News Comments Today’s main news: LendingHome surpasses $100M in monthly loan volume, secures $57M in Series C-2. KBRA assigns preliminary ratings to Prosper Marketplace Issuance Trust, Series 2017-3. RateSetter says FCA authorization merely a milestone. Qudian raises $900M in biggest listing by Chinese fintech firm. BBVA focuses on U.S.-Mexico remittances with money-transfer app. New Zealand paves path for robos. SoftBank considering second […]
Goldman puts Lending Club, Prosper on its radar. AT: “Goldman Sachs is the legacy player to watch. With their financial might, they will likely be the digital banking force to beat in a few short years. If the Big 4 tech companies go fintech, Goldman could make the fifth giant in a land of global digital tidal forces. This is a must-read analysis from CB Insights.”
J.P. Morgan to buy WePay. AT: I’ve wondered when J.P. Morgan would get in on the acquisition game. Depending on how it’s managed, this could be a huge boon to Morgan’s banking business.”
New Zealand opens the door for robo-advice. AT: “This is interesting. They don’t change the standing rule that financial advice must involve a human. Instead, they offer robos an exemption from the rule.”
Less than a week after announcing its new office in Pittsburgh, real estate marketplace lending platform LendingHome announced it has surpassed $100 million in monthly loan volume and secured $57 million during its Series C-2 funding round, which included participation from Sberbank and Noah Holdings Limited.
The online lender also revealed the closing of the LendingHome Opportunity Fund II, which was managed by LH Capital Management, with $100 million in commitments from more than 40 investors including asset managers, international funds, family offices, and high net worth individuals. An additional credit facility of up to $300 million brings the fund’s total potential assets to $400 million.
Georgia companies scored the most venture dollars in the third quarter, since first quarter 2000. Fintech Kabbage and access management technology firm Core Security raised a combined $450 million, or about 60 percent of total venture capital invested in Atlanta companies in the third quarter.
As its bond trading revenue plummets, Goldman has undergone a major strategic shift, looking to grow the revenue opportunity from its consumer digital finance operation.
Goldman Sachs has changed a lot through its 148-year history. But as technology continues to roll through the financial services industry, Goldman is one of the few bulge bracket banks today that is staking its reputation and future on new strategic bets in digital finance.
When Goldman announced it would be entering the online lending business in 2015, Lending Club‘s then-COO Scott Sanborn quipped, “We are looking forward to competing with Goldman Sachs on customer experience.” More recently, when Goldman bought $2.8B worth of bonds held by Venezuela’s struggling central bank at a 70% discount to market price, Ribbit Capital founder Micky Malka tweeted, “This is why @GoldmanSachs won’t become a consumer first brand.”
46% of Goldman Sachs job postings are in technology.
Goldman Sachs’ online lending arm Marcus lent $1 billion in the first 8 months of operation. Now it is taking its digital finance brands global.
Goldman Sachs is one of the top two most active US bulge bracket banks investing in fintech startups.
Goldman has pushed investments into Brazil.
Goldman made its first fintech acquisition in 2016 and is looking for more.
Goldman’s cryptocurrency patent made headlines, but most of its patents have focused on improving its systems.
BACKGROUND ON CORE GOLDMAN SACHS
Goldman Sachs makes money in five primary areas: investment banking, equities, investment management, investing & lending, and FICC client execution.
Source: CB Insights
Digital finance initiatives
Notably, Goldman seems to believe that its digital consumer lending and deposit platform has as large of a net revenue growth opportunity as its FICC trading unit. This is a remarkable shift in strategy that only materialized in the last three years, and the strategy is still in the extremely early innings of its growth potential for Goldman.
Another advantage Marcus has over other bank incumbents looking to launch a competing initiative is its non-legacy IT architecture and the fact that Goldman does not have an existing consumer credit card business for Marcus to cannibalize.
Marcus reportedly passed $1B in loan origination in its first 8 months and is expected to originate $2B by the end of 2017. While data on number of loans doled out is hard to find, Goldman reached its first billion in consumer loans significantly faster than competing online personal loan companies (Lending Club launched in 2007). At the CB Insights Future of Fintech conference, Talwar noted that Marcus’s average loan size was “around $14,000.”
Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA) assigns preliminary ratings to three classes of notes issued by Prosper Marketplace Lending Issuance Trust 2017-3 (“PMIT 2017-3”). This is a $501.05 million consumer loan ABS transaction.
This transaction represents the eighth securitization collateralized by unsecured consumer loans originated through the online marketplace lending platform operated by Prosper Funding LLC (“Prosper” or the “Company”).
Preliminary Ratings Assigned: Prosper Marketplace Issuance Trust, Series 2017-3
eOriginal, Inc. and Quicken Loans today announced a partnership to complete the final steps of the online mortgage process – to digitally create an electronic note, and securely store it as an authoritative copy with delivery to both custodians and the secondary market. This advancement accelerates the time between origination and replenishment of capital.
Quicken Loans, the country’s largest online mortgage lender, closed more than $7 billion in mortgage volume through Rocket Mortgage, the nation’s first fully online mortgage process, in 2016 – its first full year in market. The rapid growth of Rocket Mortgage comes from its appeal to a new generation of homebuyers. In fact, two-thirds of Rocket Mortgage clients used the online process to finance a home purchase, and 80 percent of those consumers were first-time home buyers.
eOriginal’s platform delivers a fully digital mortgage and supports every type of digital closing strategy.
Modo, the payments fintech working with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Alliance Data, FIS, Verifone, and Klarna, today announced they’re ready to break their self-imposed silence and discuss the work they have been doing to deliver innovative payment solutions for their clients in Q4 2017.
Modo has already announced support for three payment event types, in diverse areas of payments with Klarna, Verifone and FIS, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch (respectively):
Payout Events: Enable your corporate and commercial customers to send money globally using the ever growing number of digital wallets to accelerate the last mile of disbursements.
Checkout Events: Checkout anywhere, using any method of payment. Whether you are a merchant or a payment provider, offer consumers any way to pay.
Loyalty Events: Earn and burn loyalty in entirely new ways in entirely new experiences. Combine multiple rewards and loyalty programs to make a purchase or send a gift.
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM) said that it agreed to buy payments company WePay Inc. in the bank’s first sizable acquisition of a financial-technology startup.
The banking giant plans to roll out WePay’s technology to J.P. Morgan’s four million small-business customers, said Matt Kane, CEO of Chase Merchant Services. WePay, which has roughly 200 employees, helps online marketplaces and crowdfunding websites like GoFundMe process payments.
The two companies didn’t disclose terms of the deal. But a person familiar with the matter said the price was above the roughly $220 million valuation that Redwood City, Calif.-based WePay achieved in a 2015 fundraising.
Bank of America processed $4 billion in Zelle transactions in the third quarter of 2017 alone, CEO Brian Moynihan reported on the bank’s earnings call Friday morning. Digital payments volume increased nine percent to $324 million. Within that, person-to-person payments growth was about 67 percent with the addition of Zelle this summer, reporting 13.6 million transactions and $4 billion in volume. The bank recently processed half a billion dollars in a single week, Moynihan said.
The bank’s digital users grew 5.2 percent to 34.5 million on a year-over-year basis. Mobile banking users grew 10.8 percent to 23.6 million.
Over at Wells Fargo, CEO Tim Sloan said during that earning call that third-quarter peer-to-peer payments increased 46 percent, but didn’t provide a Zelle-specific number.
At many times in history there have been finance companies that made loans that banks chose not to make. Such finance companies have thrived in good economic times and tended to fail in major recessions. I predict the same will be true of the newer editions.
But second, let us ask why are the banks not making these loans? The answer is simple. The combination of the costs of marketing and administration and the credit risk is too great to make money on a consistent basis. Therefore the banks are funding a large part of the loans by lending to the lenders and taking a senior position, cushioned by the equity of other investors and shielded from the marketing and loan acquisition costs (as well, perhaps, as some of the consumer regulatory risks). Smart banking, it seems to me. The banks have a lower cost of funds than the new lenders, so they can make money at a lower effective interest rate on the money they lend, so long as it is safer.
I have been shocked at the levels of expenses being incurred by some of the new lenders.
Not finding a mortgage lender you like? Try borrowing from a friend – or several of them – instead. According to reports, a new platform called Celsius could make P2P mortgage lending a viable option.
Using blockchain technology, Celsius is in the process of building a peer-to-peer lending network specifically aimed at the Millennial market. According to Alex Mashinsky, founder of the company, the platform will allow younger buyers to secure funding using their social circle, rather than big banks and financial institutions.
So how will it work? To start, each user creates a digital profile. They’ll need to upload FICO scores, online transaction histories and other non-traditional financial data. Then, Celsius will assign each profile a credit score that’s unique to the site.
To protect lenders, Celsius will offer insurance that covers a percentage of the principal loan amount in case of default.
Digital Asset Holdings LLC has raised $40 million in a Series B round, bringing the enterprise blockchain startup’s total funding so far to $110 million.
AlphaPoint Utilizes Intel Security Technology to Deliver Enterprise-Ready Blockchain Platform (AlphaPoint Email), Rated: A
Today, AlphaPoint announces the AlphaPoint Asset Digitization solution making illiquid assets liquid by facilitating the digitization of assets and launching new markets. AlphaPoint also announces the release of the AlphaPoint TrustedVM, a trusted virtual machine enabled by Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) technology which allows smart contracts and blockchain services to run securely.
The latest release of the AlphaPoint Asset Digitization solution with AlphaPoint TrustedVM adds additional enterprise-class capabilities by securing access to information from intermediaries and network participants, thereby enhancing privacy and security to the AlphaPoint Distributed Ledger Platform. AlphaPoint has been working with some of the largest Fortune 100 financial institutions since 2013 to launch markets on blockchain technologies.
Enterprise-ready Blockchain Platform
In collaboration with Intel, the AlphaPoint Asset Digitization solution as designed at its core to help enterprises efficiently deploy blockchain solutions that implement business initiatives with world-class privacy and security. This solution was architected to create Trusted Virtual Machine, or TrustedVM, that leverages the trusted execution environment (TEE) that Intel SGX enables. AlphaPoint’s solution utilizes the security and privacy capabilities of Intel SGX, thereby allowing customers to benefit from several key technology and business advantages:
Faster time to market – Quickly develop and deploy blockchain applications with proven technology.
Hardware–enforced privacyand secure consensus – Execution and validation inside the TrustedVM, ensuring data is not visible to any unwanted parties.
Lower and predictable costs – With linear scalability, this technology improves total cost of ownership (TCO) and operational efficiencies.
Simplified development – Smart contracts and applications may be written in TypeScript and JavaScript, instead of highly specialized languages.
IBM is using the technology behind bitcoin to help farmers and other small businesses in underdeveloped countries participate in global trade.
The companies will use IBM’s blockchain technology to process financial transactions across borders and currencies — a process which is often prohibitively slow and costly for small business owners, especially when they are in developing regions with smaller banking infrastructures.
The project is focused on what Stellar calls “underdeveloped payment corridors” — countries like Samoa and Fiji, where monetary policies, currencies, and economic instability make it difficult for businesses to move money internationally.
Minorities are more likely to turn to a financial technology firm when seeking a business loan, but they may pay higher interest rates, according to the preliminary results of a congressional investigation released Monday.
A fintech startup with no mobile app does a fundraising round. It secures $8 million. How is that even possible?
True Link, a retiree-focused hybrid advice platform, had a simple pitch to investors: elderly clients like the convenience of digital advice, but want to talk on the phone. The firm claims it received 1.6 million client calls last year.
Now they are actually doing something about it, by launching a new framework for corporate governance, investing and trading called the Long-Term Stock Exchange. Backed by top Valley figures such as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, the LTSE says it plans to seek regulatory approval by the end of this year to become the newest U.S. stock exchange.
Its key feature: a system in which the voting power of shares increases the longer investors own them.
A year ago Lending Club launched a deal for new investors with United Airlines. New investors could earn 1 MileagePlus frequent flier mile for every $2 invested in a new Lending Club account.
Well last week Lending Club sweetened the deal. They basically doubled the amount of miles you can receive. So, instead of 1 mile for every $2 invested it is now 1 mile for every $1 invested. This deal is only valid until January 9, 2018 whereas the last deal had a three year expiration date.
whoa: blockchain, blockchain, blockchain (CB Insights Email), Rated: B
First, we’ve teamed up with Fortune Magazine for a joint review of Blockchain Trends & Opportunities. Robert Hackett of Fortune will be joined by CBI Intelligence Analyst, Arieh Levi.
RateSetter applied for full authorisation in October 2015 and cofounder and CEO Rhydian Lewis said in a statement the process has been “a long but positive journey during which we have learnt a lot, improved our infrastructure and implemented important changes, notably making the business more transparent.”
“Authorisation is a milestone but not an end in itself and we look forward to working with the regulator and all stakeholders to continue to deliver good customer outcomes and to grow RateSetter.”
According to data gathered by AltFi lending volumes through P2P platforms achieved a staggering compounded annual growth rate of 110% between 2011 and 2016 and shows little sign of letting up this year.
However, there are some indications this honeymoon period for the industry may be over as the UK’s inflation rate hit 3.0% last month piling pressure on the Bank of England to raise interest rates. This is an understandable worry for the industry, as much of the lending it facilitates is higher risk than that of the traditional banking sector.
Furthermore, there are several emerging industry trends, which are likely to boost its resilience to deteriorating economic circumstances.
Consolidation- While nearly 100 platforms are operating in the UK a resilient oligopoly is emerging. This is made up of the markets four largest lenders: Zopa; Funding Circle; LendInvest and Rate Setter who cumulatively facilitate over 70% of lending volume.
Securitisation – Previously, P2P platforms lacked the scale to make securitisation economic and this new trend will likely provide a further edge to the industries established participants.
Zopa, the world’s oldest “peer-to-peer” lender, has long focused on low-risk borrowers. The weighted average interest rate the 12-year-old company charges its British customers has never gone higher than 10 per cent and was as low as 5.6 per cent in 2013. While startups like Wonga focussed on the high returns available from borrowers who are under-served by financial institutions, Zopa has largely competed at the “prime” end of the spectrum with high street banks. The returns are lower, but so too are the risks, including to its reputation.
In recent years, Zopa has added riskier borrowers to help drive growth. (It’s worth saying that it is still miles from Wonga territory.) The weighted average interest rate across its portfolio has grown from 5.8 per cent in 2014 to almost 8.8 per cent in 2017:
Source: Financial Times
Zopa has been taking on more risk to achieve pretty much the same returns as when it made fewer risky loans.
Britain has seen its population of small housebuilders shrink by 80% in a single generation as market dominance has passed to an entrenched group of major players – among the top 10 UK housebuilders, none was founded after 1990. The disappearance of small and medium-sized housebuilders from the UK – defined as companies that complete between one and 100 units a year – has seen their numbers fall from more than 12,000 in the mid-1980s to about 2,400 today, according to research by the non-bank mortgage lender LendInvest.
Chinese online micro-credit provider Qudian Inc said it raised about $900 million in an IPO that priced above expectations, underscoring robust U.S. investor demand for fast-growing Chinese companies.
The offering from Qudian represents the biggest-ever U.S. listing by a Chinese financial technology firm. It is also the most high-profile company to take part in a resurgence of U.S. listings by Asian firms this year.
Qudian , an online microlender backed by e-commerce giant Alibaba’s financial unit, priced its U.S. listing above its expected range on Tuesday, says Reuters.
It offers fast growth, low default rates and, unlike many tech startups, is already profitable. At $24 per share, the final price represents a 2018 PE of 13.8, compared to 13.0 for smaller U.S.-listed online lender Yirendai.
China’s household debt relative to income is still low, and consumer credit is underpenetrated at 7 percent of gross domestic product, versus 20 percent in the United States, says Goldman Sachs.
Backed by Alibaba’s Ant Financial, Qudian lends cash to young Chinese consumers such as white collar workers, and advances credit so they can buy goods online and pay for them in monthly installments. The company provided $5.6 billion to 7 million active borrowers in the first half of 2017.
The sale of 37.5 million shares in Qudian has already raised about $900 million, making it the biggest U.S.-listing by a Chinese company this year, the report said. The offering values Qudian at as much as $7.9 billion, the report added.
Online micro-lending company Qudian is about to go public at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, and it’s set to be one of the largest U.S.-listed floats by a Chinese company this year.
In its prospectus, Qudian said it was offering 37.5 million American Depository Shares with a float price range of $19-$22 per share. The company said it could offer up to 43.1 million shares if underwriters exercised an option.
In recent years, raising funds through crowdfunding activities is becoming increasingly popular among enterprises worldwide, and the governments of quite a number of countries have introduced legislation to regulate raising funds through crowdfunding activities. On the other hand, the Financial Services Development Council (FSDC) released on March 18 last year a report entitled Introducing a Regulatory Framework for Equity Crowdfunding in Hong Kong, which explored options for establishing a framework and a regulatory regime to promote and, at the same time, regulate equity crowdfunding activities in Hong Kong. So far, however, the Government has not yet announced any specific measures to promote equity crowdfunding activities.
Reply:
(1) We note that crowdfunding activities might come in different forms, including equity crowdfunding (ECF) and peer-to-peer (P2P) lending. The regulatory approaches towards these activities vary globally across jurisdictions in view of the nascent nature of the business. While some economies have developed dedicated new regimes, others leverage existing rules to regulate such activities.
(2) At present, parties engaging in crowdfunding activities in Hong Kong (e.g. where the activity involves an offer to the public to purchase securities, including shares, debentures or interests in collective investment schemes, or where the platform offers its own funds to borrowers) may be subject to the provisions of the Securities and Futures Ordinance (Cap. 571), the Companies (Winding Up and Miscellaneous Provisions) Ordinance (Cap. 32) and the Money Lenders Ordinance (Cap. 163), depending on the specific structure and features of the relevant arrangement.
Israeli startup Innovative Assessments (IA) says financial lenders like banks are missing out on huge numbers of potential clients because their criteria for handing out credit are too stringent and do not take the full picture of the client into account.
As a result, banks are effectively cutting themselves off from lending out money to large segments of the population, and many borrowers are denied access to affordable credit.
IA wants to help solve this problem. Banks should not only look at financial information to assess creditworthiness, IA says, but also at personal character, which is a whole new dimension of data that is missing from today’s credit scores. So, IA has come up with an idea to help lenders do this.
IA has developed patent-pending software that uses advanced psychometrics for credit scoring.
“Our algorithms look at people’s preferences towards certain financial behaviors,” added Fine. “And while there are no right or wrong answers, we can also identify people who may be responding insincerely.”
SeerGate, a real-time payments firm, was acquired by MyCheck in May 2015 while Ramat Gan-based Sling, whose platform allows micro-merchants to accept electronic payments from consumers via smartphones, was snapped up by Avante in July last year.
NSKnox has created a Digital Notary based on cooperative software that allows a secure transaction approval for banks and organizations, the company says. The software, which uses algorithms, allows two or more blind witnesses — who are actually financial or other kind of organizations — to help independently authenticate, authorize and detect fraud while verifying business transactions.
A total of 68 startups, including nine in the latest brew, have taken part in Citi’s Israel Accelerator program since it was set up in November 2013 in Tel Aviv.
Citi provides the entrepreneurs access to experts within the company globally to bounce ideas off of and the opportunity to use the bank’s huge infrastructure as beta sites. The banking giant does its mentoring and fostering pro bono, without taking any stakes in the companies it fosters.
The graduates of Citi’s program, which include startups like Paykey, Paybox and Vatbox, have raised a total of $300 million to date, according to data provided by Citi, and there have been two exits, with Sling and SeerGate having been acquired.
BBVA, Spain’s second-largest bank that snatched up mobile banking startup Simple for $117 million back in 2014, is now entering the mobile money transfer business with today’s launch of a new app called Tuyyo. The app, which is available on both iOS and Android, is focused on the $73 billion annual market for remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean from the U.S.
However, the service is initially launching with money transfers from the U.S. to Mexico, where the average amount sent by U.S. workers is about $1,900 per year, says BBVA. It also notes that the U.S. to Mexico corridor sees over $27 billion flowing between the countries annually, making it one of the world’s largest.
Many of the world’s poor in developing countries — nearly 2 billion, according to the World Bank — struggle to lift themselves out of poverty simply because they don’t have a bank account or financial services.
However, a new collaboration supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will change that. Ripple, in partnership with Dwolla, ModusBox, Software Groupand Crosslake Technologies, with funding and support from the Gates Foundation, developed a new open-source software called Mojaloop for creating a real-time, interoperable payments platform on a national scale to reach the world’s poor with essential financial tools.
Leveraging the power of the Interledger Protocol (ILP), Mojaloop offers a way for financial providers, governments and mobile network operators to simplify and reduce the cost of developing inclusive payments platforms.
Financial technology has the potential to radically transform the securities industry. The fast pace of change could lead to disintermediation, according to an Iosco study.
Key trends identified in the report include:
Greater availability of data
Exponential growth in computing power allowing the analysis of ever larger data sets
Broader access to and the decreasing cost of goods and services
Increasing disintermediation and re-intermediation
Demographic and generational changes
Innovative fintech business models are disintermediating and re-intermediating certain regulated activities. For example, online equity crowdfunding platforms intermediate share placements and disintermediate stock exchanges and underwriters; peer to peer lending platforms intermediate or sell loans and disintermediate banks and lenders, and robo-advisers provide automated investment advice and thereby disintermediate traditional advisors.
Beginning with bitcoin in 2009, cryptocurrencies have also seen their prominence rise due to some of the qualities that they share with gold, the most prominent of which is their scarcity.
With the emergence of today’s digital age, a startup called GoldMint is seeking to alter this trend with a new means of exchange for physical gold, with transactions occurring over a blockchain-based platform.
GoldMint’s platform will leverage the private and individual gold trading market, including potentially the management of larger physical stocks such as those in central banks. It will also deliver an electronic payment solution tethered to physical gold, as well as a gold-backed peer-to-peer lending system.
There are two options for trading GOLD for fiat or cryptocurrencies. First, there is a method for seeking a GoldMint-guaranteed buyback. And second, a loan can be requested. For either option, the process is as follows:
Through the use of a special app which is not yet available, GOLD can be transferred as collateral to a designated GoldMint account.
GoldMint utilizes the current price of gold, as set by the LBMA, to fix the rate of a loan.
GoldMint requires the customer to undergo its know-your-customer (KYC) process as well as consent to GoldMint’s loan terms to receive the loan. Various repayment options for the loan amount and the means of repaying it are then offered.
If a customer defaults on repayment, their GOLD cryptoassets are transferred to GoldMint.
GoldMint also has a process for converting gold into GOLD tokens and reconverting these tokens into gold for cross-border passages.
The Financial Markets Authority has decided to allow financial services companies to provide so-called “robo-advice” to individuals.
Such methods are widespread around the world, but New Zealand law requires any financial advice to be given by a human adviser, and law changes to allow advice to be given by a computer programmes are not expected to be passed until 2019.
Companies wanting to offer robo-advice will have to apply to the FMA for an exemption.
The Financial Markets Authority will let Kiwis access personalised automated financial advice, known as robo-advice, with an exemption kicking in before a legislative overhaul of the sector.
The market watchdog sought feedback on the proposal in June and today decided to expand the range of products robo-advice can cover to include mortgages and personal insurance, it said in a statement. Providers wanting to offer the service will need FMA approval on the good character of directors and officers and satisfy the regulator of their capability and competence. Another round of consultation is needed to finalise the exemption and the FMA is aiming to start the process early next year.
Big banks are planning roboadvice services, but only BNZ has revealed how far advanced it is.
Westpac and BNZ have both told the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) they expect to launch roboadvice services, which could close the “advice gap” by using artificial intelligence (AI) systems to give customers advice on things like KiwiSaver, insurance and mortgages.
The banks’ intentions were revealed in submissions on whether the FMA should use its “exemption” powers to allow roboadvice services to operate despite current law only allowing personalised advice to be given by a human being.
ANZ and Kiwibank’s intentions were blacked out in their submissions, released by the FMA.
Submissions to the consultation focused on a number of themes:
Strong support for an exemption from the current laws preventing personalised robo-advice.
Opposition to financial limits and product exclusions.
Robo-advice should meet the same standards as those that apply to authorised financial advisers (AFAs).
Exemption applicants should be pre-approved or licensed.
Exemption conditions should be aligned with new advice regime requirements.
The FMA has decided not to impose financial limits on personalised robo-advice and the eligible product list has been expanded to include mortgages and personal insurance products.
Companies seeking to offer personalised robo-advice will have to provide the FMA with good character declarations for directors and senior managers as well as information showing they have the capability and competence to provide the robo-advice service. The exemption conditions will also be designed so that the robo-advice service is provided in a manner that is consistent with AFA requirements.
A summary of the submissions can be found here. 49 submissions were received by the FMA. 47 are being published.
Mumbai-based peer-to-peer lending platform Lenden Club has raised $500,000 almost Rs 3.5 crore in equity investment from three major investors Venture Catalyst, Anirudh Damani and an Indian venture capital fund. Venture Catalyst and Anirudh Damani had put in seed investment of Rs 1.5 crore in the company as well in May last year.
The Reserve Bank of India’s notification on peer to peer (P2P) lending issued on October 4 this year (“Regulations”) seems to have only added an element of ambiguity in the minds of stakeholders. Eighteen months since the RBI issued the consultation paper and it is not certain how and whether stakeholder comments have been internalised in the paper.
The definition of a “peer to peer lending platform” as an intermediary providing the services of loan facilitation, may unintentionally bring into the purview, a wide variety of operators. As a literal construct, this does not seem to take into cognizance the various types of business operations in the industry simply because it doesn’t clarify whether this excludes a model that doesn’t provide syndication. Theoretically even an internet search engine, business correspondents and lead generators could fall under this definition.
This must be the first category of Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC) to not function in the manner in which it has been typically designed. The new Regulations set a precedent to regulate entities as NBFC’s that undertake neither lending nor credit enhancement.
The new Regulations also seem to bring into its ambit, an “off-line” P2P: the very essence for P2P start-ups has been low transaction costs thereby resorting to the online medium for such lending.
Japanese Internet conglomerate SoftBank is in early discussions to launch another fund that can possibly be larger than its existing $100 billion Vision Fund, Recode reported, citing anonymous sources.
The Information, in its report, noted that SoftBank got the right to prevent online lender Kabbage, in which it led a $250-million investment in August, from selling parts of itself, buying other companies, selling stock below a certain price or borrowing money beyond a certain level.
The fintech revolution sweeping finance will lessen the profitability of banks in the GCC when it comes to parts of consumer banking – such as money transfers and foreign exchange – but overall it is unlikely to hurt the ability of regional lenders to make money.
The rating agency noted that the GCC banks that it assigns ratings to get about a quarter of their revenues from fees and commissions and foreign exchange gains and, while a big portion that is generated from lending and advisory activities, some of that money comes from transfers and currency exchange.
Investments in technology and digitisation are also timely for UAE banks as profitability has been on the wane in the wake of the biggest oil price slump since the 2008 financial crash. Lenders are fortunate that this country has one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world.
The rising influence of financial technology (fintech) firms in the Gulf could eventually threaten jobs and profitability at the region’s banks, warned ratings agency S&P Global.
“This would push some banks to adjust their operations through increased digitalization, branch network reduction, and staff rationalization,” said Mohamed Damak, S&P Global Ratings credit analyst in the report.
Already, the region’s banks are starting to rethink their business model.
In early October, Mashreq launched one of the region’s first full service digital branchless bank — Mashreq Neo — as well as a new new digital mobile wallet service called Mashreq Pay — that can be used to make purchases around the world.
The Dubai-based bank has also started to use robotics in the third quarter to manage open account trade payments, according to the bank’s Q3 statement.
LENDING Loop, a Canadian peer-to-peer lending platform, has agreed to finance Snakes & Lattes, a cafe chain where people can play and buy board games.
Amfil Technologies, which owns Snakes & Lattes, said on Tuesday that the financing will be used to fuel the expansion of the brand across North America.
Snakes & Lattes has entered into an EXCLUSIVE partnership with Lending Loop, Canada’s first fully regulated peer-to-peer lending platform focused on small businesses. This partnership will fuel and facilitate the mass expansion of the Snakes and Lattes brand across North America, while simultaneously preserving shareholder value. This is the first time in history that Lending Loop has made a direct partnership to finance a growing company, and they will be conducting a mass marketing/advertising campaign to promote both Lending Loop and Snakes & Lattes.
In contrast, Amfil is collaborating with financial innovator, Lending Loop, to fuel the subsidiary’s growth at a fair market rate with flexible cash repayment terms.
Internet pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee looks at the fintech landscape today and sees something familiar — a creative ferment that reminds him of the early web. He also sees some mistakes in danger of being repeated.
News Comments Today’s main news: Elevate customers save more than $2B. Overstock launches SEC-compliant ICO alternative. RateSetter trims secondary market fees. PeerStreet funds over $500M in loans with zero investor losses. Qudian leads 2 IPO launches totaling $869. Kabbage on the road to $161M raise. Today’s main analysis: International P2P lending volumes. Today’s thought-provoking articles: Renren’s Joe Chen’s sneaky SoFi share grab. Hedge […]
Hedge Funds flip ICOs. AT: “I don’t know why this seems like big news, but it shouldn’t be. The question is, how long before the SEC clamps down on the practice?”
International P2P lending volumes for September 2017. AT: “Assetz Capital and Funding Circle see significant increases in new loans issued from last month and last year same-month. MoneyThing saw no new loans, the sharpest decline at 100%.”
Elevate Credit, Inc. (“Elevate” or “the company”), a leading tech-enabled provider of innovative and responsible online credit solutions for non-prime consumers, today announced their customers have saved more than $2 billion, versus what they would have paid for payday loans. $613 million of these cumulative savings were incurred in the first half of 2017 alone.
But in Silicon Valley Renren’s founder and CEO, Joseph “Joe” Chen, is no outcast. He is a well-connected guru and mentor who sits on the boards of companies in which Renren has invested, like LendingHome, Fundrise, and Motif Investing. Chen also sits on the board of Social Finance, known as SoFi, which has been under fire due to a mounting sexual harassment scandal that recently saw Mike Cagney resign as SoFi’s CEO and chairman.
Chen is cooking up a deal that will allow shareholders of Renren who are “qualified purchasers” and “accredited investors,” to exchange their shares in the company for ownership in a spinoff entity consisting of its investment portfolio, including Renren’s stake in SoFi. Other shareholders who do not qualify would instead get a cash payment reviewed by a special committee of Renren’s board.
Under the spinout plan, Chen, who owns 31% of Renren’s stock, SoftBank, which owns 39% of Renren, and DCM, which owns 8.6%, will likely increase their SoFi holdings. Most of the shareholders owning the remaining 20% of Renren would lose their exposure to SoFi given that they appear to largely be individual retail investors, Securities & Exchange Commission filings show. This would leave them with a yet-to-be determined dividend, and a holding in a declining, money-losing Chinese internet company.
Renren still has its stake in SoFi, which together with some other Renren investments is worth more than Renren’s market capitalization of $630 million.
Online retail giant Overstock.com is currently not only offering custom jewelry or discount mattresses but has been delving into cryptocurrency through Overstock.com, its subsidiary focused on Blockchain ventures.
In their Overstock.com, they are now in a joint venture together with RenGen and Argon Group to launch an Automated Trading System (ATS) for trading tokens issued via ICOs.
According to reports, $2 billion has been raised in token sales this year alone.
Hedge funds are proving to be first among equals when it comes to digital token sales by technology startups, receiving preferential discounts and terms and then often cashing out. While legal, the maneuver is drawing comparisons to some of the eyebrow-raising practices that took place during the IPO heyday of the 1990s, when many preferred investors would quickly resell shares for big profits.
“It’s not healthy for the ecosystem, and it’s pretty abusive,” said Kyle Samani, a managing partner at Austin, Texas-based Multicoin Capital, which invests in ICOs. “They are getting a discount because they are a big name, and they think it’s going to draw the retail investor. It’s the greater fools theory –- I’ll buy it if there’s someone who’s more of a fool than me.”
Source: Bloomberg
Startups often announce, with much fanfare, that such-and-such funds and big-name investors have participated in the presale. What isn’t as well publicized is that the early investors — and, possibly, even the startup’s founders — can often cash out right after the ICO.
Source: Bloomberg
More than 80 percent of ICOs are doing presales, according to Lex Sokolin, global director of fintech strategy at Autonomous NEXT.
PeerStreet funds over half a billion in loans, maintains zero losses to investors (PeerStreet Email), Rated: AAA
PeerStreet, the real estate investing platform for real estate debt, has just hit the milestone of having funded half a billion in loans and with zero losses to investors since the company launched in 2015.
Platforms in the P2P and crowdfunding space are seeing increasing competition and scrutiny, but PeerStreet has continued to offer investors access to quality loans and high yields, earning the public testimonial of some high-profile users, such as
Online SME lender Kabbage is raising $161 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Fintech firm filed the Form D last week indicating it had already received $80,573,040 with the same amount remaining to be raised.
Kabbage, which is mulling an IPO, has raised about $80 million on the planned raise, according to a Securities & Exchange Commission filing. The fintech, valued at more than $1 billion, announced a $250 million investment from SoftBank last year.
It’s only been a few weeks since the blockbuster announcement that SoftBank is investing $250 million into Kabbage, which thrust the small business lender into the spotlight for a few reasons, not the least of which was the more than $1 billion valuation that has been speculated for Kabbage.
This valuation, of course, is in stark contrast to that of OnDeck, which also lends to small businesses.
“All of our bank partnerships are technology integrations where our technology sits in their systems. They use our technology to deliver the customer experience. And I think what SoftBank saw in us was that potential. Whatever the valuation was I can assure you it was a result of a lot of due diligence on the part of SoftBank,” she said.
What value do the three big ratings bureaus, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, provide today in our emerging digital economy?
Increasingly in a world where payments may involve a peer to peer exchange, a global transfer, and more and more often a mobile phone transaction, the definition of good credit is going to change and widen.
Today, Experian maintains credit information on 215 million American consumers [Experian]. That’s over two-thirds of the total U.S. population [U.S. Census]. Roughly half of the population in the US has a FICO credit score that is less than 650, meaning that nearly half of people in the US cannot get credit from banks today.
The Equifax debacle turned up the volume on the call for change. We’re about to see more innovative ways of looking at credit, most of them built by mobile-first fintech companies.
Companies like PayPal, Kabbage, SmartBiz, Square, and others have stepped in to look at new ways to determine creditworthiness. Rather than depend solely on a single score like FICO, they are looking at a more holistic picture of a credit applicant.
SoFi, another lending startup, is using AI to analyze data from sources other than credit card information. And ShoCard, a blockchain-identity management system (IMS), teamed up with Creditinfo to let a customer claim their identity and manage who it gets shared with.
Chad Swenson of Lantern Credit believes your credit should be under your control. “Companies,” he says, “now have the ability to work with multiple alternative data streams outside of the traditional data delivered from the bureaus.”
Evan Singer, CEO of SmartBiz, a company devoted to helping small businesses secure loans, says that other metrics like your bank rating (how you use your bank rather than your credit) is another important piece of the puzzle often ignored.
CrowdStreet, provider of the leading commercial real estate investment platform for investor acquisition and relationship management, today announced several enhancements to its flagship Sponsor Direct white-label software platform designed to address the needs of modern investment firms. With these new features, Sponsor Direct is now the only software offering that combines support for financial advisor accounts with a suite of tools specifically developed to help them engage, communicate with and service their investors. Hines Securities Inc. is the first firm to leverage these new capabilities, relying on Sponsor Direct to provide easy-to-use online real estate capital fundraising functionality to financial advisors.
CrowdStreet’s proven software solutions currently support more than 53,000 investors, managing more than 1,000 offerings and $3.7 billion in invested capital. Since its launch, the CrowdStreet software platform has been used to raise more than $260 million and distribute more than $684 million to investors.
ATM fees have reached an 11-year record high, and New Yorkers are paying the second highest rates, says Bankrate’s annual Checking Account Survey for 2017.
The national average ATM fee is $4.69, equaling the average ATM surcharge of $2.97 plus the average out-of-network fee your main bank charges of $1.72.
Cities whose fees top over $5 include Pittsburgh ($5.19), New York ($5.14), Washington, D.C. ($5.11), Cleveland ($5.11) and Atlanta ($5.05).
Even the lowest fees still don’t drop below $4 with Milwaukee at $4.19 and Dallas at $4.07.
Overall, ATM withdrawal fees have risen by 55% over the last ten years and there is little to curb this growth.
1031 Crowdfunding, LLC announced today that the Company moved up in the rankings for the 2017-2018 Top 100+ Real Estate Crowdfunding Sites to #4 overall and maintained its position as #1 ranked Real Estate Crowdfunding site for 1031 Exchanges.
The Real-Estate Crowdfunding Review conducted in-depth research of over 100 real estate crowdfunding sites to form the reviews and rankings provided in the Top 100+ Real Estate Crowdfunding Sites. Site features most highly-valued included: pre-funding, low investor fees, low investors minimums, bankruptcy protection, velocity, positive investor feedback, co-investment by the company, and venture capital funding in the company.
13 sites in the former top 25 have fallen completely out of the rankings due to abandoning their business model or challenges. 5 sites have improved tremendously with substantially increased volume, and a few of these that were lower ranked have leaped up the charts as well.
Tier 1: Best of the Best
These sites have it all: High transparency, co-investment, pre-funding, high-volume, average to low fees, excellent bankruptcy protection, strong administration and customer service, and strong financial backing.
None. No site has all these features yet, but we hope that will change by the time of our next review.
Tier 2: All-Stars
These sites are all extremely strong in the majority of the fundamentals that are most important to investors.
There are 2 types of sites in this category. The 1st are up-and-coming sites that may not be as polished as competitors but have some sort of promise or potential for the future. The 2nd are sites that did well in last year’s rankings, but since then have had substantial investor complaints, decreasing volume or other challenges.
Following an antitrust review that lasted almost a year, the Department of Justice has greenlighted a real-time payments network being developed jointly by the nation’s largest banks.
The government’s approval may boost the prospects of a system that is being built by The Clearing House, the payments firm co-owned by JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and a host of other banks.
Has the state of consumer credit changed post-crisis? Lending Club Chief Executive Scott Sanborn said he believes that the “new normal” in consumer lending is riskier.
Wages are stagnant, Sanborn said, and a greater portion of many consumers’ income now goes toward repayment of debt. Credit cards, student loans, and auto loans are among the major drains on the consumer wallet today, he noted.
A common use of marketplace lenders’ credit is debt consolidation loans, undertaken by consumers to bring down their overall borrowing rates.
Lending Club is not alone among nonbank digital lenders in going beyond traditional credit criteria. A co-panelist with Sanborn, Sarah Friar, chief financial officer at Square, said that her company—which recently applied for an industrial bank charter in Utah—doesn’t use FICO ratings at all. Friar said Square—which began as a payments mechanism and has expanded into small business credit—looks at financial accounts, number of employees, and status versus other players, among other factors.
LendingTree®, the nation’s leading online loan marketplace, has released the findings of its study on how well residents in the top 50 U.S. metropolitan areas are spending within their means – or aren’t.
Among the 50 ranked metro areas, residents are, on average, using 30 percent of their revolving credit lines — such as credit cards and home equity lines of credit, or HELOCs. They also have mortgage balances averaging 79 percent of their annual income and non-housing debt balances averaging 44 percent of annual income, and have had five credit inquiries in the last two years.
Greenville, SC takes the top score, despite having the second-lowest average income among the 50 cities ranked at $65,503 per household.
Goldman Sachs GroupInc.GS 0.40% is weighing a new trading operation dedicated to bitcoin and other digital currencies, the first blue-chip Wall Street firm preparing to deal directly in this burgeoning yet controversial market, according to people familiar with the matter.
Goldman’s effort is in its early stages and may not proceed, the people said.
RATESETTER has announced that it is simplifying the way investors can access their money, with one single “transfer fee” when selling loans on the secondary market.
Lenders are currently charged two fees when selling out existing RateSetter loans, but from 2 November this is being streamlined into a single charge. The fee will be a percentage of the capital being withdrawn, and will be fixed for each market.
Property finance platform LendInvest has called on government to do more to support small builders after discussing the subject with a group of influential MPs.
The event follows the publication of a report by LendInvest earlier this year on the challenges faced by property SMEs. These include constrained access to finance and distorted policy around regulation, taxation and access to land.
At the time of the report LendInvest said only 12.5% of new homes built today are constructed by small builders, down from 37.5% before 1990.
Online lenders that are repaid from people’s salaries have raised more than £175m in recent months, marking out the nascent sector as one of the hottest areas of the UK financial technology market.
Legal & General, the insurer, will on Wednesday announce that it is leading the latest £40m investment in SalaryFinance, which provides loans to employees of 50 groups in the UK and plans to expand in the US.
Founded by three former executives from Google, PA Consulting and Royal Bank of Scotland, SalaryFinance combines with companies to offer their employees loans at lower rates than credit cards or payday lenders.
The company has an unusually low default rate of 0.5 per cent because of the security of deducting repayments directly from a borrower’s salary, and the extra information it gains about its customers by tapping into their employer’s payroll systems.
Despite the high number of UK consumers who use financial products and the extent of financial services penetration in the country — 91% of people across the UK have a current account, and 67% use contactless payments at least once a month — awareness of fintech services in the UK remains low, according to a Source: Business Insider
According to the latest Buy-to-Let Index from online mortgage lender LendInvest, Luton has managed to hold on to the top spot as the best place for buy-to-let investment.
Luton has seen a 4.51% increase in rental price growth and an average yield of 4.51%.
Chinese online lender Qudian Inc. launched an estimated $769 million initial public offering on Tuesday, adding to a growing IPO pipeline along with private equity-backed medical device company OptiNose Inc., which set terms on a projected $100 million offering.
Beijing-based Qudian plans to offer 37.5 million Class A shares priced between $19 and $22, raising $768.8 million if shares price at midrange. Qudian, represented by Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, is directly offering 35.6 million shares in the IPO while various existing shareholders are selling 1.9….
Robo.cash, an automated P2P lending platform that includes a buyback guarantee, recently celebrated its own steady growth during 2017 Q2, noting that its total amount of investments now exceeds €1.8 million. In addition, nearly €400,000 in loans were added in August alone, while the average invested amount per investor gained 2.2% to the previous month at €3,270 in August. More than 900 investors have joined the platform in the first six months of operation.
GoldMint, a blockchain-based startup that helps gold owners profit from digital assets backed 100 percent by physical gold, recently announced an innovative collaboration with the mineral production company Eurasia Mining .
Through this agreement, GoldMint is establishing a method for applying blockchain-based technology to the development of resource industry projects.
Last year, State Bank of India (SBI) announced that the ceiling limit for its foreign educational loans would be raised from Rs 30 lakh to Rs 1.5 crore.
According to statistics, about45 per cent of international students in US alone comprise of Chinese or Indian students.
Here’s a quick look at the financial loan options other than SBI:
The Indian Government has installed the portal ‘Vidya Lakshmi’ that allows students to check out various loan options and fund providers. Loans are provided in four slabs — Below Rs 4 lakhs, between Rs 4 lakhs and Rs 7.5 lakhs; and above Rs 7.5 lakhs with differing interest rates for each slab.
Credila, an HDFC Ltd. Company, India’s first dedicated educational loan company, offers loan approvals before you secure admission. You can get loans up to Rs 2.5 crores.
Prodigy Finance offers competitive loans which does not need a co-signer or collateral. Students can start repaying six months after graduation, and there are no penalties for early repayment. You can also avail of their $10,000 scholarships, which is being given away this year to mark their decade of business.
GyanDhan, India’s first educational loans marketplace, offers 100 per cent financing for top B-Schools and engineering schools. They offer loans with collateral starting as low as 9.1 per cent.
Avanse Educational Loan covers 100 per cent of study abroad expenses on a floating interest of 12 per cent to 17 per cent.
Nationalised banks are offering a comparatively lower rate of interest between 9 per cent to 13 per cent on an average.
Money Forward, a well-established financial tech startup, has launched its IPO, marking a watershed moment for Japan’s burgeoning fintech scene.
The firm, started in 2012, is now worth US$505 million after listing on the Mothers Index Futures section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which is designed for high-growth and emerging stocks.
Payday Loan Ranger is a loan service that specializes in providing loans from $50 to $1000.
Payday Loan Ranger’s popularity rises from the fact that it completely simplifies the process and never makes it as hectic and difficult as similar services. Their entire service is reduced down to three simple steps, applying online, searching for the best lenders, and then receiving the cash as early in the first 24 hours.
With over 2,000,000 applications already processed, it has become one of the most popular services used for such transactions and continues to rise in usage as it seems people are truly in need of such a novel service.
The issue of financial exclusion can be summarized into two categories: unbanked and underbanked. Unbanked individuals do not have an account at a regulated financial institution, while underbanked individuals have accounts, but frequently use alternative or unregulated financial services.
Unbanked individuals are faced with a heavy economic burden when conducting even the most basic financial transactions. For example, cashing a cheque can cost the average person with full-time employment as much as USD$20,000 over his/her lifetime. Western Union, as an example, charges as much as USD$42 to send a USD$500 remittance to Barbados. ‘Underground’ alternative financial service providers levy as much as USD$10 on every USD$100 transferred.
Another reason for unbanked individuals is attitudinal and behavioral; they really do not trust banks. This sentiment may not be all that unfounded, as a number of the banks across the Caribbean region have been reducing the teller services that unbanked individuals are familiar with and prefer, forcing more (non-technical) customers to online channels, regularly increasing service fees, and even worse, looking to divest their retail operations in favor of corporate banking and wealth management business units.
To obtain Bitcoin, you must already be “economically included” — both in terms of Internet and financial access.
Predatory businesses are convenient where the unbanked live. Rural areas like Trelawny, Jamaica or Mayaro, Trinidad are home to large swathes of unbanked households. Traditional banks don’t see a viable business cases for locating a branch or satellite office in such districts. This means that check cashing and money changing businesses that charge exorbitant rates are the only real means of conducting transactions. Kenya’s M-PESA succeeded because it leveraged an existing network of agents and vendors.
Globally, mobile banking is overtaking branch-centered activity more and more — for example, in Norway, 91% of the population use online banking channels. The explosion of fintech companies that are ‘unbundling’ traditional banking functions, added to the maturity of the first generation of Internet banking solutions, are hastening this trend. Consequently, the amalgamation of omni-channel banking, fintech platforms, and open APIs are obscuring the lines between traditional and alternative finance.
Moreover, besides remittances, financial inclusion also includes micro-credit, micro-insurance, cooperatives, peer-to-peer lending, rural/agricultural credit, mobile money, mobile vouchers, and a number of other alternative financial services. Financial inclusion is multi-faceted, and Bitcoin has yet to distinguish itself in any of the aforementioned categories.
The Caribbean region has serious online trust issues. In 2016, OAS and IDB published a report titled, ‘Cybersecurity: Are We Ready in Latin America and the Caribbean?’ Researchers conducted assessments of 13 Caribbean nations, including Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad & Tobago. The methodological framework covered ‘Culture & Society’, and one of the key findings was the extremely low levels of online trust in the region. Caribbean people do not trust that their online activities aren’t being monitored, they do not trust their service providers, they do not trust social networks, they do not trust their search engine provider, they do not trust companies to keep their personal data safe and secure, and most relevant — they do not trust online and mobile banking platforms.
News Comments Today’s main news: PayPal to fully integrate Swift Financial after closing acquisition.GoCardless raises $22.5M.Qudian poising for U.S. IPO.Varengold Bank AG to give $61M to MarketInvoice.Bondora hits 100M Euro milestone.Reserve Bank of India to treat P2P lenders as non-banking financial companies. Today’s main analysis: Public distrusts regulators as much as Wall Street.(a must-read) Today’s […]
PayPal to fully integrate Swift Financial over the next year. AT: “PayPal is making bigger, bolder moves toward becoming an online lender. They could very well be a major competitor in small business lending very soon. After that, they could tackle consumer lending.”
Public distrusts Wall Street regulators as much as Wall Street. AT: “This is a must-read. Based on a Cato Institute survey, it tells the attitudes of Americans toward banks, regulations, Wall Street, credit, consumer lending, and a host of other financial matters. Quite interesting that Americans thing tech executives, along with athletes and entertainers, are over paid, however, they don’t want regulation to oversee pay scales.”
A manifesto to all men: We have to do better. AT: “I wholeheartedly agree. With two younger sisters, three daughters, and two granddaughters, I want them to live in a world where they are as respected for their talents as men are for theirs. There’s absolutely no reason men shouldn’t respect their female colleagues as much as they respect their male colleagues.”
PayPal said that it plans to fully integrate Swift Financial into its payment service “over the course of the next year,” according to Darrell Esch, PayPal’s vice president and commercial officer of global credit, in a blog post.
PayPal has actually offered a working capital program for lending money to small businesses since 2013, and it has loaned more than $3 billion through the program to date. This compares to the $3 billion Amazon has loaned SMEs since the launch of Amazon Lending back in 2011, and the $1.5 billion in loans Square has doled out since launching Square Capital in 2014.
The new Cato Institute 2017 Financial Regulation national survey of 2,000 U.S. adults released today finds that Americans distrust government financial regulators as much as they distrust Wall Street. Nearly half (48%) have “hardly any confidence” in either.
Americans have a love-hate relationship with regulators. Most believe regulators are ineffective, selfish, and biased:
74% of Americans believe regulations often fail to have their intended effect.
75% believe government financial regulators care more about their own jobs and ambitions than about the well-being of Americans.
80% think regulators allow political biases to impact their judgment.
But most also believe regulation can serve some important functions:
59% believe regulations, at least in the past, have produced positive benefits.
56% say regulations can help make businesses more responsive to people’s needs.
Americans want regulators to focus on preventing banks and financial institutions from committing fraud (65%) and ensuring banks and financial institutions fulfill their obligations to customers (56%).
77% believe bankers would harm consumers if they thought they could make a lot of money doing so and get away with it.
64% think Wall Street bankers “get paid huge amounts of money” for “essentially tricking people.”
Nearly half (49%) of Americans worry that corruption in the industry is “widespread” rather than limited to a few institutions.
Source: Cato Institute
Few Americans Want “More” Financial Regulations—They Want the Right Kinds of Regulations, Properly Enforced
Polls routinely find that a plurality or majority of Americans want more oversight of Wall Street banks and financial institutions. This survey is no different. A plurality (41%) of Americans think more oversight of the financial industry is needed. However, only 18% think the problem with federal oversight of the banking industry is that there are “too few” rules on Wall Street. Instead, 63% say the government either fails to “properly enforce existing rules” (40%) or enacts the “wrong kinds” of regulations on big banks (23%).
Despite Distrust of Wall Street, Americans Like Their Own Banks and Financial Institutions
90% are satisfied with their personal bank; 76% believe their bank has given them good information about the rates and risks associated with their account.
87% are satisfied with their credit card issuer; 81% believe their credit card issuer has given them good information about the rates, fees, and risks associated with their card.
83% are satisfied with their mortgage lender.
Of those who have used payday or installment lenders in the past year, 63% believe the lender gave them good information about the fees and risks associated with the loan.
Source: Cato Institute
Democrats and Republicans Want a Bipartisan Commission to Run CFPB, Divided on CFPB Independence
Nearly two-thirds (63%) of Americans think the CFPB should be run by a bipartisan commission of Democrats and Republicans, rather than by a single director. Support is post-partisan with 67% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans in favor of a bipartisan commission leading the agency.
A majority (54%) of Americans think that Congress should not set the CFPB’s budget and should only have limited oversight of the agency.
Few Americans (26%) believe the CFPB has achieved its mission to make the terms and conditions of credit cards and financial products easier to understand. Instead, 71% say that since the CFPB was created in 2011 credit card terms and conditions have not become easier to understand—including 54% who believe they have stayed the same and 17% who think they have become less clear.
Most Support Risk-Based Pricing for Loans, Say Low Credit Scores are Due to Irresponsibility
Nearly three-fourths of Americans (74%) say they’d be “unwilling” to pay more for their home mortgage, car loan, or student loan to help those with low credit scores access these loans.
The acquisition will expand PayPal’s ability to provide access to business financing options to the millions of small business owners who rely on PayPal and our partner platforms to run their businesses. As we’ve said before, increasing access to capital is vital to the success of small businesses and is a strategic offering for PayPal, which drives merchants’ sales growth, increases processing volume, and reduces merchant churn.
Like many of you I was shocked and infuriated by the news out of SoFi last week. I think we all expected better from the company and its leaders. Some of the behavior that has been reported is reprehensible and it points to a much deeper problem that goes way beyond fintech. The problem of sexual harassment in the workplace is bigger than any one company, any one industry or even any one country. It is rampant throughout the globe.
Men: we cannot keep behaving this way.
I have been drinking at the bar late at night at enough conferences to know that many men believe it is still ok to treat women as objects. This kind of attitude has consequences in the workplace. And if the leaders of the company condone this behavior there will be a culture that is at best unwelcoming towards women and at worst so toxic it can endanger the very survival of the company.
Women in Fintech
People often complain to me about the lack of women in fintech. People say that LendIt does not have enough female speakers and there are not enough women in general at our events.
This article is the first step in what I expect will be a long journey towards making fintech a more welcoming place for women. I want to see us do better as an industry. We should do everything we can to make fintech an attractive career choice for young women. We have several initiatives around this that are in the planning stages that we hope to roll out at LendIt USA in San Francisco next year.
Ellevest, a nearly three-year-old, New York-based digital investment platform built for women and led by former Wall Street titan Sallie Krawcheck, has raised $34.6 million in fresh funding.
It’s technically a Series A round, according to the company, which says a widely reported $10 million round that closed last year was seed capital.
The round — which was led by Rethink Impact, and includes participation from PSP Growth, Salesforce Ventures, CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund, LH Holdings, SK Impact Fund, Morningstar, Khosla Ventures, Mellody Hobson, Ulu Ventures, Contour Venture Partners and Astia Angels — brings the company’s total funding to $44.6 million.
Chinese payments company Ant Financial is planning to resubmit its application for U.S. review of its deal to buy MoneyGram International Inc (MGI.O) for $1.2 billion, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday.
Ant Financial and MoneyGram have already refiled for clearance from Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) when they were unable to secure it within an assessment period after the first application, Reuters reported in July, citing sources.
Ant Financial’s latest attempt for approval would be its third as the maximum time of 75 days for assessing such applications nears completion.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is partnering with another fast-growing technology firm, this time to help business clients eradicate paper checks.
The bank is working with Bill.com, the largest U.S. business-to-business payments network, to enable customers to send and receive electronic payments and invoices, according to Stephen Markwell, a product strategy head for JPMorgan’s commercial bank. The New York-based lender will pilot the service in early 2018 and plans to offer it to more business and commercial clients later in that year, Markwell said.
While many consumers already are embracing digital tools for sending money, like PayPal Inc.’s Venmo or the banking industry’s Zelle, more than half of business payments are still via check, according to Markwell. Companies write 8 billion checks a year, each costing about $4 to print and handle, he said.
LendingTree Inc. (NASDAQ:TREE) has acquired an online loan platform for businesses called Snap Capital, known as SnapCap, in a potential $21 million deal. SnapCap is LendingTree’s fifth acquisition since June of 2016.
LendingTree says the acquisition has a potential value of $21 million. The online marketplace will pay $12 million in cash upfront and if SnapCap hits certain performance targets over time, it will receive contingent payments of up to $9 million.
Charlotte-based LendingTree has been diversifying its business over the last several years beyond mortgages. And its stock price has been on the rise as a result. LendingTree’s stock was up about 7% Tuesday afternoon after the acquisition announcement. The company’s shares were trading at $251 Tuesday afternoon, up from about $93 per share a year ago.
Online lender LendingPoint announced Tuesday (Sept. 19) that it had closed an up to $500 million credit facility on Aug. 22.
In a press release, the company said the credit facility was arranged by Guggenheim Securities. LendingPoint noted it drew down $138.5 million of the facility at the closing, and it took an additional $32.7 million on Sept. 15. The proceeds are being earmarked to bankroll the growth of its consumer installment loan portfolio, a business element which has roughly doubled between August 2016 and August 2017.
According to the company, the up to $500 million credit facility is among the largest credit facilities raised in the online consumer lending market in 2017.
Pine River Capital Management is closing its $1 billion flagship hedge fund after clients asked to withdraw more money than the firm was expecting, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The move will further shrink the Minnetonka, Minn.-based firm’s assets under management to $7.5 billion, half the roughly $15 billion it managed in 2015.
Most of the country has never heard of Madden v. Midland Funding and the common law doctrine of “valid-when-made,” but the impact of the misguided decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on consumers is far-reaching.
Rate exportation has been key to the rise of standardized nationwide financial products, like credit cards, allowing banks to lend to borrowers across state lines without necessarily establishing a physical presence in every state, giving consumers better choices.
Following the Madden decision, it is unclear in the 2nd Circuit whether certain bank loans transferred to a marketplace lending platform would be ruled valid or not. Are loans bound by the bank’s “home” state rate cap, or the borrower’s “host” state rate cap? No one knows for sure. This legal uncertainty has caused nonbank investors in these loans to pull back, which, in turn, has led to a reduction in responsible and affordable online lending. Borrowers who are still trying to build credit have lost better options. According to an August study by professors at the Columbia, Stanford and Fordham law schools, “the decision reduced credit availability for higher-risk borrowers in affected states.”
San Diego-based Reliant Funding and New York-based Merchants Capital Access are now joined as one under the Reliant Funding name.
Four Facts about Reliant Funding
Reliant Funding’s business model provides access to capital for businesses that traditional banking typically does not serve. With innovative pricing and cutting-edge risk management, it gives businesses the fuel they need to penetrate their market and grow.
Since its founding, Reliant has funded businesses over thirty thousand times, providing over $900 million in working capital to America’s small businesses.
Reliant Funding speaks directly with thousands of American small and medium sized businesses each month and services thousands more. The focus is always on the individual client, their business story and meeting their needs.
Reliant Funding’s Wholesale Division currently works with hundreds of partners, providing them with funding for their clients as if those clients were directly originated in-house. The key is a commitment to strategic alliances, ensuring the relationship lasts longer than a single transaction. It’s just one aspect of many which sets Reliant Funding apart from the competition.
Cloud computing, big data and financial technologies have raised the stakes for finance and accounting professionals according to Randstad Professionals‘ new whitepaper, Technology’s Impact on Finance and Accounting.
There are three broad areas in which emerging technologies and digital tools are causing significant disruption to the way things are done:
Breaking down big data for strategy: Finance and accounting employees can use big data to their advantage by forecasting trends, pinpointing behavioral patterns and suggesting probable outcomes — all of which can tie into a company’s strategy and impact their bottom line.
Leaving repetitive work to the cloud: Cloud actions have the ability to handle inventory management, generate invoices and provide accurate financial data. The software also delivers convenience for employees who want to digitally share company finances among coworkers, financial advisors, customers and other key stakeholders at a moment’s notice.
Putting the functionality in finance: Finance is making its way into fixed markets that provide mobile phone applications and access on everyday devices. Over the years, we have revolutionized how we pay, view our bank statements and transfer money through start-ups such as Bitcoin and Linden Dollar. Technologies that also integrate peer-to-peer lending or personal loan requests allow for a frictionless experience for customers.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is expected in coming days to release a long-anticipated rule curbing payday lending, now that a final review by other regulatory agencies has concluded, three people familiar with the matter said.
The rule pits the country’s consumer financial watchdog against payday lenders who say the new regulation will wipe out much of their established industry, currently overseen by the states, and push poor and rural customers to use illegal loan sharks.
Because the loans can carry interest rates as high as 390 percent, borrowers can become trapped in devastating cycles of taking out new loans to pay outstanding ones, the CFPB said.
Payday and short-term lending is an approximately $6 billion-a-year industry, one that both critics and supporters of payday lending agree will take a major hit if the CFPB’s proposed rules on payday lending go through.
To make that block happen, Republicans in the House of Representatives added a “rider,” or amendment, to a spending bill banning the CFPB from regulating the payday loan industry.
The CFPB rules on payday lending have been in the works for some time and would require lenders to conduct background checks showing borrowers can afford the loans and to limit the number of loans made to a single borrower.
First Associates Loan Servicing announced today the release of the Morningstar ranking report certifying their overall excellence in loan servicing. Morningstar awarded First Associates a MOR RV1 ranking of ‘stable’ which is the highest certification possible and deeply assesses risk management, call center performance, quality assurance, technology, security protocols, project management and disaster recovery protocols.
Since the majority of consumers lacked insurance coverage for flood damage, the costs keep adding up from replacing furniture and appliances to renting another home or apartment until the costly repairs are completed.
What makes it so diverse? The markets available or the types of real estate?
Amy Kirsch: All of the above. We’ve done deals in 39 states, we offer debt and equity, commercial and residential, and we’ve done basically every asset class.
Do you have a minimum for investment?
The lowest limit we have now is $5,000, but it varies on how large of a fundraise we’re completing.
What’s innovative about RealtyShares? The technology, or what it lets you access?
A combination of both—I’ve invested in real estate in the past, and it’s always come through people I knew, and it was concentrated to where I was living at the time. When you’re looking at middle-market opportunities or don’t have hundreds millions of dollars to invest, the opportunities become a little more rare. So access is definitely a differentiator here.
On Monday, Prime-Ex Perpetual‘s real estate crowdfunding effort began in earnest with the launch of their PEX-Token cryptocurrency sale, aimed at generating $25,000,000 in USD equivalent cryptocurrencies. The PEX-Token is a dividend token in which the company will pay 80% of company profits back to the PEX-Token holders. Beginning Monday people purchasing PEX-Tokens will receive 15% bonus PEX-Tokens for purchasing PEX-Tokens early.
Once again, Accel, Balderton Capital, Notion, and Passion are backing GoCardless, this time to the tune of $22.5 million and on the back of what the startup says is record annual growth in the U.K. and strong, early traction in new markets. Outside of Blighty, the company operates its bank-to-bank payments network in the Eurozone and Sweden.
GoCardless isn’t disclosing revenue. Instead the company says it processes over $4bn worth of transactions across more than 30,000 organisations in the U.K. and Europe, working with small startups and large enterprises across a number of industries. It offers an API and off the shelf integrations with over 100 partners including Xero, Sage and Zuora. Customers include Sage, Thomas Cook, Box and The Guardian.
Artificial intelligence (AI) will soon be everywhere. The insurance industry is facing huge changes as AI steps boldly into every aspect of its internal operations and external relationships wearing the bright new clothes of InsurTech.
It has brought new players into the insurance market with some, like Lemonade, the world’s first peer-to-peer insurance carrier powered by AI and behavioural economics, experiencing phenomenal growth over a very short time.
It is estimated that around £1.32 billion was invested globally in the InsurTech arena in 2016, up 32% on the previous year. The lion’s share of this was in the United States but the UK and Europe are increasing their investment (see chart below).
Other innovations, such as fractional insurance where customers buy on a pay-as-you-go basis or peer-to-peer insurance, will have a deeper impact.
For Rutter, one of the key cultural challenges for the insurance industry is going to be its cautious approach to regulation.
he Financial Conduct Authority is the lead regulator in this area and it has been trying to engage the industry, setting up a ‘sandbox’ to encourage insurers to work with it to explore the impact of regulation on technological innovation. In particular, it will be aiming to test the boundaries of legislation such as the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD).
There will be some InsurTech applications that get it wrong, predicts Rutter, potentially selling large numbers of policies to the very people underwriters don’t want on their books: “Insurers need to understand that once automated decisions have been made, you can’t pull back from them by cancelling policies. That is hardly treating customers fairly”.
Falling returns, big loans going bad and news that new Innovative Finance ISA has failed to attract investors is leaving questions hanging over the future of peer-to-peer lending.
The bad news began last month when RateSetter, one of the biggest peer-to-peer lenders, was forced to cough up nearly £9 million to stop customers losing money after a big loan went wrong.
It’s not just Ratesetter
At the same time, another peer-to-peer lender is coming under fire from its customers. Zopa is being criticised by customers who are seeing falling returns on their investments.
Paltry take up on the Innovative Finance ISA
Finally, interest in the new Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA) has been disappointing. New stats from HMRC shows that just 2,000 IFISAs were opened in the 2016/17 tax year.
Bruce Davis, co-founder and MD of green energy-focused P2P platform Abundance, has been appointed to the government’s Green Energy Taskforce. The group has been set up to help accelerate the growth of green finance and the UK’s low carbon economy.
Abundance is the UK’s biggest green energy-centric peer-to-peer site, with roughly £50m in finance facilitated for projects to date, according to AltFi Data. Its investors are able to invest in debentures for projects such as wind turbines and solar farms, and can hold those investments in an Innovative Finance ISA.
Online consumer microlender Qudian said it plans to raise up to $750 million in a New York IPO, in the second of two major fintech deals this month which are expected to kick off a wave of similar listings by year-end. But a source with direct knowledge of the situation told Caixin the final fundraising amount is likely to exceed $1 billion, possibly making it the largest IPO by a Chinese company in the US this year.
Uncertainty around Brexit may be mounting as political leaders from the U.K. and the European Union clash on the terms of separation, but that isn’t slowing down foreign investors from betting on Britain’s top peer-to-peer lenders.
Varengold Bank AG, a Hamburg-based private banking firm, will provide 45 million pounds ($61 million) in annual funding for loans to small businesses arranged by MarketInvoice Ltd., the British finance company said in an emailed statement.
Younited Credit, the Paris-headquartered consumer lender announced a capital increase of €40 million subscribed by a panel of the top of the crop growth investors in France. Next to its historical shareholders, Eurazeo, Crédit Mutuel Arkema, AG2R La Mondiale and Weber Investissements which are already very active in Fintech and alternative finance financing, the startup now takes on board new major investors: Bpifrance, Matmut Innovation, and Zencap Asset Management.
Today, on the 20th of September, GoldMint is launching its ICO.
GoldMint is celebrating the beginning of its ICO by attending 3 major events on the same day the crowdsale kicks off. One of these events is BlockchainLive in London – Europe’s leading Blockchain conference bringing together over 75+ global experts in various fields.
Another one is Moscow’s ICO Event which this time mainly focuses on how legislation will impact the cryptocurrency space.
Today GoldMint is also present at the Global Blockchain Summit in Hong Kong gathering iconic speakers from various industries to discuss about the real-world applications of blockchain technology, as well as its potential benefits, risks, and regulatory concerns.
To spread the word about GoldMint in the USA – GoldMint’s advisor and business developer Evgeniy Volfman has recently completed the official Northern American road trip representing the project in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami.
Simultaneously, GoldMint is opting to expand its campaign globally, with the Middle East & Singapore regions being the current primary focus.
Nominations are open to Innovate Finance’s Women in Fintech Powerlist, which recognises women shaping the future of fintech around the world.
UK-based membership organisation Innovate Finance compiles its Powerlist of Women in Fintech each year, with the aim of closing the fintech gender gap by showcasing the women driving the global fintech space.
Bitcoin peer-to-peer lending platform Wayniloans has withdrawn its support for the SegWit2x bitcoin scaling proposal and the New York Agreement (NYA).
Wayniloans joins several other companies in withdrawing support for SegWit2x and the NYA. Banking and payment processor Bitwala announced last month it will only follow the SegWit2x blockchain if it receives support from Bitcoin Core, which does not appear likely.
FinTechs are certainly in competition with other FinTechs, but the real competition is the established financial service industry, epitomised by the big four banks. Consumer banking is where FinTechs aim to cause the most disruption – and many would say it’s an area where disruption is long overdue.
One recent startup, Spriggy, is out to grab its fair share of the kids’ bank accounts market, for instance.
Over the past 10 years, consumers have lost about $5.7 billion to financial advisers and financial services providers who put their own interests first. The scandals have included Opes Prime, Storm Financial, Timbercorp/Great Southern, Bridgecorp, Fincorp, Trio/Astarra, Westpoint and Commonwealth Financial Planning.
The size of the market in Australia has grown substantially year on year. In 2014, $9.45 million changed hands by way of P2P consumer lending platforms, for instance; in 2015, the P2P consumer lending figure stood at $43.15m.
And when it comes to money raised through crowdfunding, the figure jumped from $8.2m to $26m over the same time period.
At the moment, there are at least 86 FinTech tools operating in Australia through which you can borrow money, most of which are P2P lending services.
And there are at least 24 crowdfunding services on offer. It’s no surprise, then, that the biggest external challenge for FinTechs these days is finding customers.
Nine Australian FinTech companies made the 2016 list of the top 100 FinTech innovators around the world, an annual roundup compiled by the FinTech investment firm H2 Ventures and KPMG Fintech.
Prospa – Offers small business loans from $5000 to $250,000 with payback terms from three to 12 months, “for any business purpose”
Tyro – A payment system technology designed for businesses.
Society One – A P2P lender that says it provides “simple, investor funded personal loans with low rates based on your good credit history”.
Afterpay – Allows you to pay for goods in instalments direct debited from your credit card or other payment option.
Brighte – Offers 0% interest loans to approved homeowners for household energy efficiency improvement, such as solar panels or more efficient windows.
Data Republic – A customer data exchange service to help businesses better target their services to customers.
Identitii – Allows banks and other financial institutions to get more information about where and when payment transactions occur.
HashChing – An online home loan service that connects you with mortgage brokers.
Spriggy – Allows parents to manage kids’ bank accounts using digital tools.
The Reserve Bank of India on Wednesday notified that peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms would be treated as non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), an agency reported. This suggests the lending interface will now come under the purview of RBIs regulation under the RBI Act.
Rubique, India’s leading FinTech company, is now taking giant strides in enhancing the level of education and training in the FinTech domain in India. In view of the highly lucrative opportunities that await young professionals in the landscape, it is leveraging its expertise to co-certify courses in FinTech at the prestigious SP Jain School of Global Management.
Many Latin Americans are hard pressed to obtain credit for their businesses or family needs, as 49% of adults do not have bank accounts.
The region’s fintech industry secured $186 million in venture capital investments last year, according to the Latin America Venture Capital Association (LAVCA) – with more than one-third going to startups. Deal count increased by 81%, with 38 transactions.
In Brazil, 160 million adults have some type of banking relationship, but only 55 million are borrowers, according to the country’s central bank. This, combined with more than 20 million unbanked people, turns Latin America’s largest economy into a fertile ground for fintechs, says Jose Prado, founder of Conexao Fintech, an online hub for fintech entrepreneurs and enthusiasts.
Creditas raised $19 million in a Series B funding round. The Sao Paulo-based firm provides asset-backed debt focused on auto and mortgage loans.
In Mexico, where 55.9% of adults have no access to any form of savings deposits, fintechs are offering digital, user-friendly alternatives to traditional banking products, according to Jorge Ortiz, founding president and CEO of non-profit organization Fintech Mexico.
Ripio Credit Network, a company that has raised $5 million in funding from VC like Tim Draper, Pantera, DCG, Overstock (Medici Ventures) and others. Has launched their Initial Coin Offering pre-sale as they gear up for the crowd sale scheduled to launch on October 17th. This comes just as Ripio has received a nice recognition, along with a check, from the d10e Pitch competition.
Ripio, a prominent crypto-based company in Latin America, is building a global credit network solution that aims to enhance transparency and reliability in credit and lending. Ripio is designed to enable connections between lenders and borrowers located anywhere in the world, regardless of currency.
FMO together with Miami based Fintech and digital transformation strategists above & beyond (a&b), launched “ FinForward”, a marketplace where Fintech companies, Financial Institutions (FIs) and Mobile Money Providers (MMPs) in Africa are matched.
The objective of the new platform is to accelerate the digitization of the financial industry in Africa by supporting innovation of the core business with digital solutions. The matching and integration tool will make global Fintech companies accessible and top-of-mind to African financial institutions in order to help them to reduce costs, innovate, add services, tap into new revenue streams and work towards open banking platforms. It will also enable them to service difficult to reach segments such as the bottom of the pyramid, women and small entrepreneurs.
The matching and integration tool will make global Fintech companies accessible and top-of-mind to African financial institutions in order to help them to reduce costs, innovate, add services, tap into new revenue streams and work towards open banking platforms. It will also enable them to service difficult to reach segments such as the bottom of the pyramid, women and small entrepreneurs.
How does it work?
Outreach – Banks, Mobile Money Providers and Fintechs are invited to join
Fintech Opportunity Scan – Participating banks and mobile money providers define their problems and needs
Matching – Pairing of Fintechs based on problem definition
Acceleration & Integration – Testing of Fintech solutions in a sandbox and integrating the technology into the bank’s operations
Showcase – demonstrate success during showcase days
News Comments Today’s main news: Equifax CEO vows to make changes in USA Today op-ed. dv01 closes Series A with big name investors. SmartBiz Loans surpasses $500M in SBA loan funding. stREITwise rolls out first REIT, focused on institutional-quality office buildings. Klarna completes BillPay acquisition. Wish Finance intros SME lending on blockchain in Singapore. Today’s main analysis: What millennials would give […]
Millennials would rather give up voting in the next two elections than pay student loans. AT: “No one really wants to pay off a loan. We’d rather get free money and get on with our lives. But where this gets interesting is that millennials would rather get out of paying off their debt than to influence an election that could have far greater consequences to their lives for as long as it takes to pay off the debt. The question for lenders is, How can you capitalize on this sentiment?”
Working to expose Silicon Valley’s dark side. AT: “If you can get past the self-reverential tone, this piece is important to understanding how journalism works. Often, the best (or worst) stories come from tips because someone recognizes that a particular topic is of interest to the journalist. This should encourage lending firm leaders to be on their best behavior.”
There’s a new REIT in town. AT: “We’ve gone past crowdfunding websites offering REITs to crowdfunding websites specializing in REITs. A nice development.”
Pave rolls out new decentralized Global Credit Profile. AT: “Everyone in the industry recognizes that lack of access to credit is a big problem globally. Pave’s new online platform promises to put a dent in that. We’ll see how this develops.”
Samsung working with banks on retail pop-ups. AT: “I’m not sure how this is going to solve the problem for people who don’t want to visit bank branches. Mobile banking does not mean drive up to my street corner.”
Last Thursday evening we announced a cybersecurity breach potentially impacting 143 million U.S. consumers. It was a painful announcement because of the concern and frustration this incident has created for so many consumers. We apologize to everyone affected. This is the most humbling moment in our 118-year history.
Equifax Security first discovered the intrusion on July 29. Understandably, many people are questioning why it took six weeks to report the incident to the public. Shortly after discovering the intrusion, we engaged a leading cybersecurity firm to conduct an investigation.
At the time, we thought the intrusion was limited. The team, working with Equifax Security personnel, devoted thousands of hours during the following weeks to investigate.
dv01, the data management, reporting, and analytics platform that offers institutional investors transparency and insight into lending markets, today announced a $5.5M Series A round, led by OCA Ventures. Ribbit Capital, Illuminate Financial, and CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund also participated in the round, joining existing dv01 investors Leucadia National Corporation and Pivot Investment Partners.
OCA advisor Jack Lavin has joined dv01’s board, and will work alongside existing board members from Jefferies LLC, a subsidiary of Leucadia National Corporation, and Quantum Strategic Partners Ltd., a private investment vehicle managed by Soros Fund Management LLC.
SmartBiz Loans, the first SBA loan marketplace and bank-enabling technology platform, today announced that it has surpassed half a billion dollars in funded SBA loans. This milestone comes on the back of other recent successes for SmartBiz, including the addition of a fifth bank to its software platform and ranking as the number one facilitator of traditional SBA 7(a) loans under $350,000 for the 2016 fiscal year, over Wells Fargo and other major banks according to SBA lending data released in November, reflecting its 2016 fiscal year.
The company’s first-of-its-kind software platform automates a bank’s underwriting to cut time and costs by up to 90 percent for processing SBA loans under $350,000. By automating the underwriting process, the platform helps banks get low-cost capital into the hands of small business owners in a matter of weeks instead of months. This is vitally important to any busy, small business owner who needs capital.
The $500 million in funded SBA loans reflects not only continued growth for SmartBiz, but also for the entire market of bank-originated, small-sized business loans. Post-2008, banks reduced the number of smaller business loans they made because they couldn’t process them efficiently enough to make a profit.
The number of people with student loan debt is staggering. According to the latest numbers from the U.S. Department of Education, 42.3 million Americans are paying back $1.33 trillion in federal student loan debt. Lenders are collecting payments on another $64 billion in private student loans. A survey of borrowers by the Federal Reserve puts the median student loan debt balance at $17,000, with monthly payments of $222. Student loan debt can be suffocating for those who are struggling to make payments each month.
A staggering 49.8% of all respondents said they would give up their right to vote in the next two presidential elections in order to have their debt forgiven
Ride-sharing services like Uber or Lyft don’t seem to matter to millennials quite as much as some of the other options in the survey. According to the results, 43.6% were willing to give up these services forever in exchange for debt forgiveness
Interestingly, 42.4% of respondents would also give up traveling outside of the country for 5 years, while only 27.0% said they would be willing to move in with their parents for 5 years
Millennials seem to value texting more than the other options – only 13.2% reported being willing to give up texting and any mobile messaging equivalent for the next year in exchange for having their debt forgiven
Only 8.2% of respondents chose to select none of the above and said they would rather keep paying off their student debt
Even before the ink was dry on an article Nathaniel wrote last year about an online lending start-up, Social Finance, and its unusual success — headlined “SoFi, an Online Lender, Is Looking for a Relationship” — he began hearing from people who painted a very different picture of what life looked like inside the company.
But in the intervening months, tales of sexual harassment and wrongdoing in Silicon Valley took center stage, in part because of Katie’s own reporting, which exposed a dark side to an industry known for growth, wealth and fantastic employee perks. Companies like Zenefits, Theranos and Uber made it clear that many venture capitalists and the companies they funded were incentivized to focus on growth at any cost, with good governance and corporate culture getting short shrift.
We are already getting more emails and phone calls that point to where the story might go from here — both with SoFi and the issue of bad behavior in Silicon Valley more broadly. These issues aren’t going away anytime soon.
stREITwise is introducing a new way to invest in real estate online commission-free by allowing direct investment on its website. Today they announced a Regulation A+ initial public offering for their first Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) – 1st stREIT Office – which seeks to provide a diversified portfolio of institutional-quality office buildings with a revolutionary low-cost structure. Because it’s filed as a Regulation A+ offering, 1st stREIT Office will allow accredited and non-accredited investors alike the opportunity to participate.
This announcement comes shortly after 1st stREIT Office successfully raised over $20 million in a private offering to acquire the Panera Bread HQ Property in St. Louis, MO. At 99% occupancy in three separate buildings, the Panera Bread HQ Property includes over 290,000 square feet of Class “A” office space that is leased to many large tenants, including Panera Bread (World HQ), New Balance (Regional HQ), Wells Fargo, Edward Jones, Nationwide Insurance, and others.
With the Panera Bread HQ Property acquisition, 1st stREIT Office has been able to make 10% annualized dividend distributions to its existing investors. The company seeks to acquire more high-quality, stabilized office buildings in undervalued markets across the United States.
While Non-Traded REITs typically charge upfront fees of 10-15%1, stREITwise caps its upfront fee at just 3% by cutting out the middleman, eliminating financial advisor commissions, and passing the savings on to investors.
The New York firm said Tuesday that loans to wealthy clients, companies and consumers would contribute almost half the $5 billion in revenue growth it is projecting by 2020.
Harvey Schwartz, a top lieutenant to Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein, on Tuesday said persistently low volatility in financial markets meant that the third quarter would be a “challenging” one in terms of trading. J.P. Morgan ChaseJPM 0.29% & Co. CEO James Dimon and executives at CitigroupInc. and Bank of America Corp. projected trading declines of between 15% and 20% for the quarter.
Goldman on Tuesday laid out a detailed plan to grow revenue, which has remained flat since the financial crisis. Its target of $5 billion in new revenue by 2020 hinges on businesses that have been footnotes for most of the firm’s 147-year history: lending, asset management and tending to the mundane needs of corporate clients and money managers.
Lending to wealthy clients, companies and consumers could add $2 billion of new revenue over the next three years, said Mr. Schwartz at a global financial-services conference hosted by Barclays PLC.
Online lender Lenda has announced plans to expand its reach to more states along with increased investment in its software platform, which offers a complete refinancing or mortgage origination transaction online.
Pave, Inc announces an initial coin offering (“ICO”), scheduled for mid-October to fund Pave’s Global Credit Profile project, which could provide a ground-breaking solution to the problems associated with credit reporting worldwide. Based on its deep knowledge of lending to individuals with limited credit history (“thin files”), Pave’s GCP will give consumers and credit institutions access to richer and more accurate personal financial data than traditional credit bureaus provide, while significantly improving data security. GCP has the potential to unlock access to credit for millions of people — such as millennials and immigrants — who are marginalized by the current financial system.
While the centralized systems of companies such as Experian, Equifax and TransUnion continue to perform a valuable service by acting as a reliable source of information for third parties, they are plagued with systemic problems including a lack of transparency and control over personal data, vulnerability to fraud and data theft and unnecessary administrative costs. Using blockchain and related technologies, Pave’s GCP will decentralize the storage and ownership of an individual’s financial data by placing the user in control. The GCP thereby removes the reliance on a singular record keeper making security breaches infinitely less likely.
DigiFi, an enterprise financial technology company, announced today the launch of its cloud-based digital loan origination system (“LOS”) for banks, credit unions and consumer finance companies. DigiFi’s next-generation LOS enables the automated online delivery of multiple consumer lending products through a single platform, driving better customer experiences and lower operating costs.
DigiFi’s proprietary technology was built over three years to digitize the consumer lending process, offering consumers immediate feedback and funding from any device at any time. The platform supports multiple products including Personal Loans, Credit Cards, Personal Line of Credit, and Student Loan Refinancing, and DigiFi is adding additional products, including Home Equity, Auto and Mortgages.
The platform is highly configurable, empowering banks, credit unions and consumer finance companies to utilize their own risk models, documents and procedures.
Shields, a longtime purveyor of payment technology, is the founder and former CEO of Vancouver-based Hyperwallet Systems Inc. After handing the reigns of that company over to Brent Warrington in 2015, she went on to launch Fi.Span, a provider of cloud-based platforms for commercial banks.
In the second half of the podcast, data mining expert Ellison Anne Williams also addressed the predominantly male demographic of her field. The effect it has on her approach is next to none, she said.
As the CEO and founder of data securitization startup Enveil, Williams brings more than a decade of experience in large scale analytics, information security and privacy.
The U.S. banking regulator, the Acting Comptroller of the Currency, said on Wednesday that he is not ready to accept applications from financial technology companies seeking a special purpose federal charter.
His comments underscore the broader difficulties faced by regulators globally as they attempt to keep up with dramatic changes in banking industry brought about by the increasing use of digital technologies which threaten to undermine traditional financial services businesses.
Banks may soon be experimenting with a new way to engage with customers: retail pop-ups.
Samsung’s head of sales for financial services, Reginald Jones, told Tearsheet that the company is in talks with its financial services customers about rolling out retail pop-ups “sooner than in a year.”
Those could be in a variety of formats, he said: a bus promoting a certain bank that drives a number of customers to an NFL game; a university campus presence where banks look to attract customers as they become of banking age; a shopping center that normally just has ATMs where banks could roll up for a weekend service to attract these potential new customers. Samsung, the consumer electronics giant, provides the devices that change how bank employees conduct business — to better influence the customer outcome.
Samsung has been working with bank branches for the last five years, incorporating its display screens into retail spaces as they take old signage and posters and move them to digital platforms. In some branches, greeters and bankers are also using Samsung tablets, he said.
Fintech companies around the world have moved swiftly to fill the gap left by mainstream lending institutions due to constraints related to interest rates and profit margins. Big lenders in the market are under constant pressure to increase profit margins, which limits the size of their addressable market, especially when trying to woo small and medium-sized business borrowers. Their interest rates are often high as they seek to remain competitive in the larger spectrum of the financial services industry.
One of the largest beneficiaries is LendingClub Corp. (NYSE:LC), which has seen its revenue increase 1,278% in under five years, from just over $37 million to over $500 million as of June 30 on a trailing 12-month basis.
Brazilian-based fintech companies are paying investors about 22% returns per year while borrowers are charged interest rates from as low as 1.7% to as high as 6.3% per month based on their credit profiles.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia announced that it will hold a FinTech seminar in conjunction with the Journal of Economics and Business on September 28-29, 2017, focused on consumers, banking, and regulatory policy.
Aptly named FinTech: The Impact on Consumers, Banking, and Regulatory Policy, the conference will feature keynote speeches and research from industry experts on consumer protection; roles of alternative information; FinTech lending; blockchain-based currencies; machine learning and artificial intelligence; the new FinTech landscape; and marketplace lending and crowdfunding. The conference will also focus on the disruptive factors of blockchain technology and to what measure they continue to shape regulatory policies.
Star Mountain Capital, LLC (“Star Mountain”), a specialized investment manager focused exclusively on the large and underserved U.S. lower middle-market, is pleased to announce that industry veteran Erik A. Falk has joined the firm as a strategic personal investor and Senior Advisor.
Mr. Falk is a senior executive focused on strategic initiatives at Magnetar, a $13+ billion alternative asset management firm. Until early 2017, Mr. Falk oversaw the private funds as a Head of Private Credit within KKR’s (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.) $35 billion credit business and served on the Private Credit Investment Committee, the Leveraged Credit Investment Committee and the Portfolio Management Committee. He also oversaw KKR’s investment in Star Mountain. Before joining KKR in 2008, Mr. Falk spent eight years at Deutsche Bank where he held several roles including founding the Special Situations Group and Co-Heading the Global Securitized Products Group. Mr. Falk began his career in the Asset-Backed Securitizations group at Credit Suisse First Boston where he knew Star Mountain’s Chairman, Brian Finn, whose prior roles include Co-President of Credit Suisse First Boston and Head of Credit Suisse Alternatives (with approximately $100 billion in AUM at the time).
The UK’s annual inflation rate climbed to a higher-than-expected 2.9% in August, matching a four-year high reached in May, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said on Tuesday, two days ahead of a key meeting by members of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee.
The consumer prices Index (CPI) climbed from 2.6% in July, the ONS said on Tuesday. The August reading matched the highest since April 2012 and beat the 2.8% average forecast by economists polled by investing.com.
The annual core inflation rate, which strips out volatile food and fuel costs, also jumped to 2.7% from 2.4% in July, topping the 2.5% expectation by economists in an investing.com survey.
Advisory firms need to do more to attract the next generation of clients or risk selling themselves short, financial adviser Keith Churchouse has said.
His firm Chapters Financial is developing a chatbot platform for its online advice business Saidso.
The chatbot will be aimed at the generation of clients who are more comfortable with changing and emerging technology. They are usually 45 years old or younger; the typical age group of customers who already use the Saidso website, which has been operational for the past two years.
The UK City watchdog has warned investors of the “high risk, speculative” nature of initial coin offerings as their popularity booms, becoming the latest global regulator to sound the alarm.
The Financial Conduct Authority warned that ICOs are mostly unregulated and potentially fraudulent, while investors may be provided with “unbalanced, incomplete or misleading” documents by the ICO issuer.
Even if an ICO is not fraudulent, the regulator said, investors still had “a good chance” of losing their entire investment.
Advantages of platforms with a track record –I prefer platforms that have a track record and have operated at least 1 or two years.
Loan term and loan types – There are three main types: consumer loans, SME loans and property secured loans. SME loans has further subtypes like invoice financing. It can be a good idea to diversify over different loan types and different platforms.
Diversification – Diversification can be achieved faster on platforms with very many comparable consumer loans, and will take longer on property platforms which launch only few large property loans.
Autoinvest – Before you use the autoinvest I suggest to spend the first days/weeks making manual investments on the primary market to get a better understanding of the loans on offer.
Secondary market – Before you use the secondary market, I suggest you first spend some time investing on the primary market to deepen your understanding of how the platform works.
Cash drag – Investors only earn interest on money invested into loans. Cash deposited, but not (yet) invested will earn no interest.
Unsecured vs. secured loans – Consumer loans listed on platforms are mostly unsecured (exception some car loans). SME loans offer no or or some type of asset as security and property loans typically offer a first or second charge on the property as security. Usually it is preferable to lend with some kind of security offered.
Recovery process – A certain percentage of loans will default. This is normal in p2plending and nothing to worry about as long as this percentage stays in a healthy relationship to the interest offered for the risk.
Tax – If the country you live in does not allow you to offset default losses against interest income earned, it may be a good idea to invest into loans with lower interest rates, but also lower default rates, to achieve higher returns after tax than with a more risky strategy.
Final tip – Start slow. P2P lending has somewhat of a learning curve.
Klarna Bank AB (publ) today announces that the acquisition of German online payments company BillPay has been completed. This will strengthen Klarna’s position as one of the leading e-commerce payment providers in Europe and further accelerate its growth in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and The Netherlands.
However, it wasn’t clear how much money had been invested. Now Swedish tech site Di Digital has revealed that Visa took part in Klarna’s $75 million euro acquisition of Billpay, a German competitor, in February.
Out of the $57 million euro share emission that went to financing the deal, Visa paid roughly a third, or $22 million.
GoldMint is a comprehensive P2P solution that allows businesses like pawnshops to raise credit.
Recently, a Time article revealed that 28 percent of college educated millennials between the ages of 23-55 have accessed short-term lending from pawnshops and payday loan providers in the last five years.
Dmitry has had an eye on the pawnshop segment since 2015, when he noticed that while the pawnshop business was immensely profitable, it was void of technological progress. He worked with a team of four people in 2016 to address the four main issues that faced the pawnshop businesses:
realization of unclaimed pledges
wired payments
funding of pawnshops (lending)
the introduction of unified standards (consolidation)
GoldMint is holding an initial coin offering (ICO) in less than a week’s time starting Sept. 20, 2017. They have published a detailed whitepaper which lays the details of their crowdsale.
We started by developing the Smart Contract. It was ideal to begin with the token escrow contract, which allows the collateral to be held securely in the Smart Contract until the borrower repays the loan. If the borrower does not repay, the lender can claim the tokens and realize any losses. We made many interesting findings during the development and wrote the white paper after Alpha DApp. We believe this is a big advantage for us since practice does not always follow theory. Also, delivering an Alpha for the Ethereum main-net is important proof-of-concept wise.
7. Do you think the system will be more popular among individuals or companies?
Hard to tell since at the moment individuals are more keen on using cryptocurrencies. ETHLend has received a lot of interest from miners who want to expand their mining facilities or purchase more rigs. There are also growing tendencies for companies to use blockchain technology. We have received inquiries about pledging some of the ICO tokens for financing pre-sale marketing efforts. What I would like to see is that merchants who use cryptocurrencies would adopt ETHLend for financing and increasing their business.
8. What is the difference between the type of crediting ETHLend offers and the scheme “have sold the possessed currency-have bought ETH for raised money”.
Good point. Since our main financing instrument is pledging digital tokens, it provides opportunity to receive ETH when one does not want to sell digital tokens. Such might be the case when one has a token portfolio, investment funds like TaaS or ICONOMI. Funds or individuals could easily keep the possession of the token positions and still get more liquidity for growing their portfolio. On the other hand, a blockchain startup might keep more tokens at their possession when pledging the token before an ICO for a loan and repaying the loan after an ICO. A strategy like that leaves more tokens for the startup to recruit more talent.
11. How much time do you think you need to launch the project in case you obtain sufficient financing?
ETHLend has an extensive roadmap that stretches to the late 2019. At the moment we are still developing the ETHLend DApp. However, we need further resources to comply with the features set in the roadmap. We are also looking to add more developers and financial experts to the team. The basic collateral based lending is available on ETHLend but there are lot of functions that require more time to develop, such as being able to borrow Bitcoin or to use the price feed for the collateral value. We aim to have a fully sophisticated DApp by the end of 2019.
14. The last tricky question: is lending good or bad?
Lending is an instrument that should be used in the correct circumstances and for the correct funding goals. Lending could be compared to other products – when consumed wrongly, they might be bad and vice versa.
Igors Puntuss, co-founder of Bulkestate.com, explained that as wages rose rapidly and with it “population welfare”, meaning disposable income and savings, people living in Baltic countries began to look for safe and profitable ways to invest their spare cash. But banks are not able to provide smaller investors with attractive interest rates on deposits and, as the market of real estate crowdfunding is far from maturing, there are opportunities to be had.
He added that high reliability does not equate to low profit, when it comes to real estate crowdfunding. The website offers an annual interest rate of 14% at a low threshold for those who are risk adverse, and the minimum investment required is just 50.00 euros at Bulkestate.com.
Anne Boden of Starling Bank and Zopa’s Jaidev Janardana will be speaking at LendIt Europe, which brings together fintech experts from across the continent.
The conference takes place on 9-10th October at the InterContinental London – the O2, where more than 120 speakers will take to the stage with experts from banking, lending, technology and regulation.
Anne will be speaking on LendIt’s keynote panel, which will look at the digitalisation of finance and how customer expectations are changing.
The latest edition of the PYMNTS.com B2B API Tracker™, a FI.SPAN collaboration, examines how APIs are helping both banks and smaller businesses address their fears and embark on new ventures in new markets.
Recent research indicates merchant anxiety over non-payments is widespread. According to a study by Payoneer, 75 percent of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have backed away from global trade over concerns of not getting paid for their services.
OpenTap, a fintech firm that enables peer-to-peer lending for middle and low income borrowers, aims to facilitate ₹100 crore in short term loans by the end of 2018.
The Chennai-based fintech firm provides alternate financial services to blue-collared workers, which is two times of net salary. As on date, it has provided credit worth ₹3 crore to 1,200 borrowers.
Wish Finance, based in Singapore, has announced the launch of its blockchain-based lending platform for small and medium businesses. The company has reportedly issued 100+ loans in 2017 during a soft launch with every loan successfully repaid and 0% default rate. Wish Finance plans to keep its entire portfolio on the public blockchain, anonymized, so investors can audit its performance at any given time.
Wish Finance is offering merchant cash advances and business loans with interest rates based on the company’s real cash flow, not assets. Wish Finance said it has direct access to POS terminals infrastructure to see real time financial transactions, which it combines with the local market data for scoring. Wish says it issues a loan in 24 hours, and then deducts a few percents of the merchant customer’s’ payments to automatically repay the loan. In this way, repayments are made seamless and effortless for SMEs. Each loan is said to be insured from customer’s bankruptcy.
The global trade finance gap has fallen from US$1.6tn to US$1.5tn, but the impact of fintech has been minimal to date.
But despite the industry’s zeal for digitisation, just 20% of firms reporting have used digital finance platforms. In line with global trends, peer-to-peer lending is the most-used fintech model (23%).
74% of rejected trade finance transactions are for SME and midcap applicants, with 29% of these being rejected over KYC concerns. Last year’s survey showed that 56% of SME trade finance proposals are rejected, compared with 10% of multinationals.
Singapore-based financial technology company Six Capital Groupresponded Thursday to complaints from users who say they’re unable to cash out from the firm’s web-based strategy game.
The game, called Tagg Switch, works similarly to how trading currencies works: Players purchase one of six types of so-called “Nodes” that represent a different currency — either the U.S. dollar, Singapore dollar, British pound, euro, yen or the Australian dollar.
News Comments Today’s main news: Equifax cybersecurity breach. Goldman to take on UK retail banks. China cracks down on online lenders, cryptocurrency dealers. Klarna is testing credit cards with employeees. Today’s main analysis: CECL overview. Today’s thought-provoking articles: Consumers who go to Equifax for help after data breach may not be able to sue. The data behind Zopa’s lowered return […]
The Equifax cybersecurity incident. AT: “A letter sent to Equifax customers regarding the cybersecurity breach, and where to go for assistance.”
Consumers who seek help from Equifax may lose right to sue. AT: “Arbitration clauses are in place for a reason: They are an insurance policy for corporations against class-action lawsuits, and could save companies millions of dollars. If consumers sign them, they could be giving up their right to join a class-action lawsuit at a later date. Evidently, Equifax wants consumers to sign an arbitration agreement before it helps them rebound from data breach. I think the more important thing is that you get your privacy and security back.”
Square becoming a bank is brilliant. AT: “If it makes sense for any company to become a bank, it’s got to be Square. This article brings out the one huge benefit for companies like Square: If they become a bank, they may not longer need to partner with Fintech is no longer a boutique financing optiona bank. This could be why banks are so vociferous in opposing them. It would give Square a fair advantage.”
Goldman Sachs to take on UK retail banks. AT: “Might as well. The UK market is the one to beat, so if your plans are to be the premier international online investment bank, then you should compete against the early leaders. They’re in the UK.”
Online lenders, cryptocurrency deals feel the heat. AT: “It’s interesting that Chinese regulators are banning crypto-products, but not online lending where the biggest problem has been. Could this be about something else? Maybe their worried about how it will impact fiat currency.”
Klarna is reportedly testing credit cards with employees. AT: “This is an interesting approach. First, issue credit to your employees. If it goes over well, expand it to your existing customers, then go beyond those to the wider world. Klarna is getting serious about this banking thing.”
At Equifax, we recognize that consumers and customers expect us to provide superior data security, and we work hard to do that every day. Unfortunately, on September 7th, 2017, we announced a cybersecurity incident involving consumer information. This cybersecurity incident strikes at the heart of who we are and what we do. Above all else, our first priority is to support consumers and you, our customers, by doing what we can to make this right.
What happened?
On July 29, 2017, Equifax identified a cybersecurity incident potentially impacting approximately 143 million U.S. consumers. Criminals exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files. Equifax discovered the unauthorized access and acted immediately to stop the intrusion. We promptly engaged a leading, independent cybersecurity firm that has been conducting a comprehensive forensic review to determine the scope of the intrusion, including the specific data impacted. We also reported the criminal access to law enforcement and continue to work with authorities.
What information may be impacted?
The information accessed primarily includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances, driver’s license numbers. Criminals also accessed credit card numbers for approximately 209,000 U.S. consumers, and certain dispute documents with personal identifying information for approximately 182,000 U.S. consumers.
Additional Information:
We have found no evidence of unauthorized activity on Equifax’s core consumer or commercial credit reporting databases. In addition, we have found no evidence that this cybersecurity incident impacted Equifax’s core consumer or commercial credit reporting databases, including, ACRO, Workforce Solutions, including The Work Number payroll data, NCTUE, IXI and CFN.
To see if you are potentially impacted, you can click on the Potential Impact Tab
To enroll in complimentary identity theft protection and credit file monitoring services and how to find out if your personal information may have been impacted, you can click on the Enroll Tab.
To learn more about the complimentary offering, you can click on TrustedID Premier Tab. TrustedID Premier provides you with copies of your Equifax credit report; the ability to lock your Equifax credit report; 3-Bureau credit monitoring of your Equifax, Experian and TransUnion credit reports; Internet scanning for your Social Security number; and identity theft insurance.
To speak to someone directly, we have also established a call center at 866-447-7559, available every day (including weekends) from 7 a.m. – 1 a.m. EST, for individuals to ask questions.
On Thursday credit bureau Equifax said a data breach put personal information of 143 million people at risk. Now its response is drawing more outrage, as lawmakers and others accuse it of encouraging consumers who come to it seeking answers to sign away their chance to seek recourse in the courts.
Following the breach, which compromised tens of millions of Social Security numbers and other valuable data, Equifax set up a website to help worried consumers determine whether or not their information was at risk. That website encouraged visitors to sign up for a program known as TrustedID Premier, the company’s credit monitoring service, which provides automated alerts to credit changes and up to $1 million in ID theft insurance. That’s where the trouble began.
TrustedID’s terms of service include an arbitration clause, insisting that customers agree “all claims, disputes, or controversies…shall be finally settled by arbitration” rather than a court of law. Such clauses aren’t unusual for credit monitoring services — or indeed many other consumer products. But in this circumstance, it created the impression that Equifax was asking consumers it had harmed to surrender their legal rights — including becoming part of a class-action law suit — before it would agree to help them.
One key legal avenue that arbitration clauses typically close off for consumers is the class-action lawsuit. That could be significant for Equifax — at least on one proposed class-action lawsuit was already filed against the company late Thursday, according to Bloomberg.
The 143 million Americans whose information was compromised by the Equifax data breach may still be on edge even with the free credit monitoring service being offered by the company.
Everything from names, addresses, social security numbers and credit card numbers were hacked in the Equifax data breach.
Kuehner said right now the company is sending out letters letting people know if they have been potentially affected. They can also check online at equifaxsecurity2017.com.
However, it is not only the breach that has consumers concerned, it is the company’s response.
“We’re taking unprecedent step of offering every U.S consumer in the country a comprehensive package of identity theft protection, ecredit file monitoring at no cost,” said Rick Smith, Equifax Chairman, and CEO, in a statement released online.
This past Wednesday, FASB released an update to the current expected credit losses methodology (CECL) for estimating credit loss allowances. This new accounting standard, which was initially published in June 2016 (in conjunction with regulators such as the FDIC, OCC, and NCUA), will apply to financial assets carried at amortized cost, including loans held for investment and held-to-maturity debt. Once in place, these assets must be held on the balance sheet net of an expected loss account. Changes are effective for fiscal years beginning after Dec 15, 2019, for all for-profit companies that file with the SEC.
Once firms adopt CECL, management will have increased discretion around forecasts and ultimately net asset carrying value. This represents a dichotomy for investors. Assets should be carried at more accurate levels and better reflect the organization’s financial position. However, management estimates will significantly affect the balance sheet and income statement.
The major change with the CECL methodology is that organizations are expected to include forward looking information when determining credit losses. Banks will need to calculate expected credit loss at the loan level for the entire life of the loan and then aggregate with similar instruments.
Since ECL is calculated for the life of the financial asset, rather than the annual rate, almost all held-to-maturity instruments that are not risk-free will have a credit loss allowance. These long-dated assets may appear more volatile than financial statement users are accustomed to because their impairment has large implications for the balance sheet and income statement. Under the new regulation it will be more important to have correct, auditable, and explainable expected credit losses.
Source: PeerIQ, FASB, FDIC
Overall, we applaud the coming changes to US GAAP and expect investors to respond favorably.
However, there is much more to this story. In fact, this strategic decision could be one of the best moves the company has made. Square’s decision could start a revolution and revamp the entire financial institution structure to address the changes in the transaction and lending environment.
Although the banking sector has tried, most banks still have too many fees and capital requirements to provide business accounts with their needs. Numerous freelancers or startups just can’t satisfy those requirements because banks are still designed with the larger business in mind.
More small businesses need smaller sized loans to tap into for their launches and expansion. Recognizing how peer-to-peer lending has grown together as an entire industry illustrates how ripe the financial industry is for more competition. Peer-to-peer lending is more personal, with a much needed boost to the financial sector in watching to find new ways to provide the much-needed financial support of smaller entities and businesses.
With these products, it makes sense that the company could become a one-stop shop for financial needs. To become a one-stop service requires obtaining a bank charter, which is what the company has now applied for under the moniker, Square Financial Services Inc.
While your average American doesn’t have much in the way of savings, the younger “millennial generation” is actually saving at a higher rate than any other generation. More than 80% of those “investment professionals” will then go on to underperform the market and get paid anyway.
If all of this sounds too daunting already and you want the easy way out, use Betterment.
Founded in 2013, Los Angeles startup PeerStreet has taken in just over $21 million in funding from investors that include Andreessen Horowitz to build “a marketplace that provides unprecedented access to high quality real estate loan investments“. Before you start getting too excited, take note that you’re going to need some cash to bring to the table. PeerStreet shows you some dropdown boxes when you create your account and unless you choose the one that says you make $300,000 a year or the one that says you have $1 million in assets, you’re not going to be allowed in. Those of you who were smart enough to major in a STEM subject are more likely to be squared away here while those of you who majored in underwater basket weaving should probably just stop reading right now.
Right away we can see that this is a property that is out of reach for the majority of Americans with a hefty $3.78 million price tag.
This means that the amount of money we could get from selling our property falls to around $3 million which still makes it very easy to pay off a $2 million loan. In fact, the only point we would start to worry is if property prices fell more than -53% over an 18-month period. This would represent a “black swan” type of event which has a very low probability of occurring. Of course there’s always the risk of PeerStreet going under but then you still have the property as collateral for the loan and you are first in line to receive payback should their property portfolio be liquidated. For providing everyone with this great service, PeerStreet takes a reasonable .75% fee which is paid each month alongside the interest payments.
The first thing to note here is that the price of entry is an extremely attractive $1,000. You’d be joining the 295 other investors who have already plunked down an average amount of $6,169 which brings the loan up to 91% funded. If you then went out and found 9 other properties to invest in, you’d have a nice little diversified portfolio of 10 various property investments that are transparent and relatively simple to understand (provided you took the time to understand the risks as we have done with this example), all for just $10,000.
The early days of peer to peer lending have morphed into a far more complex and data driven credit service that is competing against not just innovative Fintech startups but traditional lenders seeking to maintain relevance. Crowdfund Insider recently asked Lend360 organizers a few questions on their perspective of the online lending industry and what has changed – and what they expect going forward.
What has changed in the lending environment in the past 12 months?
The biggest change is that Fintech is no longer just viewed as a boutique financing option, but a key component of today’s lending market. For proof of this change one only needs to look at the push for a national Fintech charter.
Where do you see current opportunities?
As long as there is a demand for credit, there will be an opportunity for Fintechs to step up and fill the void.
New research, “The unGolden Years: Non-prime Baby Boomers,” from the Elevate Center for the New Middle Class indicates that non-prime Boomers are borrowing against their 401k accounts three times as frequently as prime Boomers do. The survey found that 4% of prime Boomers have 401k loans, while 13% of non-prime Boomers have borrowed against these retirement plans.
Less than half—43%—of the non-prime Boomers in the company’s research feel comfortable with their ability to manage their day-to-day finances, let alone prepare for retirement. Not that prime Boomers all feel confident, either, with 76% saying they can manage daily financial needs.
Elevate’s study, based on a survey of over 1,000 prime and nonprime consumers, found that non-prime Boomers are 14 times as likely as prime Boomers to have difficulty predicting monthly income—and 4 in 10 say they live paycheck to paycheck. They also tend to have difficulty predicting monthly expenses and are therefore more likely to experience unexpected expenses, the research says.
Among non-prime boomers, 7 in 10 run out of money at least once a year, in spite of generally decent employment levels—frequently, in fact, with more than one job apiece.
The study asked respondents how they would meet an emergency need for $1,200. Among the non-prime Boomer respondents, nearly half had difficulty coming up with a source of funds—1 in 8 could think of no solution at all.
22% of non-prime Boomers could cover the $1,200 surprise through savings—about half of the portion of prime Boomers who could do so.
22% said they could use a credit card to cover the surprise, but less than a third said they could pay off that borrowing before it began to accrue interest.
11% said they could tap family or friends for the money. Interestingly, only 2% of prime Boomers would go that way.
A small portion—4.4%—of non-prime Boomers would use payday lenders, deposit advances, or overdraft programs. Interestingly, in a separate question, 13% of non-prime Boomers said they’d used a payday loan in the previous 12 months.
HedgeCoVest is pivoting away from being a platform to help investors access hedge funds in favor of being a turnkey asset management platform. To reflect the change, the company is rebranding as SmartX Advisory Solutions.
And as part of the change, SmartX is bringing on 27 new investment strategies from firms like Blackrock, Morningstar Investment Management and Nasdaq Dorsey Wright. The models will cover strategies including ETFs, income portfolios, international equities, global/macro investing and U.S. equity strategies.
RIA in a Box Introduces Trade Monitoring
The technology company has a new employee trade-monitoring tool for its MyRIACompliance software platform that RIA in a Box says will help firms comply with Rule 204A-11, which requires the submission of securities holdings and transaction reports. The new tool digitizes the process, provides an interface for employees to electronically link applicable personal brokerage accounts, and provides chief compliance officers with supervision, administration and reporting capabilities.
Cryptocurrency IRAs
CoinIRA, a subsidiary of Goldco focused on digital currencies, is launching Digital IRA Bundles, new investment products that come prepackaged with combinations of popular cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum.
Commonwealth Selects Quovo for Aggregation
Commonwealth Financial Network announced the completion of an upgrade to the account-aggregation features within Investor360 using Quovo.
We all know payday lenders, loan sharks, and credit cards profit when you go into debt and, therefore, they can be dangerous. But many of these companies conceal their danger with clever marketing. Beware: a debt trap by any other branding is just as dangerous.
Over at the Outline, writer Gaby Del Valle discusses one such company, Affirm. v
The difference between this service and a typical subprime loan seems to mostly lie in the marketing. Unlike other loans, Affirm is a bit more upfront about the terms you’re getting into.
Everyone is picking on Affirm here, but the issue is not unique to them. This reminds me of the recent fiasco with Navient, the student loan servicer that was sued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) over shady business practices like misapplying student loan payments. In the lawsuit, Navient said they have no obligation to act in their customers’ best interest. But that’s not exactly the message that comes across on their “Financial Tips Blog.” These companies use financial literacy to hook you into making bad financial moves.
High-interest debt, such as credit cards, sometimes seems impossible to pay off.
Peer-to-peer loans are unsecured — you don’t have to tie any collateral to them. They’re attractive to borrowers with high-interest rate debt because they provide concrete payoff dates and an option for a fixed — and potentially lower — interest rate.
In fact, according to peer-to-peer platform Lending Club, its borrowers — on average — secure a 24% lower interest rate when using its peer-to-peer loans to consolidate debt.
SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq:SSNC), a global provider of financial services software and software-enabled services, today announced the availability of Precision LM™ 3.0, the latest version of the company’s loan origination, servicing, accounting and asset management solution. The new version marks the culmination of significant input and engagement from Precision LM clients as well as SS&C’s proven ability to execute on its comprehensive development roadmap.
Automated financial advice is becoming more commonplace in the hunt for bigger returns, yet Pefin bills itself as “the world’s first [artificial intelligence] financial advisor.” The company aims to use machine learning to deliver a range of financial planning and investment advice via a chat interface.
“I started Pefin mainly because when you think about less affluent people, there’s really no access to financial advice aside from robos,” Joseph told CNBC in an interview recently.
“Robos are trying to execute a transaction, while we are trying to manage your finances. Investing is optional with us, and we’ll help you if we think it’s the right move for you” rather than generating fees for the company, she told CNBC.
Pefin, the world’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) financial advisor, welcomed Catherine Flax as Chief Executive Officer today.
Flax has had a multi-decade, distinguished career on Wall Street, as the Managing Director and Head of Commodity Derivatives, Americas at BNP Paribas and as Chief Marketing Officer of J.P. Morgan. She was named the Most Influential Woman in European Investment Banking in 2012 and one of the 100 most influential women in European Financial Markets in 2010 and 2011. Flax has been a leader in the FinTech space, as a Board Member of leading blockchain company, Digital Asset Holdings, and for the last two years, as an Advisor to Pefin in matters of Marketing, Regulation, Business Development and International Growth.
CoverWallet, the winner of Best Insurtech Solution at the 2017 Benzinga Global Fintech Awards, has hired Paul Rosen, formerly the chief sales officer at On Deck Capital IncONDK, as its chief operating officer.
Insurtech reminds Rosen of what fintech looked like five to six years ago, he told Benzinga.
Pearl Capital Business Funding, a provider of direct financing to small and midsize businesses, announced Jared Kogan joined the company as chief revenue officer.
Kogan joined Pearl following a 10 year career in the fintech space, most recently serving as the director of OnDeck’s broker division where he funded 10,000 loans for over $650 million in volume and was able to grow production from $14 million to over $40 million per month. Prior to OnDeck, Kogan served as vice president at Newtek, the largest non-bank SBA lender in the country.
Typically, these lenders operate only on the web and promise quick assessment and disbursal with less bureaucracy. Some specialist bad credit lenders are ready to structure loans according to your convenience. You can also look at peer-to-peer lending platforms that give you access to individuals who are looking to invest their money in different ventures. Again, these platforms can get cash relatively more quickly into the system.
Goldman Sachs is looking to expand its retail banking business to the UK, replicating its mass-market offering in the US, as it continues a steady march from Wall Street to Main Street.
The New York-based investment bank began to pivot in the US about 18 months ago, offering high-interest online savings accounts for a deposit of as little as $1. Last October it took a step further by launching Marcus by Goldman, a digital consumer-lending platform that seeks to rival the San Francisco trio of Lending Club, Prosper and SoFi.
Now Goldman is taking it international, aiming to launch an online deposit business in the UK about the middle of next year. According to Stephen Scherr, the bank’s head of strategy, the lender plans a greenfield start in the UK under the Marcus brand, but could look to buy a book of deposits — as it did in the US — if the opportunity came its way.
The data behind Zopa’s lowered return projections (AltFi Data Email), Rated: AAA
Zopa has an enviable track record of delivering net returns as evidenced by a more than 10 year track record of delivering 4-7% returns (after losses and fees).
INVESTORS rank the expected rate of return as the most important factor when choosing an investment provider, research shows.
Analysis by bond provider Minerva Lending, based on a poll of 1,000 adults with more than £50,000 to invest, found 61 per cent consider the rate of return as the most important factor when choosing who to trust their money with.
The research, released on Friday, does not refer to peer-to-peer lending but investors appear to be looking for many factors that P2P firms offer.
THE UK is facing a technology skills shortage that may worsen because of Brexit, Zopa’s co-founder and chairman has warned.
Giles Andrews (pictured) said that the peer-to-peer consumer lender’s decision to open a hub in Barcelona was partly due to a concern that it would be harder to recruit top tech talent following the UK’s departure from the EU.
Assetz Capital, part of the Manchester-based Assetz Group, has relocated from Newby Road in Hazel Grove where it occupied 3,000 sq ft of a 6,000 building, to take the newly refurbished Building 3 on a 10-year lease.
On Friday, Caixin, a Chinese business news outlet, reported that financial authorities have decided to shut down virtual currency exchanges.
Beijing appears eager to eliminate money laundering and choke off capital outflows by shutting down bitcoin exchanges and other virtual currency trading platforms. It is also tightening its grip on peer-to-peer lending, in which individuals privately contract to borrow and lend.
Some exchanges have temporarily halted trading in response to the report. Investors rushed to sell their digital currencies for cash, sending bitcoin about 20% lower versus the yuan at one point on Saturday, compared with the day before, to below 24,000 yuan ($3,703).
Regulators in China are said to be considering a move to close all domestic bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges.
As of now, no official announcements from regulators have been seen. However, there are reasons to believe the report may be authentic.
The work group was first launched by China’s State Department in 2016 to tackle market risks in the country’s financial technology industry such as p2p lending.
According to report from the Central Bank, in the second quarter of 2017, banking financial institutions have handled 36.247 billion electronic payment services, amounting to 545.58 trillion RMB, which was down about 4.4% from the same period of last year.
Actually, non-bank payments including Alipay and wechat Pay are growing rapidly. The Central Bank’s data also shew that in the second quarter of 2017, the scale of non-bank payment market reached to 570.95 trillion RMB. Compared to the amount of 23.35 trillion in the same period last year, it has significantly increased 34.87 percent.
On September 6th, Zhao Jianjun, deputy director of the Department of Finance at Ministry of Education, announced at a press conference that online marketplace lenders are banned from lending to college students in China.
On September 6th, Zhao Jianjun, deputy director of the Department of Finance at Ministry of Education, announced at a press conference that online marketplace lenders are banned from lending to college students in China. According to WeChat Pay, users of the new product will be able to make payments and transfer, send Hongbao, pay back credit card debt and be awarded with interest on their digital wallet balances.
As response to the latest regulation, NEO Council announced it would offer refunds for NEO purchased through its ICO.
On September 4th, China’s leading digital payment service Alipay announced to expand its operation to Norway.
Early this week, Proptech BBT announced that the platform had managed to secure RMB 60 million Pre-A funding from Hongdao Capital at the beginning of August.
Since Klarna received its full banking license this summer, there have been many questions as to how exactly it would be leveraged. One among many speculative scenarios includes launching the company’s very own credit- and bank cards.
Now there are some initial reports indicating that the credit card rumours are for real. Referring to internal documents it has been able to access, Breakit reports that the Swedish e-invoicing giant, valued at $2,5 bn, is testing credit cards in-house.
A memo sent through the company’s intranet has supposedly given Klarna’s Swedish employees the opportunity to test proprietary payment cards for a limited amount of time.
SME lender Grid Finance is expanding its offering to include a digital pension product targeted at the owners of small businesses. The company has engaged Conexim to provide the back office infrastructure on the product – as well as the regulatory umbrella – while Grid will act as distributor.
It is the latest piece of innovation being undertaken by the company, which is looking to build what chief executive Derek F Butler calls “a small business bank in all but name”.
The 10 selected entrepreneurs reflect the acceleration of the Swiss fintech scene in the recent years and the impressive quality of its startups. They will join the intense journey taking place from September 10 – 16 in New York.
Advanon, Phil Lojacono: Advanon in its basic version is an online platform that allows SMEs to pre-finance their open invoices directly through financial investors.
Algo Trader, Andy Flury: The startup provides an algorithmic trading software that allows automation of complex, quantitative trading strategies.
Creditgate24, Teddy Amberg: CreditGate24 is an independent Swiss company and a fully automated platform for lenders and borrowers which offers efficient, transparent and scalable credit processing at high quality.
KiWi (eBOP), Christian Sinobas: KiWi transforms merchant’s phone into a smart point of sale.
Monito (Global Impact Finance), François Briod: Sending money abroad? Monito is the Booking.com for money transfers, helping migrants and expatriates find, review and compare money transfer services.
OneVisage, Christophe Remillet: OneVisage is a leading cyber-security company developing biometric solutions to help financial services eliminating identity theft and increasing user’s digital experience.
SONECT, Sandipan Chakraborty: SONECT enables every shop in the neighborhood to act as a virtual ATM.
Consultancy firm Accenture found that 68% of global consumers would be happy to use robo-advice to plan for retirement, with many feeling it would be faster, cheaper, and more impartial than human advice.
Joe Ziemer, vice president of communications at Betterment, a US robo-adviser with more than $9bn under management, says: “The Betterment service takes your information and uses a series of algorithms to create an asset allocation plan, which might be, for example, 90% equities and 10% bonds for a retirement saver.”
Wealth Wizards, for example, typically charges £65 for investments up to £30,000, and 0.30%, or £300, on a £100,000 investment pot. Betterment charges 0.25% a year.
That’s peanuts compared to human advisers’ fees, which come in at about £580 for advice on a £200-a-month pension contribution, or £1,000-£2,000 for guidance on what to do with your £100,000 pot when your retire, according to UK adviser network Unbiased.
The young lender says the total amount of investments now exceed €1.8 million. Approximately €400,000 in loans were added in August. The average invested amount per investor gained 2.2% to the previous month at €3,270 in August. In regards to the number of investors using the platform, in August Robo.cash added 188 users. Currently, there are more than 900 investors in total who have joined the platform in the first six months of operation.
For the first time at FinovateFall, Mitek (NASDAQ:MITK) (www.miteksystems.com), a global leader in mobile capture and identity verification software solutions, will demonstrate Mobile Verify® for Lending. This new, five step digital lending experience enables lenders to verify identity and bank account information in real time for fast loan decisions with a simple process for borrowers.
When applying for a consumer loan from a desktop computer, the borrower will first log into their online bank account and agree to have their account information shared with the lender. A text message is then sent to the borrower’s smartphone directing them on how to take four photos: front and back of their driver’s license, a selfie and a photo of their pay stub or other trailing document, to complete the loan application process. This new digital experience is quick and easy for the borrower and provides the lender with real-time identity and bank account verification.
Moroku lands on the BNP Paribas Radar (Moroku Email), Rated: A
Dear friends
Last week Moroku was identified as one of the top 4 Fintech’s globally best positioned to take on the battle for Millennials
The financial technology boom has transformed the way over a billion people engage with financial services, particularly when it comes to making payments, but Larry Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, said that no company has yet managed to use technology successfully to get people investing for the long term.
Both in China, and in Europe and North America, a plethora of investment platforms and robo advisory services are evolving, but none has yet reached critical mass.
Eurasia, the platinum, palladium, iridium, rhodium and gold production company, is pleased to announce it has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with GoldMint PTE (“GoldMint”), a Singapore based Limited Company.
More brokers will diversify into the SME loan space due to increased competition in traditional markets and growing demand from clients, the lender’s head of sales Michael Burke said.
“Brokers are not only looking to move into online lending because of the speed and ease of doing business it offers, but because their time-poor customers are demanding a more convenient solution involving faster turnaround times.”
As well as providing a digital platform to facilitate the loan process, OnDeck’s underwriting policy also helps ease the broker’s burden, Burke told Australian Broker.
PledgeMe, the equity crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending platform, has joined rival Equitise in signalling plans to enter the Australian market ahead of a law change coming into effect across the Tasman this month.
Co-founder Anna Guenther will relocate to Brisbane for six months to establish the Wellington-based company’s Australian arm, according to a PledgeMe blog post. PledgeMe will participate in the Queensland government’s HotDesQ programme, which provides networks, support, and funding for companies to relocate to the state.
SoftBank Vision Fund, the world’s largest pool of private capital, placed its second major bet on an Indian startup in a span of two months with its investment in OYO Rooms. The $250-million funding has taken OYO’s valuation from $460 million in August last year to between $850 million and $900 million.
Allow me to set the scene: in the wider region of Southeast Asia that surrounds Singapore, where Lattice80, our not-for-profit fintech hub that we launched last year is based, there is a huge unbanked population. KPMG estimates put the number at about 438 million. In poor countries like Cambodia, the population with a bank account falls to just 5 percent.
McKinsey did a similar study in 2010 on the world’s 2.5 billion unbanked. Asia’s emerging markets were identified as a hotbed of unbanked. The same study suggests that reaching the unbanked population in ASEAN could increase the economic contribution of the region from US$17 billion to US$52 billion by 2030.
Q WHAT IS THE ATTRACTION OF MULTI-ASSET INVESTING?
A It is the ability to combine a range of asset classes with different and largely independent economic drivers in order to achieve consistent return and reduce downside risk.
Years of central bank intervention in markets have depressed interest rates and left investors hunting for reliable yield. More asset classes beyond traditional equities and bonds have become more accessible in the past decade.
Q WHAT IS THE COMPOSITION OF YOUR MULTI-ASSET PORTFOLIOS?
More recently, we added peer-to-peer lending, mortgage and corporate funds that offer excess return over corporate bonds for a similar level of risk, litigation financing and credit funds. The world’s largest institutional investors have already diversified into these assets. Now, smaller institutions and individual investors can too, through our multi-asset strategies.
