lend £12m to Adpop. Both Vehicle Trading Group and Adpop subsequently went into financial difficulties, and RateSetter then bought the two companies.
RateSetter thus decided to back Adpop’s repayments of third party loans, preventing its provision fund from absorbing the hit, as it normally would in case a borrower defaults.
Starling Bank has been granted approval by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) to offer customers a wide array of financial products by the mobile only bank. Starling Bank received a licence to operate as a bank by the Bank of England in 2016. The digital only challenger bank will now be able to provide; mortgages, consumer loans, ISAs, and other investment products via their App. No bricks and mortar necessary.
P2P Global Investments (P2P), the largest of the listed alternative lending funds, has won the backing of Invesco Perpetual’s Mark Barnett, its largest shareholder, for the turnaround plan it outlined last week.
The financial advisory sector has seen much change in the past few years, much of it driven by new technologies and a wave of new market entrants. While we are seeing consolidation and innovation in response, this is just the start. So if you thought the merry-go-round was slowing down, then grab hold tightly because it is only going to accelerate.
‘Fintegration’ – the integration with fintech services – is emerging as an important factor.
What is common to both groups is their appetite for financial online and digital services – from online banking and mortgage management to peer-to-peer lending platforms. There is no doubt we will shortly see the fully integrated dashboard becoming commonplace.
The 24-year-old secretary is among millions of Chinese who have turned to proliferating online companies that dish out quick loans — and are worrying the country’s leadership.
Jia started accumulating her debt when she was in college, turning to tech titan Alibaba when she could not get a credit card.
The ease of a few taps on her phone and a four minute wait led Jia to borrow and borrow and when she was finally able to take out a card, she used it to repay Alibaba’s affiliate Ant Financial.
But her debt reached roughly US$9,000 this summer, and her monthly interest payments eclipsed her meagre salary.
‘Lending nirvana’
Alternative lending, with loans that can be wired to accounts within minutes, has taken off in China and accounts for 85 percent of the global market, according to a University of Cambridge report.
N26, the European mobile banking service, today announced the launch of N26 Metal, the company’s premium MasterCard-affiliated debit card “tailored to the needs of digital customers” at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. N26 Black customers in Germany, France, Italy and Austria will be able to sign up for the new NFC-enabled card, which obviously features a metal core made from tungsten and that makes the card weigh a lot, starting December 14.
It’s also worth noting that this is the first metal card in Europe that supports contactless payments.
What better company to partner with then than co-working and real estate startup WeWork. Using the N26 Metal service, N26 customers will also be able to join the WeWork network and get credits to reserve workspaces and conference rooms.
Revolut, which provides foreign currency services to consumers and small businesses, said that from today its users would be able to buy bitcoin and other “cryptocurrencies” using 25 conventional currencies.
Marking its 15th anniversary year, BFS Capital, a leading small business financing platform, announced it has now extended over $1.7 billion in financing since funding its first deal in 2002. The company also reported that over 75 percent of its originations have occurred in the last five years and more than 25 percent took place in the last 18 months. For full year 2017, BFS Capital expects to generate more than $300 million in originations, a new annual high.
Today, Kabbage announced they had crossed the $4 billion mark. They have now lent to more than 130,000 small businesses which they claim is the largest customer base of any online small business lender.
This week LendingHome announced it had crossed $2 billion in mortgage loans for homeowners and real estate investors.
Funding Circle UK crossed the £3 billion (approx. $4 billion) mark in small business lending for their UK business.
LendingClub quietly announced total small business originations of $500 million since 2014 in a recent blog post.
The Chinese government instituted tough new regulations on online consumer lending platforms, which are made up of payday loans and peer-to-peer lending. Some of them are associated with large holdings in the emerging markets exchange-traded fund like Ant Financial, an Alibaba Group affiliate.
While much of this is a continuation of the Chinese debt bubble, the move suggests that it has gotten out of the regulators’ control.
We see a global trade boom continuing to drive emerging markets as global Purchasing Manager indexes show continued growth in demand for manufactured goods. For example, Korea is already registering signs of slowing Chinese demand but is still showing 9.6 percent year-on-year growth for November exports. However, we continue to watch the tone out of Washington, since a shift toward more protectionism could put a dent in this.
Viola, the Israel-based technology investment group, is launching new independent VC fund targeting fintech startups from anywhere in the world. Dubbed Viola FinTech, the “cross-stage venture fund” has an initial closing of $100 million but will extend that towards $120-150 million. It is backed by global banks, insurance companies and asset managers from North America, Europe, APAC and Israel, including Scotiabank, The Travelers Companies, Inc and Bank Hapoalim.
San Francisco-based financial technology company Credible Labs Inc. is going public, but not on a U.S. exchange.
The startup, a consumer loans marketplace, raised $50 million (A$66 million) in an initial public offering on the Australian Securities Exchange, according to a statement Thursday.
The IPO values Credible at A$300 million, about 50 percent higher than the valuation it got in its last fundraising round, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as the details aren’t public.
Yellow Brick Road has added online lender Prospa to its lending panel. The move was described as an effort to diversify its lending offerings for Australian small business customers. Yellow Brick Road is a full service wealth management company that offers products and services for home loans, financial planning, insurance, superannuation, and investments.
Speaking to Nest Egg, CEO of fully licensed marketplace lender Zagga, Alan Greenstein said that self-directed investing is now a “very, very big part of SMSF investment” and that according to Zagga research, well over 30 per cent of SMSFs at a sophisticated wholesale level are self-directed investors.
Pointing to a recent whitepaper produced by Zagga, Mr Greenstein said SMSFs tend to be invested at either end of the spectrum; very high risk and high yielding opportunities, or very low risk opportunities.
He said that Zagga’s newly launched ZAG Fund offered a middle ground, with a targeted net return of 6.5 per cent.
With loan capital provided by Kiwibank, Ngā Tangata Microfinance (NTM) provides no-interest loans to qualifying clients for family well-being and relief from high-interest debt.
An evaluation conducted by the University of Auckland’s Centre for Applied Research in Economics found NTM’s no-interest loans were crucial in helping low-income clients break the cycle of debt caused by predatory payday and fringe lenders.
Partnering with local budgeting advisors, NTM has now disbursed more than $660,000 in no-interest loans to more than 300 clients, with 70% of the support being for relief from high-interest debt. It is estimated these loans had potentially saved clients a total of more than $1 million in interest and additional costs. Requests for help continued to trend up – 30% more NTM loans were approved in the past 12 months compared to the previous year, amounting to nearly 130 loans worth $275,000.
When you buy a phone, you have the option to pay for it then or pay later. You have this option even when you are buying grocery or paying bills. Credit these days can be available relatively easily, even for amounts as low as Rs1,000. In fact, in a country where you need to have a good credit history and credit score to get loans from banks, you can now get loans on your phone—even if a bank would not lend to you.
According to data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt. Ltd (CMIE), personal loans (incremental numbers) increased 179% and credit card outstanding rose 34.63% in value during April to October period in FY 2017-18. In comparison, incremental numbers during the same period for housing loans showed negative 32.7%.
Source: livemint
HDFC Bank Ltd saw a 35.75% growth in personal loans and 44.50% growth in credit card business in the second quarter (on a year-on-year basis). ICICI Bank, in its second quarter results this financial year said that its personal loan book saw a 40.1% year-on-year growth and the credit card business grew by 36.5%. And this is true for the non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) as well. Bajaj Finance Ltd saw a 42% growth in consumer lending in the same period.
Vietnam has launched its first peer-to-peer lending service Vay Muon, enabling people to borrow and lend money without having to go through a financial institution.
Matching lenders and borrowers via a smartphone application, the lending platform does not require mortgages and one-on-one meetings, local VTV online newspaper reported on Thursday.
First-time loan requests will be reviewed and disbursed within four hours and subsequent requests will be handled in just half an hour.
Korean startups flock to Silicon Valley hoping to become the next Facebook or Google. However, setting up a business from scratch where thousands of new startups come and go every year, is not easy, and becoming a “unicorn” is near impossible.
One fundamental reason is because they can’t get enough funding, according to Tim Chae, head of the Korean unit of US accelerator 500 Startups.
First of all, a company should either run a business in a certain sector for which Korea is widely famous worldwide, such as beauty and e-sports segments, rather than roll out me-too services and products.
On November 29–30 a large-scale event — Block Show Asia 2017 — was held, and Datarius Cryptobank participated in this event.
Datarius Cryptobank is a unique project. This is a first social cryptobank built on base of the distributed register technologies using neural networks and artificial intelligence. The main attractive features of the project for investors and future customers are the lowest transaction fees, as well as P2P-lending.
IOU Financial Inc. (“IOU” or “the Company”) (TSXV: IOU), a leading online lender to small businesses (IOUFinancial.com), announces today that it has facilitated more than US$500 million in financing to thousands of merchants and small businesses across the United States and Canada since launching its lending platform.
News Comments Today’s main news: SoFi surpasses $25B in originations. JPMorgan Chase rolls out mobile banking app. ID Analytics has 85% visibility into online consumer lending. Zopa prices new securitization. Fannie Mae expands digital mortgage platform. SEC investigated Bank of Internet. China’s cash loan market hits 1 trillion RMB. Lendified secures $60M credit facility. Facebook, Clearbanc partner on merchant cash advance. Today’s main […]
SoFi hits $25B in loan originations. AT: “Interestingly, instead of firing out a press release, they made the announcement on Twitter. Congratulations.”
JPMorgan Chase rolls out mobile banking app. AT: “Apparently, this is an attempt to reach millennials, but I wonder if the younger crowd will fall for that, giving their distrust of legacy financial institutions, or opt for the more independent mobile banking apps?”
JPMorgan Chase spent more than a year researching what millennials (and clients wanting to bank like them) desire in a financial relationship. The result is a new mobile-only app that lets people sign up for a bank account within minutes and also helps manage their spending.
The megabank made a splash on Monday debuting Finn by Chase, an app that includes a checking and savings account and a physical debit card.
At Money2020, deBanked caught up with Kevin King, Director of Product Marketing and Ken Meiser, VP of Identity Solutions for ID Analytics. The last time I crossed paths with the company was six months ago at the LendIt Conference in New York City. Since then, the company has increased its visibility into the online consumer lending market to 85%.
Behalf’s merchant acceptance partners have found a way to apply Amazon’s small business strategies to their own business models. By adding the Behalf instant credit approval tool to their ecommerce experience, they also unlock the power of flexible terms on every sale. Customers of our partners can get instant access to up to $50,000 in buying power with their choice of flexible payment terms. With this boost in working capital, small businesses are able to invest in their growth, which increases their business purchasing velocity. Case in point: 92.3% of the Behalf acceptance partners surveyed reported that adding Behalf to their checkout experience drove a 10-20% sales lift.
Online lender Bank of Internet was the subject of a formal 16-month Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, according to a report.
The company, led by Chief Executive Greg Garrabrants, was the subject of scrutiny until June — when it ceased without the SEC taking any action.
The probe was focused on alleged conflicts of interests, auditing practices, and loans made to two entities, according to subpoenas and government documents obtained by Probes Reporter, a publisher of investment research.
Large U.S. banks are starting to pay up to keep depositors from moving their money, saying customers are becoming increasingly demanding as the stronger economy nudges interest rates higher.
The average interest rate paid by the biggest U.S. banks on interest-bearing deposits jumped to 0.40% in the third quarter, the highest level since 2012 and the biggest quarterly increase this year, from 0.34% in the second quarter, according to Autonomous Research.
Bank executives said that the newest pressure for higher rates is coming primarily from wealth-management customers, typically well-to-do individuals and families who deposit cash as part of their investment accounts.
Fifth Third executives said they were raising deposit rates for some of those customers, particularly those who had other relationships with the bank.
On October 25, 2017, Credit Sesame announced it has raised over $42 million in equity and venture debt
The funding comes from existing and new investors including Menlo Ventures, Inventus Capital, Globespan Capital, IA Capital, SF Capital, among others, along with a strategic investor
The $42 million in funding is comprised of $26.6 million in equity and $15.5 million in venture debt, bringing the Company’s total funding to over $77 million
Headquartered in Mountain View, CA, Credit Sesame was founded in 2011 and has provided credit and loan management tools to over 12 million members
The mobile and web solution provides consumers with tools to build a path to achieve financial wellness, including free access to their credit profile complete with their credit score, credit report grades, credit monitoring, interactive step-by-step tools and recommendations for better lending options
With about $2.4 billion raised in IPOs on US exchanges by Chinese companies so far this year, other China-based firms are increasingly vying for US investors and exchanges.
On October 18, Chinese online micro-credit provider Qudian Inc listed on the NYSE, raising $900 million in an IPO that was priced at $24, in the biggest ever US listing by a Chinese fintech firm. The financial sector firm’s stock, trading under the symbol QD, closed at $33 as of October 23. The stock commands a market capitalization of $8.8 billion in the US stock market.
Year-end Forward P/E for the depository receipt is estimated at 21.47. Estimated earnings-per-share stand at $8.21.
China Internet Nationwide Financial Services (CIFS)
This Beijing-based financial sector firm, trades under the ticker CIFS on the NASDAQ GM stock exchange, is engaged in providing financial advisory services in China. The company’s stock listed on the US stock market on August 8 at an initial offer price of $10 a share, raising $20.2 million for the company. The stock, trading at $31.5 (as of October 23rd), commands a market capitalization of $693 million in the US stock market.
Listed since April 28th on the NYSE stock market, China Rapid Finance Limited operates one of China’s largest online consumer lending marketplaces. The company caters well to China’s 500 million EMMAs (Emerging Middle-class Mobile Active consumers), and has facilitated over 20 million loans to more than 2.7 million borrowers. Back in April, the company raised $69 million in an IPO, marking its listing on the US stock exchange under the ticker XRF. The shares initially offered at $6 a share, and now trade at $9.06 (as of October 23) with a market capitalization of $586.2 million.
JPMorgan was the first major US bank to partner with a fintech company when they launched their small business lending partnership with OnDeck in early 2016. That partnership was renewed earlier this year and has helped the bank to offer a seamless small business lending experience and reach customers it might not have otherwise. In recent months they have struck a new partnership with Mosaic Smart Data to help the slumping fixed income trading revenues and they have also completed an acquisition of WePay, a Silicon Valley company that offers payment capabilities to business platforms using APIs. Finally, just this week they launched Finn by Chase, an app aimed at millennials that allows people to use a phone to open a bank account, make deposits, issue checks, track spending and set up savings plans.
Bank of America saw more than 1 million users added to their digital channels and active digital banking users go from 32.8 million to 34.5 million in the last year. The main driver of this growth was through their mobile app. Customers are using the mobile deposit feature more than any other, mobile deposits now account for 21 percent of total bank deposits.
Wells Fargo’s digital growth, which includes web based and mobile users, saw a 2 percent increase from 2016. Branch and ATM interactions were down 6 percent while digital sessions through the web and mobile app increased 6 percent.
Citi is the first global bank to integrate banking, money movement and wealth management on mobile.
“Technology has helped us bring efficiency, speed and first-rate customer service to the small-loan space for all of our stakeholders, borrowers and brokers alike,” said Bonnie Habyan, executive vice president, marketing, at Arbor. Small-balance owners and operators need to work long hours to be successful, and the time and paperwork dedicated to obtaining financing is an inefficient use of time. Online multifamily financing platforms such as Arbor LoanExpress, or ALEX, address this by providing the ability to e-sign and upload documents.
“Crowdfunding was originally created to give average investors access to investments they normally wouldn’t have access to, and to give sponsors or borrowers easier access to capital,”said Bill Lanting, vice president, Commercial Debt at RealtyShares. “We were formed specifically with that idea in mind, to make borrowing easier and less cumbersome, and also to make investments in assets more available to everybody.”
AutoGravity, a FinTech pioneer on a mission to transform car financing by harnessing the power of the smartphone, announced a partnership with Global Lending Services LLC, a South Carolina-based auto finance company, to provide access to finance offers through the innovative AutoGravity digital platform. Qualified car buyers gain access to an even broader set of car finance options through the AutoGravity iOS, Android and Web Apps.
The good news about student loans is that they allow millions of people to earn college degrees who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford them. The bad news is that college graduates enter the workforce deeply mired in debt that deflates their net worth and keeps them cash-strapped for years, if not decades. The current wave of college graduates is facing debt in amounts far above previous generations.
Oliver Wyman, a global management consulting firm, sets the median figure for an undergraduate degree at more than $25,000. That figure rises with each advanced degree. Graduates with MBAs enter the workforce with a median debt of $45,000. Medical school graduates can expect to be $200,000 in debt.
Debt repayments for the typical college graduate will amount to $265 a month and for medical school graduates, $1,600 a month.
Target announced that, starting this November, the retailer will integrate a wallet function in its Target mobile app. The purpose, says the retailer, is to allow customers to pay for purchases and redeem promotions through the use of a smartphone.
Veteran investor Jim Rogers believes that banks must invest in the financial technology (fintech) space or they face being replaced.
According to the report, he has invested in Hong Kong-based ITF Corporation, the world’s first financial technology bank founded by Hui Jie Lim. Rogers has also invested in Tiger Broker, a Chinese online brokerage.
He also believes that digital currencies could change how we see money in the next 10 to 20 years. Even though he hasn’t invested in the crypto market Rogers is of the opinion that governments could issue their own cryptocurrencies in the future.
A securitisation of loans originated by peer-to-peer lending firm Zopa has received a warm reception in the market. The deal, which is the second securitisation of Zopa loans, has been priced significantly tighter than last year’s transaction.
The securitisation was led by P2P Global Investments PLC, the first UK listed investment trust to dedicate itself to investing in marketplace loans, and was arranged by Deutsche Bank. The most senior class of notes was priced at 70bps over one month Libor, compared to 145bps last year.
The senior tranche of the £209m securitisation, which represents 80 per cent of the portfolio, was rated AA by Moody’s.
One central piece to understanding why trading (or flipping) strategies can be highly attractive is the effect of even small premiums pocketed on the portfolio yield. Take an investor that invests into a 100 (whatever currency) loan part and sells that part for 100.40 after holding it for 5 days. That is only a 0.4% premium, but the annualized yield is 33.8%.
Two main strategy approaches
Investors can
A) Invest on the primary market and then sell the loan later on the secondary market
or
B) Buy loan parts on the secondary market which they deem underpriced and then sell at a higher price. Be it buying at discount and selling at a lower discount, or already buying at premium and selling at an even higher premium.
One important point, is that market conditions change, usually good opportunities will stop working after a few months or weeks either because too many investors try to use them, or more general the demand/supply ratio changes or the marketplace itself changes the rules how the market functions.
First an investor will want to look how loan information is presented on the primary and secondary market.
Understand the allocation mechanism on the primary market. How does the autoinvest feature work exactly?
When is interest paid? Does it accrue for each of the day held, or does the investor holding the loan at the date of the interest payment gets full interest credited. This is important, because if in the example at the start of the article the investor not only makes a 0.40 capital gain but also collects interest for the 5 days he held the part, it will have a huge impact on yield
Usually for this strategy longer duration loans are more attractive.
Usually smaller loans are more attractive.
Usually the time span a trading investor wants to hold on to a loan part, will be as short as possible (days). However there might be patterns observed where it could be desirable to hold for longer time spans.
Strategies that allow to hold parts only at a time when the status of a loan cannot change can be attractive.
Monzo has announced today, after a week of dropping hints on various Twitter accounts, that it plans to integrate Android Pay into its user interface for current account users.
A few hours earlier, Starling Bank confirmed this morning that it will be the first bank in the UK to connect with Fitbit Pay.
The UK peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market has flourished in the last decade. Lending volumes among the major platforms are increasing rapidly, pushing the cumulative total above £7 billion for the first time, as the understanding of the investment model continues to grow.
New technology architectures, as well as the ability to quickly run up minimal viable products, mean that emerging P2P companies can turn ideas into reality much faster than their larger counterparts (“fail fast” or as I like to call it, “test quickly”).
This prioritisation of speed and efficiency, coupled with the ability to focus, means that P2P lenders can zero in on specific problems and provide what customers want and are increasingly expecting. At Landbay we can bring a new micro service up from scratch in 20 minutes, with the lag for code from committing to going live being about six to eight minutes whilst still maintaining the up time required.
As the alternative finance market has become saturated with different funding options, it can be difficult for brokers to determine the best solution to suit their clients’ needs.
Loans can also be tailored to fit the specific needs of customers, with fixed rates available to allow customers to budget effectively for the full term of the loan. The flexibility of loans means borrowers can cover unexpected costs or finance planned purchases at more affordable rates, meaning P2P finance is a great option when situations happen to change at a company.
Whilst 25% of borrowers that apply to banks have their loan application rejected, according to British Business Bank, other forms of lending have paved the way for businesses to obtain cash, with P2P lending becoming one of the most prominent solutions in the current market.
Dear Andrew, your comments on the BBC on Monday 16th October reflect the concerns that many share with the FCA about the effect of the high cost of credit impacting society widely and, in particular, the young.You cited concerns about certain aspects of credit card and payday lending practices, but you did not pass comment on the retail banks and their provision of overdraft credit at rates that may well exceed the rates of payday and credit card loans.It should be noted that at 1p per day for every £7 of overdraft, the fees for an overdraft of, for example, £2,000 pa, are in excess of 50% interest, uncompounded. This is certainly higher than many credit cards.Alex Letts
Founder and chief unbanking officer, U
Cash loan originated from the payday loan in America, and accelerated in China. In less than one year, the total volume increased from 600 billion RMB to 1 trillion RMB. As a branch of consumer finance, cash loan developed rapidly as much as P2P lending industry.
Early in this April, the regulator issued the first order to clean up the “cash loans”，while after six months the trend of compliance in the field is still unclear. Recently, with several relative businesses coming to the U.S. for IPO, the critical voice on the profiteering of cash loan becomes louder.
However, owing to the annual lending rate much more than the rate legal limited (36%), taking the consumer finance vents, cash loan still grow wildly under strict regulation.
Houses are for living in, not for speculation, Chinese President Xi Jinping said last week. The trouble is, fueling this speculation has been a surge in consumer lending, not only by banks but also by fintech firms such as recently listedQudian Inc.
Thanks to improved earnings and corporate debt that’s souring at a slower rate, Chinese bank shares have rallied this year.
Source: Bloomberg
What investors may be ignoring at their peril, however, is the spike in household advances. Consisting of mortgages, credit-card debt and auto loans, consumer lending as a share of the total is relatively low. Only 400 million Chinese had personal loans in 2016, or about 29 percent of the population. The ratio in the U.S. is about 82 percent, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. But it’s been growing fast and even People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan is worried. China’s household debt-to-GDP ratio reached 47 percent in the first half, according to a recent Citigroup Inc. report.
In the first half year of 2017, Chongqing Ali Microcredit Ltd. has made the revenue of 3.97 billion RMB, which increased 100 million RMB compared to the 3.86 billion RMB of 2016. The company’s net profit was 2.644 billion RMB, in a growth of about 700 million RMB from the end of 2016.
As one of the Ant Financial eco-system, Ali Microcredit takes the business of credit loan (Ant Jiebei). Therefore, Ali Microcredit is already the industry leader in the consumer finance field. Even compared to the listed banks, Ali Microcredit’s profit data can defeat many of them. Take the first half year for example, the company profit exceeded 14 of all the 38 listed banks in stock exchange of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Shenzhen, including Guangzhou Rural Commercial Bank (01551.HK, profit of 2.639 billion RMB), Bank of Tianjin(01578.HK,profit of 2.62 billion RMB), Bank of Hangzhou(600926.SH, profit of 2.53 billion RMB),etc.
Chinese people are becoming more and more willing to spend. But if they don’t have money, they borrow. This ever-growing phenomenon has recently thrown cash loans, also known as fast loans, right under the public spotlight.
Han, a 26-year-old white-collar worker in Shanghai, who preferred only to give her surname, borrowed a 6-month loan of 10,000 yuan ($1505.53) from Mayi Jiebei, the online cash loan service provided by e-commerce giant Alibaba’s subsidiary Ant Financial, at the end of September.
When borrowing the money, Han was informed by Mayi Jiebei that she will need to pay a monthly interest rate of slightly more than 100 yuan. In total, Han will need to pay an interest rate of 637 yuan to the provider.
Currently, the entire cash loan market is worth between 600 billion yuan and 1 trillion yuan, the wdzj.com report showed.
China provides the infrastructure for financial technology to succeed, such as clearly-defined laws and good internet penetration, says Soul Htite, Dianrong CEO.
China Rapid Finance has named Zhou Ji’an a non-executive independent director. He becomes the seventh member of a board that includes former executives of Hewlett Packard, McKinsey & Company, Morgan Stanley, and UBS.
Mr. Zhou is the executive director and general manager of China United SME Guarantee Corporation aka Sino Guarantee. He previously served in senior roles with China Export & Credit Insurance Corporation, and China Life Insurance Co . and is a senior scholar of the Eisenhower Fellowships, an international nonprofit leadership corporation.
Two main topics of the 6th Annual Convention of the European Crowdfunding Network (ECN) on October 19th and 20th were technology innovation and cross-border finance.
To retain their lead in innovation over banks and traditional finance’s Fintech, startups must keep delivering greater customer orientation and execution efficiency. The success of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) is a clear signal, and a red flag, that there exist gaps in technology and cross-border funding that finance has not filled.
Cross-border alternative finance is still hampered by the fragmentation of the European Union (EU) regulation at many levels: Not only do crowdfunding and crowdlending regulation differ from one country to the next, but so do investor taxation and corporate law.
Ingi Sigurdsson, CEO, Karolina Engine, claimed that artificial intelligence enables the platform to predict the success of crowdfunding campaigns with 80% accuracy. Mads Dalsgaar CMO, Funderbeam, explained how Funderbeam uses Bitcoin’s blockchain to register, clear and settle the trading of private companies’ shares. For Rein Ojavere, CFO of Bondora, technology enables his lending platform to “cut through the layers of fat” of multiple investment intermediaries. In the same vein, Lasse Mäkelä, CEO of Invesdor, called his company a “digital investment bank.”
Umberto Piattelli of law firm Osborne Clarke summarized the conclusion of ECN’s updated complete review of national crowdfunding and crowdlending regulations in 29 countries. He stressed the strong correlation between the growth of alternative finance and effective crowdfunding regulation. Only 11 out of the 28 EU markets researched have published specific regulations for crowdfunding and crowdlending. These markets have taken off rapidly after the issuing of such regulations.
Swedish fintech company Tink has signed with Nordic banks Nordea, Klarna and Nordnet. Integrating in 2018, the banks will use Tink’s payment technology and personal finance management (PFM) platform within their existing customer channels.
In addition to the partnership agreements, SEB, Nordea, Nordnet, ABN Amro, Creades and Sunstone has invested €14 million in Tink.
The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a provider of clearance, settlement, and a wide range of other services to the financial markets, has issued a new white paper on technological innovations and the disruptions fintech may generate.
By “core banking functions,” (1) the authors of the white paper have in mind credit, liquidity, and maturity transformation. The banks have more institutional experience handling these functions than upstart fintech firms and, to the extent the latter take over the core functions of the former, there may be reason to worry. Likewise, the fragmentation (2) of “the creation and delivery of financial services across additional providers and platforms” could cause errors and inefficiencies. And (3) if certain players could become too good at delivering these services in this way, they could pose systemic risks.
A research report by Transparency Market Research, predicts that the global peer-to-peer (P2P) market lending valuation will reach US$897.85 billion by 2024, as it expands at a significant CAGR of 48.2% from 2016 to 2024.
Dragon Victory International Limited (NASDAQ: LYL) announced today that, the Company has entered into a Strategic Cooperation Agreement (the “Agreement”) with Shenzhen 708090 Investment and Development Co., Ltd (“708090”), a leading provider of shared workspace, community, and services for entrepreneurs, freelancers, startups and small businesses, to promote incubation services.
On October 24th, Fiserv announced that Regions Bank will expand their digital money movement capabilities with the addition of person-to-person payment and account-to-account transfer solutions from Fiserv.
On June 15th, Yirendai announced that it was awarded the Best P2P Lending Platform in ChinaAward at The Future of Finance Summit (the “Summit”) held in Singapore. Yirendai is the first FinTech company in China to receive this prestigious reward.
Qudian Inc. (NYSE: QD) is a leading provider of online small consumer credit in China. The Company uses big data-enabled technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to transform the consumer finance experience in China. The company recently emphasizes Its collection efforts and pricing policy. The Company’s collection efforts extend to every delinquent borrower. The Company’s collection process is divided into distinct stages based on the severity of delinquency, which dictates the level of collection steps taken. As part of the major upgrade of the Company’s risk management system in January 2017, the Company has developed a machine learning algorithm to better allocate collection resources based on more detailed grouping of larger delinquency risk. Higher risk groups are allocated with more collection resources as the likelihood of their outstanding balance becoming longer-term delinquent or even uncollectable is generally higher.
On Tuesday, ASIC announced that it had reached a confidential in-principle settlement with ANZ resolving the dispute over alleged BBSW misconduct. Commenting on the matter, RateSetter chief executive Daniel Foggo said the corporate regulator’s activity in this area of the market bodes well for a more transparent financial system.
There was a time when a loan mostly meant you were going to buy a house or a car. This is not the case any longer. With changing times, now there are loans against salary advance to fund even your honeymoon. Today, there are loans available practically for every need and dream.
Take the case of the ubiquitous car loan, the advent of luxury cars has turned several car companies to offer loans that are tailored to suit customer offerings. For instance, Volkswagen Finance (India), offers financing solutions to customers for both new and pre-owned Volkswagen group vehicles (namely Volkswagen, Skoda, Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini, MAN and Scania) through registered and authorised Volkswagen group dealer channels.
Yet, borrowing is not as smooth as one would expect it to be. Take for instance Mumbai-based Amit Shukla, he had to take a personal loan of Rs 5 lakh to fund his first commercial car, because a car loan did not work out the way he wanted it to work for him.
When equity and debt-based crowdfunding platforms were launched in the market, there were concerns that these vehicles could be used for money laundering. After all, investors could unknowingly fund a fraudulent company and the money could end up being misused by the issuers for their personal gain or, even worse, to fund criminal activities.
The Securities Commission Malaysia (SC) introduced a legal and regulatory framework for equity crowdfunding (ECF) in 2015 and peer-to-peer (P2P) financing last year to address these concerns. According to the SC’s deputy general manager Tengku Ahmad Ruzhuar Tengku Ali, the regulator views money-laundering activities to be of minimal risk on ECF and P2P platforms due to the safeguards built into their frameworks and the platform operators’ vetting process.
There have been several cases of fraud linked to investment crowdfunding. The first widely known case, involving US-based Ascenergy, came to light in 2015. The company had raised US$5 million from about 90 local and foreign investors by leveraging some of the better known crowdfunding platforms such as Fundable and EquityNet.
The SC’s approach
All six ECF operators registered in Malaysia are operational. According to Tengku Ahmad Ruzhuar, 31 issuers had successfully raised RM18.3 million on ECF platforms as at end-September, reaching 80% of their target amount.
Retail investors are allowed to invest up to RM5,000 per issuer and a total investment of RM50,000 within a 12-month period. Angel investors registered with the Malaysian Business Angel Network can invest up to RM500,000 while there are no restrictions for sophisticated investors.
Issuers are able to keep the funds raised if they reach a minimum of 80% of the target amount, but they are not allowed to raise multiple funds for the same purpose.
Lendified, a Canada-based lender who provides small business loans online has entered into an agreement with ClearFlow Commercial Finance to increase its lending capacity. According to the lending platform, through the agreement, ClearFlow is providing it with a $60 million credit facility to fund loans delivered through its website.
Small businesses advertising on Facebook can now get their hands on up to half a million dollars in growth capital, in the latest example of an online platform moving into territory historically dominated by bricks-and-mortar banks.
The social network has been trialling a scheme in partnership with Clearbanc, a Toronto-based firm, since February. Under the scheme, known as “Chrged,” customers connect their Facebook Ads account and their payment processor with Clearbanc, which then makes an offer.
Funds are not loans but merchant cash advances, giving Clearbanc the right to a certain portion of revenues flowing through the customer’s account until it gets its money back, plus a fee, typically of 5-10 per cent. The fee is set by analysing daily cash flows to determine the customer’s ability to repay.
About 1,000 small-business owners have so far taken up an offer.
According to CB Insights and PwC’s Canada’s latest MoneyTree report, 2017’s sluggish start may transform into a podium finish by year’s end.
The report, which tracks VC activity in Canada for Q3 2017, indicates that Canada could exceed $2.5 billion ($2 billion USD) across more than 300 deals for the year. The result would match or surpass activity from last year, when a total of $2.2 billion USD was invested, and 2016, which fell just below the $2 billion USD threshold.
Source: Betakit
Seed-stage deals accounted for 32 percent of deals in Q3 2017, a 19 percent drop from 51 percent of all deals in Q2 2017. However, early-stage and expansion-stage deals increased to 27 percent and 21 percent of deal share, respectively. Expansion-stage deals climbed to an eight-quarter high in Q3 — a strong contrast from past quarters where seed-stage deals were the most prominent, and perhaps a sign of a more robust investment ecosystem.
FinTech was another notably strong sector, as Canadian FinTech companies have received $252 million ($200 million USD) across 27 deals. This year is on pace to see $341 million ($270 million USD) invested across over 30 deals, on par with last year’s figure of $351 million ($278 million USD).
Orchard updates Lendscape graphic. AT: We can see a growing number of institutional investors and originating banks, not to mention a push into new areas of lending with expanding categories of originators.”
Top sources of small business financing based on approval rates. AT: “It looks like the year goes to institutional investors and big banks. Credit unions and alternative lenders are in decline. I guess this means you can innovate all you want, money still talks.”
AutoGravity surpasses $1B USD in finance amount requested. AT: “AutoGravity, by far, is doing the most interesting thing in the area of auto finance. This is a huge milestone. Congratulations, with the expectation to see more great achievements from this young startup.”
ID-verification firms capitalize on Equifax’s failure. AT: “This is a natural consequence, and I expect to see more alternative ID verification products hit the market in the coming year. Companies that take their time and do it right have a greater chance at success, long-term.”
OCC Fintech Charter undermines our authority, says NY Department of Financial Services. AT: “The struggle for control over regulation between the states and the federal government continues to heat up. Of course, states have no authority not granted by the Constitution, and that authority is subservient to the federal government in most cases. I suspect the federal government will win this battle, though it will take a few years.”
High net worth individuals would use Amazon for wealth management. AT: “I find this quite interesting. Around the globe, HNWs would use Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA) for wealth management. This sounds like an invitation for the Big 4 to intro their own robo-advisors. Who knows? It could happen.”
LendingClub (NYSE: LC) has sponsored and contributed to its second securitization deal following the the last successful self sponsored deal this past June. The “Consumer Loan Underlying Bond” (CLUB) Credit Trust 2017-P1 (CLUB 2017-P1) issued $323.1 million in prime notes backed by consumer loan assets originated via the LendingClub platform. This is the sixth securitization supported or sponsored by LendingClub, and the fourth rated securitization of LendingClub facilitated loans overall. LendingClub described the deal as further expanding investor access.
LendingClub reported the transaction was backed by approximately $350 million of collateral and includes $217.3 million of Class A notes rated “A-(sf)”, $51.0 million of Class B notes rated “BBB (sf)” and $54.7 million of Class C notes rated “BB (sf)”.
Orchard Platform, the nexus of loan originators and institutional investing, has updated their ongoing graphical view of the online lending world or “Lendscape”. As the online lending universe has moved from peer to peer lending, to marketplace lending to all forms of online lending, the Lendscape has changed and grown. New lending platforms have been launched, new verticals targeted, and a growing number of ancillary services have joined the space. Orchard points to the addition of lenders like LendingPoint, Liberty Lending, Lendmart, Allegro Credit, UpLift, ArtMoney, Ascend, OppLoans, and Lendistry.
Perhaps the most important shift in online lending is the growing participation by traditional finance firms.
Morningstar Credit Ratings, LLC believes the next iteration of property assessed clean energy securitizations will be in the commercial sector. While securitization of residential PACE assessments tops $3 billion, there have been no public transactions consisting primarily of commercial liens.
Evaluating Property Income Generated to Pay Debts In analyzing the credit risk of transactions backed by commercial assessments, Morningstar considers the debt service coverage ratio, because PACE lending is tied to the property rather than the owner’s creditworthiness.
Evaluating Property Income Generated to Pay Debts
Morningstar evaluates a property’s net operating income in relation to its annual debt-service payments. Among securitized commercial mortgages, the average DSCR is approximately 2.14x, according to Morningstar. C-PACE lenders and aggregators typically require a minimum total DSCR in the 1.00x to 1.15x range. Although, in some cases, the DSCR has dipped below 1.00x, especially if total debtto-value is low when operating expenses are higher than revenue. Factors possibly mitigating a lower DSCR, which include county support, property ownership affiliations within a network, liquidity account and equity position require case-by-case analysis. In addition, DSCR of the lien is more important than the DSCR of the overall debt.
Evaluating Divergent Leverage Metrics
The lien-to-value ratio is another leverage metric that Morningstar analyzes. Although a PACE assessment raises a property’s lien-to-value ratio, the increased risk to the underlying mortgage is likely minimal, as the obligation is usually small in comparison to the mortgage.
It can be more challenging to calculate the lien-to-value ratio for C-PACE levies, because the properties can run the gamut from hotels, farmlands, nursing homes, and gas stations to nonprofit buildings such as churches. Across residential PACE deals, we have seen lien-to-value ratios around 6.7% and combined PACE-lien-plus-mortgage-tovalue ratios at around 62.7%. In C-PACE, lien-to-value ratios hover around 25.0%, not including mortgage debt.
While we scrutinize total debt-to-value, the distribution of leverage offers insight into the financial health of the property. For example, we view a property with a 90% debt-to-value ratio that is composed of an 89% mortgage loan and a 1% PACE assessment more favorably than a property whose debt is composed of an 89% PACE obligation and a 1% mortgage because of higher subordination levels.
Growing Market Size
C-PACE financing has grown to about $482 million as of Sept. 1, encompassing 1,097 commercial projects, according to PACENation. More than 2,500 municipalities have C-PACE programs.
Compared with residential programs, C-PACE is in its infancy, as R-PACE financing totaled about $3.67 billion and R-PACE securitizations totaled around $3.40 billion. A sliver of
commercial assets was included in one of those securitizations, GoodGreen 2016-1, with commercial PACE levies representing approximately 4.8% of the pool’s assets.
According to the latest Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index™, the monthly analysis of more than 1,000 small business loan applications on Biz2Credit.com. Loan approval percentages of institutional investors have continuously reached new heights this year in terms of approval rates. In August Institutional lenders’ loan approval rates in August reached 63.9%.
Alternative lenders’ approval percentages continue to decline; in August the rate dipped to 57.1%. Approval percentages have dropped every month for more than a year.
Approval percentages at small banks rose one-tenth of a percent in August to 49.0% from July’s 48.9% figure. It is conceivable that the number may cross the 50% benchmark.
Big banks improved one-tenth of a percent to 24.6% in August, setting a new high for the Biz2Credit Index, which has tracked loan approvals since January 2011. The number is creeping up to one-in-four. It’s a good time for bank lending.
Loan approval rates at credit unions dipped to 40.3% in August, falling to a new low for this category of lenders on Biz2Credit’s index.
AutoGravity, a FinTech pioneer on a mission to transform car shopping and financing, today announced that it has reached $1 billion USD in finance amount requested on the AutoGravity platform. Additionally, AutoGravity has announced the launch of real-time inventory for new and used cars from partner dealership groups across the nation. Car shoppers can browse real vehicle inventory on dealership lots, find the specific car that’s right for them and secure up to four finance offers in minutes on the AutoGravity smartphone app.
More over 750,000 car shoppers have downloaded AutoGravity, collectively requesting over $1 billion USD in financing. These users can now search inventory by car brand and model year – as well as characteristics such as body type, drivetrain and color. Car shoppers can find their desired car waiting for them on the showroom lot for the payment they want. With car selected and offers in hand, users can pick up their car and drive off the lot with the confidence of knowing they have secured a fair deal.
AutoGravity partnered closely with the largest dealer groups in the country to design a seamless process by which dealers can easily load inventory feeds, including vehicle details and pictures, to AutoGravity’s secure platform. Inventory is updated and shown to users in real time.
The Equifax hack, combined with the rise of online lending, may have turned 2017 into a golden age for companies with new ideas for ID.
The software company Mitek plans to roll out a product in the coming year called Mobile Verify for Lending, which offers lenders a five-step process to quickly verify customer identities. Borrowers first share their online bank account information with lenders. They then submit four pictures taken from their smartphones: the front and back of their driver’s licenses, a selfie and a pay stub.
Other players are offering digital lending solutions to make it easier for banks to keep pace with speedy fintech competitors. Upstart, for example, is marketing software, called Powered by Upstart, to banks wanting to get into digital lending.
The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s plan to offer a special-purpose bank charter for financial technology companies “undermines” the Department of Financial Services’ regulatory authority in New York, the state agency argued in court documents.
“The Fintech Charter Decision is an unlawful assertion of power that usurps New York consumer protection laws and would preempt plaintiff’s ability to regulate any number of the over 600 nondepository institutions she currently regulates,” wrote Matthew Levine, the executive deputy superintendent for enforcement at the department.
Stockpile, a brokerage popular with millennials that is pioneering fractional share stock investing, announced today that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Fidelity backed Eight Roads Ventures, with participation by Mayfield, Arbor Ventures, Hanna Ventures, Wang Ventures, and others.
This latest investment brings the total raised by Stockpile to more than $45 million. Mayfield led Stockpile’s $15 millionSeries A in October 2015, with participation by Arbor Ventures, Stanford University, and actor Ashton Kutcher. Stockpile will use the new funds to bring stock investing to more millennial customers and expand its unique features, Lele said.
Chime is raising $18 million in Series B financing for its mobile-first approach to banking. Cathay Innovation led the round with participation from Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Forerunner Ventures, Homebrew and others.
It’s a bank account and debit card built for the digital age.
Without monthly fees or overdraft charges, Chime tries to appeal to the millennial generation, touting its affordability and easy-to-use app. Since launching in 2014, Chime has signed up 500,000 customers, who are typically in their late 20s and making between $50,000 and $70,000 per year.
Shinola/Detroit LLC is targeting millennials by adding an option to pay for its watches and other luxury goods in an old-fashioned way: the installment plan.
The average order value for Affirm customers is 70 percent higher than the sitewide average, Kopitz said. And about half of those using the service with Shinola are 18-34 years old, the release said.
Around 1,000 retailers now accept payment through Affirm.
As new as fintech and marketplace lending—once known as “peer to peer lending”—may still seem, Noreika suggested that the online lending fraternity may be moving toward maturity.
Noreika said the sweat that went into those ideas has hit $40 billion in consumer and small business credit, with volumes doubling every year since 2010. He noted that some project that at that rate, marketplace lending will hit $1 trillion by 2025—versus the $3.7 trillion in unsecured consumer lending as of yearend 2016.
Noreika pointed out that marketplace lenders have been seeing cracks in their credit since the fourth quarter of 2015.
“Hardly a day goes by where there isn’t a recording of some scandal or another,” Levitt said. “I think that’s generally true of emerging cultures and emerging standards and cultures. That makes the odds of winning much less than in well established companies with better established cultures.”
His fellow fintech panelists, Sarah Friar, chief financial officer at Square, and Scott Sanborn, CEO of Lending Club, both pointed out that established companies have had their own share of scandals.
Levitt said it’s difficult for startups to attract the kind of quality board members that larger, more mature companies are able to attract.
“Regulators are always playing catch up,” he said. “Regulation today trails the fintech world and often presents impediments and costs that are unnecessary. Regulators are constantly protecting their space so they don’t get caught up in a scandal they’re held accountable for, so there’s a tendency to over-regulate.”
Today, Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry (R, NC-10), the Vice Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced the IRS Data Verification Modernization Act of 2017. This bipartisan bill will require the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to automate the Income Verification Express Services process by creating an Application Programming Interface (API) allowing small businesses and consumers to access accurate credit assessments more efficiently. Joining McHenry as an original cosponsor of H.R. 3860 is Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D, OR-03), a senior member of the House Committee on Ways and Means.
Plug and Play formally announces the startups accepted into their Winter 2017 batches. Plug and Play will run five programs this quarter focused on Health & Wellness, Insurtech, Internet of Things, Mobility, and Travel & Hospitality.
We’re incredibly excited to welcome the newest member of Wunder Capital’s team, Rich Mauro. As Director of Capital Markets, Rich will lead Wunder’s institutional fundraising activities, bolstering our capital stack and helping us scale Wunder’s platform to the next level.
Funding Circle remains a loss-making business (accumulated losses stand at £116.6 million to date) but Desai says it is on a long-term path to profitability.
Funding Circle, however, has remained a firm market leader, and its annual results for 2016 show it continues to do well.
Its losses narrowed 3% from £37 million ($50 million) in 2015 to £36 million ($48 million) in 2016, as revenue grew 59% year-over-year (YoY) from £32 million ($43 million) to £51 million ($68 million), and originations saw a 61% boost from £846 million ($1.1 billion) to £1.4 billion ($1.9 billion).
The £220m Ranger Direct Lending fund could see its dividend pay-out for the second half of 2017 fall to nearly half of that in the first six months of the year, according to a statement by Ranger.
It is expecting NAV returns in H2 2017 to average 0.4 per cent-0.5 per cent per month (c.5-6 per cent pa), and then recover to 0.6 per cent-0.7 per cent per month (c.7 per cent-9 per cent pa) in 2018, assuming the resolution of Princeton this year.
As a result aggregate dividends of c.25p are expected for H2 2017, compared to 46p in H1.
LendInvest, an online marketplace platform for property lending and investing, was named the most valuable tech company at the prestigious Investor Allstars event in London on Wednesday evening.
A “RegTech” — regulation technology — company founded by three Oxford grads all under 30 has raised $30 million (£22.4 million) from investors including Microsoft’s venture capital arm.
Onfido, an identity verification startup, has raised the “Series C” fundraising from Crane Venture Partners, Microsoft Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors. It takes the total raised by the London startup to over $60 million.
Onfido’s latest $30 million funding injection follows a $25 million investment last April. Kassai says the latest funding will go towards technology investment and global expansion.
One of the biggest changes in the financial sector in the UK has been the introduction of challenger banks.
Crucially, these banks have not been mired by the many recent scandals and still rely on customer deposits to build their balance sheets. That’s why fledgling banks such as Metro Bank, Aldermore, Tesco Bank and United Bank UK and currently dominating the best buy tables.
Retail banking is the area that has seen the biggest change as a result of the FinTech sector, but that’s not to say there hasn’t also been a significant impact in the commercial banking sector.
A perfect example is Barclay’s mobile payments service Pingit, designed to compete with Apple Pay, while other banks have launched new mobile banking businesses away from their legacy businesses in an attempt to compete in a digital age.
Bringing financial services to small businesses
One example is peer-to-peer lending, a sector that has sprung up from nothing ten years ago to lend a total of £2.9bn in 2016. This is now filling the capital void for many growing businesses and lending at lower rates than many firms would be able to access elsewhere.
SIX new trustees have been appointed to the board of the Finance Innovation Lab.
The new trustees include Caroline Ellis, a social and organisational change consultant who is taking on the role of chair of the board, and Kate Ormiston Smith, director of finance and operations at The B Team, who is taking up the post of treasurer.
The other new members of the board are: Hanna McCloskey, founder and chief executive officer of Fearless Futures; Toyin Ogundana – investment manager at CAF Venturesome; Paul Riseborough – chief commercial officer at Metro Bank and Julian Thompson, social innovation and fundraising strategist.
When considering your initial application for funding, crowdlending platforms will review your business plan, financial information and other details about your company. In other words, the platforms will review your company’s financial information as well as your personal information in much the same way as banks will do before offering you a loan. Therefore, it is imperative to ensure that your business plan is engaging, comprehensive and well thought out.
Investors will usually seek to get more information about you and your business from social networks like Facebook, Twitterand LinkedIn. It will serve you well to ensure that you have an online presence before you seek for funds through crowdlending.
Going by the FundingKnightresearch, most UK investors have a love for the community and would want to give back to some UK SME to ensure its prosperity.
More Chinese fintech firms vying to go public could choose Hong Kong as their listing venue, after the city’s first fintech IPO received a hot response from investors, and that Hong Kong has unique advantages compared with other global financial hubs, said JP Morgan’s head of global investment banking in China.
Zhong An Online Property and Casualty Insurance, China’s first online-only insurer, closed nine per cent up from its IPO price on Thursday in its Hong Kong debut. With an oversubscription of nearly 400 times from retail investors, the company had priced its IPO at the top end of the expected range, raising US$1.5 billion in the city’s biggest ever fintech offering.
“The next Zhong An could show up in online payment, P2P lending, [financial] product distribution, or online insurance.”
In particular, revenue from online payment is estimated to increase to 202 billion yuan by 2020. Revenue from online distribution of financial products could grow to 52 billion yuan by then, while that for online lending and online insurance may reach 142 billion yuan and 60 billion yuan respectively.
ZhongAn’s IPO will likely make the company the 4th most valuable fintech company in the world with a market cap of about US$10.4 billion, following the top three fintechs, which are Paypal ($78bn), Ant Financial ($68bn) and Lufax ($18bn).
Peter Renton interviewed the CEO of ZhongAn Insurance, Jeffrey Chen, on the Lend Academy Podcast over the summer. Jeffrey said in the interview that ZhongAn has 492 million insurance customers as of December 31, 2016. That is more than four times that of insurance giant AXA’s customer base (107 million, as of December 31, 2016). By this measure, ZhongAn truly is the world’s largest insurance company. And this is just a four-year old company!
Why ZhongAn is So Succesful
For the technology part, ZhongAn has been using artificial intelligence and big data analytics in each step of the insurance value chain, from marketing, underwriting, pricing to claims processing.
Another example is that ZhongAn has partnered with a Chinese automaker to develop internet of things (IoTs) and telematics solutions. Telematics devices can capture drivers’ behavioral data, which can be fed to algorithms using big data techniques to tailor product pricing to observed risk levels.
In ZhongAn’s early days, the revenue generated by shipping return policies accounted for almost 90% of the total revenue. This product would not have been such a success were it not for its partnership with Alibaba. Ant Financial, the financial affiliate of Alibaba, is also the single biggest shareholder (16.04%) of ZhongAn.
Shenzhen Suishou Technology Co. (“Suishou” or the “Company”), a leading personal finance management platform in China, and global investment firm KKR today announced the signing of a definitive agreement under which KKR will invest in Suishou’s Series C funding round to support the Company’s expansion across China.
Emerging peer to peer lender Robo.Cashhas topped €2 million in loans with the advent of the 1000th investor. According to Robo.Cash, investors are spread across most of Europe with lenders now coming from 28 different countries. The short term loans are coming from Spain and Kazakhstan.
The total sum of earned interests has amounted to more than €50,000 since the start of the platform’s work.
Switzerland is one of the major global fintech centers and the industry is booming: Swisscom counted fewer than a hundred fintech startups in 2015, today there are 208 companies active in wealth management, comparative consulting, crypto finance, data management, payment services and lending (see illustration below).
Blurred Dividing Line
And this may also spell the end of fintech as we know it, in Switzerland, and abroad. That’s at least what Armands Broks (pictured below) believes. The founder and CEO of Twino, a peer-to-peer lending platform, thinks that the fine line between finance industry and fintech is about to be blurred and that fintech eventually will disappear.
The only way forward for fintech is through cooperation agreements and in doing so, «the fintech industry is signing its own death sentence,» Broks said.
PWC consultants said that about 60 percent of Swiss banks have links to fintechs. Four out of five banks are eyeing partnerships in the near future or are planning to expand existing ones.
The same year it launched GS Bank, it began building a digital-only consumer loan product, Marcus, that was fully developed and on the market 12 months later. Without having the legacy infrastructure under previously existing consumer products and services, the overhaul other major banks have been experiencing don’t exist for Goldman.
“[The] platform approach has not been an obvious approach on Wall Street. Our competitors are generally structured in deep vertical silos and we have a different architecture: these shallower silos built on top of many layers of software, tech infrastructure, cybersecurity, enterprise platforms and increasingly, client platforms,” Marty Chavez, an engineer and Goldman Sachs CIO-turned-CFO this year, said in a keynote at Harvard University earlier this year.
46 percent of Goldman jobs are in technology
CB Insights analyzed more than 2,000 open Goldman Sachs job listings by division and business unit to confirm it’s focused on building its technology and digital finance units.
Many of the jobs are in digital finance. Earlier this month it reportedly poached 20 employees from New York-based online lending startup Bond Street — engineers, product developers, and risk and marketing specialists — presumably to build out a lending product.
According to the research, published Tuesday, 46 percent of all of the firm’s jobs as of Sept. 14 are in technology, with the highest amount for core platform roles, followed by operations engineering and then equities technology.
Source: Tearsheet
Marcus is expanding in the U.K.
Marcus, the online lending startup built inside the investment bank, has been growing tremendously in the eight months since it launched in October 2016. It has one product: a customizable personal loan for Prime borrowers, with at least a 660 credit score, of up to $30,000. It promises no fees and straightforward repayment terms. It recently passed $1 billion in loan originations with expectations to originate $2 billion by the end of this year. By comparison: SoFi, which launched in 2011, reached its first billion after 14 months; Avant, founded in 2012, took 28 months; 10-year-old Lending Club took 65 months; and Prosper, launched in 2006, passed $1 billion in 98 months.
Goldmoney Inc. (TSX:XAU) (“Goldmoney”) (the “Company”), a precious metal financial service and technology company, today unveiled the addition of vaulted Bitcoin and Ethereum as secure and fully-reserved offline investable assets within the Goldmoney® Holding, a major enhancement that allows qualified clients to buy, sell, and exchange cryptocurrencies with nine global currencies as well as gold, silver, platinum and palladium bullion. With today’s launch, Goldmoney becomes the world’s first publicly traded and regulated financial service to offer insurable, auditable, and Anti-Money Laundering (“AML”) compliant exposure to cryptocurrencies.
Buying and selling of digital assets that are safely secured in vaulted cold storage. Cryptocurrency offerings currently include Bitcoin and Ethereum; additional leading digital assets will be added over time.
Funding of Goldmoney Holdings with 50 types of cryptocurrency, enabling wallet holders to sell a variety of cryptocurrencies and fund their Goldmoney Holding with fiat currency to access precious metals and other Goldmoney service offerings.
Will seek the establishment of peer-to-peer (“P2P”) lending capabilities on digital assets in partnership with Lend and Borrow Trust, allowing owners of Bitcoin and other assets to safely borrow against their positions.
The majority of high net investors would turn to Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon for wealth management, Bloomberg writes.
If one of the four tech giants were to enter the advice space, 56.2% of wealthy individuals would entrust them with their money, according to a Capgemini survey of 2,500 individuals with a net worth of $1 million or more in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia-Pacific cited by the news service. And among people under 40, more than 81% would use one of the four tech firms, according to the survey.
It’s called Study Loans and is said to be the first online platform dedicated to providing loans to students for both vocational and higher education.
Working closely with education providers, the fintech will track student performance and provide funds as you study through ‘tranches’ – which are based on the number of units you do and when they are completed.
Think of tranches as a ‘pay as you go’ kind of deal. So whether you pass one unit or four, Study Loans will release the funds according to your course progression.
Study Loans has raised $5 million debt equity so far, which is ready to be distributed as the first tranche to Aussie students who have already applied through the platform.
Financing options for students:
Student loans –Student personal loans are designed to help fund your education. They often have a more lenient application criteria and have lower interest rates than standard personal loans. But you are expected to make monthly repayments – so you’ll need to make sure your budget can handle the amount.
Peer-to-peer lending
HECS-HELP – This is a Government funded scheme for students enrolled in Commonwealth supported institutions with no real interest charged on the loan. You won’t have to pay your student fees upfront, however, you are expected to make repayments once you start earning a salary of $54,869.
Monefly is an innovative new Fintech platform in Australia, focused on providing tools and resources that empower its members to grow income, reduce expenses, build assets, eliminate debt and protect themselves from risk. Some of these exciting tools include free property valuations, automated budgeting, credit scores, bank account consolidation and much more.
Monefly has partnered with Envestnet | Yodlee to help its members access comprehensive financial data available across banking and wealth management from over 15,500 data sources globally.
The data being integrated into Monefly includes superannuation, cash, credit cards, personal debts, mortgages, assets, shares, real estate, credit scores and other investment data.
MyAdvo, India’s leading Legal Tech Startup has entered into an agreement with Square Capital, the digital lending arm of India’s largest real estate transaction platform Square Yards to enable loan facilitation for lawyers on its panel.
Square Capital currently facilitates USD 30- 40Mn(INR 200cr – INR 260cr) of loan disbursals every month, contributed majorly by secured mortgages spread across 50+ banking partners for their different products in home loan, loan against property and business loan.
This exclusive tie-up will benefit MyAdvo registered lawyers in receiving immediate loan solutions without any hassle.
Robo-advisers, or automated services based on computer algorithms, are catching on in the Indian market due to the relatively lower penetration of financial products in India compared to developed markets.
According to a Business Insider Intelligence forecast, robo-advisers (with some element of automation) will manage investment products worth $1 trillion by 2020, which will go up to $4.6 trillion by as early as 2022.
Scepticism notwithstanding, financial institutions in the country are realising the benefits of robo-advisory services by either building the product in-house or partnering with fintech companies to develop robo-advisers. Take the case of FundsIndia.com, which has a robo-advisory service for which it is forging partnerships with financial biggies. “We have a partnership with Axis Securities and one more company. There is a growing acceptance from the industry, and we are trying to enable better product design,” said Srikant Meenakshi, co-founder, FundsIndia.com. According to him, 15% of his company’s overall portfolio comprises robo-advisory services. Similarly, 5nance has an agreement with HDFC Mutual Fund for its robo-advisor.
Robo-advisory start-up ArthaYantra uses a patented methodology called the Personal Financial Lifecycle Management on its online platform, Arthos. Since its launch in 2008, the site claims to have helped 120,000 customers across more 650 cities and 30 countries.
Singapore banks have closed accounts of several companies which specialize in providing cryptocurrency and payments services, according to two local bodies which represent financial-technology firms.
Chia Hock Lai, president of the Singapore Fintech Association, which has broader membership than Access, said some of his organization’s members also experienced account closures, though he didn’t provide figures.
Access has 106 members and the Fintech Association has 185, though the two organizations said some companies belong to both groups.
According to Joseph Huang, president of E.Sun Bank, speaking in an interview with The Asset, payments is one area that every bank is looking to explore, although it does not generate huge profits for most banks.
Banks are also more frequently working with technology companies. E.Sun Bank partnered with IBM Taiwan in building its digital branch, which opened in February 2017, making it the first digital branch in Taiwan. Similarly, CTBC partnered with LINE Pay to help merge its banking services with communication apps and social media.
Taishin Bank’s e-banking application, Richart, which attracted over 120,000 subscribers, is targeting young Taiwanese users, while Cathay United Bank is also providing its products to retail customers through its platform My MobiBank.
Orchard updates Lendscape graphic. AT: We can see a growing number of institutional investors and originating banks, not to mention a push into new areas of lending with expanding categories of originators.”
Top sources of small business financing based on approval rates. AT: “It looks like the year goes to institutional investors and big banks. Credit unions and alternative lenders are in decline. I guess this means you can innovate all you want, money still talks.”
AutoGravity surpasses $1B USD in finance amount requested. AT: “AutoGravity, by far, is doing the most interesting thing in the area of auto finance. This is a huge milestone. Congratulations, with the expectation to see more great achievements from this young startup.”
ID-verification firms capitalize on Equifax’s failure. AT: “This is a natural consequence, and I expect to see more alternative ID verification products hit the market in the coming year. Companies that take their time and do it right have a greater chance at success, long-term.”
OCC Fintech Charter undermines our authority, says NY Department of Financial Services. AT: “The struggle for control over regulation between the states and the federal government continues to heat up. Of course, states have no authority not granted by the Constitution, and that authority is subservient to the federal government in most cases. I suspect the federal government will win this battle, though it will take a few years.”
High net worth individuals would use Amazon for wealth management. AT: “I find this quite interesting. Around the globe, HNWs would use Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA) for wealth management. This sounds like an invitation for the Big 4 to intro their own robo-advisors. Who knows? It could happen.”
LendingClub (NYSE: LC) has sponsored and contributed to its second securitization deal following the the last successful self sponsored deal this past June. The “Consumer Loan Underlying Bond” (CLUB) Credit Trust 2017-P1 (CLUB 2017-P1) issued $323.1 million in prime notes backed by consumer loan assets originated via the LendingClub platform. This is the sixth securitization supported or sponsored by LendingClub, and the fourth rated securitization of LendingClub facilitated loans overall. LendingClub described the deal as further expanding investor access.
LendingClub reported the transaction was backed by approximately $350 million of collateral and includes $217.3 million of Class A notes rated “A-(sf)”, $51.0 million of Class B notes rated “BBB (sf)” and $54.7 million of Class C notes rated “BB (sf)”.
Orchard Platform, the nexus of loan originators and institutional investing, has updated their ongoing graphical view of the online lending world or “Lendscape”. As the online lending universe has moved from peer to peer lending, to marketplace lending to all forms of online lending, the Lendscape has changed and grown. New lending platforms have been launched, new verticals targeted, and a growing number of ancillary services have joined the space. Orchard points to the addition of lenders like LendingPoint, Liberty Lending, Lendmart, Allegro Credit, UpLift, ArtMoney, Ascend, OppLoans, and Lendistry.
Perhaps the most important shift in online lending is the growing participation by traditional finance firms.
Morningstar Credit Ratings, LLC believes the next iteration of property assessed clean energy securitizations will be in the commercial sector. While securitization of residential PACE assessments tops $3 billion, there have been no public transactions consisting primarily of commercial liens.
Evaluating Property Income Generated to Pay Debts In analyzing the credit risk of transactions backed by commercial assessments, Morningstar considers the debt service coverage ratio, because PACE lending is tied to the property rather than the owner’s creditworthiness.
Evaluating Property Income Generated to Pay Debts
Morningstar evaluates a property’s net operating income in relation to its annual debt-service payments. Among securitized commercial mortgages, the average DSCR is approximately 2.14x, according to Morningstar. C-PACE lenders and aggregators typically require a minimum total DSCR in the 1.00x to 1.15x range. Although, in some cases, the DSCR has dipped below 1.00x, especially if total debtto-value is low when operating expenses are higher than revenue. Factors possibly mitigating a lower DSCR, which include county support, property ownership affiliations within a network, liquidity account and equity position require case-by-case analysis. In addition, DSCR of the lien is more important than the DSCR of the overall debt.
Evaluating Divergent Leverage Metrics
The lien-to-value ratio is another leverage metric that Morningstar analyzes. Although a PACE assessment raises a property’s lien-to-value ratio, the increased risk to the underlying mortgage is likely minimal, as the obligation is usually small in comparison to the mortgage.
It can be more challenging to calculate the lien-to-value ratio for C-PACE levies, because the properties can run the gamut from hotels, farmlands, nursing homes, and gas stations to nonprofit buildings such as churches. Across residential PACE deals, we have seen lien-to-value ratios around 6.7% and combined PACE-lien-plus-mortgage-tovalue ratios at around 62.7%. In C-PACE, lien-to-value ratios hover around 25.0%, not including mortgage debt.
While we scrutinize total debt-to-value, the distribution of leverage offers insight into the financial health of the property. For example, we view a property with a 90% debt-to-value ratio that is composed of an 89% mortgage loan and a 1% PACE assessment more favorably than a property whose debt is composed of an 89% PACE obligation and a 1% mortgage because of higher subordination levels.
Growing Market Size
C-PACE financing has grown to about $482 million as of Sept. 1, encompassing 1,097 commercial projects, according to PACENation. More than 2,500 municipalities have C-PACE programs.
Compared with residential programs, C-PACE is in its infancy, as R-PACE financing totaled about $3.67 billion and R-PACE securitizations totaled around $3.40 billion. A sliver of
commercial assets was included in one of those securitizations, GoodGreen 2016-1, with commercial PACE levies representing approximately 4.8% of the pool’s assets.
According to the latest Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index™, the monthly analysis of more than 1,000 small business loan applications on Biz2Credit.com. Loan approval percentages of institutional investors have continuously reached new heights this year in terms of approval rates. In August Institutional lenders’ loan approval rates in August reached 63.9%.
Alternative lenders’ approval percentages continue to decline; in August the rate dipped to 57.1%. Approval percentages have dropped every month for more than a year.
Approval percentages at small banks rose one-tenth of a percent in August to 49.0% from July’s 48.9% figure. It is conceivable that the number may cross the 50% benchmark.
Big banks improved one-tenth of a percent to 24.6% in August, setting a new high for the Biz2Credit Index, which has tracked loan approvals since January 2011. The number is creeping up to one-in-four. It’s a good time for bank lending.
Loan approval rates at credit unions dipped to 40.3% in August, falling to a new low for this category of lenders on Biz2Credit’s index.
AutoGravity, a FinTech pioneer on a mission to transform car shopping and financing, today announced that it has reached $1 billion USD in finance amount requested on the AutoGravity platform. Additionally, AutoGravity has announced the launch of real-time inventory for new and used cars from partner dealership groups across the nation. Car shoppers can browse real vehicle inventory on dealership lots, find the specific car that’s right for them and secure up to four finance offers in minutes on the AutoGravity smartphone app.
More over 750,000 car shoppers have downloaded AutoGravity, collectively requesting over $1 billion USD in financing. These users can now search inventory by car brand and model year – as well as characteristics such as body type, drivetrain and color. Car shoppers can find their desired car waiting for them on the showroom lot for the payment they want. With car selected and offers in hand, users can pick up their car and drive off the lot with the confidence of knowing they have secured a fair deal.
AutoGravity partnered closely with the largest dealer groups in the country to design a seamless process by which dealers can easily load inventory feeds, including vehicle details and pictures, to AutoGravity’s secure platform. Inventory is updated and shown to users in real time.
The Equifax hack, combined with the rise of online lending, may have turned 2017 into a golden age for companies with new ideas for ID.
The software company Mitek plans to roll out a product in the coming year called Mobile Verify for Lending, which offers lenders a five-step process to quickly verify customer identities. Borrowers first share their online bank account information with lenders. They then submit four pictures taken from their smartphones: the front and back of their driver’s licenses, a selfie and a pay stub.
Other players are offering digital lending solutions to make it easier for banks to keep pace with speedy fintech competitors. Upstart, for example, is marketing software, called Powered by Upstart, to banks wanting to get into digital lending.
The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s plan to offer a special-purpose bank charter for financial technology companies “undermines” the Department of Financial Services’ regulatory authority in New York, the state agency argued in court documents.
“The Fintech Charter Decision is an unlawful assertion of power that usurps New York consumer protection laws and would preempt plaintiff’s ability to regulate any number of the over 600 nondepository institutions she currently regulates,” wrote Matthew Levine, the executive deputy superintendent for enforcement at the department.
Stockpile, a brokerage popular with millennials that is pioneering fractional share stock investing, announced today that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Fidelity backed Eight Roads Ventures, with participation by Mayfield, Arbor Ventures, Hanna Ventures, Wang Ventures, and others.
This latest investment brings the total raised by Stockpile to more than $45 million. Mayfield led Stockpile’s $15 millionSeries A in October 2015, with participation by Arbor Ventures, Stanford University, and actor Ashton Kutcher. Stockpile will use the new funds to bring stock investing to more millennial customers and expand its unique features, Lele said.
Chime is raising $18 million in Series B financing for its mobile-first approach to banking. Cathay Innovation led the round with participation from Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Forerunner Ventures, Homebrew and others.
It’s a bank account and debit card built for the digital age.
Without monthly fees or overdraft charges, Chime tries to appeal to the millennial generation, touting its affordability and easy-to-use app. Since launching in 2014, Chime has signed up 500,000 customers, who are typically in their late 20s and making between $50,000 and $70,000 per year.
Shinola/Detroit LLC is targeting millennials by adding an option to pay for its watches and other luxury goods in an old-fashioned way: the installment plan.
The average order value for Affirm customers is 70 percent higher than the sitewide average, Kopitz said. And about half of those using the service with Shinola are 18-34 years old, the release said.
Around 1,000 retailers now accept payment through Affirm.
As new as fintech and marketplace lending—once known as “peer to peer lending”—may still seem, Noreika suggested that the online lending fraternity may be moving toward maturity.
Noreika said the sweat that went into those ideas has hit $40 billion in consumer and small business credit, with volumes doubling every year since 2010. He noted that some project that at that rate, marketplace lending will hit $1 trillion by 2025—versus the $3.7 trillion in unsecured consumer lending as of yearend 2016.
Noreika pointed out that marketplace lenders have been seeing cracks in their credit since the fourth quarter of 2015.
“Hardly a day goes by where there isn’t a recording of some scandal or another,” Levitt said. “I think that’s generally true of emerging cultures and emerging standards and cultures. That makes the odds of winning much less than in well established companies with better established cultures.”
His fellow fintech panelists, Sarah Friar, chief financial officer at Square, and Scott Sanborn, CEO of Lending Club, both pointed out that established companies have had their own share of scandals.
Levitt said it’s difficult for startups to attract the kind of quality board members that larger, more mature companies are able to attract.
“Regulators are always playing catch up,” he said. “Regulation today trails the fintech world and often presents impediments and costs that are unnecessary. Regulators are constantly protecting their space so they don’t get caught up in a scandal they’re held accountable for, so there’s a tendency to over-regulate.”
Today, Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry (R, NC-10), the Vice Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced the IRS Data Verification Modernization Act of 2017. This bipartisan bill will require the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to automate the Income Verification Express Services process by creating an Application Programming Interface (API) allowing small businesses and consumers to access accurate credit assessments more efficiently. Joining McHenry as an original cosponsor of H.R. 3860 is Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D, OR-03), a senior member of the House Committee on Ways and Means.
Plug and Play formally announces the startups accepted into their Winter 2017 batches. Plug and Play will run five programs this quarter focused on Health & Wellness, Insurtech, Internet of Things, Mobility, and Travel & Hospitality.
We’re incredibly excited to welcome the newest member of Wunder Capital’s team, Rich Mauro. As Director of Capital Markets, Rich will lead Wunder’s institutional fundraising activities, bolstering our capital stack and helping us scale Wunder’s platform to the next level.
Funding Circle remains a loss-making business (accumulated losses stand at £116.6 million to date) but Desai says it is on a long-term path to profitability.
Funding Circle, however, has remained a firm market leader, and its annual results for 2016 show it continues to do well.
Its losses narrowed 3% from £37 million ($50 million) in 2015 to £36 million ($48 million) in 2016, as revenue grew 59% year-over-year (YoY) from £32 million ($43 million) to £51 million ($68 million), and originations saw a 61% boost from £846 million ($1.1 billion) to £1.4 billion ($1.9 billion).
The £220m Ranger Direct Lending fund could see its dividend pay-out for the second half of 2017 fall to nearly half of that in the first six months of the year, according to a statement by Ranger.
It is expecting NAV returns in H2 2017 to average 0.4 per cent-0.5 per cent per month (c.5-6 per cent pa), and then recover to 0.6 per cent-0.7 per cent per month (c.7 per cent-9 per cent pa) in 2018, assuming the resolution of Princeton this year.
As a result aggregate dividends of c.25p are expected for H2 2017, compared to 46p in H1.
LendInvest, an online marketplace platform for property lending and investing, was named the most valuable tech company at the prestigious Investor Allstars event in London on Wednesday evening.
A “RegTech” — regulation technology — company founded by three Oxford grads all under 30 has raised $30 million (£22.4 million) from investors including Microsoft’s venture capital arm.
Onfido, an identity verification startup, has raised the “Series C” fundraising from Crane Venture Partners, Microsoft Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors. It takes the total raised by the London startup to over $60 million.
Onfido’s latest $30 million funding injection follows a $25 million investment last April. Kassai says the latest funding will go towards technology investment and global expansion.
One of the biggest changes in the financial sector in the UK has been the introduction of challenger banks.
Crucially, these banks have not been mired by the many recent scandals and still rely on customer deposits to build their balance sheets. That’s why fledgling banks such as Metro Bank, Aldermore, Tesco Bank and United Bank UK and currently dominating the best buy tables.
Retail banking is the area that has seen the biggest change as a result of the FinTech sector, but that’s not to say there hasn’t also been a significant impact in the commercial banking sector.
A perfect example is Barclay’s mobile payments service Pingit, designed to compete with Apple Pay, while other banks have launched new mobile banking businesses away from their legacy businesses in an attempt to compete in a digital age.
Bringing financial services to small businesses
One example is peer-to-peer lending, a sector that has sprung up from nothing ten years ago to lend a total of £2.9bn in 2016. This is now filling the capital void for many growing businesses and lending at lower rates than many firms would be able to access elsewhere.
SIX new trustees have been appointed to the board of the Finance Innovation Lab.
The new trustees include Caroline Ellis, a social and organisational change consultant who is taking on the role of chair of the board, and Kate Ormiston Smith, director of finance and operations at The B Team, who is taking up the post of treasurer.
The other new members of the board are: Hanna McCloskey, founder and chief executive officer of Fearless Futures; Toyin Ogundana – investment manager at CAF Venturesome; Paul Riseborough – chief commercial officer at Metro Bank and Julian Thompson, social innovation and fundraising strategist.
When considering your initial application for funding, crowdlending platforms will review your business plan, financial information and other details about your company. In other words, the platforms will review your company’s financial information as well as your personal information in much the same way as banks will do before offering you a loan. Therefore, it is imperative to ensure that your business plan is engaging, comprehensive and well thought out.
Investors will usually seek to get more information about you and your business from social networks like Facebook, Twitterand LinkedIn. It will serve you well to ensure that you have an online presence before you seek for funds through crowdlending.
Going by the FundingKnightresearch, most UK investors have a love for the community and would want to give back to some UK SME to ensure its prosperity.
More Chinese fintech firms vying to go public could choose Hong Kong as their listing venue, after the city’s first fintech IPO received a hot response from investors, and that Hong Kong has unique advantages compared with other global financial hubs, said JP Morgan’s head of global investment banking in China.
Zhong An Online Property and Casualty Insurance, China’s first online-only insurer, closed nine per cent up from its IPO price on Thursday in its Hong Kong debut. With an oversubscription of nearly 400 times from retail investors, the company had priced its IPO at the top end of the expected range, raising US$1.5 billion in the city’s biggest ever fintech offering.
“The next Zhong An could show up in online payment, P2P lending, [financial] product distribution, or online insurance.”
In particular, revenue from online payment is estimated to increase to 202 billion yuan by 2020. Revenue from online distribution of financial products could grow to 52 billion yuan by then, while that for online lending and online insurance may reach 142 billion yuan and 60 billion yuan respectively.
ZhongAn’s IPO will likely make the company the 4th most valuable fintech company in the world with a market cap of about US$10.4 billion, following the top three fintechs, which are Paypal ($78bn), Ant Financial ($68bn) and Lufax ($18bn).
Peter Renton interviewed the CEO of ZhongAn Insurance, Jeffrey Chen, on the Lend Academy Podcast over the summer. Jeffrey said in the interview that ZhongAn has 492 million insurance customers as of December 31, 2016. That is more than four times that of insurance giant AXA’s customer base (107 million, as of December 31, 2016). By this measure, ZhongAn truly is the world’s largest insurance company. And this is just a four-year old company!
Why ZhongAn is So Succesful
For the technology part, ZhongAn has been using artificial intelligence and big data analytics in each step of the insurance value chain, from marketing, underwriting, pricing to claims processing.
Another example is that ZhongAn has partnered with a Chinese automaker to develop internet of things (IoTs) and telematics solutions. Telematics devices can capture drivers’ behavioral data, which can be fed to algorithms using big data techniques to tailor product pricing to observed risk levels.
In ZhongAn’s early days, the revenue generated by shipping return policies accounted for almost 90% of the total revenue. This product would not have been such a success were it not for its partnership with Alibaba. Ant Financial, the financial affiliate of Alibaba, is also the single biggest shareholder (16.04%) of ZhongAn.
Shenzhen Suishou Technology Co. (“Suishou” or the “Company”), a leading personal finance management platform in China, and global investment firm KKR today announced the signing of a definitive agreement under which KKR will invest in Suishou’s Series C funding round to support the Company’s expansion across China.
Emerging peer to peer lender Robo.Cashhas topped €2 million in loans with the advent of the 1000th investor. According to Robo.Cash, investors are spread across most of Europe with lenders now coming from 28 different countries. The short term loans are coming from Spain and Kazakhstan.
The total sum of earned interests has amounted to more than €50,000 since the start of the platform’s work.
Switzerland is one of the major global fintech centers and the industry is booming: Swisscom counted fewer than a hundred fintech startups in 2015, today there are 208 companies active in wealth management, comparative consulting, crypto finance, data management, payment services and lending (see illustration below).
Blurred Dividing Line
And this may also spell the end of fintech as we know it, in Switzerland, and abroad. That’s at least what Armands Broks (pictured below) believes. The founder and CEO of Twino, a peer-to-peer lending platform, thinks that the fine line between finance industry and fintech is about to be blurred and that fintech eventually will disappear.
The only way forward for fintech is through cooperation agreements and in doing so, «the fintech industry is signing its own death sentence,» Broks said.
PWC consultants said that about 60 percent of Swiss banks have links to fintechs. Four out of five banks are eyeing partnerships in the near future or are planning to expand existing ones.
The same year it launched GS Bank, it began building a digital-only consumer loan product, Marcus, that was fully developed and on the market 12 months later. Without having the legacy infrastructure under previously existing consumer products and services, the overhaul other major banks have been experiencing don’t exist for Goldman.
“[The] platform approach has not been an obvious approach on Wall Street. Our competitors are generally structured in deep vertical silos and we have a different architecture: these shallower silos built on top of many layers of software, tech infrastructure, cybersecurity, enterprise platforms and increasingly, client platforms,” Marty Chavez, an engineer and Goldman Sachs CIO-turned-CFO this year, said in a keynote at Harvard University earlier this year.
46 percent of Goldman jobs are in technology
CB Insights analyzed more than 2,000 open Goldman Sachs job listings by division and business unit to confirm it’s focused on building its technology and digital finance units.
Many of the jobs are in digital finance. Earlier this month it reportedly poached 20 employees from New York-based online lending startup Bond Street — engineers, product developers, and risk and marketing specialists — presumably to build out a lending product.
According to the research, published Tuesday, 46 percent of all of the firm’s jobs as of Sept. 14 are in technology, with the highest amount for core platform roles, followed by operations engineering and then equities technology.
Source: Tearsheet
Marcus is expanding in the U.K.
Marcus, the online lending startup built inside the investment bank, has been growing tremendously in the eight months since it launched in October 2016. It has one product: a customizable personal loan for Prime borrowers, with at least a 660 credit score, of up to $30,000. It promises no fees and straightforward repayment terms. It recently passed $1 billion in loan originations with expectations to originate $2 billion by the end of this year. By comparison: SoFi, which launched in 2011, reached its first billion after 14 months; Avant, founded in 2012, took 28 months; 10-year-old Lending Club took 65 months; and Prosper, launched in 2006, passed $1 billion in 98 months.
Goldmoney Inc. (TSX:XAU) (“Goldmoney”) (the “Company”), a precious metal financial service and technology company, today unveiled the addition of vaulted Bitcoin and Ethereum as secure and fully-reserved offline investable assets within the Goldmoney® Holding, a major enhancement that allows qualified clients to buy, sell, and exchange cryptocurrencies with nine global currencies as well as gold, silver, platinum and palladium bullion. With today’s launch, Goldmoney becomes the world’s first publicly traded and regulated financial service to offer insurable, auditable, and Anti-Money Laundering (“AML”) compliant exposure to cryptocurrencies.
Buying and selling of digital assets that are safely secured in vaulted cold storage. Cryptocurrency offerings currently include Bitcoin and Ethereum; additional leading digital assets will be added over time.
Funding of Goldmoney Holdings with 50 types of cryptocurrency, enabling wallet holders to sell a variety of cryptocurrencies and fund their Goldmoney Holding with fiat currency to access precious metals and other Goldmoney service offerings.
Will seek the establishment of peer-to-peer (“P2P”) lending capabilities on digital assets in partnership with Lend and Borrow Trust, allowing owners of Bitcoin and other assets to safely borrow against their positions.
The majority of high net investors would turn to Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon for wealth management, Bloomberg writes.
If one of the four tech giants were to enter the advice space, 56.2% of wealthy individuals would entrust them with their money, according to a Capgemini survey of 2,500 individuals with a net worth of $1 million or more in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia-Pacific cited by the news service. And among people under 40, more than 81% would use one of the four tech firms, according to the survey.
It’s called Study Loans and is said to be the first online platform dedicated to providing loans to students for both vocational and higher education.
Working closely with education providers, the fintech will track student performance and provide funds as you study through ‘tranches’ – which are based on the number of units you do and when they are completed.
Think of tranches as a ‘pay as you go’ kind of deal. So whether you pass one unit or four, Study Loans will release the funds according to your course progression.
Study Loans has raised $5 million debt equity so far, which is ready to be distributed as the first tranche to Aussie students who have already applied through the platform.
Financing options for students:
Student loans –Student personal loans are designed to help fund your education. They often have a more lenient application criteria and have lower interest rates than standard personal loans. But you are expected to make monthly repayments – so you’ll need to make sure your budget can handle the amount.
Peer-to-peer lending
HECS-HELP – This is a Government funded scheme for students enrolled in Commonwealth supported institutions with no real interest charged on the loan. You won’t have to pay your student fees upfront, however, you are expected to make repayments once you start earning a salary of $54,869.
Monefly is an innovative new Fintech platform in Australia, focused on providing tools and resources that empower its members to grow income, reduce expenses, build assets, eliminate debt and protect themselves from risk. Some of these exciting tools include free property valuations, automated budgeting, credit scores, bank account consolidation and much more.
Monefly has partnered with Envestnet | Yodlee to help its members access comprehensive financial data available across banking and wealth management from over 15,500 data sources globally.
The data being integrated into Monefly includes superannuation, cash, credit cards, personal debts, mortgages, assets, shares, real estate, credit scores and other investment data.
MyAdvo, India’s leading Legal Tech Startup has entered into an agreement with Square Capital, the digital lending arm of India’s largest real estate transaction platform Square Yards to enable loan facilitation for lawyers on its panel.
Square Capital currently facilitates USD 30- 40Mn(INR 200cr – INR 260cr) of loan disbursals every month, contributed majorly by secured mortgages spread across 50+ banking partners for their different products in home loan, loan against property and business loan.
This exclusive tie-up will benefit MyAdvo registered lawyers in receiving immediate loan solutions without any hassle.
Robo-advisers, or automated services based on computer algorithms, are catching on in the Indian market due to the relatively lower penetration of financial products in India compared to developed markets.
According to a Business Insider Intelligence forecast, robo-advisers (with some element of automation) will manage investment products worth $1 trillion by 2020, which will go up to $4.6 trillion by as early as 2022.
Scepticism notwithstanding, financial institutions in the country are realising the benefits of robo-advisory services by either building the product in-house or partnering with fintech companies to develop robo-advisers. Take the case of FundsIndia.com, which has a robo-advisory service for which it is forging partnerships with financial biggies. “We have a partnership with Axis Securities and one more company. There is a growing acceptance from the industry, and we are trying to enable better product design,” said Srikant Meenakshi, co-founder, FundsIndia.com. According to him, 15% of his company’s overall portfolio comprises robo-advisory services. Similarly, 5nance has an agreement with HDFC Mutual Fund for its robo-advisor.
Robo-advisory start-up ArthaYantra uses a patented methodology called the Personal Financial Lifecycle Management on its online platform, Arthos. Since its launch in 2008, the site claims to have helped 120,000 customers across more 650 cities and 30 countries.
Singapore banks have closed accounts of several companies which specialize in providing cryptocurrency and payments services, according to two local bodies which represent financial-technology firms.
Chia Hock Lai, president of the Singapore Fintech Association, which has broader membership than Access, said some of his organization’s members also experienced account closures, though he didn’t provide figures.
Access has 106 members and the Fintech Association has 185, though the two organizations said some companies belong to both groups.
According to Joseph Huang, president of E.Sun Bank, speaking in an interview with The Asset, payments is one area that every bank is looking to explore, although it does not generate huge profits for most banks.
Banks are also more frequently working with technology companies. E.Sun Bank partnered with IBM Taiwan in building its digital branch, which opened in February 2017, making it the first digital branch in Taiwan. Similarly, CTBC partnered with LINE Pay to help merge its banking services with communication apps and social media.
Taishin Bank’s e-banking application, Richart, which attracted over 120,000 subscribers, is targeting young Taiwanese users, while Cathay United Bank is also providing its products to retail customers through its platform My MobiBank.
