Date: APRIL 18 2018 Location: NEW WORLD STAGES 340 W 50th St, New York NY 10019 Hear from those forging new trails in payments, blockchain, lending, robo-advisors, insurance tech, real estate and more. In addition to attracting hundreds of FinTech entrepreneurs, this conference also plays host to the investors and service providers that help accelerate […]
Date: APRIL 18 2018
Location: NEW WORLD STAGES
340 W 50th St, New York
NY 10019
Hear from those forging new trails in payments, blockchain, lending, robo-advisors, insurance tech, real estate and more. In addition to attracting hundreds of FinTech entrepreneurs, this conference also plays host to the investors and service providers that help accelerate startups. The audience can also look forward to keynotes, panels and demo updates from some of the top FinTech startups in the world.
Speakers include:
Brandon Krieg, Co-founder & CEO, Stash
Patricia Kemp, Co-founder & General Partner, Oak HC/FT
News Comments Today’s main news: Kabbage to acquire Orchard Platform. Zopa to raise 50M GBP. RateSetter investors wait to file taxes. Shanlin Finance being investigated. Kaleidofin raises $2.8M. Today’s main analysis: Hedge funds depend on public information. Today’s thought-provoking articles: Online lenders adopt the model they disrupted. How Plaid became the happy plumbers. How hedge funds depend on public information. United […]
Kabbage looking to acquire Orchard. AT: “The company is interested in the technology, which should not be surprising. It would likely give Kabbage a huge boost.”
Online lenders adopt the model they disrupted. AT: “This is a natural progression in the lifecycle of a nascent industry. First, disrupt. Then, adopt the proven business models of those you disrupted. Third, grow and optimize the business model for maximum profitability. Today’s disruptors are tomorrow’s legacy firms.”
Kabbage plans to use Orchard’s technology, and some of the employees are also expected to move to Kabbage’s New York office, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. It’s unclear how much Kabbage will pay, and the transaction could still fall through. Kabbage and Orchard declined to comment.
Alan D. Crane and two colleagues have written a paper on whether and how hedge funds profit from publicly available information, in particular from SEC filings.
To choose the most likely among the other three, the Rice authors looked at so-called “scrapers,” that is, funds whose essentially strategy is the systematic scraping of the SEC website. Scrapers perform best when filings are long and complex. A long and complicated filing will likely contain important information in the details – information that only a scraper is likely to find.
Source: Do Hedge Funds Profit from Public Information?
The bad news is Cincinnati made the list of 50 U.S. cities, according to Charlotte, N.C.-based LendingTree. The good news is the Queen City finished near the bottom of the list, tied for 45th place with Kansas City, Mo.
The bad news is that Denver made the list of 50 U.S. cities, according to Charlotte, N.C.-based LendingTree. Among LendingTree users in Denver, 6.2 percent have fraud alerts on their credit reports.
This week, at the online lenders’ largest annual conference, much of the talk was about building something closer to a full-service bank, albeit one designed for the digital age.
“If the only thing you’re doing is lending money online, it’s going to go the way of the dinosaur,” said Rob Frohwein, the CEO of Kabbage, which started in loans but has added more products for its small-business customers. “Our objective is to sit at the financial nerve center of small businesses.”
Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA), the main trade association for payday lenders, filed the lawsuit on April 9 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, according to The Washington Post.
At issue is a CFPB rule, effective in August 2019, that could alter the way payday lenders do business. Lenders will be required to verify if borrowers can afford their requested debt prior to receiving money, and the number of times borrowers can take out consecutive loans will be capped.
Plaid software acts as a kind of plumbing, connecting apps to each new user’s bank to quickly confirm an account holder, without any penny deposits or paperwork.
PLAID HOOKS INTO around 10,000 banks. Its internal fortunes have improved, with $59 million in funding from investors such as Spark Capital, NEA and the venture arms of Citi and American Express. In 2016, its $44 million Goldman-led Series B valued the company at $250 million. Today, with sales quadrupled, the company has recently received funding interest valuing the company at $1 billion, according to a source with knowledge of its finances.
Look under the hood at startups like Acorns, Betterment, Coinbase and Clarity Money, and you’ll find Plaid humming away. Developers love Plaid’s fast tech; founders and their investors like saving money by not having to build their own connections. “We built this for ourselves,” Hockey says, “solving problems that were incredibly hard to do.”
Plaid’s own public status page reveals connections to banks with uptime of 98% or even 95%—meaning that 5 out of every 100 authentications with that bank will fail in that moment, a rate that would be unacceptable were it not for the difficulties imposed by the banks.
Travel lenders say they appeal to people with average credit scores who may not qualify for travel reward cards that require excellent credit. The loans also can make sense for people who are building credit and prefer the discipline of fixed payments over credit cards’ revolving payments.
White Oak Global Advisors, LLC on behalf of its institutional clients (collectively “White Oak” or the “Company”), announced today that it has partnered with C2FO, the world’s largest market for working capital, to offer new and innovative receivable financing options to C2FO’s extensive network of businesses throughout the U.S.
With the White Oak partnership, C2FO can provide businesses access to additional funding options when early payment is not available from out-of-network customers.
Premium Title, a national provider of title and escrow services, today announced it has secured escrow licensing in Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington. This additional licensing expands the business’ footprint and allows Premium Title to now provide clients with direct title/settlement services in 45 states plus Washington, D.C.
The grande dame of peer to peer lending in the UK, Zopa, is raising £50 million at a valuation of £400 million, according to several reports. SkyNews states this most recent funding round will be led by current investors including Wadhawan Global Capital out of India. The report does not preclude new money joining the round. Zopa raised £32 million last summer to help fuel its transition into the next generation digital bank. A forthcoming initial public offering is said to be in the queue as well.
The company also revealed a restructuring of boards. The bank and the online lending vertical will now have separate boards to help guide strategy.
Christine Farnish, the founding Chairperson of the UK P2PFA, will become the Chair of Zopa’s peer to peer lending board. Farnish is widely respected within the global P2P industry as well as with public officials and thus represents a significant addition to Zopa’s leadership.
On the banking side, former Standard Chartered executive Richard Goulding, Paul Cutter of Paddy Power Betfair and former Tandem CEO Peter Herbert will be joining the board. Herbert will reportedly become Zopa Bank board chair.
RATESETTER investors looking to file their tax return early have been stifled by the platform removing its tax statement functionality for enhancements.
The deadline for paper tax returns is at the end of October this year or it can be done online by 31 January 2019, but some may want to file at the start of the tax year in April if they are owed a tax refund.
LendInvest, the specialist property finance lender, has partnered with mortgage sourcing partners Twenty7Tec and IRESS’s TriGold system to bring its Buy-to-Let product to more intermediaries. These sourcing systems now bring LendInvest BTL loans to the market in a faster, more efficient way to reach a wider range of customers.
UK-based peer-to-peer lender Landbay announced on Thursday it is set to close its latest equity crowdfunding round on Seedrs next Tuesday (April 17th). The campaign quickly secured its initial £1.25 million and has successfully raised more than £1.4 million thanks to over 250 investors.
Landbay reported that more than 25% of mortgages on its platform have been originated in the last three months. The lender has had no defaults and no losses to date.
JustUs has partnered with property developer, Mersten, to launch the Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA) investment.
Initial funds will be used to renovate and develop a property in south-west London, which will help house residents with learning disabilities and those that require 24/7 care.
Real estate crowdfunding platform Property Partner has announced RFIB Group chief executive Marshall King as its new top man replacing outgoing chief executive and founder Dan Gandesha.
Gandesha founded the crowdfunding platform in 2015 and overseen year-on-year revenue growth of more than 100% since then as chief executive. He will remain in the company as a member of the board but has stepped down from the top position ahead of plans to relocate to Ireland with his family at the end of the month.
Combined with the greater flexibility enjoyed by private investors since the pensions freedom reforms of 2015, this has spawned the rapid growth of a new investment class known as “alternative income”.
Although these funds are structured as equity, investors are looking for something which is more akin to a fixed income product, ie stable sources of income (dividend yields are usually 5% or more and sometimes index linked) backed by secure revenues from real assets or other receivables.
Funds offer instant diversification, by spreading your investment across a range of stocks and shares which are all linked by a common theme. If you have an interest in one particular sector or geography, a dedicated investment fund is a great way to introduce your money to new areas without taking on too much risk.
2. Create a balanced portfolio
Traditionally, a ‘balanced’ portfolio refers to a portfolio which is largely split between equitiesand bonds, with a small amount of money held in cash.
3. Review your portfolio regularly
As your portfolio matures, you will find that your risk appetite or investment goals change significantly.
On April 10, Shanghai-based peer-to-peer lending company Shanlin Finance, which reportedly has over $2 billion in assets under management, was shut down by Shanghai authorites. On the same day, investors reported difficulities withdrawing money from Shanlin’s homepage, and the Shanlin Fortune App, which officially launched on May 10, 2016, could no longer be opened.
On that evening, reporters from a website, ndb.com, went to Shanlin’s headquarter in Shanghai and found the office area was still brightly lit, and a display screen in its lobby was still playing Shanlin Finance’s promotional videos. However, there were no employees working in the office, except several security personnel, and at least five workers were using carts to carry a number of packed carton boxes to a truck parked outside the building.
About 200 million households in India have no access to formal banking, insurance and investment services. Chennai-based Kaleidofin uses algorithms to tailor financial services to the needs of the unbanked. Investors includes Omidyar Network, Blume Ventures and individual investors.
PublicInvest Research said it is favourable on N2N Connect Bhd‘s prospects and maintained its outperform call on the stock while awaiting more details on its latest stake acquisition plan.
N2N had announced that it plans to acquire 28% interest in Australian-based OurMoneyMarket Holdings Pty Ltd for A$2.8mil cash.
News Comments Today’s main news: PayPal to sell $6B in consumer loans. Cleveland Fed retracts study on P2P lending. China Citic, Baidu launch direct bank. Flender to expand into eastern Europe, Spain. Douugh partners with Choice Financial. Today’s main analysis: Orchard Platform says how hurricanes affect unsecured consumer loans. Is LendingClub shifting to higher quality borrowers permanently? Today’s thought-provoking articles: […]
Marcus deep dive. AT: “Marcus has already become a force to reckon with for the industry, and it will likely be even more so now that Goldman Sachs has been emboldened by early success.”
Are banks, credit unions prepared for the new mobile era? AT: “Interesting read. And it’s even more interesting that young smartphone users are concerned about how much time they spend on their phones while those 55+ are not. Will banks and credit unions begin to target older customers for mobile products?”
PayPal announced today it has agreed to sell $5.8 billion in consumer credit receivables to Synchrony Financial, in an expanded relationship between the companies. The deal also includes Synchrony’s acquisition of $1 billion in participation interests in PayPal receivables held by certain investors and a chartered financial institution, the company said.
As a result of today’s deal, the two companies will expand their partnership by making Synchrony Bank the exclusive issuer of the PayPal Credit online consumer financing program available to PayPal customers in the U.S. for the next 10 years, replacing Comenity.
In a recent blog, Orchard Platform posted initial research how much Hurricanes Harvey and Irma affected the U.S. unsecured consumer lending industry. According to Orchard Platform, approximately 91% outstanding loans in Florida were in designated FEMA disaster areas including metropolitan areas Tampa, Orlando, Miami and Jacksonville.
“The population of loans in the areas affected by Harvey experienced a 3x increase from July 2017 to September 2017,” according to Orchard Platform Credit Analytics Manager Nicholas Del Zingaro. “All consumer unsecured loans in Texas experienced a 170 bps increase in Current to 30 Roll Rate over the same period. Irma made landfall on September 10th, but the Florida and Irma designated areas within Florida and Southern Georgia already show signs of distress, with the Current to 30 Rate increasing from 1.5% to 2.5%. The total population had an uptick of 30 bps from August to September.”
The Marketplace Lending Association is calling upon the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland to temporarily retract and revise its report on online lending due to what we see as serious flaws in the authors’ reliance on certain underlying data.
In our view, this paper — “The Taste of Peer-to-Peer Loans” — and its accompanying materials show that a lack of precision and understanding of subject matter can result in significant inaccuracies. The report’s authors presented findings that seemed to reflect issues with the P-to-P industry, but they actually relied on data from a much broader category of loans. The result was a misleading and brutally critical report about the P-to-P industry that was actually based in part on data from more traditional loans.
Earlier this month Crowdfund Insider posted a research report published by the Cleveland Federal Reserve that was highly critical of the peer to peer lending industry (marketplace lending) in the US. The report, authored by Yuliya Demyanyk at the Cleveland Federal Reserve, Elena Loutskina at the University of Virginia, and Daniel Kolliner at the University of Maryland, has since disappeared from the Federal Reserve site.
Marcus, was launched in October 2016 amidst mixed perceptions from market participants. One-year later, however, Marcus has achieved its $2 Bn origination objective – making it the fastest growing lending platform that PeerIQ tracks.
GS CFO Marty Chavez notes that Marcus has an aggressive ~3.5% ROA objective. By comparison, Discover’s ROA is currently ~2.4% and has only achieved a quarterly 3.5% ROA once in the last ten years.
Source: PeerIQ
Although the statistics look similar, each lender is measuring loss-rates somewhat differently:
Lending Club and Prosper cumulative loss rates on 36-month prime term loans are ~12% – as estimated by ratings agencies during a base case (not thru cycle) scenario.
GS projects thru-the-cycle annual credit losses of 4.0%. Therefore, GS is betting that it will outperform on losses thru-the-cycle.
Discover’s 3.2% loss-rate is a realized statistic from the most recent 10-Q.
Discover management notes that loss rates are re-normalizing to higher levels. Indeed, Discover’s loss rate was 2.1% two year ago in 3Q 2015 and management expects losses will continue to re-normalizing going forward.
We believe a comparable thru the cycle loss-rate for Discover would meet or exceed 4%. By way of comparison, the Discover loan portfolio experienced a peak charge-off rate during the financial crisis of ~7%. (and continued to deliver a positive ROA).
* GS estimate of 4%, Lending Club and Prosper based on 3-year ratings agencies cum. Loss estimate of 12%. Discover based on 3Q-10Q realized Source: PeerIQ, GS Investor Presentation, Public Filings, Bloomberg.
A recent post on the Lend Academy Forum spurred a discussion about the potential future of LendingClub, particularly as it relates to the types of borrowers they serve. While we don’t have insight into what LendingClub’s plans are, there are several things that have happened over the last two years that help us hypothesize that LendingClub’s strategy may be shifting.
LendingClub recently sent an email titled “How LendingClub Notes May Help You Generate Long-Term Wealth”. In it, they tout returns in the 4-6% range, a far cry from the returns some investors saw in LendingClub’s early days. The 4-6% range they present is footnoted, clarifying that this includes only grades A-C.
After I began writing this article LendingClub coincidentally announced in their recent earnings call that loan grades F and G would no longer be available to investors These loans have an average interest rate of 24.16% on LendingClub’s platform. Moving forward, the loans will be brought in house as part of a test portfolio for LendingClub.
You can clearly see the expansion of C grade loans, which has increased to 36.09% of total originations in 2017, the most ever.
Source: Lend Academy
C grade loans currently make up just shy of 50% of 60 month loans.
After years of strong mobile growth being driven by younger demographic segments, the majority of recent, more modest growth can be attributed to the 55 and older generation. In fact, consumers in the 55+age group have a three-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 8% compared to only 2% for the 18 to 34 segment, according to a study from Deloitte.
As in 2016, close to 90% of consumers viewed their phone within an hour of waking up, with roughly 80% doing the same within an hour of going to sleep.
Interestingly, the Deloitte research found that over 70% of younger demographic groups believe they are using their phones too much and are looking for ways to limit dependence. Alternatively, only 13% of consumers over 55 had the same concerns.
Source: The Financial Brand
When consumers were asked about the way they communicated on mobile phones, all options increased in 2017, including text messaging (91%), voice calls (86%), email (81%), social messaging (72%) and video calls (30%). The increase in voice calls reversed a four-year decline.
The survey found a significant growth in use of mPayments in 2017, albeit against a rather low base number. According to Deloitte, consumers who said they made an in-store mobile payment with a smartphone or other device in 2017 reached 29%, which is a 50% increase over 2016. Those who used mPayments weekly also increased by 50% in 2017, (from 8% to 12%).
The PeerStreet platform lets accredited private investors access the huge market of real estate loans, backed by big data and advanced underwriting to identify loans that can give consistent returns.
Brett Crosby, Co-Founder and COO of PeerStreet, has extensive experience in analytics from his time working at Googleas Director of Product Marketing.
What did you do before this?
I was the co-founder of a company called Urchin, which was early in the web analytics space. We were acquired by Google in 2005, and turned Urchin into Google Analytics. I stayed at Google for 10 years, building and launching Google Analytics, launching mobile ads, local ads, the go-to market on social initiatives at Google, and Google Drive. After that, I was running global growth on Chrome, Gmail Docs and Drive.
If President Trump taps Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney as interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as is widely expected, he will be a sea change from outgoing head Richard Cordray.
Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, was a fierce critic of the bureau when in Congress and he sat on the Financial Services Committee.
The CFPB’s final payday loan rule was published in today’s Federal Register. Lenders covered by the rule include nonbank entities as well as banks and credit unions. In addition to payday loans, the rule covers auto title loans, deposit advance products, and certain high-rate installment and open-end loans. For a summary of the rule, see our legal alert.
At issue is the different ways that states try to handle payday lenders. Some states try to crack down on them with caps on interest rates. But other states are more lenient. And the situation is further complicated by big national banks, which operate under federal law and only have to comply with interest rate caps in the state they’re chartered in.
That loophole enables national banks to engage in “rent-a-charter” schemes. Since these banks aren’t subject to an interest rate cap (or are subject to a more lenient one), they can issue a predatory loan, then immediately sell that loan to a smaller payday lender barred by state law from issuing it on its own.
Pavaso Inc. has announced that it has selected eOriginal to support lenders in the digital mortgage process. Specifically, Pavaso will utilize eOriginal’s electronic promissory note (eNote) and electronic vaulting (eVault) services.
51.8% of Elevate Credit shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 40.9% of shares of all “Professional Information Services – NEC” companies are held by institutional investors.
Some 2.7 billion people worldwide today have zero access to capital. Despite lacking any credit history or verifiable economic identity, these so-called unbanked or under-banked individuals can now access global capital markets with a $10 Android phone, thanks to blockchain-based economic identity platforms like BanQu or Humaniq that create a unique hash of verifiable authenticity — similar to a social security number — from a simple retina scan or selfie. The total market opportunity this group represents is a staggering $380 billion, according to a recent report.
On Thursday, Coinbase, the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange, announced a new platform that might quell the anxieties of big money investors looking to invest in crypto. The platform, called Coinbase Custody, was built specifically to meet the needs of such investors, including hedge funds and family offices, according to a Medium post by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.
Just last week, an unidentified user accidentally deleted the code library required to use recently created digital wallets within Parity, a popular digital-wallet provider, and cryptocurrencies have long been associated with the chasms of the deep, dark web.
The service will charge users a $100,000 startup fee. Armstrong said there will also be a monthly fee based on assets.
Because index funds pose little competitive threat, expense ratios for the leading alternative funds are far higher than elsewhere in the industry. These days, the vast majority of conventional fund sales go into funds that have expense ratios of less than 0.60%–usually much less. With alternatives, on the other hand, a 1% expense ratio is considered low-cost. Most of the larger funds have expense ratios approaching 1.5%, which would doom them were they not alternatives.
Given all these differences, it’s not surprising that, for alternatives, industry leadership is upside down. The giants are absent. Among them, Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity, Capital Research, and T. Rowe Price run a grand total of $7 billion in alternative mutual funds. In contrast, the management firm AQR controls $29 billion.
RealEstateInvestingProfits.com, a strategic consulting and real estate investing educational platform that is responsible for a combined 1,000 closings and nearly a 100m in total sales volume focused on wholesale/flips with their partners and affiliates, are making a compelling argument, suggesting that real estate and Bitcoin should be natural partners and doing their best to open eyes to possibilities in this area.
With the Real Estate Market Size growing from $7.1 trillion in 2015 to $7.4 trillion in 2016, currency movements effectively reduced the size of the global real estate investing market by approximately 2.3% in the dollar (USD) terms according to MSCI Research, the question many are asking – Can Bitcoin be a positive disruptor to save on third-party fees and high transactions exchanges from lending?
Affirm makes it easy to repay the loan, send out email and SMS text messages to remind the customer of upcoming payments. Users can pay theur Affirm bills online, by debit card or ACH transfer, and sign up for autopayment.
The company makes money the same way that a credit card does: by charging interest of between 10 percent and 30 percent.
There’s a problem with shadow banking and alternative finance. It’s called what to do when bad stuff happens.
Whereas most consumer lenders will struggle to provide 5%, platforms such as Funding Circle,Assetz and ThinCats can easily provide a net yield in excess of 5%, even after allowing for losses.
This deeper understanding of the lending process and defaults is all for the good but I think it raises a much more critical issue, especially relevant for SME lending – how do lenders cope with problem borrowers?
But Funding Circle also has a sweet spot in lending tens and hundreds of thousands of pounds which means they tend to avoid lending large sums in the £500k to £50m bracket (in fact nothing towards to the top end).
Which? Money analysed 43 advice firms which are listed on on Unbiased.co.uk – a comparison service that allows you to find a financial adviser – which stated they employed certified financial planners. These are advisers who hold a specific certification from the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investment (CISI).
Some 63% of them (27 firms), however, did not actually employ any such advisers.
Seven out of 24 firms (29%) were also falsely claiming to be accredited by the Society of Later Life Advisers (SOLLA), and 14 out of 72 firms (19%) claimed to have advisers with chartered financial planner status, despite not employing anyone who was, in fact, chartered.
A London-based fintech startup is planning on launching a prepaid Visa debit card, giving users the option to spend a range of cryptocurrencies across the U.K.
On Tuesday, the London Block Exchange (LBX) launched, headed by an 18-year Credit Suisse veteran.
The cryptocurrencies include bitcoin, ethereum, ripple, litecoin and monero.
London-based Glint has been pretty stealthy about what it planned to offer, despite several funding rounds and a vague description that it wanted to a create new “global currency” based on gold. Well, today the fintech startup is finally de-cloaking with a staggered launch of its multi-currency account, app and card that does indeed let you store your money in gold and convert it back to fiat currency at the point of payment.
Komodo (KMD) has a much smaller market cap at $233 million. Komodo promises to be a block chain interoperable network to allow transactions across coins to help financial institutions bring banking to freelancers, small business owners, and other underserved customers accept and send payments.
Monaize is now teaming up with Komodo for the first dICO to facilitate financial transactions using cryptocurrency.
China Citic Bank Corp (601998.SS) and search engine giant Baidu Inc (BIDU.O) launched on Saturday a direct banking joint venture, dubbed AiBank, to capitalize on China’s rapidly growing fintech sector.
Consumer lending is booming in China, thanks to a less thrifty younger generation who have cast off the save-at-all-costs mentality of their parents.
China’s unsecured consumer loans amounted to just 9 percent of gross domestic product in the first nine months of this year, compared with 15 percent in the U.S., according to consultants Oliver Wyman. The educated 18- to 36-year-old borrowers LexinFintech targets tend to be ignored by banks, even though their job prospects mean that they’re unlikely to default.
Auto financing, meanwhile, has exploded to account for more than a third of car purchases last year from 8 percent in 2011, according to CLSA Ltd. data.
Peer-to-peer lender PPDAI Group Inc., which listed in New York last week, also said that its rates exceeded 36 percent once fees are included. The company’s shares are trading below their offer price.
People’s Bank of China, China’s central bank, has made plans to launch a united platform by the end of 2017 for collecting personal credit information and assessing people’s credit ratings.
The new platform is expected to cover data from non-traditional market participants, especially Fintech industry (e.g. peer to peer lending), which will complement the existing credit data mechanism, increase supervision over non-traditional financial sectors and effectively reduce systematic risks.
Third-party credit service agencies may also become shareholders in the new platform with a ratio of 8% respectively.
On November 16th, Jianpu Technology Inc. announced it would be listed on the NYSE. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan are the bookrunners for the deal.
On November 16th, Xiamen Financial Affairs Office released the first P2P lending firms fillings in China. However, what drew the media’s attention more in the fillings is a firm called Jing Dong Xu Hang Online Lending Information & Intermediary Service Ltd. This company is a wholly owned secondary subsidiary of JD Finance.
Flender, a peer-to-peer lending start-up backed by Ding founder and Esat Digifone co-founder Mark Roden, is eyeing up an expansion to eastern Europe and Spain after it launches in Britain next year.
As reported in May, peer-to-peer lending start-up Flender was seeking to get €1 million in funding and is targeting a UK launch after getting full authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority.
Over in Israel, Tipigo Ventures, which offers an artificial intelligence (AI) powered wealth management platform, has raised $1 million in seed funding. The firm says this puts its valuation at $10 million.
Kuants, an algorithmic trading platform, will “co work” and “co live” at IA’s start-up academy during a three-month long acceleration programme.
Staying in India, Sumeru Enterprise Tiger Business Solutions, a Bengaluru-based banking software start-up, has raised $900,000 from unnamed investors in India and the US.
Sydney-based fintech start-up Douugh has scored a partnership with US mutual bank Choice Financial, as it readies to launch its smart banking personal assistant, Sophie.
As part of the open banking partnership, Douugh will launch an integrated bank account and debit card with the bank, giving it the ability to accept deposits. Choice Financial has also invested in Douugh, as part of a $2.5 million seed round.
Amongst those startups who have been simplifying digital lending are Rubique, InCred, ZestMoney, Qbera, Loan Singh etc.
Working as a medium for a customer and financial institutions, data analytics performed on hundreds of data points on Rubique’s platform assess the creditworthiness of the customers (loan origination qualification), bringing predictability by giving them eligible offers to choose from.
Using real-time processing is also part and parcel for Zest Money, based in Bangalore since 2015, whose USP is its simple digital process, fast approval time and flexible products, with the benefit of multiple options to pay EMIs.
Using cutting-edge technology and proprietary credit underwriting algorithms, based on alternative data sources, Loan Singh enables frictionless lending to creditworthy and underserved borrower segments. It mainly provides personal loans (for salaried individuals), Professional Certification Loans (for students pursuing skill development and certification programmes), and Small Ticket Unsecured Personal and Consumer Loans (through third-party associations).
Others like InCred, founded in January 2017 and based out of Mumbai, focus on giving credit to those customers who have traditionally been underserved by large banks and NBFCs.
While contributing eight percent to the nation’s total GDP, micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) also provide for 40 percent of the total export. Producing over 10,000 different types of products, these small-scale ventures are also responsible for 45 percent of the entire manufacturing output.
However, given a favourable environment and a slew of radical changes, there is still a huge credit deficit that is still unmet for the sector. This is exactly where the number of mushrooming fintech startups step in. To disrupt the status quo and level the playing field, a number of fintech lenders are supporting these small-scale ventures. The fact was made evident by McKinsey, claiming that nearly 75 percent of the emerging fintech lenders are helping MSMEs with lending, payment systems, retail banking, wealth management and more.
Aegon Life Insurance is exploring partnerships with fintech firms to expand customer base through a digital push of selling policies online, a top company official said.
Singapore-based P2P lending solutions provider Crowd Genie plans to conduct an initial coin offering (ICO) of its CGCOIN currency, aiming to raise up to ETHB100,000 ($31.69 million).
For the better part of a decade, banks have relaxed their lending conditions, too, so small businesses are finding more success with being approved for a loan.
But banks are not the only ones providing funding to small businesses, as they are actually reluctant to lend money to such enterprises in some jurisdictions. In China, for example, state-owned banks are not too fond of lending to individuals and small businesses. However, here P2P lending is a booming market, with around 2,200 p2p lenders and a market valued at US$100 billion.
Not all small businesses have the capability to launch their own ICOs, nor build their own blockchains over Ethereum, however. For this purpose, a startup called Starbase will empower any business or individual to crowdfund using cryptocurrencies and tokens without building their own network.
It is based on this point of view that MAS and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority decided to collaborate on a Blockchain-based cross-border trade finance platform. The platform, which is called Global Trade Connectivity Network (GTCN), is an open-sourced Blockchain platform and will be launched at the start of 2019.
The authority noted that as of September this year, 24 P2P lending companies consisting of 16 local companies and 8 foreign companies have been registered and licensed in OJK. Meanwhile 31 P2P lending companies are in the process of registration.
News Comments Today’s main news: Lending Club closes 5 investment funds, rebrands LC Advisors. CommonBond closes $248M securitization, receives AA S&P rating. LendingTree Q3 results. LandlordInvest expects to double IFISA intake. Ant Financial puts off IPO. Renredai volume surpasses 37.8B RMB. New Zealand prepares for open banking. SMART Box to debut in Canada. Today’s main analysis: Don’t forget about loan recoveries. Today’s […]
LendingTree Q3 results. AT: “LendingTree is looking good and setting new records in several areas.”
Big Tech vs. Big Banks. AT: “So far, all this talk of Amazon and Google threatening banks has been speculation. They certainly have the financial clout and technological prowess to be the threat that everyone is anticipating. But we still haven’t seen it happen–yet.”
Anticipation for Amazon SMB lending disruption grows. AT: “The danger for Amazon, if it branches out into too many verticals, is a threat of running up against antitrust concerns. They may very well be checking into those possibilities.”
Yesterday, Lending Clubannounced the closure of several funds. The funds were part of what was previously known as LC Advisors, an investment management company dedicated to investing in notes originated by the platform.
Since each fund is a separate legal entity there were many different buyers that participated. While we don’t know the terms of the deals or who purchased these loans, Suri did share with us that there were over 40 bids for the assets and 5 of the 6 funds have been sold at fair value or a slight premium.
What happens next?
Lending Club is rebranding its asset management business. Now called LendingClub Asset Management or LCAM for short.
When we asked Suri about positioning the new offerings to investors he stated that their biggest flagship fund under LC Advisors had delivered slightly over 6% annualized since 2011.
CommonBond, a leading financial technology company that helps students and graduates pay for higher education, today announces the close of a $248 million securitization of refinanced student loans. The offering’s most senior notes achieved AA ratings from Moody’s, S&P, and DBRS – Aa2, AA, and AA (high), respectively – the company’s highest ratings to date.
The transaction was CommonBond’s fifth and largest to date. Investors submitted $1 billion in orders, making the deal more than four times oversubscribed. Goldman Sachs served as structuring agent, co-lead manager, book-runner, and co-sponsor. Barclays and Citi also served as co-lead managers and book-runners on the transaction, while Guggenheim Securities served as co-manager.
The transaction was the first of CommonBond’s to be rated by S&P, who assigned AA ratings to the transaction, alongside similar ratings from Moody’s and DBRS. Moody’s and DBRS also recently upgraded CommonBond’s ratings on previous deals in recognition of the company’s strong credit performance.
To showcase the significance of the third-party debt collection industry in America, the New York Fed publishes in their Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit a ‘Third-Party Collections’ chart (below). As of 2017-Q1, between 12-13% of consumers with debt have debt being collected by third-party agencies (blue line). Of those, the average amount of debt in collections is ~$1,400 (red line).
Source: Orchard Platform
The 2015-2016 roll rate matrix is experiencing a higher percentage of loans going from non-performing (60-89 DPD & 90-119 DPD) to current when compared to the 2013-2014 roll rate matrix. This 100 bps difference for 60-89 DPD and 200 bps for 90-119 DPD can be attributed to the improvement of servicers’ collection and outreach programs for delinquent loans.
Source: Orchard Platform
Consumer loans have experienced a monthly recovery rate between 5% to 15% within different portfolios on our platform. Based on this table, a $100M pool of loans would have a $1M valuation difference between a 5% and 15% recovery rate input.
LendingTree, Inc. (NASDAQ: TREE), operator of LendingTree.com, the nation’s leading online loan marketplace, today announced results for the quarter ended September 30, 2017.
Third Quarter 2017 Business Highlights
Record revenue from mortgage products of $73.8 million represents an increase of 38% over third quarter 2016 driven by strong growth in both purchase and refinance revenues at 87% and 24%, respectively. According to Mortgage Bankers Association, originations industry-wide were down 16% in the comparable period.
Record revenue from non-mortgage products of $97.7 million in the third quarter represents an increase of 138% over the third quarter 2016 and increased to 57% of total revenue compared to 43% one year ago.
Home equity revenue growth accelerated, increasing $9.0 million, or 176% over third quarter 2016, and marked the eighth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth exceeding 100%.
Personal loans revenue of $25.4 million grew 44% over third quarter 2016 and grew 24% sequentially.
Revenue from our credit card offerings grew to $39.4 million in 3Q compared to just $6.6 million in 3Q 2016. On a proforma basis, giving effect to the CompareCards and MagnifyMoney acquisitions as if they had occurred on January 1, 2016, credit cards revenue grew 43%.
More than 6.5 million consumers have now signed up for free credit scores and savings alerts through My LendingTree, and the volume of new enrollments accelerated. Revenue contribution from MyLendingTree grew 96% in the third quarter compared to the prior year period as new features and smarter savings alerts are driving increased engagement.
Third Quarter 2017 Financial Highlights
Record consolidated revenue of $171.5 million represents an increase of $76.9 million, or 81%, over revenue in the third quarter 2016.
GAAP net income from continuing operations of $10.1 million, or $0.74per diluted share.
Record Variable Marketing Margin of $59.1 million represents an increase of $22.8 million, or 63%, over third quarter 2016.
Record Adjusted EBITDA of $34.7 million increased $16.2 million, or 88%, over third quarter 2016.
Adjusted Net Income per share of $1.17 represents growth of 65% over third quarter 2016.
During the quarter, the company repurchased 42 thousand shares of its stock at a weighted-average price per share of $237 for aggregate consideration of $10.0 million. As of September 30, 2017, the company has $38.7 million in repurchase authorization remaining.
Business Outlook – 2017
LendingTree is revising Revenue, Variable Marketing Margin and Adjusted EBITDA guidance for full-year 2017, as follows:
Revenue is anticipated to be in the range of $603 – $608 million, representing growth of 57% – 58% over full-year 2016 and an increase from prior guidance of $580 – $590 million.
Variable Marketing Margin is anticipated to be $202 – $205 millioncompared to prior guidance of $190 – $195 million.
Adjusted EBITDA is anticipated to be in the range of $111 – $113 million, up 59% – 62% over full-year 2016 and an increase from prior guidance of $103 – $106 million.
A recent report from McKinsey on the global banking industry addressed the threat banks face from technology firms. Amazon stock jumped 13% on earnings and reporting that Amazon is increasing its lending footprint. Tune into Bloomberg Radio archive to hear more about this topic as PeerIQ’s CEO discusses the threats and opportunities of big technology with Bloomberg’s Lisa Abramowicz and Pimm Fox.
Summary of Amazon’s Lending Business
Amazon finances small businesses that sell products through the Amazon marketplace on an invitation-only basis. Interest rates range from 6 to 15%, tenor ranges from 4 to 6 months, and loan size is up to $750K.
Although there is no segment-level P&L reporting for the lending unit, loss-rates according to Amazon’s Peeyush Nahar have been “very, very small.” Amazon’s lending makes up a small part of their business (e.g., $3 Bn in loans to date vs. Amazon’s $136 Bn annual revenue). Amazon is also not directly financing the consumers indicating substantial opportunity to grow.
Owning the Customer
The most compelling advantage big tech has outside of data and customer acquisition are the creation of entirely new channels that banks cannot easily replicate.
A few examples:
In-Home: Large consumer tech firms occupy the most intimate space of consumer through services such as Amazon’s Echo, Google’s Home, or Apple’s Siri. These platforms represent a trojan horse for delivering new products and services in a highly personal and exclusive manner.
Personal assistants that are increasingly anticipatory and have access to the calendars, preferences, and daily lives of consumers.
Mobile and virtual wallets which shift the battleground from legacy “share of wallet” and “primary card” concepts to mobile platforms and virtual wallets
Virtual spaces created via social media including Facebook or services such as Lyft or Uber which enable unobstructed access to the consumer.
Technology giants like Google and Amazon, which gained their market muscle from non-finance-related ventures, are slowly stepping into the space. Their next target could be small business lending, and according to some experts, it’s fast approaching the market.
Amazon in particular is positioned to dominate. The company has already lent more than $1 billion to merchants selling on its platform, and, just as alternative lenders put the pressure on traditional FIs with their quick surge into the market, the Amazons of the world will do the same, Mills predicted.
Chatter Picks Up Steam
Karen Mills’ statements have found new backing in the latest banking report released by McKinsey & Co. this week. New reports in Bloomberg on Wednesday (Oct. 25) said the report identifies Amazon as the newest, biggest threat to the small business lending status quo.
The report points to sagging return on equities for the banks, which have not been able to surpass 10 percent since the 2007/2008 global financial crisis. The FIs that collaborate with those FinTechs could boost their return on equities to 14 percent and even higher if they develop their own solutions in-house.
When customers open an account at one of these automated investing firms, they’re put into funds from companies like Charles Schwab Corp. and Vanguard Group and charged a fee of anywhere from 25 to 50 basis points. In return, they get some extra benefits, like tax loss harvesting, which can result in a lower tax bill, and automatic re-balancing at no extra cost.
But there’s a catch, the funds that customers buy through these advisors are all available on free trading platforms such as Robinhood Financial, where there’s no added cost.
Consumer analytics company SelfScore has rebranded as Deserve, writes Julie Muhn at Finovate (Banking Technology‘s sister company).
The California-based company continues to be committed to providing underbanked Americans with access to credit, and to fuel that mission, Deserve has received $12 million in funding. The round was led by Accel, with participation from Aspect Ventures, Pelion Ventures, Mission Holdings, Alumni Venture Group, and GDP Venture, and brings Deserve’s total funding to $27 million.
Blockchain is particularly relevant to the lending market. Lending is a contract-intensive process with an extensive lifecycle; it carries significant risk and limited trust across its value chain – from origination to funding through to the fulfillment and servicing of the loan.
Moreover, the integration of blockchain with digital lending ensures transactions are tracked in an open and transparent way. Banks and lenders get direct visibility into exactly what happened during the lending process – who was involved, who had control over the authoritative copy of the digital assets and ultimately, who owns the value of those assets, as required by law.
Jiko, an Oakland, Calif.-based personal bank startup, raised $7.7m in Series A funding.
The round was led by Upfront Ventures and Radicle Impact with participation from Social Capital, 500 Fintech, Digital Currency Group, Core Innovation, Embark Ventures and Story Ventures.
Templum, LLC, a NYC-based fintech startup facilitating regulatory compliant ICOs as securities and secondary trading of digital assets, closed a $2.7m seed funding round.
The round was led by Raptor Group, Galaxy Investment Partners, Blockchain Capital and firstminute.capital.
Touching on the recent boom in real estate crowdfunding firms, John McNellis, co-founder of Palo Alto, Calif.-based development firm McNellis Partners, divided the crowdfunding sector into two groups: firms that simply connect investors with developers and firms that invest in projects themselves. The first concept should work in the long term, he noted. But when it comes to crowdfunding firms underwriting real estate deals, McNellis pointed out that it takes at least a decade in the business to become a reliable underwriter. “To expect these 20-year-olds who are good at tech to be good at underwriting” is unrealistic, he said. McNellis added that established developers normally already have financial partners that they prefer to work with. The developers most in need of crowdfunding dollars would be either those just starting out in the business or developers with a spotty track record.
The decline in underlying collateral quality — a theme across wider consumer ABS sectors — has been playing out in marketplace loan ABS, with recent deals from Prosper, Marlette Funding and Avant featuring a growing proportion of loans taken by borrowers with credit scores of less than 680.
There is now a way anyone can help veterans launch their new life through a concept called StreetShares.
You can invest just a few dollars or thousands to the fund. Investors can earn 5 percent on their money.
For Shane and Melissa Underwood, a $20,000 loan allowed them to purchase a piece of equipment that launched their small business Driveshaft Specialists.
A 2017 crowdfunding reportby the National Women’s Business Council, for example, found that 47% of successful campaigns on the popular crowdfunding platform Indiegogo were run by women.
Online Lenders
Keep in mind that online business loan shopping sites may operate in a variety of ways:
Lead generation sites will simply gather your information then sell it to various lenders, which may then call or email you with information or offers.
Online lenders may offer a specific set of loan products aimed at specific types of borrowers (for example, those with significant credit card sales). Remember: just because you can’t qualify with one lender doesn’t mean you can’t quality with others.
Online brokers may try to help get you funding with various lenders with whom they have a relationship. They may charge a significant fee for this service, so be sure to ask.
Online marketplaces will present you with options and allow you to choose which ones seem right for your needs. Ideally, you’ll also see which loans are best matched to your qualifications. (Disclosure: Nav’s small business loan marketplace operates this way.)
Zeus CrowdFunding once again offers borrowers what other lenders won’t – low rates designed specifically for the real estate investor and their year-end needs. For a limited time, qualified applicants will pay only six percent interest for the first six months of the loan term.
The company loans up to 100 percent of a project’s cost to qualified applicants in as little as four days.
On Deck Capital, Inc. (NYSE:ONDK) is scheduled to be issuing its quarterly earnings data before the market opens on Wednesday, November 1st. Analysts expect the company to announce earnings of $0.03 per share for the quarter.
As banks rush to catch a wave of robo technologies, Wells Fargo Advisors is rolling out a factor-based approach designed for advisors and their clients.
The wirehouse has launched an expansion to its electronic model portfolio services platform, according to Patty Loepker, WFA’s head of research directed advisory programs. The new managed accounts program features allocations built around smart beta ETFs.
Litigation finance specialist Pravati Capital has launched its third fund vehicle to capitalize on opportunities in the burgeoning litigation finance sector.
The new fund, named Pravati Credit Fund III, will invest in mature stage, high-probability, high-value cases or case portfolios where there is established liability and precedent for settlement, according to a statement.
LANDLORDINVEST is expecting its Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA) intake to double this tax year.
The property peer-to-peer platform, which launched its IFISA in January, said it attracted £419,385 in the previous tax year and was hoping to see that double to nearer £1m.
LENDINGCROWD has been ranked as an alternative to Funding Circle for investors looking to continue with manual lending, as they both offer similar interest rates and borrower profiles.
The U.K. government’s economic and finance ministry has released a new policy document stating that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin pose a “low risk” for terrorist financing.
The paper further cited the peer-to-peer lending industry, which it said has the potential to be used as a “terrorist financing tool,” though no incidences have been observed in the U.K. to date.
Initially, my co-founders and I had experience verifying identity documents meant for an offline world. The current way of verifying documentation for a standard current account requires hours and hours of face-to-face in-branch and still not getting approved; it’s no wonder there’s a 40% drop-off.
Of the 7 billion people in the world, Facebook has brought their social identity online, LinkedIn has brought their professional identity online and now we’re looking to bring their legal identity online.
How exactly are Onfido providing something that mainstream banks should take notice of?
Very simply, we help business verify the identity of the people they are onboarding digitally. That can be with a photo of their government issued ID that the user can send with a smartphone. We cover 600 IDs globally and use machine learning to verify whether the ID is genuine or not. There are three steps to our core technology. The first, we extract the details, see if the patterns are consistent and compare them to the millions of historically computed IDs. The second step is asking the user to take a photo or short video of their face, which we compare to the photo on their identity document for similarity. The third step is to check that their details – name, date of birth and address – are consistent with records on multiple databases. Altogether this verifies the person is who they claim to be and, end-to-end, takes two minutes.
We use a hybrid machine/human approach – the technology is able to automatically process the vast majority of documents, and the small number of outliers are passed to our expert human team for review. It means that human resource can be put to more effective use, and would heavily cut down on the 30,000 people employed by Citibank, for example, who just work on onboarding and compliance checks.
As a Millennial yourself, how much of a role do you think generations play on attitudes to banking?
Millennials are just so used to doing absolutely everything on their phone.
Fintechs have really monopolised the millennial market and they’re building the models to ensure they keep that market for the next 15-20 years. That’s where PSD2 becomes very relevant as a leveller of the playing field for the market – it’ll increase healthy competition.
Silicon Valley investors have more than doubled funding for UK technology companies this year, in a sign of strengthening links with the world’s biggest tech hub after the Brexit vote.
British start-ups received £884.8m from venture capital backers based in San Francisco and the Bay Area in the first nine months of this year, compared to £342m in the whole of 2016, according to London & Partners, the London mayor’s promotional agency.
According to the latest figures from London & Partners (L&P), the Mayor of London’s official promotional firm, investors from around the world have backed London-based fintech firms to the tune of £825m so far this year. This is a positive sign for the industry after UK fintech investment plummeted by more than a third in 2016 as investors put off decisions in the wake of the Brexit vote.
One of the biggest London fintech success stories, currency exchange platform Transferwise, is reported to be in discussions with investors to raise a further £77m, which would value the company at more than £1.2bn.
Strange as it may seem, using the analogy of Lego may be the best way to demonstrate why we believe the peer-to-peer (P2P) industry also isn’t – and can’t be – a one trick pony. While some see the industry as a fad that is set to become redundant, there are many reasons why this isn’t the case.
P2P platforms are exploring a range of new and old ways, and their aim is to create something which is more equitable, satisfactory and useful for everyone.
Uber has appointed a former senior adviser to the Bank of England as non-executive chair in the UK, as it endeavours to clean up its image and “make things right” after Transport for London last month revoked the ride hailing company’s licence to operate in the city.
Laurel Powers-Freeling, who will take up the newly created position, is currently senior independent director at online lender Atom Bank.
Flush with cash, Chinese financial-technology giant Ant Financial Services Group is putting on hold plans for an initial public offering while it steps up investments in everything from startups to artificial intelligence, according to a senior company executive.
Investors and analysts have been expecting Ant to go public sometime in 2018. The Hangzhou-based company last raised $4.5 billion from private investors in April 2016 in a deal that gave it a $60 billion valuation—and its business has since expanded significantly.
51 CreditCard (u51.com), an online platform for credit card bill management, is reported to be listed on Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) in 2018, aiming to raise at least 500 million dollars.
According to a report of China Daily, the credit database of PBOC has collected credit information of more than 840 million individuals as well as more than 19 million companies and organizations by the end of April. Among these agencies, only 255 licensed micro loan companies have been connected to the company credit information system and 156 to the individual credit information system.
From November 1st, customers will be able to pay their train tickets by using WeChat Pay through the official booking website 12306.com or in the train station (booking office/self-service ticket machine).
On October 18th, Trustdata released the long-awaited “Trustdata: China Consumer Finance Analysis Report (2017)”. The document presents a comprehensive review of consumer finance development in China, makes a deep analysis of payday loan, installment credit and consumer behaviors, and proposes a new concept called “Consumer Finance Development Index”.Statistics from the research notes that, by the end of last month, the credit scale of consumer finance in China has reached more than 110 billion yuan with 3.7 million registered users.
The phenomenon of “Chinese companies lining up for an IPO in the United States or Hong Kong” has re-surfaced recently, Tiger Brokers, an online brokerage helping Chinese investors trade US- or HK-listed stocks, told chinadaily.com.cn Thursday.
Beijing-based Jianpu Technology Inc, which is 100 percent controlled by RONG360 Inc filed its preliminary prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, without the estimated IPO price range, on Oct 20.
Prior to Jianpu, Chinese online small consumer credit provider Qudian Inc made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Oct 18. Qudian priced its IPO of 37,500,000 American depositary shares (ADSs) at $24.00 per ADS for a total offering size of about $900 million, according to Xinhua News Agency. Qudian closed at $26.39 Wednesday after diving 7.24 percent, still above its IPO price.
Recently, Renrendai issued its performance report for the third quarter of 2017.According to the report, the cumulative turnover of the platform surpass 37.88 billion RMB, with 524 thousand transactions in total.
More details, Renrendai remained steady growth in the third quarter. The volume on the platform reached 6.51 billion RMB this quarter, a 109% increase over the same period last year, and the amount of money that investors earn is up 55% from the same period last year. In addition, the per capita borrowing amount on the platform is 80.8 thousand RMB, which represents the capital requirements of small business owners and self-employed people in the class, and always below the national regulations of loan balance ceiling of $200000.
On 27th October, the shares of Qudian tumbled again, closing down $3.59 to $22.8, down 13.6% below the offering price of $24 a share.
The company has fall into constant questioning just after it landed in the SEC. Luo Min, the CEO of Qudian, responded several questions through an interview Qudian’s Luo Min Respond To All, but this move has raised more query. Many media and media outlets gathered to lambast Luo Min for “lying” in her response.
On 23th October, Luo Min avoided all the media interviews again. Since then, the shares of Qudian began to slump, which closed at $26.39 on 26th Oct, down nearly 20 percent from the opening price of $31.89 on Wednesday.
Jianpu Technology Inc, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chinese fintech firm Rong360, has filed for a $200 million IPO in the US. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan are bookrunners for the deal, according to a stock exchange filing.
China is preparing to tighten regulation of online consumer lending as part of a campaign against financial risks, dealing a possible setback to Chinese fintech groups that hope to sell shares in the US.
Household debt in China remains low as a share of GDP, and authorities have encouraged growth of consumer credit as a way to rebalance the economy towards consumer spending, but now concerns are rising about irresponsible lending practices online.
Online consumer lending has replaced peer-to-peer lending as the trendy new area in Chinese fintech, as a regulatory crackdown on P2P reduced that sector’s profitability. Short-term consumer loans outstanding in China grew by Rmb1.49tn ($225bn) through the first nine months of this year, compared to an increase of Rmb830bn for all of 2016, according to PBoC data.
Chan also said the rapid growth of new fintech services, such as peer-to-peer lending marketplaces and online money market funds, was made possible by a lack of innovation by the country’s traditional banks in addressing the needs of not only the average consumer, but also many small and medium-sized enterprises.
High-flying start-up Ant Financial Services Group, which runs online payments service Alipay and money market fund Yu’ebao, has made AI a key driver for expanding its businesses and improving customer service.
China was the world’s second-biggest investor in AI enterprises last year, injecting US$2.6 billion into the sector, according to the state-run think tank, Wuzhen Institute. The United States topped the list with US$17.9 billion in investments.
What would your reaction be if you wanted to get a loan and your bank asks to go through your Facebook profile? In China, this is already happening on a large scale, but it’s not banks that are doing the rating—it’s the country’s burgeoning fintech companies. And it’s not Facebook they are looking at—its social platform WeChat and shopping website Taobao.
Social credit scoring analyses data from non-traditional sources: social media, online shopping, payment apps, cell phone accounts, and more. This type of scoring is meant to fill a gap for people who want a loan but don’t have any way of proving they can repay one. In order to gauge whether you are creditworthy or not, the score can take into account a number of variables: who your friends are, what you buy, whether pay your bills on time or even how much time you spend reading the user agreement. It’s like FICO but decidedly more creepy.
Alibaba was once a kind of shadow lender too. The company first started building its own credit scoring model to provide loans to Taobao vendors. For this, it relied solely on the platform’s ability to gather big data—transactions, user ratings, market positioning, and others.
Sesame Score (screenshot above) tracks five areas: identity information, such as information on users’ education and work, ability to keep financial obligations, credit history, behavioral preferences like shopping, money transfers, and connections with other people. In return, it offers deposit-free bike and power bank rentals as well as other benefits.
Yirendai (YRD) is a Chinese fintec company focused on facilitating unsecured loans. Leveraging the experience of its parent company, CreditEase, Yirendai has facilitated more than RMB 47 billion (US$7 billion) of loans since commencing operations in March 2012.
Financials and performance
Yirendai’s core business has seen rapid growth, facilitating over RMB 20 billion(US$3 billion) in loans in 2016, up 112% from 2015. The most recent forecastfrom the company expects loan volume to continue to grow through 2017, with RMB 35-37 billion (US$5.3-5.6 billion) this year. Earnings have been strong and growing as well, with net income for the six months ending June 30, 2017, rising from RMB 392 million to 620 million (US$58.9 million to 93.2 million) over the same prior-year period, translating to diluted earnings per ADS of RMB 6.71 to 10.26 (US$1.01 to 1.54) for the same periods.
China’s upcoming Social Credit System
Presently, eight companies have been licensed to develop algorithmic SCS scoring systems, including China Rapid Finance, a partner of social network TenCent (OTCPK:TCEHY) and Sesame Credit, which is run by Ant Financial, an Alibaba (BABA) affiliate.
Italian P2P firm BorsadelCredito.it has followed in the footsteps of its UK antecedent Funding Circle by launching a closed-end fund. The unlisted fund, which is called Colombo, hopes to raise €100m to invest across a 5 year timespan, and is managed by BorsadelCredito.it (through a vehicle named ART SGR SpA). The fund’s custodian bank is Caceis Bank.
By investing in Italian SME loans, originated exclusively by BorsadelCredito.it, the fund will target a yield of 5 per cent (5.5 per cent pre-tax).
To be or not to be a bank? That was the question asked by Funding Circle boss Samir Desai at the AltFi Europe Summit in London earlier this year (video below).
Desai left the audience in no doubt that Funding Circle has “no plans” to launch a bank. Later that same day, Zopa CEO Jaidev Janardana delivered his keynote: “Why we’re launching a bank”.
José Rego, who runs Portuguese P2P firm Raize, sees the issue as black-and-white.
“By definition, if you become a bank, you stop being an alternative lender,” he said. “Becoming a bank is an extremely complex and very expensive strategic decision which typically takes into consideration other elements besides the equity value generated by the alternative lending. Only a select number of platforms are likely to have the opportunity to become banks (if they wish so). So, in reality, I don’t think it should be something we’re thinking about within the industry.”
In a new report ‘Asset & Wealth Management Revolution: Embracing Exponential Change’, PwC anticipates that global Assets under Management (AuM) will almost double in size by 2025, from US$84.9 trillion in 2016 to US$111.2 trillion by 2020, and then again to US$145.4 trillion by 2025.
By 2025, AuM will have almost doubled – rising by 6.2% a year, from US$84.9 trillion in 2016 to US$145.4 trillion in 2025, with the fastest growth seen in the developing markets of Latin America and Asia Pacific.
While active management will continue to grow and play an important role, reaching $87.6 trillion by 2025 (60% of global AuM), PwC predicts growth in passive management to reach $36.6 trillion by 2025 (25% of global AuM).
If current growth is sustained, the industry’s penetration rate (managed assets, as a proportion of total assets) will expand from 39.6% in 2016 to 42.1% by 2025.
PwC anticipates assets growing at 5.7% a year in North America from 2016 to 2020, slowing to 4.0% per annum from 2020 to 2025, lifting assets from US$46.9 trillion to US$71.2 trillion over the nine years. Similarly, Europe is projected to grow at 8.4% and 3.4% per annum respectively over the two periods, with assets rising from US$21.9 trillion to US$35.7 trillion.
McKinsey said that the industry needs to continue its digital makeover to protect the up to 40 percent of revenues at risk by 2025 and prepare for competition from so-called platform companies like Bezos’s Amazon.com Inc.
As he extends Amazon’s reach, the Seattle-based company has had discussions with banking regulators about financial innovation, according to lobbying disclosures reviewed by American Banker. And it already has a small-business lending arm that has doled out more than $3 billion to more than 20,000 of the merchants on its e-commerce platform.
The global banking industry, which had an 8.6 percent return on equity last year, could offset the loss of profits from price competition by partnering with platform companies and generating more revenue from their data. Banks that go further by creating their own platforms could elevate their ROE to 14 percent, according to the report. ROE is a measure of profitability.
Furthermore with smartphone prices of $30 to $50, Asian markets maintain a robust mobile market. 76% of Taiwan is connected to mobile, and 70% of Myanmar is connected.
Experts estimate Asia as the region to become the fastest growing Internet region by 2020. And while their internet industry is flourishing, only 27% of Southeast Asians have a bank account. In 2017, China has 731 million internet users. That is only 53.1% of the population. China represents internet development at a fast pace, but it still has 21% unbanked. Internet traffic growth in Myanmar is at 58%, yet Myanmar is one of the lowest banking rates in Asia with over 70% of adults (aged 15+ years) unbanked.
As an example OECD research points out that financial sector works constitute 19% of the top 1% earners but the share of finance in the overall employment is only 4%.
In developed world, there are huge reserves of money lying in banks at sub zero, zero or miniscule interest rates. On the other hand in the developing world where there is a dearth of credit, loans can only be had at rates as high as 20-30%.
According to Eurostat, SMEs represent around 99% of all enterprises. In OECDcountries alone SMEs are responsible for job creation to the tune of 60-70%.
Source: Cryptocoins News
Karma plans to use the blockchain in such a way that individuals as well as legal entities can make the most of profitable relationships with each other. This will entail creating a community of participants, who will be able to lend money, borrow money, insure against default, Score loans and carry out assessments and even collections. All of this will be fuelled by the Karma token that will be at the centre of this new ecosystem.
The sale of Karma tokens is legal in all jurisdictions including the United States and China. Qualified US investors can participate. The basic price of Karma Token is US$ 0.01. Early investors can get discounts of 50% till US$ 1 mln is collected, thereafter 30% discount is available till US$3 mln is collected and 15% till US$ 8 mln is collected. There is a hard cap of US$ 10 mln on the token sale.
Though fintech can take many forms, “I think the disruption is really in the payer experience,” says Sharon Butler, EVP, education at Flywire, a global payment solutions company. “Essentially we are leveraging banking infrastructure. I think really what fintech is, is sort of the blend of the old and the new.”
Preceding the growth in cross-border tuition fee payment services, which track the money and file it instantly with minimum costs involved, were more staff resources sifting through multiple transactions and matching them to the student, coupled with uncertainty from the student’s side about when or whether the money would actually have arrived.
Improvements in payment services is one of the biggest ways fintech has benefitted students, agrees Devie Mohan, founder of fintech research company, Burnmark.
Fertile ground in China
Financial technology as an industry has grown globally at an unprecedented scale. Last year, fintech reaped $17.4 billion of venture capital investment – a colossal increase on the $2.5 billion it received just four years ago.
And $7.7 billion of this investment went to China, seeing it overtake the US as the top investment market for fintech companies for the first time.
A platform targeting the Chinese market has recently struck a deal to partner with ChinaPay, the online payment subsidiary of China UnionPay, one of the world’s payment giants.
The mobile payment industry is one which has grown particularly quickly in China in comparison with other countries around the world, predominantly led by Alipay and WeChat Pay. These two platforms combined saw $2.9 trillion in transactions overall last year.
Modernising student loans
But it was Prodigy Finance that entered the loan market specifically to serve international students. Since its inception in 2007, the platform has lent over $310 million to international students all around the world to study overseas, and is expanding its services.
Financial services startup Ethercash has proudly announced its Pre-ICO Campaign, which will raise funds to develop its blockchain-backed financial platform. The Ethercash platform aims to revolutionise three core functions of finance to bring greater transparency and security in the way we lend, send and spend. The Etherecash platform will allow its users to leverage their cryptocurrency holdings to acquire fiat currency loans without the need for credit history, through the application of lawyer-backed smart contracts. The Etherecash Pre-ICO campaign will run from October 25th, 2017 until November 7th, 2017 and ICO campaign will begin November 15th, 2017 and finish on December 19th, 2017.
Andrew Sieprath is among the first people in the Europe to embrace “open banking” as a customer.
His chosen banking provider is Revolut, which isn’t even a bank.
Revolut is just one of three “open banking” services due to launch here in the next few months. They will lead New Zealand into something of a banking revolution which threatens to do to banks what Uber is doing to taxi firms, and ultimately put more pressure on them to cut staff or close branches.
There are many emerging open banking models, but as a starting point, think internet banking that’s slicker, more intuitive, and allows users to see and manage accounts from multiple banks in a single place.
While the technology behind robo-advice is making it cheaper to invest, it doesn’t mean it is actually providing advice let alone the right advice, says the Association of Real Return Investment Advisers general manager Rebecca Jacques.
She told a recent Calastone forum that she put a few global and domestic robo-advisers to the test by giving each the same simplistic target: to pay her young children’s private school fees.
Every robo asked for a country of origin; only one asked for a tax bracket – but what was “scary” was that not one asked if the funds would be used for private school tuition, she notes.
IN the competitive fight against the big banks, smaller lenders such as credit unions find themselves hopelessly outgunned in terms of technology budgets.
But the chairwoman of the Customer Owned Banking Association said smaller lenders were taking opportunities to collaborate on budgets and spruce up their technological offering.
But the report found property transactions made up a very small part of that alternative financing industry, making up just $49 million, or 8%, of the $609 million dealt out in 2016.
Australia lags behind the Asia-Pacific average (excluding China) of 17% of alternative financing going towards real estate. The popularity of peer-to-peer property financing in South Korea is a big contributor to the high average.
The $49 million alternative lending spent on real estate in Australia is made up of $36 million in peer-to-peer lending and $13 million in crowdfunding. In the US, peer-to-peer is worth $1 billion and crowdfunding $800 million.
CrowdfundUP – The startup has so far allowed 2,000 people invest in 17 projects, with individual investments typically ranging from $5,000 to $2 million.
CoVESTA – The real estate on offer includes residential, commercial and even agricultural properties, with investors requiring to contribute at least 5% of the purchase price if they wish to be a tenant in the property. For passive ownership, just 1% ownership is required.
It has been observed that, when the P2P lending industry or any other industry is prudently regulated, it attracts more participation. In terms of P2P, the regulation will increase entry of investors as well as borrowers. This is a reason why RBI regulating the NBFC-P2Ps is a long-term positive for the Indian P2P lendingindustry.
RBI regulating the sector means dead-end for players that are looking only to generate money without adding any value.
However, the potential social benefits of P2P lending are contingent on a facilitative and proportionate regulatory ecosystem. A review of the P2P regulations issued by the RBI leaves much to be desired in that sense. Saliently, the P2P regulations delegate potentially arbitrary discretion to RBI in gatekeeping, impose high market-access barriers that would inhibit innovation in a technology-intensive sector, and lack clarity around critical issues like leverage ratio.
A. Excessive regulatory discretion: One of the principal governance issues of a modern state is injecting accountability into regulatory discretion.
B. Disproportionate minimum capital requirements: The RBI has prescribed a mandate that would require a minimum net-owned fund (NOF) of Rs2 crore.
C. Lack of clarity around critical issues like leverage ratio: Leverage ratio is defined as “total outside liabilities divided by owned funds, of the non-banking financial corporation in P2P (NBFC-P2P)”. This leverage ratio has been capped at 2.
The current marketplace for financial products in India is still highly inefficient, time-consuming & uncertain for customers – especially the SMEs and the MSMEs. When they require loans as working capital or for expenditures like purchase of raw materials, payment towards wages etc. to achieve scale and growth, approaching a bank directly or even visiting loan aggregator websites becomes challenging in terms of time & information. Also, due to varied risk appetite of traditional financial institutions, many SME and MSME entrepreneurs are often puzzled in terms of documentation requirements; different banks and lenders have their own set of risk parameters which they assess while sanctioning a lending facility. This results in high rejection rates within the loan ecosystem.
Why online lending is emerging as an enabler for India’s MSME industry
New-age fintech lending marketplaces endeavor to revolutionize the country’s financial lending patterns by changing the way it works. They are enabling easy access to loans by connecting these small businesses to financial institutions on a consolidated platform for quicker sanctions. Such neutral platforms, with customer-centric features offering a wide range of loan products and end-to-end loan fulfillment, enable MSMEs to concentrate on building their businesses rather than worrying about finances to fulfill the gap in their cash flows or fund their expansion and growth.
While the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) guidelines for lenders and borrowers on peer to peer (P2P) lending platforms are important cautionary moves, caps on lending should ideally be linked to lenders’ incomes, Neha Agarwal, co-founder of i2ifunding, told Shritama Bose. The company has disbursed more than Rs 3 crore so far in FY18 and has a full-year target of Rs 10 crore, she added.
We have had more than 30,000 registrations on our platform so far, of which around 25,000 people are registered as borrowers and around 5,000 as lenders. Since launch, around 500 loans have been disbursed and we have around 2,000 active lenders.
The average loan size is about Rs 1.5 lakh.
Almost 90% of the lenders have invested more than once. Around 40% of lenders are lending regularly on our platform.
Gregor has a company in Singapore where individuals can securely store their gold and silver.
Using peer to peer lending you can withdraw up to half of your holdings in loans at low-interest rates. For example, if you have $100k worth of gold you can deposit and take out a loan for 50k at around 3.5% interest per year.
The fast growing Fintech industry is another feather in the cap of rising Asia. According to EY FinTech Adoption Index 2017, there is a palpable global shift of fintech activities from the UK and the US to Asia.
Source: e27
Another report provided by KPMG and CB Insights says in 2016, investments in Fintech companies in Asia hit $8.6 billion across 181 deals.
Source: e27
In light of this, fintech innovation labs and fintech accelerator/incubator spaces are rapidly growing throughout Asia, especially in Hong Kong. The FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific is collaboration between Accenture and leading financial institutions including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, and Standard Chartered, etc.
A bout of high-profile mega-rounds in the Chinese market has also played a vital role in uplifting Fintech investment. One such activity was a whopping US$4.5 billion funding round by Ant Financial, an affiliate of Alibaba group. The other smaller but successful funding rounds in China during 2016 were: US$73 million to Quant Group, and US$30.4 million to China Rapid Finance.
According to a recent research conducted by Startupbootcamp FinTech Mumbai and PwC, it was found that more than 95% of financial service companies are seeking partnership with Fintech startups through collaboration rather than competing with them.
Another report regarding Indian Fintech ecosystem is more interesting. It says Indian Fintech market is expected to double from current US$1.2 billion to US$2.4 billion in 2020.
Tan, who formerly partnered with Sequoia Capital Asia, said his Singapore-based fund is looking for ambitious, strong Korean tech startups to invest in what could become the next unicorn.
He believes Asian-based VCs have a competitive advantage over established VCs from Europe or the US in the region as they can effectively tackle the needs of startups.
Fintech and software as a service, especially targeting small and midsized businesses, are the buzzword in Southeast Asia, according to Yoo Jung-ho, investment manager at Korea Investment Partners.
“In many of these countries, payment, banking abd finance, are still in a nascent stage with only 10 percent of the population utilizing credit and banking services,” said Yoo. “There is a great demand for firms that provides peer-to-peer lending and payment services. “So companies that target small and medium enterprises that make up the majority in Southeast Asia, will have a fighting chance.
According to recent reports, only 12 percent of households in Malawi have access to credit. With 65 percent of the population living under the poverty line, the rural population is especially vulnerable to the limitations of credit.
In today’s modern age, a physical bank is no longer needed to conduct financial services. Virtual and automated banking is expected to replace 30 percent of bank roles in the next ten years. These virtual banks even the playing field for Malawians by allowing consolidated rates, 24/7 access to services, and a location for information about other services. Some of these alternative, virtual services include:
Personal Loans: To find a personal loan, Malawians can use search sites such as this example from Finland.
Peer to Peer Loans:Rather than receiving a loan from a financial institution, peer to peer loans allow people to receive a loan directly from an individual financer. In order to apply for a loan, you must visit a peer to peer lending platform such as Prosper or Perform, and the online marketplace will match borrowers and lenders. Although the site still uses credit scores, individuals may have more sympathy towards you and your situation as opposed to a national bank.
Crowdfunding:Another way to finance an opportunity is through crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is a fairly recent innovation that utilizes crowdsourcing as a way to raise funds for a project or business.
The change in financial technologies in the coming years will have a great impact in Malawi, and create more access to services for the entire population.
The Canadian Lenders Association (CLA) and the Innovative Lending Platform Association (ILPA) today announced the introduction of the SMART Box™ into Canada – a model pricing disclosure and comparison tool that will enable Canadian small businesses to better assess and compare their finance options. Top small business lenders in the country, including Company Capital, Evolocity Financial Group, IOU Financial, Lendified, Merchant Advance Capital, OnDeck and Thinking Capital, have committed to adopt the tool for use by their customers.
Lendified, a Canada-based lender who provides small business loans online has entered into an agreement with ClearFlow Commercial Finance to increase its lending capacity. According to the lending platform, through the agreement, ClearFlow is providing it with a $60 million credit facility to fund loans delivered through its website.
Finn.ai, the award-winning, AI-powered virtual assistant built for banking and personal finance, today announced it has raised $3 million in its recent institutional financing round.
Ron Suber Joins Credible as Executive Vice-Chairman (Credible), Rated: AAA
Renowned fintech executive, advisor and investor Ron Suber has joined personal finance marketplace Credible.com as executive vice-chairman and a member of the board of directors.
“It’s been extremely exciting to see the Credible team turn a startup with a promising business model into a fast-growing company that’s respected by consumers, lenders and the industry” Suber said. “I have decided that now is the right time to help Credible seize their broader opportunity in the fintech ecosystem.”
The older vintages have longer lines, as they have more months of history. Using this data, we can examine how loans booked at different times compare to each other at equivalent periods in their life-cycle. This can help an investor evaluate their current portfolio and help them make comparative judgments about its performance.
Source: Orchard Platform
Factors to Consider Within Vintage Analysis
Interest Rates
Source: Orchard PlatformSource: Orchard Platform
Credit Grade
Vintage analysis can also help us to see how loans within a particular credit grade perform over time. In our prior analysis, we examined the performance of the top graded loans (A for Lending Club and AA for Prosper). However, as time has passed, these two platforms have increasingly been lending to borrowers with credit just below the top grades.
FICO Score and Debt-to-Income Ratio
From the data below we can see how loans from Lending Club charge-off over time controlling for the debt-to-income ratio of the borrower.
Nearly 20% year-over-year revenue growth: Revenues totaled $150.5 million, an 18.7% increase from $126.8 million for the prior-year period.
Almost 29% year-over-year growth in loans receivable: Combined loans receivable – principal, totaled $481.1 million, a 28.7% increase from $373.7 million for the prior-year period.
Stable credit quality: Loan loss provision was 48.0% of revenues and within our targeted range of 45%- 55%. The ending combined loan loss reserve, as a percentage of combined loans receivable, was 13.8%, lower than the 15.7% reported for the prior-year period.
Customer acquisition costs within targeted range: The total number of new customer loans for the quarter was approximately 66,000 with an average customer acquisition cost of $294, within our targeted range of $250-$300.
Second consecutive quarter of net income: Net income of $3.0 million, or $0.08 per diluted share, versus a net loss of $7.5 million, or $(0.59) per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2016.
Adjusted EBITDA margin: Adjusted EBITDA totaled $19.8 million, up from $7.3 million in the second quarter of 2016. The Adjusted EBITDA margin increased to 13.2% from 5.8% for the prior-year period.
Second Quarter 2017 Business Highlights
Elevate IPO. On April 6, Elevate began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the “ELVT” ticker symbol.
$200 Million in Outstandings for Elastic. Just a year after achieving $100 million in outstandings, Elastic surpassed $200 million in total principal outstandings, with more than 120,000 open accounts.
Elevate Labs Launched. The Company launched Elevate Labs, including its new San Diego-based Advanced Analytics Center, underscoring its approximately $40 million annual investment in state-of-the art technology and data science.
RISE Enters Kansas with Line of Credit Product. Bringing additional responsible loan opportunities to non-prime consumers and expanding its product offering, RISE entered its 16th state, Kansas, the first state where RISE offers a line of credit product.
Savings for Customers. The average effective APR of its products for the quarter was 131%, down from 148% in the same quarter last year. The Company estimates indicate that Elevate’s products – Rise, Elastic and Sunny – saved customers approximately $304 million in the three months ended June 30, 2017 versus payday loans.
According to the company, revenues for the quarter totaled $150.5 million – an 18.7% increase versus year prior where Elevate delivered $126.8 million in revenue. Elevate reported net income of $3.0 million, or $0.08 per diluted share, versus a net loss of $7.5 million, or $(0.59) per diluted share, for the second quarter of 2016.
Combined loans received were said to total $481.1 million, an increase of 28.7% from $373.7 from year prior quarter.
Prosper Marketplace, one of the largest marketplace lenders, is discontinuing the Prosper Daily app.
The app, formerly known as BillGuard and a favorite of many fintech insiders, helped users protect their identities and monitor their credit scores.
The online lender said it will no longer have access to users’ financial accounts once the app is discontinued and that it will reimburse annual subscribers.
To be a digital lender, banks and credit unions must do more than provide a digital app. Internal lending processes must be transformed to eliminate friction and unneeded steps, with artificial intelligence (AI) supporting proactive loan decisions.
According to PwC, a financial organization must initially define what is desired from both a customer experience and operational efficiency basis around consumer lending. Next, banks and credit unions must build a digital lending strategy around the following organizational competencies. The path to becoming a true digital lending organization involves five steps.
User-Centric Design
Data-Driven Decision Making
Flexible Infrastructure
Effective Development Approach
Organizational Agility
Digital Borrower Expectations
The expectations of the digital borrower have increased over the past several years, mostly based on marketplace offerings and digital experiences in other industries. While the interest rate and closing costs on loans are still primary considerations, the speed, simplicity, transparency and customer service of the entire process is important.
According to the PwC report, Consumer Lending: Understanding Today’s Empowered Borrower, three out of four demographic segments prefer to be online for each phase of the lending process as opposed to traditional methods, such as in person or on the phone.
While some lender apps offer the higher-ranking features – such as the ability to calculate the loan amount that the borrower can afford and the ability to lock in an interest rate on a loan, most of the other features are still not offered by most organizations.
Being a Digital Lender is More Than Just Fewer Clicks
To become a digital bank, organizations need to think beyond ‘minimizing the number of clicks’, reducing manual data entry, and improving the speed of decisions.
The process of becoming a digital lender for the long-term moves investments from ‘digital features’ to a ‘digital mentality’ and process that can support changing digital lending options. It is a major move from investing in just digital output to investing in the digital input that works behind the scenes. It is a strategic framework for the future of digital lending.
PeerStreet Integrates with Personal Capital to Provide More Detailed Investment Overview (PeerStreet Email), Rated: A
PeerStreet, an award-winning platform for investing in real estate backed loans, has announced an integration with Personal Capital, powered by the Envestnet | Yodlee Data Aggregation Platform. Customers of both Personal Capital, an automated investment service with more than $4.8 billion assets under management, and PeerStreet can now view their PeerStreet positions within the context of their investment portfolio on Personal Capital.
Realty Mogul’s REIT Turns One (Realty Mogul Email), Rated: A
Celebrating its one year anniversary, MogulREIT I recently declared its twelfth consecutive month of 8% annualized return on investment. With ten assets across the country, MogulREIT I is a diversified portfolio of commercial real estate investments designed to provide consistent cash distributions, while protecting and returning capital contributions.
Money360, a direct marketplace lender focused on commercial real estate, today announced that the company closed $143 million in loans in the second quarter, marking the lender’s best quarter to date. Money360 has now closed more than $350 million in total loans and is on pace to close more than $500 million by the end of the year. On average, the company is now closing $50 million in loans each month.
A few of the $143 million in loans closed in the second quarter include:
A $15.6 million bridge loan for a three-tenant medical office property in Grand Forks County, North Dakota.
A $11.1 million bridge loan for the acquisition of a multi-tenant retail property in Wayne County, Michigan.
A $9.7 million bridge loan for a two-story, 198-room hotel property in Cumberland County, North Carolina.
The assault on the Wells Fargo brand continues, with a lawsuit accusing the bank of pushing almost 250,000 of its clients into delinquency by forcing them into auto insurance they didn’t need — or even ask for, Bloomberg reports.
The bank allegedly made millions of dollars off unsuspecting clients, according to the proposed class-action lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court and cited by the newswire.
Wells Fargo allegedly didn’t check whether its clients taking out auto loans already had auto insurance, or ignored the fact that they did, Bloomberg reports.
Markel co-CEO Richard Whitt III on the $919M acquisition of State National
We, like a lot of people, are starting to look at the insurtech space. And State National, I think they are ideally situated to sort of be the go between the insurtech folks and sort of your standard insurance carrier types. It’s a clash of cultures there, I would say.
The insurtech folks are used to things happening lightening fast and with minimal regulatory issues and all that and that’s not insurance. So there almost needs to be a translator between insurtech folks and standard insurance folks. And that is a role that State National plays…And we see them helping us with our insurtech initiatives sort of being that translator between us and those folks.
Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg: “Change is coming”
But with that said, change is coming. And we are not alone in terms of carriers improving their capabilities, because of what technology brings that will lead that change. It’s around data, it’s around straight through process, it’s around data that improves the customer experience, while at the same time improving your ability to select risk and to do it quickly i.e. in seconds and to be able to then straight through process business.
You taking out a loan for your business and technology enables those other forms of distribution. The customer will buy it from a desktop, the customer will buy it from a mobile device, they will buy it any time anywhere and they will service it anytime anywhere.
Into this void steps Fluid, the brainchild of Timothy Li, our next guest on the Lend Academy Podcast. He has found a unique way to provide students access to credit and consequently a way to start building their credit while they are in college. Fluid provides small loans of up to $500 at 0% interest. It is a fascinating idea that we explore in some depth on the show.
Financial system regulatory costs continue to climb in part due to it being rife with problems that led to 45% of financial intermediaries, such as money transfer services and stock exchanges, experiencing economic crime. Blockchain increases transparency and decentralizes the financial system with encrypted, unforgeable records embedded in a secure network. By reducing transaction costs and removing intermediaries, blockchain technology is poised to increase mass peer-to-peer collaboration, which could make existing financial organizations unnecessary.
Automated investment services, sometimes referred to as robo-advisors, are emerging as an easily accessible, cost-efficient solution to managing assets with 24/7 availability and annual fees of .2% to .5%, making it substantially less than typical rates.
The financial technology upsurge is bringing accessibility and availability to the forefront, making existing banking options resemble archaic institutions. With apps that let you make quick, feeless transactions (such as Venmo) and peer-to-peer lending platforms (such as Lending Club), customers and millennials are welcoming these innovative platforms. According to a 2015 report, 75% of millennials visit bank branches either once a month or less than that, and 38% of them don’t use a branch to perform banking activities.
Fintech, however, is fostering financial inclusion and building public confidence, evidenced by mobile platforms such as M-Pesa reaching 80% of households within four years.
Dallas- based 2020 REI Group has announced the creation of a data services and technology division to further their mission of providing products and services to real estate investors nationwide.
The new division will be labeled as REI Data Systems and will be led by Mike Inman, Vice President of Technology for 2020 REI Group. Inman was most recently IT Manager of Application Development for the City of Grand Prairie and has a vast background in cloud based applications, GIS mapping, mobile applications, and data analytics.
The official launch for InvestorWell will be mid-August. The platform will help real estate investors find funding for their projects based on eight simple questions.
Long-term saving is a classic case study in behavioural biases. These must be managed and mitigated – whether it is through digital or face-to-face advice.
Inertia is one such bias. While people will generally put off taking action, research has shown that if they are intimately involved in preparing a plan, they are more likely to stick to it. The most committed planners also tend to be the most financially literate.
While robo-advisors are getting lots of press at the moment, they are mostly just a delivery mechanism. A nice user interface should not be a substitute for solid advice that ultimately addresses a key financial and behavioural problem. Digital poor advice is still poor advice.
Users should be asked, in non-misleading terms, whether they want a basic, average or luxury retirement lifestyle.
The language should be free of jargon and go to the heart of the users’ problem.
The tool should allow users to be actively involved in making the trade-offs based on their unique needs, wants and circumstances.
In the real world, however, insurance coverage hasn’t kept up with the social and economic changes of recent years. Sharing economies have gained scale. Jobs have gone from full-time to gig-based. And the vast millennial generation has entered adulthood intent on completing any complex transaction in a couple of minutes online.
So far this year, insurance-focused startups have raised more than $700 million in venture funding, according to Crunchbase data, with significant backing from both traditional VCs and large insurers. The lion’s share of investment has gone to companies pioneering and popularizing coverage categories and delivery models, with a particular focus on millennial customers.
One of the most richly funded players in this space is Trōv, which has an app for quickly insuring personal and work items like laptops, smartphones and high-end cameras. The five-year-old company raised a $45 million Series D round in April led by reinsurer Munich Re, bringing total funding to nearly $90 million.
Cover, which just closed an $8 million Series A, offers a similar service. Customers take a picture of the item they want to insure and Cover offers a policy, underwritten by a partner insurance firm.
One of the most richly funded insurance startups over the past few years is Metromile, which insures based on how much customers drive. Rack up few miles, and pay little beyond a small monthly base rate. Drive more, and it goes up. U.K.-based Cuvva, meanwhile, has raised seed funding to build out insurance offerings for short-term use of a car, for people learning to drive and for people who drive very little.
Silicon Valley-based Hippo is also marketing itself as a new kind of homeowners insurance company, with policies that offer stronger protections for common valuables like home electronics.
For short-term rentals, meanwhile, Slice Labs is partitioning off a space.
Next Insurance, founded last year, sells coverage for yoga instructors, photographers, home contractors and others whose needs don’t always fit with standard insurance policies. The Silicon Valley company raised $48 million to date from VC and insurance industry backers. Bunker, which bills itself as an insurer for freelancers and independent contractors, is also scaling up. The San Francisco company closed a $6 million Series A round in May.
One is Ladder, which has raised $16 million to build out a platform for offering direct-to-consumer term life insurance online. Another, Brooklyn-based Fabric, has raised $2.5 million for its digital platform offering instant quotes on accidental death coverage, as well as broader life insurance policies.
