News Comments Today’s main news: LendingPoint closes $178M personal loans securitization. OnDeck hits $879M in online financing in Texas alone. RateSetter adds three products. Funding Circle lenders face longer cash out waits. Yirendai files Form 6-K. Today’s main analysis: International P2P lending volumes for August 2019. Today’s thought-provoking articles: Silicon Valley is building a social […]
Silicon Valley is building a social credit system like China’s. This is an excellent read. While there seems to be some evidence that social credit data is useful for determining risk to lenders, consumers are growing more weary of the tactics used to gather that data.
P2P lending volumes for August 2019. Bondora, Fellow Finance, Mintos, and Thincats report milestones in cumulative volume. Total volume across the board was 634 million euros.
Fall conference season. A great list of must-attend conference to attend from September to December from Los Angeles to China.
LendingPoint, the company revolutionizing and democratizing commerce, announced today that it closed its inaugural securitization of consumer loans. LendingPoint Receivables Trust 2019-1 (“LDPT 2019-1”) issued $177.85 million of notes backed by a pool of $187.22 million of direct-to-consumer loans originated on the LendingPoint platform.
The LendingPoint Receivables Trust securitization was rated by Kroll Bond Rating Agency, Inc. and includes $117.76 million of Class A notes rated “A-“, $24.74 million of Class B notes rated “BBB-“, $23.68 million of Class C notes rated “BB-” and $10.67 million of Class D notes rated “B-.” The notes priced at a blended yield of 4.05% per annum and provided for a 95% advance rate. The transaction has a 5% overcollateralization Deposit and a 5% overcollateralization Target. The risk adjusted yield of the receivables securing the notes is expected to be 13.14% per annum.
OnDeck today announced that TyMac Electric of Plano, Texas is its Small Business of the Month for August, 2019. The 30-person company serves the Dallas-Fort Worth area with high-quality, professionally managed electrical services.
Over the last two years, OnDeck has provided additional financing to TyMac Electric as the business grew to meet demand in the Dallas-Fort Worth commercial marketplace.
Overall, OnDeck has provided more than $879 million in financing online to small business owners in the State of Texas.
Have you heard about China’s social credit system? It’s a technology-enabled, surveillance-based nationwide program designed to nudge citizens toward better behavior. The ultimate goal is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step,” according to the Chinese government.
Many Westerners are disturbed by what they read about China’s social credit system. But such systems, it turns out, are not unique to China. A parallel system is developing in the United States, in part as the result of Silicon Valley and technology-industry user policies, and in part by surveillance of social media activity by private companies.
Real estate investment platform Fundrise has raised over $22 million for their Opportunity Fund. The information was revealed in a recent Form D 5o6c filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Data is the new oil, as the saying goes, and today Kabbage — a fintech startup backed by SoftBank that has built a business around lending up to $250,000 to small and medium enterprises, using AI-based algorithms to help determine the terms of the loan — is picking up an asset to expand its own data trove as it looks to expand into further SMB financial services. The company has acquired Radius Intelligence, the marketing technology firm that has built a database of information on some 20 million small and medium businesses in the U.S.
Nonbanks and alternative lenders have garnered attention in the banking industry due to their ability to partner with legacy banks and utilize technology to make financial transactions more efficient and convenient for users.
Challenger bank Chime has reached 5 million customers in the U.S. The San Francisco-based startup is creating an FDIC-insured mobile bank without any physical branch. The company also promises fewer fees.
Back in March, Chime said it had 3 million customers when it announced its $200 million Series D round. So that’s 2 million additional customers in roughly 5 months.
Even Financial, a four-year-old New York-based provider of APIs for financial services search, acquisition, and monetization, today announced that it’s raised $25 million in a strategic round of investment co-led by Citi Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, with additional participation from LendingClub. Existing backers American Express Ventures, Canaan Partners, F-Prime Capital, GreatPoint Ventures, and Goldman Sachs also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total raised to $50 million.
Credit Sesame — which lets consumers check their credit scores and evaluate options to rebalance existing debts and loans to improve that score and thus their overall “financial health,” in the words of CEO and founder Adrian Nazari — has raised $43 million. With the company already profitable and growing revenues 90% each year for the last five, Nazari said that this round is likely to be the last round the company raises before it goes public.
Household debt in the U.S. continues to rise and as of this year now stands at nearly $14 trillion.
CrowdBureau Corporation, a fintech startup and index provider, has closed $1.1 million Series A equity funding to expand its series of benchmarks and launch a pilot program for its patent-pending regulatory technology product. The round, which values the company at $9.7 million, was led by Clydagh Limited, Estuary Holdings Ltd. and Alpama Limited along with existing investors.
A growing number of companies are helping workers gain access to payroll advances and loans, reflecting concern over the impact money problems are having on productivity levels and worker retention.
Employers including Walmart Inc. and Pima County, Ariz., have recently added these services. The aim is to help cash-strapped employees, many with damaged credit, cover unexpected expenses without resorting to high-cost debt.
Lendingblock, the regulated, open exchange for institutional borrowing and lending of digital assets, today announces the launch of its institutional lending platform on September 3, 2019. The lending product, which is a reinvented version of securities lending from traditional capital markets, is the first exchange fully dedicated to pure crypto lending and aims to support the needs of the broader cryptocurrency market by providing a secure and liquid venue for lending and borrowing needs of institutional market participants.
Upon launch, Lendingblock platform users will be able to borrow and lend BTC, ETH, PAX and USDT on a fully collateralized basis, for loan terms of 1, 7, 14 and 30 days, with a minimum trade size of $100,000 equivalent of a specified digital asset.
News Comments Today’s main news: N26 raises $170M at $3.5B valuation for U.S. launch. OnDeck, Upserve partner on restaurant financing. Quicken Loans has best quarter in history. Curve raises $55M at $25M valuation. Lufax to bow out of P2P lending. Goldman funds Lendable. Today’s main analysis: Is America ready for challenger banks? (A MUST-READ) Today’s […]
A German smartphone bank backed by billionaires Peter Thiel and Li Ka-shing has raised new funds at a valuation of $3.5 billion, making the company one of Europe’s highest valued non-listed fintech firms.
N26 GmbH extended its Series D funding round by $170 million to a total $470 million, the Berlin-based company said on Thursday.
OnDeck (ONDK) and Upserve today announced a partnership to provide Upserve’s restaurant customers with online financing options from OnDeck. Over 10,000 restaurants currently use Upserve’s restaurant management platform and Point of Sales (POS) software to manage relationships with more than 57 million active diners.
Detroit-based Quicken Loans, America’s largest mortgage lender, today announced that the second quarter of 2019 was the best in the 34-year-old company’s history.
The second quarter of the year was the first three times the company has originated more than $10 billion in a single month, with each month setting a new record for the highest closed loan volume – culminating in June being the best month in Quicken Loans history. In June, the company closed nearly $11 billion in mortgage volume, contributing to the $32 billionoriginated for the quarter.
For 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages, approximately 56.8% of purchase borrowers received offers of 4.25% or less. That is down from 60.1% of borrowers the previous week. A year ago, 0.07% of offers were under 4.25%.
Across all 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage purchase applications on LendingTree, 4.0% was the most common interest rate. This rate was offered to 15.4% of borrowers.
Of 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage refinance borrowers, 70.6% received offers of 4.25% or less, which is down from 72.8% the previous week. A year ago, no refinance offers were under 4.25%.
Across all 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage refinance applications, the most common interest rate was 4.0%, offered to 17.95% of borrowers.
Mortgage Rate Competition Index
Across all 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage purchase applications on LendingTree, the index was 0.99, down from 1.19 the previous week.
How big of a deal is it to get a mortgage APR that’s 0.99 percentage points lower than the competition? Over 30 years, that could translate to $47,073 in savings on a $300,000 loan (see Mortgage Savings Tracker graphic below).
The index was wider in the refinance market at 1.10, down from 1.35 the previous week. Refinance borrowers could have saved $52,554 by shopping for the lowest rate.
FinTechs lenders meanwhile are white-labelling banking services to complete the customer product roadmap while awaiting a charter. SoFi Money, WSFS, Radius Bank and its deposit partnerships with FinTechs are great examples of this.
This week, Boston-based Radius Bank is looking to adopt the user-friendly style set forth by the aforementioned European banks.
At a time when U.S. consumers are increasingly becoming comfortable with branchless banking and alternative financial providers, is there room for alternative digital-only banks with zero name recognition? Recent announcements by Germany-based N26 and U.K.-based Monzo that they will be entering the highly competitive U.S. in the next few months will provide a good test of the viability of foreign-based banking competition.
N26 Invites 100,000 Wait-Listed U.S. Consumers To Open Accounts
According to N26, there will be a staged rollout beginning immediately, with the 100,000 people on the U.S. wait list being invited to sign up and have full access to the product.
Is Monzo the ‘Bank of the Future’?
Referring to itself as the “bank of the future,” Monzo has also begun marketing efforts in the U.S., hoping to disrupt the traditional banks and credit unions in a way similar to what they have done in the U.K. Valued at more than $1 billion, Monzo has a mobile-only customer base in the U.K. of 2.2 million customers.
Challenger bank Varo, which has raised $179 million from Warburg Pincus and TPG, just took a big step that might separate it from competitors like Chime and Monzo.
In the past year Varo has tripled its customer base and is expected to reach 750,000 registered customers this month, Walsh said.
Specifically, Dimon said the bank learned how to conduct digital account openings through Finn and that the process was shaved down to just a few minutes. CFO Jennifer Piepszak added that 25% of new account openings at Chase are now digital signups rather than through a bank branch. The bank reported it has opened 2 million accounts digitally.
The bank had pulled the plug on the digital-only offering in June, just a year after its launch, and rolled some of Finn’s most popular features into Chase’s main mobile banking app.
The largest U.S. bank on Tuesday reported a drop in bond trading and cut its full-year outlook for net interest income — revenue from customers’ loan payments minus what the bank pays depositors — by $500 million. NII accounted for about half the New York-based company’s revenue last year.
Navient Solution’s next securitization of private student-loan refinancing will involve only loans primarily issued to advanced-degree professionals by online lender Earnest – which Navient acquired in 2017.
The $535.2 million Navient Private Education Refi Loan Trust 2019-E will include two tranches of Class A notes with preliminary triple-A ratings from DBRS and S&P Global Ratings. The Class A-1 fixed-rate notes total $263 million, while the $228 million in Class A-2 notes will be divided into fixed- and variable-rate tranches.
Research-driven, professional investments in real estate have traditionally been reserved for family offices and institutional investors. Now, a swathe of new technology platforms and consumer products are revolutionizing the industry, opening up access and shifting valuations.
According to a new survey from Bankrate, over one-third of millennials say real estate is the best way to invest money they won’t need for at least 10 years, more than the share of millennials surveyed who prefer stocks, savings accounts and certificates of deposit (CDs), gold, bonds, and cryptocurrency.
The plain truth is that there will never been such a thing as “Amazon 1-Click for real estate.” The end-to-end logistics solution for buying and managing property has not yet been perfected. Whilst there are a lot of great technology solutions being developed for the property industry they typically tackle just one or two specific pain points in a broader transaction. In isolation, these solutions have less impact on the overall customer experience because their piece is just one of a much larger puzzle. As an example, there’s not much point streamlining the purchase itself if the legal documents and mortgage approval take weeks of frustrating back-and-forth, duplicating much of the same process and paperwork.
With all the attention given to angel and venture capital, you might think that these financing options are the most likely to be used. To the contrary, debt is by far the dominant form of outside funding used: for example, 86% of $1 — $10 million companies seeking outside financing applied for a loan compared to 5% seeking equity financing, according to The 2018 Small Business Credit Survey.
However, since the late 1990s, as banks have consolidated and sought out more profitable sectors of the credit market, they have been shifting activity away from the small business credit market, according to Why Small Business Lending Isn’t What It Used to Be.
The Boston-based software company announced Monday it has raised $150 million in new funding to expand its team and issue more financing backed by its machine learning algorithms.
Most of the cash—$130 million—for Lendbuzz is in the form of debt financing from four banks and an insurance company to fund car loans through the startup’s platform. The rest is an equity investment led by venture capital investor 83North.
AlphaSense has attracted $50 million from investors including Soros Fund Management and Innovation Endeavors, in a fresh round of funding that will help the company expand its artificial-intelligence-powered offering for asset managers.
According to the draft bill, titled “Keep Big Tech Out Of Finance Act,” companies in violation would face a $1 million daily fine.
The legislation would apply to companies with $25 billion or more in annual revenue.
As the draft stands now, it would prohibit Facebook (FB) and other tech companies with at least $25 billion in revenue from becoming a financial institution or issuing a cryptocurrency.
A former manager at PayActiv, a San Jose startup that provides payday advances, is accusing the company of racial discrimination and questionable business practices.
Ibarra said in his lawsuit that he was the only Hispanic employee when he was hired in 2014, the year the company was founded. The co-founders are of Pakistani descent, the suit said.
Pedro Ibarra said he was fired because he complained about being harassed by the company’s founders over his ethnicity, and because he raised concerns about PayActiv’s handling of user data and whether the company is acting like a regular payday lender and therefore should be classified as a creditor.
A new crop of digital wallets, apps and financial tech companies are fighting for customers’ banking business. The push comes as federal data shows the Tampa Bay region hit a six-year high for the number of people living without banking accounts or easy access to credit.
CrediVia launched last fall as a hospitality financing marketplace intent on driving smarter decisions and stronger engagement in the loan process. Today the company has announced expanded platform capabilities to execute multifamilydeals as well, part of its ongoing mission to become the preferred source for more effective and transparent commercial real estate lending.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has posted final judgments in the case of real estate crowdfunding platform iFunding and co-founders William Skelley and Sohin Shah. The two founders were charged last year by the SEC Enforcement Division regarding allegations of fraud in the misappropriation of over $1.17 million from investors. The final judgments against Skelley and Shah were obtained this month.
Lending Express evolves into Become (Become email), Rated: B
Cross River Bank (“Cross River”) today announced that it has appointed Melissa Ballenger as its Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, effective immediately.
SecurCapital Corp, an expanding supply chain and financial services provider headquartered in California, today announced the acquisition of the lending business of Breakout Capital Finance, a fintech company and nationwide small business lender. SecurCapital is also providing additional equity capital to drive growth in Breakout Capital Finance’s two primary lending products: its highly regarded and innovative term-loan product and its FactorAdvantage lending solution for small businesses that utilize factoring to finance their business. The acquired lending business assets will be operated by a subsidiary of SecurCapital that will conduct business as Breakout Capital.
Online travel agency CheapAir.com today announced an expansion of its travel budgeting tool in partnership with Affirm, giving customers the opportunity to prequalify for a travel budget and then book and pay for all elements of their trip over time.
Each year the online loan marketplace LendEDU ranks programs based on its 50-point scale. This year, the Sokolov-Miller Family Center moved up two positions, tying for 13th place.
Curve, the London-based “over-the-top banking platform,” has raised $55 million in new funding. The startup lets you consolidate all of your bank cards into a single Curve card and app to make it easier to manage your spending and access other benefits.
Curve’s Series B round is led by Gauss Ventures, the London-HQ’d fintech investor, alongside Creditease, IDC Ventures and previous backer Outward VC (formerly Investec’s INVC fund).
IT’S OFFICIAL – the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will soon make it mandatory for all peer-to-peer platforms to introduce an “appropriateness test” for new investors.
The purpose of the test will be to weed out any unsuitable lenders, and any potential lenders who do not fully understand the risks associated with P2P.
Funding Circle [FCH], an online lending platform that enables individuals and companies to lend to small businesses, is the latest example of a hyped IPO from a business yet to turn a profit. A few lacklustre earnings announcements later, it appears the stock was indeed overvalued.
What metrics can traders look out for when weighing up a stock amid such an increasing amount of cash-burning companies looking to go public?
LENDY investors are likely to receive an average of 57p on the pound for development finance and 58p for every pound from bridging loans funded on the collapsed peer-to-peer lending platform.
The document shows that 22 of the 29 bridging loans made via the platform are in insolvency proceedings, with 14 out of 25 development loans in the same situation.
The document reveals the outstanding value of the bridging loans is £36m, secured against assets historically valued at £81m.
Innovate Finance has just published its Q2 UK Fintech investment report tallying activity for the first half of 2019.
The most recent report from Innovate Finance, covering Q1 of 2019, indicated that overall investment into Fintech, including venture capital, angel investing, private equity etc., topped $1 billion. In brief, Fintech boomed in Q1 as the industry experienced a 41% growth versus the prior quarter (Q4). Comparing to Q1 of 2018 it quadrupled.
Investment in UK fintechs in the first half of this year was £2.9bn, which is 85% of the total invested in 2018, according to figures from fintech industry body Innovate Finance. It is also 45% higher than the same six month period last year. London based companies took 90% of this.
For example challenger banks including OakNorth ($440m), Monzo ($147m) and Starling Bank ($98m) got the most significant investments. In payments and foreign exchange sectors Checkout.com ($230m), WorldRemit ($175m) and GoCardless ($76m) were major recipients.
Around four million people in the UK have subprime credit cards, charging interest ranging from 30% to 70% – compared to the average 20% APR on mainstream deals.
LendIt is returning to London again for the sixth annual LendIt Fintech Europe event. It will be held on 26 – 27 September at the same location as last year, the Business Design Centre. We are expecting well over 1,000 people at the event this year.
Some of the featured keynote speakers this year will be:
Independent luxury fashion retailer Jules B has six stores across the Lake District an Newcastle, as well as a strong online presence.
To that end it has been working with fintech company Klarna to provide more payment options, which he says allows it to “compete in that marketplace for the younger generation.”
Lufax, one of China’s largest online wealth management platforms that is backed by financial giant Ping An Insurance (601318.SS), plans to exit its once-core peer-to-peer lending (P2P) business, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
China is on the cutting edge of the fintech industry and promises great opportunities for fintech talent, fuelled by a rising demand for financial services and technology professionals, according to Hays plc, a global professional recruiting group.
As stated in its press release, the leading Swiss-based regulated cryptocurrency broker and financial services provider, has applied for a banking license with FINMA, following the Swiss Banking Act Art. 1a.
The firm claims it has also achieved several significant milestones in recent months, including the expansion the number of tradable digital assets, with more than 6,000 trading pairs, as well as the provision of a large scale collateralized crypto lending service to its institutional clients.
Goldman Sachs and personal loan startup Lendable from the U.K. have reached a £200m deal, in a sign of Goldman’s confidence in the startup, according to a report by the Financial Times.
Zac Prince is CEO of BlockFi, which helps crypto investors manage digital assets and grow their net worth through services such as Bitcoin loans. Frank Chaparro and Ryan Todd discuss the complexity of crypto loans and the future of the industry.
RateSetter’s personal loans and secured automotive offering will be made available to Australian Finance Group’s (AFG) broker network of over 2,900 from 22 July.
The P2P lender provides risk-based pricing for its personal loans, with interest rates starting at 5.49%. The loans range from $2,001 to $45,000 for terms between six months to five years. Creditworthy borrowers typically gain access to finance within 24 hours of filling out the five-minute application.
OnDeck Australia has joined the lending panel at Finance & Systems Technology (FAST), in an arrangement that will help facilitate more opportunities for FAST brokers interested in expanding into the SME lending channel.
With the official cash rate sitting at just 1.00% following two RBA rate cuts, you may have noticed a flurry of home loan rate drops, with some lenders slashing rates towards the 3.00% mark and below.
Competition is heating up in Singapore’s digital banking landscape as an increasing number of fintechs including e-wallet operators and payment services providers are looking to apply for when applications open in August.
Strong contenders for the Singapore’s digital bank licenses
Liquid Group, Xfers, MatchMove Pay, FOMO Pay, Razer and Singtel would be competing against the likes of Grab, Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing giant and the region’s first “decacorn,” Validus Capital, a peer-to-peer lending platform, and InstaReM, a remittance startup, which are also eyeing a digital bank license.
In June, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said that it will issue up to five new digital bank licenses, comprising up to two digital full bank licenses and up to three digital wholesale bank licenses.
Finally, accountants should also focus on financial crime compliance, which must evolve to keep up with new business models such as peer-to-peer lending, the minister said.
Ramsey will also introduce HousingHub, a new initiative for B.C. Housing to provide more affordable rental and ownership housing for middle-income individuals and families.
Small businesses can apply for a short-term loan of up to $250,000 online, and if they qualify, the funds can be delivered electronically to the business in as little as one business day.
The agreement will use OnDeck’s data analytics and digital technology to make real-time lending decisions and Coast Capital Savings to provide the financing.
News Comments Today’s main news: FDIC opens comments on Special Purpose National Bank charters. Plaid raises $250M. P2PFA member lending exceeds 10B GBP. ThinCats raise 200M GBP. Bondora originates almost 8M euro in loans in November. Klarna joins Shopify Plus Partner Program. Nubank launches debit card. Today’s main analysis: Trends in credit card debt. Today’s thought-provoking articles: Consumer credit market poised […]
FDIC seeks comments on fintech bank charters. The Trump Administration may have just opened the door wide for OCC bank charters. They want to encourage more bank startups, which is good if they are the right bank startups. More of the same won’t cut it.
Formation of new banks post-crisis is historically low. More banks have failed since 2009 than have new banks opened.This trend could leave some communities severely underbanked.
The FDIC wants to encourage new banks to startup and wants innovative FinTech firms to be part of that process. The agency wants to streamline its application process and is seeking comments on how that can be done.
The company is today announcing a $250 million Series C investment led by famed venture capitalist and the author of the Internet Trends reportMary Meeker, who will join its board of directors as part of the deal. The funds were raised at a valuation of $2.65 billion, according to sources close to the company. Capital from Meeker’s investment came from Kleiner Perkins’ growth fund — where Meeker has been a partner since 2010 — not from the reported billion-dollar-plus solo fund she’s in the process of raising.
New investors Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Coatue Management also participated, as did existing investors Goldman Sachs, NEA and Spark Capital.
Low unemployment rates and continued positive growth in both GDP and real disposable income are among the key drivers that will propel the U.S. consumer credit market in 2019. Partly due to the strong performance of these economic indicators, TransUnion’s (NYSE: TRU) 2019 consumer credit forecast found that originations and consumer balances are expected to increase for most credit products, while serious delinquency rates will likely decline or remain steady.
Source: Globe News Wire
A few outliers in the forecast come by way of serious credit card delinquency rates and originations as well as mortgage originations. Credit card delinquency rates are expected to rise from 1.94% in Q4 2018 to 2.04% in Q4 2019 as a shift toward more non-prime consumers with access to credit cards will likely negatively impact originations and consequently the serious delinquency rate.
Source: Globe News Wire
TransUnion Forecast: Top Consumer Credit Trends for ‘19
Trend #1: There’s Room for Growth in Personal Loans
Personal loans continue to display signs of strength, and total balances are expected to climb 20% to an all-time high of 156.3 billion by the end of 2019.
Trend #2: Affordability May Impact the Auto Industry
It’s also worth noting that the number of auto loan originations is expected to end 2018 at 28.5 million and grow to 29.4 million in 2019. This is a significant increase from recent years (27.5 million in 2017, 28.3 million in 2016, 28.0 million in 2015). This growth is expected to be driven from both ends of the risk spectrum. Yet as the growth continues, the serious delinquency rate is anticipated to remain muted, ticking up to 1.44% in Q4 2019, an increase from the expected 1.43% in Q4 2018 and the 1.43% mark observed in Q4 2017.
Trend #3: Homes Becoming More Expensive, but Home Equity Increases Could Be a Boon to Consumers
Mortgage originations have declined the past several quarters, a trend that is expected to continue into 2019. Rising interest rates, increasing home prices, and supply constraints are driving lower origination numbers. Average balances will continue to trend upward in 2019, growing from an anticipated $208,831 at the end of Q4 of this year to $218,490 by the end of Q4 2019, a 4.6% increase.
Trend #4: More Near Prime Consumers will Carry a Credit Card
Near prime consumers are expected to increase their origination share to 19.1% in 2019, up from 18.3% in 2018.
Americans repaid $40.8 billion in credit card debt during Q1 2018 – the second-largest quarterly payoff ever. But we added almost $38 billion back to our tab in Q3 and Q2 2018. We also began the year owing more than $1 trillion in credit card debt for the first time ever, after adding $87.3 billion to our tab in 2017.
Americans started 2018 with more than $1 trillion in outstanding credit card balances for the first time ever, and we are on pace to begin 2019 in even worse shape.
Cities with the Highest & Lowest Credit Card Debts
Percentile*
City
Median Credit Card Debt
Cost to Pay off
Months & Days Until Payoff
99
Colleyville, TX
$5,593
$880
24 months and 28 days
99
Darien, CT
$7,935
$1,167
23 months and 8 days
99
Park City, UT
$5,376
$720
21 months and 5 days
99
Fairbanks, AK
$4,655
$620
21 months and 2 days
99
Summit, NJ
$4,953
$655
20 months and 29 days
99
Leawood, KS
$4,857
$642
20 months and 29 days
99
The Woodlands, TX
$5,088
$670
20 months and 27 days
99
Mill Valley, CA
$5,110
$672
20 months and 26 days
99
Needham, MA
$4,393
$577
20 months and 25 days
99
Sammamish, WA
$4,386
$575
20 months and 24 days
99
Durango, CO
$3,583
$466
20 months and 17 days
99
Lafayette, CO
$3,600
$467
20 months and 16 days
99
Juneau, AK
$4,166
$540
20 months and 16 days
99
Southlake, TX
$5,988
$775
20 months and 14 days
99
Ridgewood, NJ
$5,625
$727
20 months and 14 days
99
Hoboken, NJ
$3,570
$456
20 months and 6 days
99
Westport, CT
$6,112
$770
19 months and 30 days
99
Winchester, MA
$4,618
$580
19 months and 28 days
99
Highland Park, IL
$5,379
$672
19 months and 24 days
99
Bethesda, MD
$4,599
$573
19 months and 22 days
99
Wasilla, AK
$4,693
$584
19 months and 22 days
99
Monument, CO
$4,157
$514
19 months and 17 days
99
Newton, MA
$4,014
$494
19 months and 15 days
99
Lafayette, CA
$5,028
$618
19 months and 13 days
99
Scarsdale, NY
$5,231
$641
19 months and 11 days
99
Bloomfield Hills, MI
$4,552
$557
19 months and 11 days
99
Deerfield, IL
$4,698
$575
19 months and 10 days
99
Woodinville, WA
$4,331
$528
19 months and 8 days
99
Brookhaven, GA
$4,221
$513
19 months and 6 days
99
Hingham, MA
$4,571
$554
19 months and 4 days
*99th Percentile = Least Sustainable Credit Card Debt
Single women own considerably more homes than single men do. On average, single women own around 22% of homes, while single men own less than 13% of homes.
Oklahoma City was the metropolitan area where single men own the largest share of owner-occupied homes, at 16%. Even though single men own a greater proportion of homes in Oklahoma City than they do elsewhere in the country, they still own fewer homes than single women, who own 24% of residential properties in the area.
New Orleans was the metropolitan area where single women own the largest share of owner-occupied homes. In this area, single women own nearly twice as many homes than single men do: 27% compared with 15%.
The OCC’s quarterly metrics report, released Tuesday, showed continued improvements in credit quality of mortgage loans at banks. But it also noted that the report is based on $3.26 trillion in principal balances, representing 32% of all mortgages in the U.S. Ten years ago, that figure was $6.1 trillion in mortgage balances, representing 60% of all outstanding mortgages.
Subprime personal loan balances have been climbing since 2014 and are forecast to increase 20% next year, to a record $156.3 billion, according to credit-scoring firm TransUnion. The last three months of this year will be the biggest quarter ever for origination, accounting for some 5 million loans.
San Francisco-based Affirm, founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, is one of the leaders in point-of-sale loans and is available at more than 1,200 US retailers. The company says its lending process allows it to approve far more applicants across the credit spectrum than traditional lenders.
Payday lending has also increased. These days, this type of high-interest, short-term debt often takes place online through installment loans. San Francisco-based LendUp is an example of the new breed of payday lenders, charging annual percentage rates that can range from 30% to more than 1,300% depending on the type of loan, according to a report by NerdWallet.
Digital banking platform Good Money just raised $30 million in a Series A funding round to continue developing its app.
Led by Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital (via its Galaxy EOS VC Fund), participants in the funding round included Breyer Capital, Blocktower Capital, Boost VC, Ken Howery, BlockChange Ventures, Cross Culture Capital, Troy Carter, Mitch Kapor, Peter Diamandis Blake Mycoskie and Justin Rosenstein, among others.
Personal safety is a real concern Americans have about the sharing economy, according to a new survey commissioned by insurance company Lloyd’s.
The sharing economy includes companies that use data and develop platforms to connect people, including ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, apartment and home lending sites like Airbnb and VRBO, as well as peer-to-peer lending, reselling, co-working, and freelancing sites, per Forbes.
The analysis showed that 60 percent of American consumers believe they are putting their personal safety at risk by using sharing services because it means interacting with strangers, and 58 percent think that the risks outweigh the benefits.
Admiral Realty Capital’s new private placement, Fund V, is engaged in providing financing to Puainako Heights Land Investment, the master-developer of a subdivision on the Big Island with over 330 single-family homesites. The offering is featured on the Boston-based crowdfunding platform Investors’ Harbour.
Different than most existing crowdfunding platforms, Investors’ Harbour does not feature an avalanche of small “fix-and-flip” projects handled by real estate enthusiasts. With a very low acceptance rate, Harbour only hosts larger-scale construction programs, conducted by commercial development firms with admirable track record.
Bloqboard – a non-custodial digital asset lending platform for collateralized loans originated, settled, serviced, and managed on the Ethereum network and powered by Dharma and Compound – has today announced the release of a new feature they call ‘Offers to Lend’. This provides lenders with the ability to offer prospective borrowers their cryptoassets for peer-to-peer loans issued on the Dharma protocol.
Blockchain enabled payments company Wyre today announced a partnership with bZx, the protocol that powers decentralized margin lending. bZx will incorporate Wyre’s KYC/AML solution for DEXs to offer compliant trading.
Digital business bank Tide has reached 56,000 SME customers, accounting for one per cent the UK’s 5.6m SMEs. The bank has more than doubled the number of customers using its services in the last 12 months.
SANCUS BMS has prepared itself for a no-deal Brexit and tightened its credit processes to protect itself from a market slowdown, its chief executive has said.
Sancus BMS, which comprises the peer-to-peer lenders Sancus Finance and Sancus Funding, sent out an email to its community on Wednesday.
OakNorth – the bank for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs – has today announced that it will be expanding its lending operations to Manchester to deal with increasing demand for its loans across the North of England.
Founded in 2015 with £1m in funding, Onedox helps people manage household bills and expenses by allowing them to connect their different accounts including gas, electric, internet, mobile, and insurance. The service – which is free of charge – allows users to stay on top of their bills while receiving personalized recommendations for saving money by switching to new providers.
China Lending Corporation has announced the launch of its new supply chain financing services, which include a business factoring program.
In addition, China Lending has acquired 98.04 percent equity interest in Hangzhou Zeshi Investment Partners, which will enable China Lending to launch its new supply chain financing services in the near future, including financing products design, related corporate financing solutions, investments and asset management, and more.
China’s financial technology, or fintech, sector, has suffered this year due to a slowing economy and stricter financial regulation. In the peer to peer lending sector, hundreds of firms have shut down due to inability to comply with regulations or insolvency. So, what can we expect from this industry in the near future?
Peer to peer lending platform Bondora says loan originations almost hit €8 million during the month of November. This follows a record-breaking month of October
In November, Bondora issued €7,894,070 of new loans, just ahead of the record set for originations in the previous month of €7,802,163.
Thanks to everyone who joined us at LendIt Fintech Europe 2018. Below you will find all of the presentations from the event. You can also view the photos from LendIt Fintech Europe 2018.
Keynotes
Joel Perlman, OakNorth Holdings – The OakNorth Growth Story – from Startup to Profitable Unicorn
YouHodler is a crypto-backed loan service provider. This established blockchain platform allows users to acquire loans instantly, by leveraging their cryptocurrencies for EUR or USD.
The company offers the highest loan-to-value ratio in the entire industry – up to 80%. And, unlike its competitors, it accepts five of the top cryptocurrencies as collateral, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ripple. Short-term loans are available at a low interest rate of just 2.5%.
THE ability for small businesses in Northern Ireland to access alternative forms of finance has become a vital factor in their successful growth, the head of a Belfast accountancy firm insists.
Since the financial crash and credit crunch, the funding void left by traditional lenders has been filled by boutique funders and alternative finance, which can allow SMEs to access finance for a variety of different needs, from long term investment through to funding for short term working capital.
Klarna announced today that they are among the first payment service providers to join the Shopify Plus Technology Partner Program, focusing on high-growth and high-volume merchants. This integration will allow merchants in Germany, the UK and the US to easily implement Klarna’s smoooth payment suite and offer a superior customer experience and thereby unlock additional growth potential.
In a press release on Tuesday (Dec. 11), Cred revealed the rollout of its developer platform CredX (not to be confused with the new credit card accounts payable solution recently launched by Finexio). The Crypto-Lending-as-a-Service (CLaaS) solution enables other crypto companies — including exchanges, crypto wallets or mining services — to integrate Cred’s lending functionality into their own solutions. Its set of application program interfaces (APIs) enable businesses to use crypto as collateral to access corporate financing products.
A new parliamentary inquiry has begun scrutinising the behaviour of payday lenders, buy-now-pay-later firms, and credit repair agencies.
Vulnerable Australians are agreeing to share their internet banking passwords so payday lenders can see their transaction history before lending them money, an inquiry has heard.
Communication and Informatics (Kominfo) Minister Rudiantara said the ministry had shut down 400 financial technologies (fintech), consisted of sites and applications, related to fraud cases on online loan services that are recently rampant in Indonesia.
The Indonesian Fintech Joint Funding Association (AFPI) asked the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH) to open the identities of 25 peer to peer (P2P) lending organizers or registered online loan services that are said to have made violation.
South Korean fintech Toss has raised an $80 million funding round led by US-based firms Kleiner Perkins and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Altos Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, PayPal, and Qualcomm Ventures, among others. This brings Toss’ valuation to $1.2 billion, making it the latest fintech unicorn globally, and Korea’s first.
Toss started out offering peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, but has since added other services —including insurance, investments, savings accounts, credit score management, and a financial dashboard that allows users to see all of their finances in one place — by partnering with third parties. Toss already has 10 million registered users, meaning it reaches around 20% of Korea’s population with its services.
“A lot of the traditional models are not applicable to onboard those people into financial systems,” says Sarah Zhang, co-founder of Singapore-based Points.
That’s where Points – also called PTS – picks up the slack. Founded last year, the blockchain-powered startup uses AI and big data to assess factors like an individual’s occupation, bill payments, and shopping activities to calculate a credit score.
Brazilian fintech Nubank has launched a debit function for its card offering as well as the ability to withdraw cash from ATMs, in a move that aims to extend its reach to as many as 120 million customers.
The startup created in 2013 and valued at over $4 billion
News Comments Today’s main news: OCC approves fintech charter. Microsoft, Nationwide invest in BlueVine. UK overtakes US in fintech investment. P2PFA members take in over 300M GBP from IFISAs. Today’s main analysis: Trump Administration hugs fintech. Today’s thought-provoking articles: Online lenders, payment companies can act more like banks. How Revolut reduced fraud by 30%. Chinese P2P lending under severe challenges. Fintechs […]
OCC moves forward with fintech charter. This has to be the best news of the year so far. Washington has long proven itself to be on the side of the status quo, so this long-awaited move was anticipated with some nervousness. The sitting president, however, being unpredictable, and his administration equally so, this isn’t as surprising as it seems, but it is most certainly welcome and should give another boost of momentum to the sector.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced Tuesday that it would move ahead to consider special-purpose charter applications from fintech firms, ending the guessing game over whether the agency was serious about giving fintechs a federal option.
The decision, unveiled just hours after the Treasury Department released a report endorsing a national fintech charter, means fintech firms that opt for the charter could soon be regulated more like banks on a national scale.
The Treasury Department released a report today with more than 80 recommendations that are aimed at tailoring regulations for nonbank financial institutions and encouraging the development of financial technology.
Source: U.S. Treasury DepartmentSource: U.S. Treasury Department
A report out of the Department of the Treasury on Tuesday notes that the growth of marketplace lending has fueled ABS deals in the sector.
Marketplace lenders have originated some $100bn in loans since 2014, with unsecured consumer debt accounting for 50% of total volume.
The strong pace of originations has fueled consumer securitization issuance, with the number of marketplace loan ABS deals ballooning every year since 2013.
Online lenders and other so-called fintech firms — including the payment processor Square, the online lender Lending Club and the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase — have pressed for regulatory routes that would let them cut through the thicket of state and federal laws that govern financial businesses.
Heeding those requests, the Treasury Department released a 222-page report laying out the Trump administration’s view on how nonbank financial companies should be regulated. Hours later, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a national bank regulator, announced a new kind of charter that would potentially free such companies from the state-by-state approvals they currently need to offer loans and other financial products.
We appreciate the Treasury’s recognition of the vital role performed by state regulators in overseeing nonbank financial service providers. And we are pleased that Treasury noted the substantial progress states have made towards harmonizing the multistate experience for industry.
At the same time, we disagree with certain Treasury recommendations. We do not support creation of new federal rules or unauthorized federal charters that would seek to compromise the ability of state officials to apply and enforce state laws. And so, we disagree with Treasury’s recommended changes to the valid-when-made doctrine and the true-lender doctrine, and the creation of an OCC special purpose bank charter for fintech companies.
An OCC fintech charter is a regulatory train wreck in the making.
Fintech startup BlueVine has added $12 million to its recently announced series E round of funding, bringing Microsoft’s venture capital (VC) unit M12 onboard alongside the VC arm of finance giant Nationwide.
BlueVine has now raised around $590 million in funding since its inception, though it’s worth noting that around three-quarters of that came in the past year via debt financing.
On average, veterans are getting, through us, about 2% to 3%lower interest rates than nonveterans. That’s an internal discount that we give. Comparing us to an OnDeck or a Kabbage, we are probably half the average APR of OnDeck and probably a quarter of Kabbage. They may disagree with that, but that’s our numbers.
Notably, a group of lenders that is currently not subject to licensing – those making loans between 7 and 16 percent – would have to become Licensed Lenders. As a result, those lenders would have to complete the licensing process, pay the associated fees, and would then be subject to supervision and examinations by the NYDFS.
Additionally, any nonbank that lends to a New York borrower, either directly or through a partnership, would have to comply with New York’s usury limit. This rule is already in effect for servicers that acquire loans originated by banks, due to the Second Circuit’s decision in Madden v. Midland Funding. However, the NYDFS recommendation would potentially expand that rule to loans originated by lending companies organized by Native American tribes, among other situations.
Gusto, which sells payroll, benefits and human resources management and monitoring services to small businesses, has raised $140 million in its latest round of funding.
The company said it will use the money to add new services to increase payment flexibility for employees. The company launched a new service called Flexible Pay, which gives employees a way to get paid no matter when a company’s pay schedule dictates. It seems sort of like a payday loan, where a percentage of the salary is taken by Gusto for providing money upfront.
Before I catch on the specific highlights for Q2, I’d like to restate, as I usually do, our commitment to use technology and advanced analytics to be the most responsible lender in our space and to make a positive impact in the lives of our customers. As Slide 3 shows, we’ve now extended more than $5.9 billion in credit to more than 2 million nonprime consumers. We’ve come to call the 170 million consumers in the U.S. and U.K. who are credit constrained, the new middle class. And we’re proud to announce on this call that Elevate products have now saved our customers more than $4 billion over what they would’ve paid for legacy products like payday loans.
Elevate Credit (NYSE:ELVT) updated its FY18 earnings guidance on Monday. The company provided EPS guidance of $0.55-0.90 for the period, compared to the Thomson Reuters consensus EPS estimate of $0.72. The company issued revenue guidance of $790-810 million, compared to the consensus revenue estimate of $803.81 million.
Several brokerages have recently weighed in on ELVT. Zacks Investment Research upgraded shares of Elevate Credit from a hold rating to a buy rating and set a $11.00 price objective on the stock in a report on Tuesday, July 24th.
A year in, Zelle’s reviews are mixed. Usage is up, but most banks haven’t signed on, meaning many consumers can’t use it without downloading a separate app. It also fell short of its goal to have 33 banks on the network by its first anniversary, and behind the scenes, it runs on plumbing that’s more than 40 years old.
Zelle’s rocky debut shows the challenges of trying to make alterations to an industry often slow to change and still weighed down by old infrastructure.
For startups, they are not the obvious places to settle down. While fintech is flush with venture capital, three states — California, Massachusetts and New York — gobble up 75% of all VC funds. Yet if there is a good time to go against the odds, it might be now. These days, it has become fashionable for venture capitalists to say they are scouting for opportunities beyond the coasts.
Most visibly, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest seed fund, co-founded by AOL co-founder Steve Case, continues to make a splash by investing in all kinds of startups across America to promote growth and increase investment capital. As Case blogged, “People know that the future of America is tied to more than just three cities, and there is an eagerness, now more than ever, to address the investment gap.”
Legislation to enhance credit scores by allowing consumers to include data about their monthly bills has broad bipartisan support, but some consumer advocates and others question whether the legislation may backfire on those it is meant to help.
The measure, which passed the House earlier this month and is authored by Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., is intended to allow consumers to benefit from positive information about lease, telecommunications and utility payments in their credit reports. An identical version has been introduced by Sens. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., in the upper chamber.
Last week, LendingTree acquired Student Loan Hero for $60 million. In an interview with Business Insider, Josuweit reflected on how his view of the student-loan industry had changed since launching his business.
Today, Student Loan Hero offers users financial-comparison tools and personalized advice for paying off student loans, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
Josuweit said he had also softened his stance on student loans in general. Where he once saw them as predatory, he now considers them a valuable tool when used wisely.
Blockchain’s Spring Labs names Peter Tapling, an identity and payments expert, as chief commercial officer and head of industry relations. He will be responsible for overseeing Spring Lab’s network development, industry awareness, partnerships and commercialization. He will report directly to CEO and Founder of Spring Labs, Adam Jiwan, and will be based in Spring Labs’ Chicago office.
The UK has overtaken the US in terms of fintech investment for the first half of the year, and taken the top spot in Europe to attract $16.1bn (£12.3bn) out of the EUs $26bn total.
Four of Europe’s top 10 fintech deals happened in the UK, which included a $250m raise by Revolut, $100m by eToro, $60m by Flender and $54m by Moneyfarm. Data provided by KPMG’s pulse of fintech report has allayed fears that Brexit would hurt the UK’s startup scene, as venture capital firms have cemented the UK’s position as a funding hot spot.
Fintech investment across the world reached record levels over the last six months, taking in $57.9bn across 875 deals. This was an increase of 34.2 per cent compared to the whole of 2017, which recorded just $38.1bn overall.
Members of the Peer-to-Peer Finance Association (P2PFA) have seen 28,000 Innovate Finance Isas (IFIsas) opened, with more than £300m of funds already under management, according to the latest figures.
The six P2PFA member platforms which offer an IFIsa are:
• Crowdstacker
• Folk2Folk
• Funding Circle
• Landbay
• Lending Works
• Zopa
UK-based neobank Revolut launched disposable virtual cards in March , and has now reported that they resulted in a 30% reduction in card fraud cases.
Disposable virtual cards provide users with card details that get destroyed right after making an online purchase, and new details are made seconds after the previous ones are scrapped. This way, a merchant can’t charge the customer again, as they don’t have the person’s actual card information.
This fraud reduction announcement comes at the right time for Revolut. Earlier in July, we reported that the neobank had discovered potential money laundering activity on its digital payments system a few months back. It informed the National Crime Agency (NCA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), suggesting that the severity of the issue was high, as conventionally companies just inform the NCA.
It’s an industry that has often come under intense scrutiny, but the high cost short term loans sector has seen a significant increase in consumer confidence. This comes as a result of the FCA facilitating dramatic changes and the enforcement of new regulations. In fact, a recent review by the FCA has stated that the noticeable improvements in the payday loan industry means that it will now not be reviewing this sector again until 2020. We take a look at the reasons why the FCA has successfully increased consumer confidence in the high-cost short term loan industry.
According to the U.K. Peer-to-Peer Finance Association (P2PFA), a self-regulating P2P industry group that includes most of the biggest names in U.K. marketplace lending, the country’s P2P lending industry had hit £9 billion in loan originations from the group’s members as of Q1 2018.
The figures also reflected having provided finance for approximately 50,000 businesses and 221,000 individuals overall, with a total investor count of about 150,000. According to the The Times of London, those figures are even higher – though they agree on the 150,000 investor count, they think about £10 billion in total loans have been underwritten.
The Financial Conduct Authority, the UK’s chief financial watchdog, has just spent months investigating the sector, where it has already intervened with new rules once to safeguard investors. Now the FCA says the sector has further problems that must be addressed, including poor standards of disclosure, opaque pricing structures, over-optimistic marketing claims and poor record-keeping. It is consulting on a series of potential reforms and has also warned individual businesses in the industry could be investigated for compliance failures.
Much of the regulator’s ire is reserved for the peer-to-peer lending sector, where online platforms facilitate loans from investors to consumers or small businesses. While defaults have been relatively rare – though the regulator points out most platforms have not been tested through a complete economic cycle – the FCA is worried that investors are sometimes being given false expectations about the returns they should expect.
Past economic turbulence, the recession, and the uncertainty over Brexit and its impact on future investments, has made it imperative for every investor to keep an eye on their investments. Individual Saving Accounts (ISAs) are a great way to earn tax-free interest on your investment. But which ISA is the most profitable? This question can now be easily answered with the new online service offered by QuickISA.
Legal & General’s (LG) fintech business has made a £3 million investment in Smartr365, a Software-as-a-Service firm which supplies systems to the UK mortgage intermediary market.
Conor Murphy, director, Smartr365, says the new funding will be used for product development – such as its LendrConnect, a mortgage API service that allows brokers to submit mortgages.
Back then new platforms were launching pretty much every day as p2p lending became the hot new investment. The number of platforms grew to well over 3,000, a number that everyone agreed was not sustainable. But new platforms kept on launching, attracting both investors and borrowers with relative ease.
We all knew the party was going to end at some point and it looks like 2018 will be the year of reckoning. According to industry data provider, Wangdaizhijia (loosely translated as Online Lending House), platforms are failing at a rate of around five a day with 114 platforms shutting down between July 1 and July 24.
But in the lead up to the company’s IPO earlier this month – which continues to be a rocky one – its founder LEI Jun went all in to deliver his bigger vision: Xiaomi isn’t a gadget maker, it’s an internet company. One that gathers data from a network of smartphones and other internet-enabled devices, and sells additional “online services” – things like utility apps and content, created by partners. In other words, a platform business built around the Xiaomi brand and gadgets ecosystem.
Well, large parts of China’s P2P sector were crumbling after a government crackdown. For some, it came too late – they had trusted sites with their savings in hopes of getting the promised returns.
Xiaomi had an explanation: It doesn’t have anything to do with those lenders. It only let them use its platform for advertising purposes.
Irish accountancy firm Big Red Cloud raises thousands in partnership with alternative-lending firm Flender.
Alternative-lending platform Flender has added another successful SME funding partnership to the pile, with Irish accountancy software company Big Red Cloud raising €31,500 in just 24 hours.
SMEs benefit from different lending models
O’Dwyer said it was encouraging to see the normalisation of alternative-lending models such as Flender as a credit option for SMEs and a novel opportunity for investors.
In the first half of 2018, the total assets increased significantly from EUR 445.2 million to nearly EUR 665.5 million. Customer deposits continue to be the dominant amount on the liabilities side with EUR 599.3 million and therefore 90%.
The company’s interest result increased due to the expanded lending volume from TEUR 2,047 in the first half of 2017 to TEUR 3,429 in the first half of 2018. The commission result remained almost constant at TEUR 8,108 in the first half of 2018 (30th June 2017: TEUR 5,818).
There were 70 mergers and acquisitions among fintechs in the U.S., Canada and South America in the first quarter, and those deals were worth a combined $3.4 billion, according to a fintech investment report issued by KPMG on Tuesday.
The number of deals fell to 60 in the second quarter, but the total value rose to $5.8 billion. M&A activity in this field is expected to remain “very healthy [in] 2018 on the whole,” the report said.
The investment flow is also breeding new companies looking for bank clients. American fintechs, the report noted, attracted $14.2 billion in overall funding in the first half of 2018.
What that means for all banks is when it comes to tech, there’s plenty to ponder: more options for their front- and back-office operations; more retail and commercial service improvements to consider; more new vendors that will be seeking their business; and more fintech investment opportunities to pursue.
China came in second place with $15.1bn, followed by the US with $14.2bn.
Four of Europe’s top 10 fintech deals happened in the UK, which included a $250m raise by Revolut, $100m by eToro, $60m by Flender and $54m by Moneyfarm. Data provided by KPMG’s pulse of fintech report has allayed fears that Brexit would hurt the UK’s startup scene, as venture capital firms have cemented the UK’s position as a funding hot spot.
Fintech investment across the world reached record levels over the last six months, taking in $57.9bn across 875 deals. This was an increase of 34.2 per cent compared to the whole of 2017, which recorded just $38.1bn overall.
The way I view it is that interval funds are a great blend of the traditional closed-end fund that Tortoise is used to managing, along with the traditional mutual fund that we also have managed in the past and still do. Compared to other registered fund structures, they’re obviously less liquid than a mutual fund and a traditional closed-end fund, but they’re great for more long-term investors that aren’t looking to need liquidity quite as often. From our fund’s perspective, you can subscribe daily. You only have the option to redeem at certain periods, and that’s typically between 5 and 25 percent on a quarterly basis. From a liquidity standpoint, obviously, this is nice for folks that aren’t qualified purchasers that aren’t getting exposure to traditional private funds in the limited partnership structure.
Estonia-based startup CoinLoan has officially launched its crypto-to-fiat lending platform that allow users to HODL crypto and borrow fiat money.
For borrowers, the platform allows them to create an application for receiving a loan in the amount that does not exceed 70 percent of the current market value of the crypto collateral. This limitation has been created for preserving the crypto assets of the borrower and reducing risk related to the high volatility of the crypto asset market.
The platform currently supports bitcoin, ethereum, Litecoin, Dash, ZCash, and Ripple. Users can borrow a loan in the following fiat currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, CNY, JPY, RUB, CHF, PLN and CZK.
A blockchain solution for global peer-to-peer lending is on the horizon, adding an exciting layer to an already booming sector which is expected to reach the $1 trillion mark by 2025.
The problem is, some aren’t excited by blockchain’s arrival. Experiencing Déjà vu? It’s easy to be transported back to the 1990s when the Internet was dismissed as just a “wasteland of unfiltered data”.
FintruX Network, the global P2P lending ecosystem, has just announced a new addition to its Board of Directors, Bob Rinaldi, a serial entrepreneur and business director. FintruX Network is an online ecosystem that facilitates the lending and borrowing of finances to small businesses in a peer-to-peer marketplace powered by blockchain and no-code development.
Heartland Bank says it’s planning a corporate restructure that will remove business growth constraints stemming from Reserve Bank regulation, and see it list on the Australian sharemarket.
The proposal is for a restructure of the Heartland Bank Ltd group of companies via a court approved scheme of arrangement under Part 15 of the Companies Act. The purpose of the restructure is to more clearly define the separation between Heartland Bank Ltd’s New Zealand and Australian businesses, and to enable it to access the most efficient forms of equity and debt funding, according to an NZX filing.
Over the past couple of years, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) in India have undergone major transformations to keep up with the growing demand in the country’s credit market.
Subsequent to the ease in regulations, a number of new NBFCs were established to supply credit to consumers. However, access to financial services was only restricted to a small segment of consumers/ borrowers with existing credit histories and profiles.
On the other hand, the unbanked sections of the population, or those with limited exposure to institutional credit were not affected much with these developments, finding themselves in more or less the same situation as before.
As the peer to peer lending market is quite embryonic, processional expertise is recommended to make sure the transactions are compliant and in keeping with existing and developing regulations.
Any new lending schemes in this field must be registered with the Central Bank of Uruguay, and payments must be legitimate and in line with existing regulations for the Prevention of Money Laundering.
Indonesian P2P firm Investree has announced the closing of a Series B investment in a round led by SBI Holdings and joined by Mandiri Capital Indonesia, Persada Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, 9F Fintech Holdings Group and previous backer Kejora Ventures.
The financial details of the round were not disclosed.
News Comments Today’s main news: SoFi launches SoFi Money. Robinhood in talks with regulators about bank products. Orca Money plans to double in size this year. Monzo, TransferWise partner. Banco BNI Europa drops 50M Euro into Linked Finance. Today’s main analysis: FREED 2018-1 Deep Dive. Today’s thought-provoking articles: What financial service firms can learn from direct-to-consumer companies. Graduate degrees with […]
Robinhood is discussing bank products with regulators. This looks like the new way for fintech companies of all stripes to compete. While most of the companies researching banking services have yet to pull the trigger, I think it’s only a matter of time before we start to see new banking models that consumers are ready to test beyond toes dipping in the water. Robinhood could be one of them.
At time of writing, SoFi is paying 1.1% on their account which is a competitive rate when you consider that it is a hybrid account. Other banks who continuously offer the highest rates available on the market such as Goldman Sachs’ Marcus are currently paying around 1.7% on savings accounts. The largest banks in the US such as Bank of America, Citi and JP Morgan Chase pay between 0.01% and 0.1% on savings accounts which varies depending on deposit amounts and current promotions.
The yield curve continued its unrelenting flattening after last week’s Fed meeting. The spread between 10-year and 2-year treasury yields now stands at 36 bps (about 1 to 2 rate hikes from inversion). An inverted yield curve and lower-long term yields have presaged economic slowdown or recessions in the past. You can read our analysis of the Fed’s interest rate decision here.
FREED 2018-1 Deep Dive
FREED 2018-1’s collateral pool consists of 2 types of loans – 61.6% Freedom Plus (F+) and 38.4% Consolidation Plus (C+).
F+ Loans: F+ loans are unsecured consumer loans to near prime and prime borrowers. F+ collateral has a WA age of 8 months and WA remaining term of 41 months. The WA current FICO score of the pool is 723 and the WA interest rate is 14.8%.
C+ Loans: C+ loans are offered to select qualified debt settlement clients as an option to shorten the duration of their debt settlement program by making funds immediately available to fund settlements reached by Freedom Debt Relief. C+ collateral has a WA age of 8 months and WA remaining term of 44 months. The WA current FICO score of the pool is 654 and the WA interest rate is 22.9%.
Robinhood Markets has more than 4 million U.S. consumers using its free stock-trading platform. Now, it’s in talks to offer them other banking services like savings accounts, according to people familiar with the matter.
On Wednesday, KeyBank announced it has acquired digital lending platform for small businesses Bolstr. According to Key, the fintech software, which is expected to be implemented later this year, will enable the banking group to provide faster and easier access both to SBA loans and to traditional capital for business owners. The acquisition comes just after the OCC recently called on banks to issue more SME loans.
The co-founder of Capital One Financial Corp. is betting now’s a good time to lend to the riskiest borrowers.
Nigel Morris, Richard Fairbank’s partner in creating the company that became Capital One, is joining the board of LendUp Global Inc. and boosting his investment in the firm, which uses machine learning to look beyond traditional credit scores in the subprime market.
A 2016 Bain study found that nearly a third of customers globally would change their bank if they could do so easily. With dissatisfaction that high, traditional financial institutions should look to emulate the branding strategies of direct-to-consumer retailers, rather than leaning on their well-established names, to engage with millennial and Gen Z consumers.
Research from BCG found that brands that create personalized customer experiences with technology and data can increase revenue by six to ten percent, and direct-to-consumer brands have capitalized on the benefits of personalization.
Many fintech companies’ value proposition is to leverage technology to provide less expensive financial advice, lower interest rates on student loans, or more fair and reflective insurance rates. For example, robo-advisor Betterment charges only 25 basis points for wealth management services and no minimum to enroll, as opposed to traditional financial advisors that charge one to two percent on assets under management and often require high minimum investments to qualify for on-boarding.
A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that 75 percent of bank customers base their purchasing decisions on whether or not they’ve had a positive customer experience at the bank.
Credible’s analysis of student loan debt levels and salaries across 16 graduate school majors shows that the most important consideration isn’t how much debt you’ll take on to obtain an advanced degree — or how much you’ll earn after graduation — but achieving the right balance between the two.
THE PEER-TO-PEER Finance Association (P2PFA) has been accused of reducing transparency and hindering efforts to enhance investor protection after changing the rules governing how firms publish their loanbook.
Previously, members of the self-regulated trade body were obliged to publish their full loanbook, showing information about all the loans on their platform.
But at the start of June, the P2PFA announced that members now have the option to “either continue to publish their entire loan book, or provide a detailed breakdown of loans in their overall loan book to enable a consumer to be informed about the nature and number of loans of different descriptions presently originated through the platform according to standards to be approved by the P2PFA board.”
Pension investors should avoid high yielding assets such as peer-to-peer loans, according to new research by UK-based Royal London Asset Management.
The firm, which manages £114bn of assets, says investors looking generate income in retirement should beware for high risk, higher yielding investments.
Ayo Adesina, 34, was lucky enough to come into a £50,000 windfall when he won series two of Channel 4’s TV programme Hunted in 2016.
Mr Adesina, who describes himself as a novice investor, put the majority of the money – £32,000 – into a peer-to-peer property lending platform. He says his investment has grown 7 per cent, or £3,000, since he opened an account a year ago.
BWB Compliance has recruited Dena Chadderton as a senior adviser. With wide-ranging experience both as a regulatory consultant and across the financial services industry, Dena will primarily be advising firms in the fintech and asset management space. In particular, Dena will continue to specialise in the regulation of P2P lending and crowdfunding platforms, a growing part of the current team’s client-base.
China’s FinUp Finance Technology Group, which operates a technology-enabled finance platform with a focus on marketplace lending, aims to widen its market in the country by going public in Hong Kong.
The fintech firm also provides a variety of other personal credit services including point of sale instalment services to automobile financing services.
Chinese fintech Pintec Technology Holdings Limited (PINTEC) announced on Wednesday it has launched installment financing on its e-commerce platforms. This news comes just a couple of weeks after PINTEC secured $103 million through its latest financing round, which as led by Mandra Capital and SINA Corp.
Asked why Monzo has chosen to work with TransferWise, Blomfield reiterates the challenger bank’s goal of becoming a “hub or control centre” for your money. This won’t necessarily all be done by Monzo, he says, “but with partner organisations who plug into this hub”. TransferWise is the first of these.
Linked Finance, Ireland’s leading peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform, has secured backing from Portugal’s fastest growing digital bank, Banco BNI Europa, who will deploy up to €50m over a 2-year period, to lend to Irish SMEs.
As part of a wider strategy to identify the best P2P lending platforms in key European markets, Banco BNI Europa will deploy its capital alongside Linked Finance’s existing lenders. Linked Finance, connects Irish SMEs who need loans with an online lending community of more than 19,000 users.
P2P lending platform InLock wants to change this by enabling cryptocurrency to be used as collateral for a loan in fiat — effectively solving the short-term spendability problem. At the same time, borrowers can remain ‘hodlers‘ with the option to get their cryptocurrency back in full after the loan is paid off, regardless of any changes in price.
Csaba: When we looked at the Bitcoin blockchain, we found that 40% of all bitcoins existing today had not been moved at all in the past year. Looking back at 2017, there were plenty of reasons to move them: hard forks, the mempool crisis, regulation problems, an amazing bull run, followed by a 70% correction.
What it does: A fintech firm focused on unlocking the potential in bespoke SME lending globally using its data and technology platform, ACORN machine.
Why it’s hot: ACORN machine is a fintech platform that helps automate the way banks penetrate this underserved and underestimated market. It does this by leveraging process excellence, machine learning and technology to fuel data-driven decision making across the loan lifecycle.
What it does: A hire-purchase provider, letting people buy products and pay them off in installments.
Why it’s hot: The company works with over 1,200 retailers in the US and its technology helps retailers increase average order sizes by 51%. Morgan Stanley and Singapore’s GIC are both investors.
What it does: User-friendly payment systems for mobile and web that lets people buy now and pay later.
Why it’s hot: The company processes 800,000 transactions a day and has been used by 60 million people globally. Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley fund that backed PayPal, is an investor.
What it does: Peer-to-peer student loan refinancing, mortgages, and other types of personal loans.
Why it’s hot: Like Zenefits, SoFi struggled with a slew of setbacks in 2017. Allegations of sexual misconduct and loan misstatements forced out founder Mike Cagney. Former Twitter CFO and ex-Goldman banker Anthony Noto is now leading a turnaround of the business.
MyBit is an Ethereum-powered ecosystem that aims to connect the global Internet of Things (IoT) industry. ETHLend works with the Ethereum blockchain as well and is a marketplace for peer-to-peer lending services that use smart contracts. The company provides low interest rates and a transparent technology for processing transactions.
Currently, it allows users to lend with Ethereum, but it may be ready to introduce new altcoins at the end of this year, including MYB.
PaisaDukan, a P2P lending platform fully owned by Mumbai based fintech startup BigWin Infotech, has decided to launch 2 branches in Noida & Bangalore as a part of its PAN India expansion and growth plans by the end of next month.
This will enable the company to have better control over their operations and widen its reach.
Rep. Min Byung-doo of the ruling Democratic Party and Rep. Kim Su-min of the minor opposition Bareunmirae Party filed two separate bills to regulate P2P lending firms in July last year and in February, respectively.
With the bills still pending in the National Assembly, financial authorities have been struggling to tackle abusive and deceptive P2P lending practices.
In a recent report by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), less than a third of MSMEs have successfully obtained loans from financial institutions, and that is not for a lack of trying.
Nigeria currently has over 35 million MSMEs and if approximately only 10 million MSMEs have been able to get loans from financial institutions, hence, a credit gap of about 25 million in the country.
What exactly is FINT?
FINT is an online lending marketplace, basically we connect verifiable income borrowers looking for access to affordable credit with lenders who are looking to fund the loans for attractive returns. We have consumer loans i.e. loans between N60,000 and N2 million at rates as low as 8% for 3 – 12 months, with retail and institutional lenders (banks and asset managers).
For lenders, they can lend in the multiples of N20,000 grows at 26-39% for one-year loan tenures, for 6 months 15-22% for 3 months it is 8-14%.
News Comments Today’s main news: Goldman buys Clarity Services. Zopa to receive 400M GBP valuation. Lending Works surpasses 100M GBP in online lending. ETHLend expands into fiat lending. Today’s main analysis: PeerIQ’s valuation report. Today’s thought-provoking articles: Why you’re not making much on your bank account. The impact of Brexit. Adjusting to new digital demands. UK venture funding takes a breather. […]
Why you’re not making much on your bank account. AT: “This is also one of the large drivers of the rise of P2P lending. If savers aren’t getting returns from the banks while banks charge high interest rates, savers can turn to lending and undercut bank prices. This is good for investors, borrowers, and everyone–except banks.”
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. bought personal-finance app Clarity Money, acquiring a mobile storefront for its growing consumer bank.
The deal closed on Friday for Clarity Money, whose backers include Soros Capital and Citigroup Inc.’s venture-capital arm. Adam Dell—brother of Michael Dell, the personal-computer pioneer—founded Clarity Money and will join Goldman as a partner, a title rarely given to outsiders.
Wells Fargo’s earnings also beat analyst expectations, but the bank cautioned that these results could change due to the ongoing CFPB investigations. Consumer loans decreased $9.5 Bn QoQ – more than LendingClub or SoFi originate in a year – driven by a $3.8 Bn decline in auto loans, $1.9 Bn seasonal decline in credit card balances, and a $1.8 Bn decline in the junior lien mortgage portfolio.
After a decade of being near zero, short-term interest rates have risen sharply in recent months. Typically, these rates — three-month T-bills, Libor, commercial paper — move together because they reflect the same basic economic reality.
Source: The New York Times
Slow but solid growth in the United States since the Great Recession has finally altered the balance between borrowers and lenders. Higher rates mean those with cash to spare now have the upper hand and can demand a higher price to part with it.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. But as any saver can tell you, some short-term rates have barely budged.
One of the dominant themes at the recent Oracle Industry Connect conference was that banking customers are not in a state of transition to digital anymore — they are all digital now.
But whether an institution is drawing up plans on how to respond to big tech firms entering the banking market, or engaged in an effort to overhaul legacy systems, Suber said, the guiding emotion shouldn’t be fear. Instead, he said, bankers should embrace a “golden age of fintech.”
Key’s goal is to use digital to enable self-service when appropriate, while gearing the branch towards serving customers with issues best suited for a one-on-one request.
Regions Bank announced on Thursday it has invested in and formed a partnership with fintech mortgage and consumer digital lending technology platform provider, Lender Price. According to the bank, the duo will focus on streamlining Regions’ digital process and simplify interaction between banks, borrowers, and bank.
Online loan marketplace LendingTree is considering moving its headquarters from SouthPark in Charlotte to the Cone Mill site in Pineville.
The company released a statement Thursday concerning the possible move.
In the statement the company said that given its considerable growth since the 2016 purchase of two buildings in SouthPark, their headcount projections have expanded significantly, so they are evaluating alternatives, including Pineville.
The beleaguered bank warned on Friday that it may revise its first quarter earnings results because of the fine. The bank says that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency have offered to resolve their investigations for that amount.
An internal review by Wells Fargo found that about 20,000 of those customers may have defaulted on their car loans and had their vehicles repossessed in part because of those unnecessary insurance costs.
DiversyFund, a crowdfunding platform that is revolutionizing real estate investing, has launched its Commercial and Multifamily Real Estate Growth Fund. Investors in this fund will own shares of a variety of real estate investments, with 80% of the fund dedicated to commercial and multifamily properties.
Projected returns are between 15% and 20% per year. The minimum investment is $5,000.
On April 12, 2018, Mick Mulvaney, the Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Bureau) testified before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs regarding the Bureau’s Semi-Annual Report to Congress. The Senate Hearing comes the day after Democrats in the House Financial Services Committee questioned Mulvaney about his leadership at the Bureau. A copy of his written testimony is here.
Increased Congressional Oversight. Throughout the hearing, Mulvaney stressed his recommendations for greater oversight to hold the Bureau accountable.
Payday Lending. Mulvaney noted, however, that he has the discretion to reach a different conclusion about the payday lending rules than his predecessor, Richard Cordray.
Data Security. While data security was an issue that spanned both sides of the aisle, Republican senators focused on the Bureau’s handling of consumer data while their Democratic colleagues focused on Mulvaney’s position on the Equifax data breach.
As to the Bureau’s handling of data, Mulvaney explained that he has instituted a data freeze and commissioned a report about the Bureau’s data collection and protection. While the data freeze does not apply to enforcement actions, the Bureau plans “to limit data that we take possession of. . . . instead of having them send it to us electronically, we are going to look at it.” Mulvaney acknowledged that “everything that we keep is subject to being lost.” When Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) asked what data had been lost, Mulvaney declined to publicly comment.
SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund said in 2017 that its minimum check size is $100 million. But in the financial-technology market, the number appears to be twice as big.
Executives at a half-dozen fintech companies said the Vision Fund has told them it’s looking to do deals where it can put at least $200 million to work over one or multiple investment rounds. These people asked not to be named because their talks with SoftBank are confidential.
Dream Forward deploys AI chatbots in its automated 401(k) platform, and is now beta testing a mobile-only version that can answer client questions via text message without requiring customers to log into their accounts.
Laserfiche develops automated workflows for advisers and later this year plans to go one step further with “robotic processes” that will automate even more of advisers’ manual, repetitive front- and back-office tasks.
UK-based peer-to-peer lender Zopa is in advanced negotiations with potential investors to seek around GBP 50.00 million in funding, helping advance the company to one of the largest financial technology (fintech) businesses in the country, Sky News reported.
Citing sources close to the matter, the broadcaster observed the simple loans and smart investment firm could be valued at GBP 400.00 million as a result of the deal, expected to be led by existing shareholders Wadhawan Global Capital.
Lender Zopa reportedly targets £400m valuation with new fundraising round
Zopa, the peer-to-peer lender, is planning to raise a £125m round, according to Sky News. This will push the company’s valuation to a soaring £400m and is rumoured to serve as a pre-IPO funding round.
UK-based peer-to-peer lender Lending Works announced this week it surpassed £100 million in online lending. According to Lending Works, the milestone comes just a little over a year after the platform surpassed £50 million. The lender also reported that 20,000 customers (over 16,000 borrowers and nearly 4,000 lenders) have used its platform.
Following a blockbuster year of over 8 billion USD invested within the UK bolstered significantly by multiple mega-rounds, – 2018 still managed to achieve a healthy start, with one $100 million round pushing the nation’s tally over 1 billion USD. The UK played host to seven of the top 10 European deals in the last quarter of 2017, but managed to scrape just one of the 10 in the first quarter of 2018. Four of the ten biggest European deals done in the first three months of 2018 were located in Germany.
No tech subsector has reached stratospheric valuations as consistently as financial technology, or fintech. The heady combination of huge markets, a radical platform shift to mobile, and newly vulnerable incumbent dinosaurs (be they banks, wealth managers, or insurers) has attracted over $30bn of annual investment. After a decade of evolution, 2018 looks set to be the first year we’ll see a herd of fintech firms go public. At least ten have filed or talked about an impending listing this year, including TransferWise, Credit Karma, Adyen and Funding Circle.
The Alternative Investment Management Association, the London-based organization representing the interests of the world’s alternative investment industry, has issued a new whitepaper about the impact of the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union.
The United Kingdom has the largest alternative assets industry in Europe, so AIMA is unsurprisingly interested in the consequences of such an exit.
Scottish fintech business The ID Co is on a recruitment drive ahead of an expected ‘tsunami’ with the advent of so-called open banking.
The Edinburgh-based company helps banks make lending decisions by analysing live financial data including online bank statements, cashflow and credit agency records – and was one of the first agitators for open banking.
Savers subscribed to 8.5 million Cash ISAs in the tax year ending 5 April 2017, down from 10.1 million the previous year, while the total amount saved tumbled by a third to £39.2 billion.
LendingCrowd’s original IFISA product, the Growth ISA, is designed for those who want a quick and simple way of creating a diversified portfolio of secured business loans.
By automatically reinvesting their interest and capital repayments, the Growth ISA has actually delivered an average return for investors of 8.5% – more than three times the rate of inflation – as shown in the chart below.
According to the recent survey, Mainland China’s small businesses are the top users of fintech application and in digital payment technologies. More than 84 percent of the survey’s respondents say that at least 10 percent of their overall revenue came via these platforms. Businesses also use fintech to access funds from crowd-sourced funding and peer-to-peer lending.
The Association for Financial Markets (AFME) in Europe wants regulators to curb the development of aggressive bank regulation, according to Reuters reports on Thursday (April 12).
The bank lobby has released a study aimed at reducing regulators’ heavy hand in the financial services market that the group said has made it more difficult for banks in Europe to support the broader economy in the wake of the financial crisis.
The AFME released a report along with PwC which surveyed 13 international banks, accounting for a combined 70 percent of capital market activity around the world, reports said. Analysis found the annual cost of regulation costs $37 billion for 13 banks combined, amounting to 39 percent of total capital markets expenses in 2016.
ETHLend, a crypto-to-crypto lending platform, has started a process to obtain a license on lending activities in over thirty countries in the European Economic Area (EEA). ETHlend’s initiative will also include other countries as well with its helping expand its current business model (crypto-to-crypto lending) to provide financing in FIAT currencies such as EUR, USD, and GBP against cryptocurrency holdings.
In payments and commerce, it’s an eternity. Too long, according to ZestFinance, a company that believes credit needs a machine learning upgrade. Trulioo thinks verification needs to step up so financial institutions can actually “know their customer.” Global cross-border payments between businesses need a major boost to support the trillion dollars worth of transactions they’ve have to support in five years.
RedCapital from Chile is a crowdfunding P2P lending startup. It offers a platform through which investors get attractive returns at low risk. Furthermore, the SMEs acquire loans at favorable rates. The startup has a risk predictor that allows its investors to realize zero default.
Unsecured personal lender and ASX-aspirant Latitude Financial is targeting up to $5 billion of new loans over the next few years as its chief executive Sean Morrissey insists it can grow responsibly amid heightened scrutiny on lending standards.
During a “non-deal roadshow” over the past month, Latitude has met with around 100 fund managers ahead of what is expected to be the biggest ASX initial public offering since Medibank Private in 2014. Latitude’s three shareholders, KKR & Co, Varde Partners and Deutsche Bank, have not yet made a decision on timing for the float, which could value the equity in the group at around $5 billion.
Maintain outperform with an unchanged target price (TP) of RM1.53: N2N announced plans to acquire a 28% interest in Australian-based OurMoneyMarket Holdings Pty Ltd (OMM) through a subscription of new shares for a cash consideration of A$2.8 million (RM8.43 million).
Online lender from micro businesses Aye Finance said that it has received Rs 30 crore debt funding from from Swiss-based impact investor, BlueOrchard Finance Ltd. The funds would help the MSME lender to further diversify its lending portfolio, reaching out to the long trail of MSMEs in India.
Cash Suvidha, a start-up fintech company that extends business loans to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups, is looking to foray into microfinance business.
According to Rajesh Gupta, founder, Cash Suvidha, the company is exploring the possibility of either acquiring an existing microfinance institution (MFI) or setting up a separate vertical for its MFI business in the next two-to-three years.
“Rural lending is one area which excites me the most,” Gupta told BusinessLine.
After rounding off 2017 at a remarkable high bolstered by megadeals, Asia continued to see large deals in Q1 2018. These include two US$1 billion+ megadeals which were struck outside China, with Singapore-based Grab’s Series G financing and Go-Jek in Indonesia’s Series E round.
“Singapore saw a record US$2.68 billion of VC investment in Q1 2018, despite a relatively muted level of activity. It is testament to the maturing of Singapore’s ecosystem that a business such as Grab could be built here to tackle the regional market. In addition, the top deals in Singapore also span across diverse sectors, from logistics, internet retail to biotechnology,” said Chia Tek Yew, head of Financial Services Advisory, KPMG in Singapore.
United Overseas Bank (UOB) has entered into an agreement with Beijing-based financial technology firm Pintec Technology Holdings to set up a joint venture company, Avatec.ai.
UOB will have a 60 per cent stake in the joint venture, the bank said in a regulatory filing on Monday (April 16).
Avatec will have an issued and paid-up capital of up to S$10 million and will be a subsidiary of UOB.
Speaking at the AltFi Australasia Summit in Sydney today, OnDeck chief executive Noah Breslow said he can see the Australian alternative finance industry working with $2 billion in new loan volumes by 2020. He expects the industry to oversee about $700 million in new loans this year.
“Compared to five years ago, 70% of small business owners perceive there are more small business lending options today than there were in 2013. It shows how mainstream this type of financing is becoming,” Breslow said.
Equifax group managing director Asia Pacific, Mike Cutter, said 54% of online lending enquiries come from Australians 35-years-old and under. And Queensland is leading the charge, he said.
Singapore is ready for open banking, but regulators don’t want to force it on the financial services market, according to reports in Bloomberg.
Bloomberg highlighted how Singapore’s approach differs from open banking initiatives in Europe and Japan, where regulators have imposed requirements for banks and other financial institutions to support the movement of data between their systems and those of third-party financial service providers. Such was the aim of PSD2 in Europe and Open Banking in the U.K.
SINGAPORE-headquartered fintech company Silot has raised some US$2.87 million from investors Arbor Ventures and Eight Roads Ventures with the completion of its pre-series A funding.
Arbor Ventures is a global early-stage venture capital firm, while Eight Roads Ventures is the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International.
The Financial Services Authority (OJK) has adopted a more relaxed view toward the financial technology (fintech) industry, believing that rigid policies may only make them obsolete in the face of fast-growing businesses in the digital sector.The financial regulator already has a policy, called OJK Regulation (POJK) No. 77/2016, which governs peer-to-peer (P2P) lending fintech companies.
After missing loan growth targets in 2017, several Malaysian banks have kept expectations more conservative this year, even as Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) data indicated a moderation in the total outstanding financing growth of 4.1% in 2017 compared with 5.6% in 2016.
OJK deputy commissioner Sukarela Batunanggar said as of April, there were 44 P2P lending businesses that had been granted operational permits by the authority. This figure, he said, was a considerable increase from just 30 P2P lending businesses in January, indicating robust growth in the industry.
News Comments Today’s main news: SoFi brightens startup scene in Helena, Montana. LendingTree rates Upgrade #1 personal loan. UK P2PFA gets a new head. India considering digital payments tax rebate for P2P lenders. Today’s main analysis: Why point-of-sale lending is hot. Today’s thought-provoking articles: Industrial loan company (ILC) applications may soon be seen in a positive light. P2P lending […]
SoFi feeds startup fever in Helena, Montana. AT: “Thanks to technology, anyone can run an international company from anywhere in the world, even small town and rural areas. Your truly hails from just outside Gettysburg, Pa.”
Why point-of-sale lending is hot right now. AT: “I think POS financing is going to be hot for some time. It has been growing hotter over the last year thanks to companies like Affirm and Klarna, but those are not by any means the only companies working in this space. There will be plenty more, and I think many online commerce companies will begin to realize they will have to offer some form of financing to remain competitive. Amazon has led the way in this. Others will follow. It will become the norm, both online and off line, for the next generation.”
Inside Overstock’s financial services strategy. AT: “Overstock is a good example of an online merchant who has taken advantage of their financial strength and available technology to improve access to financial services, including POS loans.”
There is a new millennial-friendly mixed-use development with a high-end steakhouse, movie theater, and hotel. And yes, even a town of 30,000 located more than 500 miles from the closest major metropolitan areas (Salt Lake and Seattle) has an entrepreneurial ecosystem. In fact, in some ways Helena has a startup scene larger cities would be jealous of. A few years ago, SoFi, the online student loan servicer that also provides personal loans and mortgages, contracted with two local programmers to help build their platform.
One of those programmers, David Thompson, is a graduate of the University of Montana-Western, Montana Tech, and the University of Montana. David had no interest in moving to the Bay Area, and successfully convinced SoFi to locate a substantial portion of its engineering team in Helena. Today SoFi is multi-billion-dollar startup, and David is the VP of Engineering, managing more than 100 programmers and engineers out of two locations in Helena.
For the last several decades–and especially over the last few years–we’ve heard a lot about the death of small towns and middle America. However, the success of SoFi and the emerging startup scene in Helena shows the potential for tech companies to be agents of economic revitalization in small towns and cities outside of the coasts.
LendingClub (NYSE: LC), America’s largest online marketplace connecting borrowers and investors, announced that it will report earnings for the fourth quarter of 2017 on Tuesday, February 20, 2018, after market hours. LendingClub will host a conference call to discuss the fourth quarter financial results at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time (5:00 p.m. Eastern Time) on the same day.
A live webcast of the call will be available at under the Events & Presentations menu. To access the call please dial +1 (888) 317-6003 or outside the U.S. +1 (412) 317-6061 with conference ID 8062913 ten minutes prior to 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time (or 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time).
Elevate Credit, Inc. (“Elevate”), a leading tech-enabled provider of innovative and responsible online credit solutions for non-prime consumers, today announced financial results for the fourth quarter and full year 2017. Elevate has posted its fourth quarter and full year earnings release to its Investor Relations webpage at
Upgrade, Inc. (), a consumer credit platform that combines personal loans with tools that help consumers understand and monitor their credit, announced that it has been named #1 in the personal loans category for the fourth quarter of 2017 by LendingTree.
But research conducted by banks and fintechs has found that many younger Americans are uncomfortable carrying credit card balances, partly because they saw their parents struggle with debt during the financial crisis and prefer the more certain repayment terms of installment loans.
Personal loans issued by banks — these exclude credit cards and auto and home equity loans — hit a record $807 billion at Sept. 30, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., up 9% from two years earlier and nearly 30% since 2012. That’s not even including the many billions of dollars of loans made by upstart online lenders that don’t end up on banks’ balance sheets.
San Francisco-based Affirm originated more than $1 billion in point-of-sale loans last year — and, increasingly, regional banks that are funding the loans, either directly or behind the scenes.
For the past few months, the 19-year-old e-commerce company has been quietly building out FinanceHub, a sort of marketplace for financial services that includes existing Overstock credit cards and insurance products; loans by LendingTree, Prosper and Sofi; a robo-adviser for automated investing, as of last week — and as of Tuesday morning, a discounted trading platform.
Financial-technology firms eager to offer banking products are eyeing a century-old model that fell out of favor during the financial crisis but could see a revival under the Trump administration.
The industrial loan company charter, available in a handful of states and particularly popular in Utah, allows nonfinancial companies to enter the banking sector without being subject to many of its restrictions, including oversight by the Federal Reserve. Companies seeking the charters must still obtain deposit insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which last approved insurance for an industrial loan company in 2008.
That could soon change. President Donald Trump’s pick to head the FDIC, Jelena McWilliams, suggested during Senate testimony last month that she would look favorably on new applications.
According to Forbes, Larsen’s net worth is between $7.5 billion and $8 billion in cryptocurrency, in large part thanks to his massive holding of Ripple—the cryptocurrency he co-founded in 2012.
Larsen, a Stanford M.B.A. and veteran Silicon Valley player, is no stranger to the world of digital finance. Prior to his involvement in cryptocurrency, he co-founded the online mortgage lender E-Loan. The company was valued at $1 billion in 2000. In 2006, he co-founded Prosper Marketplace—the first peer-to-peer lending marketplace in the United States.
Wealth tech company Personal Capital is making it easier for investors to put their money in causes that are important to them with the launch of its Socially Responsible Personal Strategy today.
Toyota Financial Services (TFS) has launched an evaluation of AI software from Aire to spot customers with higher risks of delinquency.
Aire’s machine learning technology will identify which lessees have entered customer delinquency by skipping a payment, and will give TFS an estimate on how likely they are to default on further instalments.
Aire’s software has already been used by lenders, including p2p lender Zopa, in the initial credit application phase.
Confluent, provider of the streaming platform based on Apache Kafka, today announced 2017 results, which include 4X subscription growth year over year and 98 percent customer satisfaction.
In the 2017 Apache Kafka Report, many companies reported using the distributed streaming platform for more accurate and faster decision making, reduced operating costs, improved customer experiences and reduced risk. 1 in 4 respondents work for organizations with more than $1 billion in annual sales, illustrating how quickly this technology has gained traction across large enterprises. In addition, more than 15% of respondents are processing more than a billion messages a day.
Other 2017 highlights include:
Raised $30 million from Sequoia, Index Ventures and Benchmark to meet global demand for streaming platforms.
Expanded employee base by 120 percent, added numerous offices throughout the US and extended its footprint to six additional countries.
Added new customers around the globe, including Alight Solutions, Capital One, Funding Circle, HomeAway and Nordea Bank.
Announced the general availability of Confluent Cloud, an Apache Kafka as a Service offering that empowers enterprises and developers to move faster with streaming data.
Surpassed 200 partners, including some of the largest Systems Integrators and Platform partners in the industry.
That Radius Bank in Boston would strike another fintech partnership — it announced one Wednesday with the startup Mantl, which is trying to cut down online-account openings to four minutes — is less revealing than its part in Radius’ evolving MO.
When Nathaniel Harley, CEO of Mantl, first visited Radius, he was seeking feedback on a personal financial management technology the company was working on. But he was quickly talked into changing the direction of his company.
The two companies started building an account-opening system for all digital channels in March 2017. They worked to reduce manual entry and other hassles from the account-opening process. Mantl brought in one of its own fintech partners, Alloy, to handle much of the decisions, including anti-money-laundering checks, identity verification and fraud detection. Radius and Mantl used Alloy’s workflow management tool to configure the decision-making process.
Banking rules cannot be rewritten overnight, and so acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Mick Mulvaney has a tall order remaking the payday loan regulation crafted under his predecessor. But observers say Mulvaney has options for altering the rule to the industry’s favor.
One option would be to refocus the rule on disclosure requirements, which would be several steps short of a repeal but more amenable to lenders than the current CFPB regulation.
Did the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau kill its investigation into Equifax’s data breach that exposed the personal information of 145.5 million U.S. consumers to hackers?
On Thursday, a group of 32 Democratic senators sent a letter to the CFPB, demanding answers on the state of the bureau’s investigation into the Equifax breach.
The CFPB has issued a request for information that seeks comment on how the agency can best achieve meaningful burden reduction or other improvement in the processes it uses to enforce federal consumer financial law while continuing to meet the CFPB’s statutory objectives and ensuring a fair and transparent process. Comments on the RFI must be received no later than 60 days after the date it is published in the Federal Register, which the CFPB expects to be February 12, 2018.
In the new RFI, the CFPB now seek comment on all aspects of its enforcement processes but lists the following seven topics:
Communication between the CFPB and subjects of investigations, including timing and frequency of such communications and information provided by the CFPB on the status of an investigation
Length of CFPB investigations
Notice and Opportunity to Respond and Advise (NORA) process, including whether the NORA process should be mandatory rather than discretionary and the information contained in letters the CFPB may send to potential subjects of investigations pursuant to the NORA process
Whether subjects of potential enforcement actions should have the right to make an in-person presentation to the CFPB before the CFPB decides whether to initiate legal proceedings
Calculation of civil money penalties, including whether the CFPB should adopt a civil penalty matrix
Standard provisions in CFPB consent orders
Manner and extent to which the CFPB can and should coordinate enforcement activity with other federal and/or state agencies with overlapping jurisdiction
Altegris, an alternative investment research and management firm, and Artivest, an alternative investment technology firm, announced today that they plan to merge under the name Artivest, pending customary corporate and regulatory conditions to closing. The joint 100-person team will service over $3 billion in client capital—immediately becoming the largest independent alternative investment technology and solutions firm for wealth managers, fund managers, and independent advisors.
Taking a next step in its mission toprovide liquidity to private growth companies,SharesPost today announced the launch of its Digital Securities Group.
The Digital Securities Group will bring security token issuers and investors into the SharesPost private marketplace. Token issuers and investors will use SharesPost’s existing Alternative Trading System to invest in ICO’s and trade in digital securities in compliance with U.S. securities laws.
Homeowners soon will be able to count income they earn from Airbnb Inc. rentals on applications for refinance loans.
A new program — expected to be announced on Thursday by Airbnb, mortgage giant Fannie Mae and three big lenders — will allow anyone who has rented out property on Airbnb for a year or longer to count some or all of that money as income.
In 2018 the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations plans to pay closer attention to matters involving retail investors, particularly when it comes to disclosures, and zero in on cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings and secondary market trading, the regulator says in a press release.
The regulator will also continue monitoring digital advice platforms, with a special focus on their compliance programs, including algorithm oversight, investor data protection and disclosures of conflicts of interest, according to the exam priorities. The SEC has made progress in the ratio of investment advisors it examines each year, from just 8% five years ago to 15% in fiscal year 2017, the regulator says. In 2018, the SEC plans to target those advisors it has never examined before, according to the regulator.
LD Holdings Group, LLC, parent company of loanDepot, the nation’s fifth largest retail lender, today appointed top real estate executive Chris Heller to head its recently-launched mello Home business. Combining digital simplicity and smart local advice, mello Home seamlessly connects home buying, financing, and improvement services into a single consumer experience.
If the theme of the 2017 T3 Conference was the fiduciary rule, 2018 was all about the future of financial advice.
Quovo launched Cue, a new alerts engine that leverages Quovo’s aggregation technology to notify financial advisers about account activity and client milestones.
MoneyGuidePro announced a new partnership with MX, a data aggregation provider, that lets advisers bring held-away assets into the financial planning software.
It was through the work of the P2PFA, led by Christine Farnish, that these regulations were sensible and promoted the growth of the industry there. And while this initial regulatory framework is currently being reviewed by the FCA, today, the UK is one of the most competitive markets in the world in no small part because of these initial regulations.
Paul Smee brings more than 17 years experience in leading trade bodies in the UK. Previously, he was Director General of the Council of Mortgage Lenders for six years so he comes with experience leading finance trade bodies. He looks like a great choice to take over from Christine.
Lendy, one of Europe’s leading P2P secured property platforms, is pleased to announce the appointment of Andrew Wawrzyniak as its new head of finance. Andrew was previously head of finance at Fund Partners, a leading fund manager, which specialises in the operation of collective investment schemes.
RegTek.Solutions, the market-leading control and compliance software provider for global trade and transaction reporting, has appointed Rob Bernstein as chief financial officer (CFO).
PEER-TO-PEER business lender Rebuildingsociety has secured an agreement with Leeds City Council whereby the local authority funds loans through its platform.
The council will review business loan requests from companies with an LS postcode prefix, consider the industry and location of the company, and contribute to the loan amounts required by suitable applicants.
According to Robo.cash, P2P lending is turning to a significant source of additional income for the growing number of the European investors.
The online lending platform also confirmed:
“The majority of investors are in the age groups: 25-34 years — 40%, 35-44 years — 31%, 45-60 years — 20%. The less number is the age of 18-24 years (6%) and 61 plus (3%). These figures are supported by the employment of investors: employees — 72%, entrepreneurs — 15%, students — 6%, retiree — 2%. At the same time, the most investors are just getting acquainted with P2P-services (52%) and the comparable number already has at least one-year practice: 1-3 years — 34% and over 4 years — 13%.”
The country has been actively promoting itself as gateway destination to the European marketplace for non-EU firms and British startups fleeing Brexit. Registering a company takes merely three days, while getting a Payment Institution or Electronic Money Institution license takes only three months, two-to-three times faster than in other EU jurisdictions. Other perks include remote Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures, low profit tax, startup visa options and a sandbox regime for fintech startups in their first year.
The country also boasts a growing talent pool of up to 31,000 trained IT professionals with a further 8000 in the pipeline.
This week, Invest Lithuania released the Lithuania Fintech Report 2017, which revealed that a total of 117 fintech companies were operating in the country in 2017, with 35 of them being registered last year.
IOU FINANCIAL INC. (“IOU” or “the Company”; TSX-V:IOU), an online lender to small businesses (IOUFinancial.com), is pleased to announce a strategic partnership with Marietta, GA-based c-store solutions provider goEBT (goEBT.com). Through this strategic partnership, goEBT’s network of 25,000 convenience store owners nationwide will be able to access IOU’s fast, convenient, non-collateral funding solutions.
Our companies come together united by the common vision of providing financial inclusion for more than one billion new and underserved individuals across the globe. We will together provide a suite of credit scoring and identity verification products to more than 20 emerging markets.
Our companies have individually facilitated over 5 million credit assessments since inception, allowing more than 50 financial institutions to disburse over $2 billion USD in credit to people with limited information.
The first joint product offering is already live in Asia and Latin America, with additional products and features scheduled for release in the coming months.
Terry Gou, the billionaire chief of Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn, is said to have invested in a cryptocurrency merchant bank being set up by Mike Novogratz, a former Wall Street macro hedge fund manager.
Citing a source familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported that Novogratz has raised about US$250 million for his cryptocurrency merchant bank venture through a private placement.
The government might consider giving tax rebates to merchants accepting payments digitally in order to promote the overall fintech sector, which is at its infancy at present but growing at a rapid pace, suggested the Reserve Bank of India.
Talking about the fintech sector the RBI has identified tech startups working in the space of peer-to-peer lending, blockchain, big data, smart contracts, robo advisors and online aggregators.
Traditionally, one’s option was limited to getting an education loan from a public sector bank. Now that the demographics are favourable and the education loan market has the potential to grow, non-banking finance companies (NBFCs), fintech players and peer-to-peer (P2P) lenders are jockeying for a piece of the market.
Seek more funding: Education loans are part of the priority lending category, but unlike the US, there is no provision for student loan waiver in India. It means your loan will not go away until you pay it off. Try and find out if there is any other source of funding available, including financial aid, bursary and scholarship or upfront savings, which will bring down the loan amount.
What Banks Offer
Most of them offer education loans for studying medicine, engineering or management at graduate and post-graduate levels or for pursuing further studies in India and abroad. Some also provide categorised loans. For instance, State Bank of India (SBI) offers Scholar Loan for students who get admitted to premier institutions like IITs, IIMs, NITs and AIIMS, and a Global Ed-Vantage loan for studying in global counterparts. Bank of Baroda offers Baroda Scholar loan for studying abroad and Baroda Gyan loan for higher studies in India while separate schemes are available for courses conducted by the country’s top institutions.
Source: Money Today
Fintech/P2P Players
Landing an education loan may not be easy anymore, given the spurt in defaults. And that is where the new-age fintech firms and P2P lenders see a lucrative opportunity. “For those who fail to qualify for education loans from banks and NBFCs, P2P lending platforms can be an alternative way to borrow,” says Gaurav Aggarwal, Associate Director, Unsecured Loans, at Paisabazaar. In other words, aspiring students can raise personal loans from banks or fintech players like MoneyTap and LoanTap, or P2P lenders like Faircent and CreditMantri to cover their educational expenses.
To understand what lies ahead for India’s fintech sector, it makes sense to understand the fintech growth is expected to boom in the Asia Pacific region. A Frost & Sullivan report predicts that the region is expected to grow at a CAGR of 72.5% from 2015 to 2020, reaching US$72 billion.
According to Quah Mei Lee, Industry Principal, ICT, Asia-Pacific, the mobile payments market in Singapore was estimated to be worth US$1.4 billion in 2017. The market is still small but is growing fast.
Indian digital payments industry is expected to reach $700 billion by 2022 in terms of value of transactions.
It is expected that more than 80% of the urban population in India will adopt digital payments as a part of their routine by 2022, and 70% of the retail chains will adopt the same.
Enter IOU Financial. As “online lending” has become a 21st century reality, a financial niche has sprung up with online lending institutions that are prepared to cater to small businesses and provide badly needed capital, efficiently and affordably.
Compared to the above, IOU Financial provides easily manageable, working capital term loans for small business, and does so:
Quickly
Efficiently
Affordably
The speed of IOU’s loan application process is a big draw for small business owners. IOU’s application generally takes roughly three to five minutes to complete.
OnDeck (NYSE: ONDK), the online lender to small businesses, today announced that Grounded Kitchen & Coffeehouse, owned by Amir Rahim, has been selected as the OnDeck Small Business of the Month for February, 2018. The Ottawa-based restaurant is the first small business in Canada to earn the OnDeck spotlight award.
So assuming I have $1000.00 I have no use for and would want to make a little interest on, All I have to do is go unto one of these platforms to match me with someone in need of $1000.00. These platforms because of the high risk they take (borrowers don’t provide tangible collaterals) usually charge higher interest and in return given higher interest to lenders than Treasury Bills will normally do. This idea is supposed to be easy and help people financially as there is gap between loans needed and financial institutions willing to give (“The two largest peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms, Prosper and LendingClub founded in 2005 and 2006 respectively, have originated over $6 Billion in loans to date. Although they have only begun to scratch the surface of the $3 trillion consumer debt market” Nav Athwal Cofounder and CEO of RealtyShares, a crowdfunding for real estate platform). Yet like most good things miscreants, hooligans and hoodlums find a way to make the system corrupt.
These swindlers promise up to a 100% interest rates within 5 working days. So they lure greedy but naïve people to roll in cash through mobile money. With a Minimal amount of GHC100.00 you get registered and paired with another person. You’re required to send the money to this person who they claim registered 5 days ago and the said day is the day of maturity.
Ways to spot financial scams and Ponzi schemes
1. If your interest is too good to be true, then its probably a lie. When you’re being offered an interest bigger than the T Bills in lending you should be wary and do due diligence.
2. They usually don’t tell the project in which your money will be invested.
3. Pressurised to respond quickly? 4. Are the contact details vague?
News Comments Today’s main news: More LendingClub-IEG drama.Black Fish raises $145M.Moneygram partners with Ripple.Kreditech expands into India with Mambu. Today’s main analysis: JP Morgan Chase’s investments into digital technology.Is Yirendai undervalued? Today’s thought-provoking articles: Investors go into debt to buy bitcoin.Small business financing trends.How open banking could change how people manage money.Banks, trade finance, and […]
More on the LendingClub/IEG Holdings drama. AT: “This is more about IEG Holdings and its bizarre founder Paul Mathieson, who claims to have left Australia in fear of his life.”
JP Morgan Chase teardown on digital technology. AT: “Besides Goldman Sachs and Citi, no other big bank is investing in digital technology like JP Morgan Chase. Whether their investments will make them a strong competitor in digital banking remains to be seen, but this is one area–at least, in the U.S.–that desires way more exploration and focus than it’s getting.”
Key trends in fintech. AT: “Some of these are obvious, but I like the mention of emerging economies because some, like Africa and Latin America, tend to get forgotten.”
Lending Club has all kinds of problems: a history of profit warnings, faint traces of scandal after a management upheaval almost two years ago, and a share price still more than 80 per cent adrift from its peak.
Add to that list: a bizarre, crypto-fuelled activist campaign waged by a Las Vegas-based payday lender called Paul Mathieson, who told authorities in his native Australia that he fled to America in 2008 because he feared being killed by a mobster.
Mathieson’s case for change at Lending Club, laid out in a letter to the company’s board on 2 January, is not a terrible one, on the face of it. He argues that the cost structure at the loss-making company, a pioneer in peer-to-peer lending, is “excessive,” noting fancy headquarters in San Francisco and “hundreds” of “excess” developers. He says that the board should consider a pivot to using its own balance sheet to lend, rather than acting as a broker, taking fees for matching borrowers with lenders. Underwriting has been sloppy, he says, resulting in sub-par returns to investors.
Mathieson is offering 13 shares in his own penny-stock company, IEG Holdings, for every share in Lending Club. At the time of the offer on Monday morning, that was a premium of 19 cents, or about 5 per cent.
IEG Holdings Corporation (OTCQB: IEGH) provides online unsecured consumer loans under the brand name “Mr. Amazing Loans” via its website, www.mramazingloans.com, in 20 US states. The company offers $5,000 and $10,000 personal loans over a five-year term at rates ranging from 19.9% to 29.9% APR. IEG Holdings plans future expansion to a total of 25 US states, which would cover 240mn people and represent approximately 75% of the US population.
Since 2013, IEGH has obtained additional state lending licenses, and they are licensed and originating direct consumer loans in 20 states including: Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The Company was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada.
IEG Holdings Plans to Create its own IEGH Crypto/Blockchain Currency Backed by Gold Metal and SEC Registration as a Security
IEGH announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, Investment Evolution Crypto, LLC (“Crypto”), is negotiating to purchase a gold project with gold metal in the ground and prospecting licenses. IEG Holdings plans to utilize a gold resource to investigate creating, through Crypto, and a joint venture with Investment Evolution Corporation, also a wholly owned subsidiary of IEG Holdings, its own gold metal-backed crypto/blockchain currency, and potentially offer loans and accept loan repayments in its own crypto/blockchain currency.
IEGH increases loan originations
The company stated that it provided $960,000 in new consumer loans through its online property mramazingloans.com, from the October 2017 to December 2017 period. This represented a 12.3% increase over its July to September 2017 operating period, during which the company’s new loan originations were $855,000.
Roughly 18 percent of people who buy bitcoin use a credit card to do so, according to a new survey by loan marketplace LendEDU. Of those, 20 percent have not paid off their balance. The phrase “buy bitcoin with credit” has been trending on Google for weeks.
Another problem with going into debt for cryptocurrencies is that people will have to pay back their debt before they see sufficient returns, said Erika Safran, founder of Safran Wealth Advisors. That may require tapping other resources, potentially creating further financial trouble.
Traditional bank loan rejections are notoriously high in all markets
Small Business Administration (and equivalent agencies) are nefarious for overextending the time-to-credit tolerances of small businesses
Volatility of markets, and exposure of almost all markets to disruption by startups could pose urgent cash needs for businesses, which are generally not considered for loan applications by traditional lenders.
Online Lending And Its Deepening Hold Over The Small Business Finance Market
In 2014, a Federal Reserve (US) survey concluded that one in five small business owners opted for loans from online lenders. Since then, the proliferation of online lending platforms has been on the surge, to the extent that traditional brick and mortar lending institutions have also had to move base to the online domain. In the coming years, multiple factors will result in the success and sustainability of online lending platforms. These include:
Growing confidence among small business owners to trust online lending platforms
Availability of cheaper, quicker, and more convenient loans
Options to truly personalize and customize the loan repayment terms to suit the business’ interests
The Call for Transparency in the Online Lending Market
Though the online lending market has been growing year on year, this doesn’t detract from the concerns around lack of transparency in the way some of these platforms operate. Some of the key concerns are around undisclosed APRs and hidden fees. In fact, some online lenders have been castigated for charging significantly high rates of interests from borrowers, often with service quality issues post-approval. Thankfully, there’s already some progress towards bringing a degree of regulation in place for online lending platforms to be at par with traditional lending regulations.
JPMorgan is making a bigger push into payments technology as digital banking becomes a strategic priority.
In 2016, the bank spent $9.5B on technology and Dimon has committed $300M alone to improve JPMorgan’s technology for its asset management products. Relative to its peer group, JPM claims the highest number of mobile banking customers and its Chase Mobile app currently sports a 4.7 (out of 5) rating in the App Store.
Earnings call analysis – Barclays, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley talking up digitization
JPM discussed continued digital consumer banking growth, which grew 6% in Q3’17.
Bank of America spent portions of its Q1’17 and Q3’17 talking about digital banking initiatives and technology investment. Specifically, CEO Brian Moynihan mentioned the bank spent $2.25B on technology initiatives in the first three quarters of 2017. The bank also now sees mobile devices account for 1 of every 5 deposit transactions.
On Morgan Stanley’s Q3’17 earnings call, Morgan Stanley CFO Jonathan Pruzan mentioned the bank is beta testing new customer-facing digital products it plans to launch, potentially in the robo-advisory space. Specifically, Pruzan noted: “When we think about our wealth business, it’s a business that’s built on scale. And it’s built on the fact that people with wealth want personal advice. So it’s going to be both a mix of technology and digital with the personal element of the advice channel. And we think that’s the winning formula going forward.”
Based on the data, JPMorgan ranks ahead of most bulge bracket banks when it comes to overall fintech investment since 2013, but behind its peers Goldman Sachs and Citi.
The Rise Fund, a private investment firm co-founded by the U2 lead singer, is making its first known bet on a fintech business by backing Acorns Grow Inc., said people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the details are private.
Oportun, a community development financial institution that provides small loans to individuals with little or no credit history, is planning to open 20 lending offices in Florida.
The Redwood City, Calif.-based lender said this week that it has already opened four offices in Miami and Hialeah and that it expects to add 16 more in the Sunshine State, primarily in South Florida, by the end of the year.
Convergence of Software and Financial Products One of the important lessons that Square taught the market is that bundles of software solutions (loyalty, POS, analytics, scheduling and many others) and lending are essential drivers in advancing growth of payment processing.
InsureTech
The Power of the Machines Companies like LendingClub are using machines to discover new relationships and patterns to introduce more tailored financial offers to their customers.
Emerging Economies Many growing companies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are developing and adopting financial solutions, often faster and with more innovation than in developed economies.
The Internet giant is finally putting its many payments capabilities — Google Wallet, Android Pay and Pay with Google — under a single name, Google Pay, after lagging for years behind Apple Pay and Samsung Pay.
Fifth Third Bancorp has received top marks from the Federal Reserve on its most recent Community Reinvestment Act examination as expected.
Fifth Third announced the results on Wednesday, saying in a press release that the Fed gave it an “outstanding” rating on its most recent exam. The Cincinnati company had said in a regulatory filing last month that it expected to ace the test, which covered the period between Jan. 1, 2014, and June 30, 2016.
Student loan debt statistics show that more than 70 percent of students graduating from four-year colleges have debt, so you aren’t alone if you need to borrow to cover educational costs.
Step 1: Understand your options
Federal loans for students
Federal loans for parents
Private loans for students
Private loans for parents
Source: Federal Student Aid
Step 7: Determine if you’ll need to apply for private loans
Family contributions if parents or other family members are willing and able to pay
Roostify announced Thursday that it hired Adnan Habib as the company’s new vice president of engineering.
In this role, Habib will lead Roostify’s growing product delivery team and will be responsible for making improvements to the Roostify’s digital lending platform.
Roofstock (www.roofstock.com), the leading online marketplace for buying and selling leased single-family rental homes, today announced the strategic hire of Suresh Srinivasan as chief marketing officer. Srinivasan has 20 years’ experience leading marketing, product, and e-commerce functions at Fortune 500 and high-growth tech startups. Most recently serving as the SVP of Marketing for Xome, Srinivasan brings a deep understanding of the fast-growing real estate technology sector to Roofstock where he will be responsible for accelerating growth of Roofstock’s marketplace for single-family rental homes and developing the company’s partnership network.
Regulators in Europe and the UK are ordering banks and credit card companies to share customer data with other companies if their customers agree. The companies will also be able to carry out payments on a customers’ behalf.
Open Banking forces lenders to offer a digital “fire hose” of data that any third party can use to get standardised access — provided the startup is registered with the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the customer agrees to share their data. They won’t have to negotiate deals with banks, just plug into their digital systems and go.
The aim of Opening Banking is to give customers greater control over their data and to encourage account switching.
ThinCats says 2018 is poised for growth. The online lender reports that December was a record month booking £12 million of funding listed on the platform followed the biggest-ever ThinCats-listed loan of £6.7 million to the Chelsea Yacht & Boat Company at the end of September.
Loan Store is the responsible lending hub that reveals to reduce the interest rates on instant cash loans for the UK people.
Hennery Dicosta, a senior adviser of Loan Store, has offered the complete details about this announcement. This is what he said- In a recent scenario, people usually try to borrow a small loan amount. That is why we have decided to provide the loans for bad credit people with no guarantor and no fees on an instant decision to resolve their short term emergencies. We never charge any processing fee and we are now providing these loans on quite low rates of interest. Besides, we do not judge the creditworthiness of the borrowers with their credit rating and give an instant decision on their loan request.
With that in mind, we asked three Motley Fool investors to each profile a company that has a low valuation now compared to its earnings-growth potential. They identified Yirendai (NYSE:YRD), Criteo S.A.(NASDAQ:CRTO), and Changyou.com (NASDAQ:CYOU) as strong contenders trading at attractive discounts.
China’s first P2P online lending platform
The Chinese P2P lending market blossomed in the late 2000s, catering to customers who were underserved by traditional banks, and is worth about $60 billion today.
Analysts expect Yirendai’s revenue and earnings to rise 74% and 14% respectively this year, followed by 43% revenue growth and 41% earnings growth next year. Yet the stock trades at just 14 times earnings, compared to an industry average of 26 for credit service providers. Based on those numbers, Yirendai looks likely an undervalued growth stock.
But there are some obvious reasons why investors are discounting it.
First, Yirendai is a subprime lender. Just 1.7% of its loans were rated as prime “Grade A” last quarter. Another 8.7% were Grade B, and 14.1% were Grade C — but 75.5% were rated Grade D. Yirendai collects higher fees from lower rated borrowers, but its business could collapse if its delinquency rates rise.
The company only discloses delinquency rates for loans past due by 15 to 89 days, and that rate came in at a low 1.8% last quarter. But it doesn’t report any data on loans delinquent for over 90 days.
Black Fish, a consumer finance platform based in China’s Nanjing region, has received $145 million in a series A round from a cluster of firms including Lightspeed China Partners and Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur based Gobi Partners.
Others who participated in the round include Morningside Venture Capital, JAFCO Asia, Fullcent Capital and Zhang Tao, founder of Dianping.com.
At this point, the average annual growth rate of consumer finance is 16.4 percent.
Renren holds a significant investment portfolio that is easily worth $12 per share. This value will likely be realized in the near term due to multiple catalysts.
The company has started to get involved with blockchain-related businesses, which potentially turns them into a “blockchain play”.
This situation leads to an asymmetrical payoff structure in which there is very little downside and significant upside. My target price is $18.
Renren was an early VC investor in Sofi, taking part in its seed round of financing as well as a later follow-on round. They currently hold a 13% stake in SoFi, having sold 14.1% of their holdings (representing 2% of SoFi) in April 2017 for $92 million.
Dianrong and the Dalian Finance Development Bureau and Dalian Finance Industry Investment Group (DFIIG) recently signed a strategic cooperation agreement to drive financial innovation in Dalian and across China. According to the agreement, Dianrong will develop a series of specific projects in partnership with the Dalian government, including:
Assist the Dalian Finance Development Bureau in creating a financial technology (fintech)cloud platform to provide fintech capabilities for small loan and guarantee companies, and other small and medium-sized financial institutions in the region and at large. Tools and services will include sophisticated fraud detection, big-data risk management tools, payment channel integration, and compliance reporting. The fintech cloud platform will also provide regulators with easier monitoring of local lending activities and trends in an ongoing and comprehensive way, helping them provide timely policy guidance and support on risk management.
Work with DFIIG to establish a special Internet finance investment fund for Dalian. The fund will focus on investment in fintech projects and startups with the potential to strengthen Dalian’s new economy and financial services industry.
Develop a supply-chain trading platform in Dalian utilizing advanced fintech and blockchain capabilities to help more small and medium-sized suppliers secure needed funding. Last year, Dianrong created the first blockchain platform for supply-chain finance with FoxConn Group, a global leader in consumer electronics.
Shanghai is one of China’s largest financial markets by market trading volume. In 2017, its trading volume was 1,438 trillion yuan ($220.9 trillion).
Shanghai has already launched a campaign against fraud and illegal behavior in financial consumer markets, such as internet-based peer-to-peer lending, cash loans to college students, and pay-day loans.
Germany’s Rocket Internet needs to hold on to its mountain of cash so it can compete with rivals from the United States and China and pounce when investment opportunities arise, the chief executive said in an interview.
CAUTIOUS MARKET
Rocket is invested in more than 100 start-ups, including in financial and property tech, logistics and travel sites, with its stakes in the five biggest of them potentially worth more than 1 billion euros to Rocket, according to Berenberg bank.
MoneyGram InternationalInc.MGI +2.63%signed on to run a pilot program testing XRP, a digital currency created by San Francisco startup Ripple, in its payments network, the companies said Thursday.
The Dallas-based company agreed to test XRP as a tool for reducing money-transfer costs and settlement times.
While global trade presents tremendous growth opportunities, businesses of all sizes are none-the-less finding it difficult to access much needed credit, resulting in a global trade finance gap. According to an Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) 2017 Trade Finance Gaps, Growth, And Jobs Survey, that gap was $1.5 trillion in 2016.
Non-financial institution competitors are aggressively targeting this market, using innovations such as blockchain to develop products and tools that not only replace outdated paper and manual-based processes, but also deliver unprecedented levels of cybersecurity that are critical in today’s digital transaction space. The same ADB survey revealed more than $13 billion in venture capital was invested in FinTech trade finance in 2016 alone.
The recent Simmons & Simmons Hyperfinance studyof the world’s leading trade banks found that only 7% believe they are at the forefront of digital innovation in spite of the fact that 80% of innovation leaders report digitally-driven products and services introduced over the past three years have expanded revenue growth. This illustrates the reality that financial institutions recognize the importance of developing a digital strategy, but few are moving aggressively enough to take advantage of these new technologies.
The question before the house right now, though, is: what about the credit rating agencies? The question comes in three parts: there are the global CRAs; the smaller/regional CRAs in most of the world, and regional CRAs in the special case of China.
First, the global CRAs [there are just two of them, Moody’s and S&P] are making “strong efforts” to incorporate an understanding of ESG issues. They are hiring staff with ESG backgrounds, equipping their existing analysts with the relevant expertise, and drawing on third party providers.
Then there is China. Its CRAs include Dagong Global, China Chengxin, and Golden Credit Ratings. The idea of integrating ESG into their analyses is thus far limited to the issue of green bonds, that is, bonds issued for the development of brownfield sites. Government policy in China encourages green bonds and the CRAs have responded. The resulting assessments are focused on the “E,” not so much the “S” or the “G.” And their environmental assessments rely on measuring the impact of the project the bond aims to finance.
Research very generally supports the hypothesis that there exists a causal link between ESG factors and the credit worthiness of a borrower;
Academic research in limited in that it is too exclusively content to measure credit risk by credit ratings, rather than testing the ratings themselves against alternative measures;
But some research does employ the spread of credit default swaps as an independent measure of risk;
Anecdotal observation indicates a clear link between G and defaults, although the linkage between E and S and defaults is more difficult to pin down;
There is much evidence in the linkage of ESG to macroeconomic factors and potential growth, which in turn are important to sovereign risk in particular.
The asset-backed bond market is braced for a slew of new issues next week, with deal flow expected to be dominated by auto issuers including BMW and Mercedes.
Just two issuers sold deals this week – GM Financial and Consumer Portfolio Services – and both auto trades were met with strong demand from investors. One banker on the GM deal said the deal was over-subscribed across the capital stack.
The biggest tightening though was seen on the smallest and lower rated tranches. The 3.58-year Class B, rated Aa3/AA by Moody’s and Fitch, priced at 30bp over interpolated swaps versus guidance of 35-40bp and whispers of 45bp area.
The 3.58-year Class C, rated A1/A, priced at 50bp over interpolated swaps versus guidance of 55-60bp and whispers of 65bp area.
Currently, it represents only 1 percent of the global financial industry. By comparison, digital media accounts for 40 percent while eCommerce accounts for around 10 percent.
Source: Tech Genix
To give you a perspective, venture capitalists invested more than $13 billion across 840 different fintech holdings in 2016, according to a report by KPMG. This is 7 percent more than they invested in 2015.
According to the McKinsey report, five areas will see high growth over the next decade. They are consumer finance, mortgage, lending, retail payment, and wealth management.
Online payments
PayPal handled $1.73 billion worth of transactions in the first quarter of 2017 alone, representing a 30 percent increase year-on-year.
Borrowing and lending
However, the delinquency rates have been increasingover the last few years. These rates have increased from 0.56 percent in January 2015 to 0.75 percent in December of the same year.
Overstock’s blockchain-focused subsidiary, Medici Ventures, named its board of directors in 2017, and also saw a number of its portfolio companies continue to use blockchain to revolutionize industries including capital markets, money and banking, property registry, voting, identity, and underlying blockchain technology, including:
tZERO, the world’s first SEC approved, blockchain-based alternative trading system, launched its initial coin offering (ICO), which attracted over 10,000 subscribers and raised $100M in commitments in the first 12 hours of its pre-sale. A significant portion of the tZERO security tokens issued will be available to accredited investors in the public sale beginning in January, 2018.
DeSoto Inc., a joint venture between Overstock.com founder and CEO Patrick Byrne and world-renowned economist Hernando de Soto, was created to develop a global property registry system to surface the property rights of billions of people in the developing world.
Bitt, a Barbados-based financial technology company using blockchain to create central banking tools and mobile money applications, named Rawdon Adams, son of former Barbadian Prime Minister Tom Adams, as its CEO. Bitt also fully launched its new mMoney digital payment product, bringing to market a blockchain-based mobile wallet that allows users to participate in digital transactions on their smartphones without the need for a traditional bank account, helping to foster financial inclusion in the region.
South-American based Ripio (formally known as BitPagos), participated in an ICO that raised $37M to fund its Ethereum-based peer-to-peer lending platform, Ripio Credit Network.
Belgium-based SettleMint launched a token sale for its DataBroker DAO, a peer-to-peer marketplace created to provide Internet of Things (IoT) sensor-owners with a clear path to data monetization, and data consumers with a decentralized marketplace in order to buy IoT sensor data. SettleMint also signed an agreement with The Islamic Research and Training Institute, the research arm of the Islamic Development Bank Group, to work with local partner Ateon on developing blockchain-based financial products that can be used to support development and inclusion in IsDB member countries.
Zürich-based lender, TradePlus24, has selected Australian deep tech startup, Trade Ledger, as its global technology partner to roll out its new trade insurance wrapped lending product across their European lending network, and enter the Australian market.
According to IDC, only about a quarter of US bank technology budgets is spent on digital transformation, as opposed to business as usual. They expect this to grow to nearer 40 per cent in 2020.
Secondly, this spending could substantially boost banks’ productivity, and profits.
Banks will drive up the cost of customer acquisition for start-ups who will increasingly struggle unless they build network effects and scale very quickly. Roboadvisers and peer-to-peer lenders will be on heightened alert. Some start-ups will need to rethink their plans to disrupt and look to form partnerships instead.
Changes in financial regulation, such as a lighter touch fintech charter being examined in the US or the second payment services directive in Europe, could potentially make this more likely. The tech giants have the brands, customer reach, digital processes and flair to develop good products, and to take swift advantage of any regulatory changes.
German online lender Kreditech is making its way to India, Bank Innovation has learned.
For this expedition, the fintech has teamed up with SaaS banking platform Mambu for providing short-term lending products specifically tailored to local consumers.
Kreditech currently operates in Europe and Latin America and will expand into India in early 2018, together with its partner PayU, a global online payments provider and Mambu client in Latin America.
The loan product is expected to go live in the first quarter of 2018, all data will be hosted by AWS India.
A rising number of start-ups as well as small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are emerging in Myanmar as business opportunities rise. However, many companies fail to achieve their full potential and contribute substantially to the economy because capital assistance is lacking in the country.
A rising number of start-ups as well as small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are emerging in Myanmar as business opportunities rise. However, many companies fail to achieve their full potential and contribute substantially to the economy because capital assistance is lacking in the country.
Currently, local banks extend loans at interest rates ranging between 8.5 percent and 13pc. The local banks began offering SME loans at8.5pc interest in 2015. Since then, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and KfW Development Bank from Germany have also launched SME loans.
P2P lending
To get around the financial constraints, borrowing from family members and peers is common.
In fact, a rising number of businesses have resorted to P2P lending for funds to build up their businesses. Without any guarantees of success though, many entrepreneurs ultimately end up in debt. Others fall prey to fraud. Last year, The Myanmar Times reported at least three cases of fraud involving fake promises of repayments with up to 30pc interest.
Cloud Lending Solutions was recognized as a “Top 25 FinTech Company for 2017” by APAC CIO Outlook Magazine. A panel of industrial experts and executives collaborated with the editorial board to curate the list with an aim to provide clarity into the ideal FinTech partners.
Cape Town-based fintech company, Wealth Migrate, has launched a global digitalcurrency – WEALTHE Coin.
According to Wealth Migrate, while almost half of the world’s wealth is held in real estate, fewer than 13% of people have access or the resources to invest in and benefit from this lucrative market.
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.
News Comments Today’s main news: OnDeck collaborates with Ingo Money, Visa on real-time SMB lending. Affirm’s new mobile app allows consumers to borrow money for almost any online purchase. N26 readies for launch in the UK. P2PFA reports over 700M GBP in Q3 new lending. Fincera issues $1B in Q2 lending. Kabbage automates SMB lending in France, Italy with ING partnership. […]
OnDeck collaborates with Visa, Ingo Money on real-time SMB lending. AT: “This is huge. Businesses can now access capital in real-time thanks to Visa and OnDeck. It’s an interesting partnership with the addition of Ingo Money, which expands the network of potential cash out locations for businesses.”
SoFi priced itself at twice its valuation. AT: “But why? Did SoFi really believe it was worth $8B, or was this a fishing expedition to see who may be interested down the road when the company could command that valuation?”
Why Charles Schwab held talks on SoFi. AT: “Very interesting. Schwab likely sees the technology writing on the wall. If they are to remain relevant in the 21st century, the company will either have to develop new technology on its own or partner with a company that already has the technology. So this makes me wonder, will they go looking for another company?”
OnDeck (NYSE: ONDK), the nation’s largest online lender to small business, announced today agreements with Ingo Money and Visa to enable real-time1 funding of loans to small businesses via their debit cards, powered by Visa Direct. OnDeck will be the first company in the online lending industry to offer real-time access to capital via a customer’s existing small business debit card.
The move by OnDeck comes in response to small business demand for improved cash flow and faster payment experiences. A recent survey found 70% of small business owners report they have a small business debit card, and of those without debit cards, 87% of them said they would get a new debit card to take advantage of real time transfers. The virtual card grants you a one-time card number, an expiration date, and a three-digit security code, which can then be used to make singular online purchases, while the repayment plan is managed through the app.2OnDeck plans to use Visa Direct through Ingo Money’s technology platform to disburse loan proceeds securely in real time to its line of credit customers via their existing small business debit cards. Visa Direct is Visa’s real-time push payments platform allowing companies to leverage Visa’s global scale to develop faster payments solutions for ubiquitous reach to consumers or small businesses with a debit card.
Ingo Push, the turnkey push payments service from Ingo Money, allows OnDeck customers to receive funds via a vast network of eligible debit or prepaid card accounts, including eligible Visa cards; online and mobile wallets; and a network of more than 40,000 cash-out distribution points.
SoFi reportedly mulled a potential sale earlier this year, but the talks evaporated over a hefty asking price. After receiving a non-binding offer of $6 billion from a foreign bank, the online lender pegged its target acquisition price at $8 billion to $10 billion as it negotiated with several US companies, including Charles Schwab, per the Financial Times. That price would have ranked the deal among the second most valuable VC-backed fintech companyin the US. It’s also one of eight American startups that have raised $500 million+ rounds this year.
But while SoFi could likely fetch a relatively high acquisition price, the $8 billion to $10 billion figure is far more than it appears to be worth. In February, the online lender raised a $500 million round at a valuation of $4.4 billion—and since then, its value has likely dropped amid sexual harassment allegations at the company.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the Financial Times (paywall) reported the deal talks with Schwab were prompted by a $6 billion offer from a foreign bank after SoFi raised $500 million in funding led by Silver Lake. With a more than $4 billion valuation after that, the unnamed foreign bank expressed interest in acquiring SoFi. That prompted the online lender to reach out to other potential suitors aiming to fetch $8 billion to $10 billion in a sale.
At first blush, a deal with Charles Schwab may not make sense, given it isn’t in the online lending business. But SoFi does have a wealth management unit that would give the San Francisco discount brokerage access to more customers and thus more assets under management. It’s also a low-cost provider on that front, something very much in Schwab’s wheelhouse. According to SoFi’s website, the company doesn’t charge customers for the first $10,000 invested and charges 0.25% per year. It also has a team of live advisors that give customers advice and ETF portfolios that are curated by the company. SoFi also has a large customer base, particularly of millennials, that would be attractive to Schwab. Earlier this year ex-CEO Cagney predicted SoFi would end the year with 500,000 customers.
Lending startup Affirm, founded by PayPal and Yelp co-founder Max Levchin, is out to destroy the credit card, or at the very least make a noticeable dent in its utter ubiquity. The company, which began in 2012 by offering simple and transparent loans for web purchases, is today launching a mobile app to the public that acts as a virtual credit card, so it can be used as a line of credit with no strings attached for pretty much any online purchase. The app is available now for iOS and Android.
The virtual card grants you a one-time card number, an expiration date, and a three-digit security code, which can then be used to make singular online purchases, while the repayment plan is managed through the app. To use the service, you need to provide proof of your identity, but credit is extended only for the item you want to buy, with the company determining your likelihood to pay back the loan based on your current credit and the total amount being lended.
You’ll need approval for every purchase you try to make, up to a maximum of $10,000. In total, Chou says Affirm has made more than 1 million loans for a total amount of more than $1 billion since it started roughly five years ago. It also now counts as over 1,000 merchants as partners, including mattress maker Casper, furniture site Wayfair, and Expedia.
Now, Affirm wants to extend its services to anyone and any merchant, by going directly to the consumer with a virtual card.
Although Affirm may offer as low as 10 percent APR, or in some cases zero percent for select partner merchants, you still run the risk of paying more for a purchase using the company’s virtual card than if you had a standard credit card. For those who are simply bad with money and borrowing, it has the same pitfalls as a credit card, though with a few more speed bumps and warning signs built in.
For every dollar of fraud, lending companies incur $2.82 in costs, which includes chargebacks, fees, interest, merchandise replacement and distribution, according to the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Fraud Multiplier. Large digital lenders, with over $50 million in annual revenue, are hit hardest by fraud in this space. These large digital lenders face a higher risk of successful fraud attempts than others within the lending space, but it really is a problem across the digital lending space, even with small and midsized digital lenders.
When BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with USD 5.7 trillion in AUM, decided to layoff talented stock pickers in favor of machines for portfolio management in March, it was a sure sign that times are changing.
The top performer in a group of the five leading robo advisors in the first eight months of 2016 generated returns that were encroaching on double-digit territory, and in some cases outperformed their more expensive mutual fund counterparts.
Source: The Epoch Times
And it’s not just BlackRock that’s demonstrated a willingness to favor machines over stock pickers. Robo advisors as a category, which is comprised of approximately 100 firms, oversee USD 60 billion in AUM as of year-end 2016 across 15 countries, according to Deloitte. That amount is expected to balloon more than fivefold to USD 385 billion in a half decade, according to Cerulli Associates research.
A recent Capital One Investing survey says in times of extreme market volatility, millennials are the least likely generation to turn to a person for financial advisory services at 69%. In fact, millennials are the generation that place the highest value on robo-advisory services, evidenced by 65% of them saying automated financial advice “enhances their financial peace of mind,” according to the poll.
Bloom seems to be the Vanguard of the robo advisory market, undercutting its competitors on fees and charging as little as USD 10 per month to manage a 401(k) or 403(b) account.
FS Card Inc., an emerging financial services leader for underserved consumers, today announced it has raised $150 million in financing to fund future growth. Through its Build Card product, FS Card will expand access to traditional credit and create an on-ramp into the financial mainstream for small-dollar loan customers. The new credit facility closing comes as FS Card wraps up a year of rapid growth with Build Card portfolio expansion of nearly 500 percent in 2017.
The funding will be used for sustained portfolio build as part of the company’s ongoing commitment to financial inclusion in a market where a new rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is likely to impact access to alternative credit products.
According to Prosperity Now and The Federal Reserve, more than half of Americans are credit invisible or subprime, while 47 percent do not have $400 to pay for an emergency expense. FS Card leverages its proprietary machine learning algorithms to actively meet the increasing demand of underserved consumers for fairly priced credit with a prime-like experience.
Fintech is a multi-billion dollar industry, with startups in the US raising around $18 billion since 2015, according to PitchBook and nearly 1,400 venture capitalist-backed deals. Two of the most valuable startups in the country — Stripe and SoFi — are in the fintech sector. And there are 11 fintech startups valued at more than $1 billion.
10. Kabbage — $1.3 billion
Kabbage is valued at $1.3 billion, according to PitchBook estimates, thanks to a $250 million investment round in August 2017.
9. Robinhood — $1.3 billion
The zero-commission, US-focused stock brokerage is valued at $1.3 billion following a $110 million funding round in April 2017.
Avant was valued at $2 billion after a $325 million funding round in September 2015.
Though its valuation makes it the fifth most valuable fintech startup in the US, it’s seen some rocky shores in the years since. In June 2016, the company reportedly laid off staff and lowered its monthly lending by half.
3. Credit Karma — $3.5 billion
Credit Karma scored a $3.5 billion valuation on a $175 million funding round in June 2015 which brought the company’s total funding to $368 million.
2. SoFi — $4.4 billion
SoFi was valued at $4.4 billion during its most recent round of funding in February 2017, which brought the company $500 million from investors. In total, the company has raised over $2 billion, including a $1 billion round led by SoftBank in 2015.
1. Stripe — $9.2 billion
Stripe was valued at $9.2 billion in its most recent $150 million funding round in November 2016. The company has raised a total of $440 million since its founding in 2010.
In response to overwhelming investor demand, Groundfloor, the only real estate crowdfunding platform that is open to non-accredited investors, today announced the launch of its Loan Origination Network for mortgage brokers and third-party originators interested in tapping additional real estate loan opportunities. The company has opened up its innovative real estate financing platform to brokers nationwide who now have the opportunity to provide customers with low cost capital for fix and flip projects.
According to a recent report from ATTOM Data Solutions, the estimated total dollar volume of financing for homes flipped in Q2 2017 was $4.4 billion, up from $3.9 billion in the previous quarter and up from $3.4 billion a year ago to the to the highest level since Q3 2017, a nearly 10-year high. Also, more than 35 percent of homes flipped in Q2 2017 were purchased by the flipper with financing, up from 33.2 percent in the previous quarter.
Key benefits for mortgage brokers and third-party originators:
Competitive rates from six percent
Unique deferred payment option
Low documentation
Closing in as little as seven days
Costs rolled into loan principal
Discounted fees for high volume partners
Partners assigned dedicated Business Development Manager
Mortgage industry veteran Debora Valentine joins the team as Senior Vice President, Business Development. Valentine brings more than 25 years of experience in sales to Groundfloor’s senior leadership team.
Alipay has partnered with Marqeta on real-time payment processing for millions of Chinese travelers visiting North America.
Yesterday, Alipay announced it had teamed up with smart terminal provider Poynt to enable its Chinese users to pay with its services through all Poynt devices in North America.
Alipay, the world’s leading third-party payment platform, today announced they are working with JPMorgan Chase, a global financial leader, toward a relationship by which Chinese consumers traveling in North America would be enabled to pay using their Alipay Mobile Wallet at Chase merchant clients.
The proposed relationship between JPMorgan Chase and Alipay would enable its acceptance at many of Chase’s merchants in North America. Through Alipay’s geolocation-based “Discover” function and push notifications within the Alipay app, Chinese travelers can locate merchants nearby, receive promotion information, and make purchase decisions. It also enables local merchants to better target and connect with Chinese consumers.
Approximately 10 million consumers are expected to originate a home equity line of credit (HELOC) between 2018 and 2022. This would more than double the 4.8 million HELOCs originated in the previous five-year period (2012-2016). The projection is part of a new TransUnion (NYSE:TRU) study that evaluated recent dynamics in the HELOC industry, and was released today during the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Annual Convention & Expo.
TransUnion projects 1.4 million new HELOC borrowers in 2017 and 1.6 million in 2018, about a 30% increase from the previous two-year period of 2015 (1.1 million) and 2016 (1.2 million).
HELOC Originations – 2017-2022 Include Projections
Year
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019-2022
HELOC Originations (In Millions)
0.7
0.8
1.0
1.1
1.2
1.4
1.6
8.4
The TransUnion HELOC study found that rising home prices and the resulting increase in equity is beginning to fuel interest in HELOCs. The Case-Shiller home price index rose as high as 180 in 2005 and 185 in 2006 before dropping to 134 in 2012. By July 2017 it had risen again to 194, and is expected to rise in the next few years to well over 200.
According to the study, there were 4.9 million HELOC originations in 2005 when home equity stood at $13.3 Trillion. HELOC originations dropped to a mere 600,000 in 2011 as home equity declined to $6.3 Trillion. Home equity has once again risen to $13.3 Trillion in 2016, yet HELOC originations continued to be low at 1.2 million.
Who are the HELOC borrowers?
The study explored the primary reasons why consumers open HELOCs and estimated the percentage of HELOCs opened under each motivating reason.
Types of HELOC Borrowers
HELOC Category
Defining this Type of HELOC Borrower
Percentage of
HELOCs
Debt Consolidation
“Consolidate balances from other credit products, usually to a lower interest rate”
30
%
Large Expense
“Finance a large credit need (e.g., home renovation project)”
29
%
Refinance
“Refinance a HELOC, often to change terms or to get a better rate”
25
%
Piggyback
“Concurrent with a mortgage origination, often used as part of a down payment”
9
%
Undrawn
“Standby, undrawn line of credit for a ‘rainy day’”
Four leading trade associations – Electronic Transactions Association, Innovative Lending Platform Association, the Marketplace Lending Association, and the Small Business Finance Association – commissioned a comprehensive survey of U.S. small business owners from Edelman Intelligence. The survey conducted by Edelman Intelligence found that a large majority (70%) of small business owners believe there are more credit options today when compared to five years ago, and 97% of those feel that the growing number of financing options is a good thing.
Key findings of the study include:
70percent of small- and medium-sized business owners say there are more lending options now, and 97 percent of those believe that the increase in options is a positive thing for their businesses.
Most small business owners reported using online small business lenders to help them expand their locations, make necessary hiring and equipment purchases, and help manage cash flow.
Of the small business owners considering taking out a loan in the next 12 months, close to 40 percent say they will consider borrowing from an online lender.
According to the study, 98 percent of small business ownerswho have used online lenders say they are likely to take out another loan with an online lender.
For many small business owners, online small business lending platforms are a popular alternativeto asking friends and family for a loan.
PeerStreet, a marketplace for investing in real estate-backed loans, is excited to announce its affiliate program at FinCon 2017. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, PeerStreet’s platform provides investments in high-yield, short-term real estate loans. The newly launched program will allow PeerStreet to partner with the personal finance community to better serve both current and future investors.
PeerStreet aims to reach more investors through the affiliate program by working with financial writers and influencers to share thought leadership and market information about this unique space. In addition to high-conversion advertising opportunities, affiliate program partners will also have access to PeerStreet’s dedicated Affiliate Director, who can provide deep insight into PeerStreet’s service and offer tailored support.
Mastercardannounced it has tested and validated its blockchain and will be opening access to it via a set of three APIs published on the Mastercard Developers website. The APIs include the Blockchain Core API, the Smart Contracts API, and the Fast Pay Network API.
Mastercard will pilot the blockchain for use in the business-to-business space, implementing it to increase speed and transparency in payments and decrease costs for cross-border payments.
Mastercard’s blockchain operates independently of a digital currency.
Online lender Fannie Mae announced on Monday the launch of its new single source validation, new API platform, and servicing marketplace for servicing transfers.
Single Source Validation saves lenders time and money
Allows lenders to validate a borrower’s income, assets, and employment with a single report from a single approved vendor that the lender chooses.
Uses source data for validation (a borrower’s bank account, including pay stream and direct deposit information).
Reduces the number of paper documents borrowers need to provide.
Amplifies savings already being realized by lenders who currently use Day 1 Certainty validation services.
New API platform levels the playing field for lenders
Provides lenders with all the information they need from Desktop Underwriter to originate a loan.
Allows lenders to access information that they can customize to their needs.
Uses industry-standard data formats and protocols so lenders can integrate the Fannie Mae API to their systems quickly and easily.
Servicing Marketplace
Provides sellers greater access to servicers when they sell loans to Fannie Mae and creates more efficiencies in managing co-issue transactions with Fannie Mae.
Offers transparent pricing, a standardized process, and standardized data requirements when a loan is sold to Fannie Mae.
Improves data quality and simplifies the servicing rights transfer process for sellers and servicers.
Envestnet | Yodlee (NYSE: ENV), a data aggregation and data analytics platform powering dynamic, cloud-based innovation for digital financial services, today announced its integration with Fannie Mae through a pilot program to digitally validate borrowers’ assets. Fannie Mae will leverage Envestnet | Yodlee’s Risk Insight Solutions to fuel the Day 1 Certainty™ validation of assets offering, which gives lenders a faster and simplified borrower experience.
Over a four-decade career in financial services I have witnessed, experienced and participated in transformational change. The conversations around emerging technology like the ATM caused industry debate – consumers would never use a machine to make a withdrawal from their account. Credit cards not tied to a specific gasoline brand, local merchant or one of the giants of the catalogue sales world – Montgomery Wards, Sears and that upstart JC Penney – would never be accepted. Consumers would never do their banking over the telephone, and of course never accept online banking – remember the first versions using a floppy disk? And checks would always be the only way, other than cash, to pay for things (bill pay, PayPal, debit cards and other payment methods…all have dispelled that).
We should be concerned about the FinTechs. They are not a fad nor are they going away. They are very well capitalized, and they have revolutionized how to leverage big data in ways we can only dream of. They have challenged credit score lending structures by leveraging their ability to engineer data. They are mobile optimized, in fact they are mobile prevalent, and they strive for immediate decisions and funding. Where traditional lenders are still caught up in past practices making it difficult to refinance student debt, underwrite small business loans in minutes, grant signature loans at the point of purchase, or embrace new credit models, the FinTechs are quickly gaining ground in market share because they can do those things today.
And we have not evolved our cornerstone lending program, the signature loan, to compete not only at the POS for autos, but for personal improvements and major retail purchases as SOFI, Lending Club and so many other FinTechs have.
Robin Erickson, an Arizona snowbird, remembers the pitch she got from her life-insurance agent about LoanGo, a startup internet payday-loan company.
The Mount Vernon, Washington, resident said she was told that the investment would generate an 18 percent return, and she “more than likely” would get her money back in a year.
“I loaned him $30,000, and I haven’t heard from him since,” Erickson, a retired elementary-school teacher, told The Arizona Republic in a phone interview.
The Arizona Corporation Commission’s Securities Division alleges that Erickson and four other older investors were defrauded of a combined $250,000 after making investments in 2011 and 2012 with LoanGo.
Administrative Law Judge Scott M. Hesla on Oct. 10 sided with state regulators and ordered the men to pay a total of $250,000 in restitution to the five investors. The judge also ordered the men to pay penalties of up to $15,000 each for “multiple violations” of the state’s anti-fraud provisions.
The judge, in his ruling, noted that Billingsley failed to inform investors that their money would be used to repay business startup loans of $10,000 each to himself and Peterson. The judge also wrotethat investors were not told Billingsley received a $15,000 commission for obtaining their investments.
The judge noted that Billingsley was repaid his startup loan the same day one person invested $45,000 in LoanGo, and that Peterson was repaid the same day a different person invested $25,000 in the company.
It has been 20 years since the Alternative Investment Management Association published its first due diligence questionnaire, a template designed to standardize the diligence process by which investors decide if a particular management is right for them.
Now it has published a new questionnaire/template, covering a broader range of entities/strategies. Specifically, for the first time there are questions specifically covering private credit and private equity strategies. The new document also integrates what were formerly separate questionnaires specific to commodity trading advisers and fund of funds managers.
Banks have welcomed the statement of principles because they are non-binding, while fintechs are encouraged by the CFPB’s recognition of key issues in the debate.
Yet the principles could also lay the groundwork for future regulation if banks and fintechs cannot work out some outstanding issues on their own.
Screen scraping
The most controversial aspect of data sharing is screen scraping. Banks loathe data aggregators’ practice of asking a consumer to provide their online banking login credentials, so the firm can scrape their account data. They argue it’s unsafe to hand out banking credentials and that aggregators bombard their servers with these requests, preventing actual customers from accessing their accounts.
The CFPB’s principles seem to discourage screen scraping without banning it.
Knight said the principle may encourage banks to directly provide data to third parties.
Informed consent
The CFPB’s principles around informed consent appeared the most stringent, suggesting that it’s not enough to just disclose what a company is doing, but disclosures must be done in language anyone can understand.
The principle may pose a challenge for banks and fintechs. How many companies send notifications about how they’re using and storing consumers’ data, in easy to understand language?
However, while Noreika again defended the OCC’s right to license non-depository companies on Thursday, he also said the agency has not decided whether it will “exercise that specific authority.” This is more ambiguous than the OCC’s previous stance, perhaps suggesting the regulator believes the measure won’t survive such strong opposition.
Noreika said there’s been progress here, as federal regulators are now more willing to engage in dialogue with each other and with fintechs.
The Robo Report, the first and only report on the performance and portfolios of robo advisors, published by BackEndBenchmarking, has been released for the third quarter 2017, the company announced.
The expanded Report now offers a first look two full years of a few robo advisors performance data, along with new sections that include interviews with WiseBanyan, Personal Capital and Betterment; the addition of Sofi, TIAA and WealthSimple; and upside/downside capture ratios for more specific quant on risk tolerance, as well as more detailed asset allocation and style analysis.
The company currently tracks Acorns, Betterment, eTrade, Fidelity Go, Future Advisor, Personal Capital, Schwab, SigFig, Tradeking, Vanguard, WiseBanyan, TD Ameritrade, Ellevest, Hedgeable and Merrill Edge, Sofi, TIAA and WealthSimple.
First Associates Loan Servicing announced today that they will be hosting an industry networking breakfast for Marketplace Lending and Investment Banking professionals the day prior to the American Banker Digital Lending + Investing Conference.
Hosted at Aureole Restaurant in Manhattan, this event will include a panel of marketplace lending superstars, including speakers from Prospect Capital, Macquarie, MoneyLion and more, who will discuss the state of the industry.
If you have interest in attending panel discussion and event, please click here to learn more.
CoinList, a provider of financial services for staging and managing initial coin offerings (ICOs), is spinning out of AngelList as a standalone company that will be led by former Sidewire CEO Andy Bromberg, it tells Axios.
Closely-watched German fintech startup N26 is recruiting a country manager to spearhead its launch into the UK.
A job listing on N26’s website says it is looking for someone to take “charge of the market entry of N26 in the UK.” The successful applicant will be “responsible for the operational setup and development of N26 in the UK market,” and should “build up the branding for N26 within the UK market in order to successfully attract and win new customers.”
THE PEER-TO-PEER Finance Association (P2PFA) has reported that new lending among its members equated to more than £700m in the third quarter of 2017, despite losing ‘big three’ platform RateSetter during the period.
The self-regulated trade body said on Monday that cumulative lending by the existing P2PFA platforms came in at more than £7.1bn by the end of September 2017.
The UK Peer to Peer Finance Association (P2PFA) has published their quarterly numbers on sector growth for the third quarter of 2017. Covering the period between July and September 2017, the P2PFA says the numbers confirm continued steady growth in levels of new lending and in the number of borrowers facilitating loans through peer-to-peer lending platforms.
Earlier this year LendInvest received the highest possible rating for the quality of our loan servicing from ARC Rating, a regulated European credit agency, for the third straight year. It’s a big achievement for any lender, but particularly an online lender.
Here are some of the things that ARC looks for when rating a lender’s servicing standards:
Open Banking refers to an open source technology that allows anyone to create apps and websites for the financial services sector. Developers use an application programme interface (API) to create software that allows customer data to be shared securely between banks and trusted third parties – with the customer’s consent.
The Open Banking Standard is publically available and can be accessed by developers when creating apps and websites. The final version of the Open Banking Standard is due to be in use by 2019.
Examples of Open Banking apps
Yolt is a money management app owned by ING Bank and launched in beta format in June 2017. Yolt allows users to view all their bank accounts, credit cards, bills etc. in one place – even if they are from different providers. Users can compare prices, including energy prices, and set budgets on their phone.
HSBC announced in September 2017 that it was testing an Open Banking platform that will allow its customers to view their current accounts, credit cards, loans, mortgages and savings from up to 21 different providers.
Wave offers a service for businesses to give clients access to all of their finances in one place. It acts as an invoicing service; tracks income and expenses to make accounting easier; allows for streamlined payment of staff and will leverage data from as many sources as possible. It also offers loans to clients by connecting with the online lender OnDeck.
DueDil is an app which uses data to make online due diligence passports for its clients so that they can prove their financial credentials.
Tandem collects the banking data of its customers from their banks, analyses their spending habits and provides suggestions for how they can save money.
As rents continue their inexorable rise, the appeal of living in inner London boroughs such as Camden – where the average monthly rent is £2,219 – is starting to lose its shine.
According to peer-to-peer lending platform Landbay, the central areas popular among students are being eschewed by graduates, who are looking to make the capital their long-term base.
Faced with spending up to 75 per cent of their take-home pay on rent, graduates looking to work in London are choosing to live in areas where they can remain in commuting distance but pay less. And with average student loan debts of more than £50,000 according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, any savings are welcome.
Top ten outer London boroughs | Average rent and yield
Users of Fitbit can start to use their devices to pay contactlessly in stores a la Apple Pay from today.
Starling Bank, a mobile bank which offers money management and payment tracking through its app, is also the first UK bank to launch with Fitbit Pay, Apple Pay and Android Pay.
Fincera Inc. (OTCQB: YUANF), a provider of online financing and e-commerce services for small and medium – sized businesses and individuals in China, has reported financial results for the second quarter ended June 30 , 2017.
According to their numbers, loan transaction volume across both CeraPay and CeraVest platforms for Q2 2017 totaled approximately RMB 6.9 billion (USD $ 1.0 billion ).
Chinese companies have raised $38.6bn through IPOs in the year to date, according to Dealogic.
Issuers in financial services — which, like education and leisure is at the confluence of the hot segments of consumer services and tech — include Ppdai, which is raising $350m in New York, Yixin, Lexin and Jianpu Technology.
Yixin illustrates another trend: many of those coming to market are backed by China’s tech royalty including Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and JD.com. Auto financier Yixin, backed by the latter trio, is expected to raise about $200m.
Like Qudian, which listed last week, fellow online lender Lexin is heading to the US and is expected to raise around $600m, according to bankers. Jianpu Technology, a financial comparison site akin to Lending Tree in the US or MoneySuperMarket in the UK, filed for its IPO last Friday.
Recently, Rong360’s JianPu Technology has filed an IPO prospectus to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Rong360, which started with a diversion business, this time takes the VIE model to list in US. Its business scope covers loans, credit cards and finance, as well as big data risk controls. However, it is noteworthy that Rong360 is still in the red, and its big data risk control business has also led to a compliance controversy.
According to the prospectus, the company plans to go public in the U.S. with a maximum of $200 million deal for it, and the underwriters are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Huaxing Capital. Rong360 was founded in 2011 and has finished four round of equity finance. The listed entity is a wholly owned subsidiary of Rong360, which was registered in the Cayman Islands in June 1st this year.
With the net loss of $7.2 million in the first half of 2017, Rong360 is still in the red. However, the deficit of JianPu Tech has been shrinking. The prospectus shows that the company’s revenue has increased from 168.4 million RMB in 2015 to 182.1 million RMB in 2016. And in the first half of 2017, its revenue has grown to 393.4 RMB, nearly tripled in less than two years.
Chinese online lender Qudian Inc is under fire in China after what observers said was a less-than-impressive interview by its CEO Luo Min Sunday that was aimed fending off criticism of the company’s business practices. The critics said it could instead exacerbate the company’s domestic image and hurt its share price.
Following its splashy debut in the US, Qudian was the subject of many negative news reports, mostly from popular social media accounts, about its business model, with some questioning its practice of targeting students for loans and others even describing the company as a “loan shark” – lending money at usurious rates.
“Our bad loan ratio is below 0.5 percent, that’s very low. So we can afford it when those people don’t pay up… Losses have been contained at a low level,” Luo said.
But part of the interview drew much attention and even mockery. Luo said, “Loans that weren’t paid on time were considered dead accounts. We never pushed people to pay back. We don’t even call. If you don’t pay back, then never mind, we’ll just give it to you as a gift.”
European Union
ING Partners with Kabbage, Inc. to Expand Automated Small Business Lending into France and Italy (Kabbage Email), Rated: AAA
Kabbage Inc., a global financial services, technology and data platform serving small businesses, and ING, a global bank, are expanding their strategic partnership into France and Italy to provide small businesses with real-time access to working capital. Building on ING’s successful launch in Spain with the Kabbage Platform TM , this partnership allows millions of small businesses throughout France and Italy to easily apply, qualify and access ongoing lines of credit up to €100,000 with ING in under 10 minutes.
Initiative Ireland has today announced the launch of Ireland’s first syndicated property finance platform.
The launch coincides with the company’s pre-approval of a €1.5 million secured loan, which has been approved for funding via the platform. The largest crowd-lending loan approved to date in Ireland, the loan will fund the development of 10 social housing apartments and a ground floor restaurant on the North Strand Road, Dublin.
One angle that needs to be discussed more is how the introduction of these new services is also lowering barriers to most financial activities.
For instance, the rise of cashless options has given the unbanked access to financial services especially in regions that banks find unserviceable. So, it is quite refreshing then that some new Fintech efforts are focused on this particular area since financial inclusion is considered as a key aspect to poverty reduction.
I recently spoke with Sharone Perlstein who is currently working on delivering microfinance services to emerging markets.
What attracted you to microfinance?
There are about 2.5 billion people in the world who are unbanked. Microfinance bypasses the banking system and can help unbanked people develop their own personal economy that will enable them to support their families, their communities, and ultimately the economy of their country.
What are the key challenges in microfinancing and how do you think they can be overcome?
Human resources: Until now, a very large workforce was required to provide this service to those who need it. Today, with automation and smarter information systems, we can significantly reduce manpower and streamline processes to make loans more economically viable for borrowers and lenders.
Most microfinance companies operate where they are most needed, namely in rural areas where the technological infrastructure is unadvanced and unstable. These areas are usually far from urban centers and transportation is inconvenient and expensive. As a result, communication between the microfinance service provider and its potential customers is complex and challenging.
Granting loans to people without a bank account may be risky from a business point of view, since it is difficult to know whether potential borrowers are trustworthy or will be able to meet the terms of the loan. It is also difficult to monitor their business and economic activity. In other words, it is very difficult to build a financial profile for a borrower with no banking activity. Here, too, mobile technology changes the picture.
Some argue that microfinance loans, supposedly meant to help poor people succeed financially, often leave them with debts they can’t afford because of the high-interest rates. What is your opinion on this matter? Is this a real problem? What causes it? And how can it be solved?
I think the best solution is to ensure that:
A. Potential borrowers understand the terms of the loan in depth.
B. The Microfinancier knows the potential borrower in depth.
Why do you choose to focus on Indonesia?
I researched the region’s economy a bit and discovered that there were more than 50 million small and medium-sized businesses, representing about 97% of the business sector in Indonesia and responsible for 30%, if not more, of its GDP growth. However, many of these businesses don’t have enough money to realize their full potential, especially in rural areas, and the banks do not provide the right solution. For this reason, the Bank of Indonesia has enacted a law according to which banks will have to devote at least 20% of their loans portfolio to microloans by 2018, thus opening a window of opportunity for businesses and other microfinance companies wishing to enter the local ecosystem.
Bitcoin could have you covered on your next home loan.
In this line, the longstanding contribution of traditional banks in the worldwide economy is undeniable. But due to their credit selectiveness, renowned bureaucracy and transactional costs, the question is: Can this system can be improved to better serve the 2 billion underbankedaround the world? Greater financial inclusion provides benefits far beyond improved economic health for underserved societies; it is also way for governments to reduce corruption and fraud and promote entrepreneurship and growth.
Anecdotally, at the end of 2015, Lending Club had a total loan volume of $15.9 billion. Year-end of 2016 shows a total volume of $24.6 billion so the annual volume for 2016 is the difference or $8.7 billion.
Just last year, Ripio Credit Network, which wrapped up a $31 million Ethereum ICO, entered the credit service market using Bitcoin as the transaction vehicle. A year later, BitPagos launched Ripio as a digital wallet that enables consumers to send, receive, store, and buy or sell Bitcoin in local currency and to make online payments. In January 2017, BitPagos rebranded as Ripio, with around 100,000 users in tow across North and South America.
Mambu is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that has quickly differentiated its product as a leader in the white label global online banking space.
Mambu is operating in 45 different countries indicating its ability to quickly adapt to diverse regulatory regimes.
Co-founded by CEO Eugene Danilkis and COO Frederik Pfisterer, Mambu is Berlin based Fintech, a standout in the emerging German Fintech scene. Danilkis started his career developing NASA-certified software for the International Space Station.
Can you please provide an update on Mambu and global utilization? How many different companies are using your digital banking services? Which countries are you operating in?
Mambu is live on 6 continents, countries of operation include the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, the US, Kenya, Australia, Philippines, China and Argentina, to name a few.
We have more than 180 live operations in over 45 countries, our solution powers over 5000 loan and deposit products which serve over 4 million end customers.
Our clients range from FinTech revolutionaries to traditional banks.
Oaknorth
N26
New10, ABN AMRO’snewly launched SME lending Fintech, went from concept to launch in 10 months and is offering a fast and fully digital loan application process for Dutch businesses.
Globe Telecom’s lending business Fuse
PayU Colombia
Is online lending, including P2P, marketplace and balance sheet lending, the most demanded service right now?
Eugene Danilkis: Across all lending verticals, consumer, business and marketplace, there is significant demand for digital and customer centric loan products.
That being said, we have experienced a rise in demand from institutions looking to launch new digital banking services, offering both deposit and loan products.
We’ve also seen a growth in institutions looking to explore a different approach and take a marketplace model similar to that of N26. They want to collaborate with product providers to offer clients a wider range of products and services.
There appears to be more traditional lenders (IE banks) more inclined to go it alone and launch their own platforms. Goldman Sachs launched Marcus which they developed in house. Is this a trend? Or an opportunity for Mambu?
Eugene Danilkis: As mentioned above, this is a trend that is gathering momentum and it is an opportunity for Mambu.
Cryptocurrency: A digital currency that uses cryptography, the art of coding messages to keep them secure.
Blockchain technology: A type of software pioneered by the bitcoin community. It is a new way to structure data by spreading it out across the network so no single party can meddle with the records.
Smart contracts: A piece of software that runs on a blockchain platform and is programmed to automatically complete transactions based on specific circumstances.
Mining: The process of verifying transactions on decentralized cryptocurrency networks is called “mining.”
ICO: An initial coin offering is a type of fundraising campaignwhere a high-tech project raises cryptocurrency by selling tokens, usually a new token unique to this project or startup.
P2P: This stands for peer-to-peer, direct transfers between two people. If you send a friend money through the Venmo mobile app, that’s a P2P money transfer.
Altcoin: A generic term for almost any cryptocurrency that isn’t bitcoin, short for alternative coin.
Cryptocurrency wallet: In the crypto space, a wallet is a piece of software that manages your coins and assets.
Utility token: A cryptocurrency that activates a product or service, grants access to a community or network, or otherwise spurs the blockchain-based project’s development.
Mortgage network Connect for Intermediaries has added State Bank of India – the largest bank in India – to its panel.
The bank offers limited company and special purpose vehicle buy-to-let mortgages with rates starting from 2.59% to 60% LTV and 2.89% to 75% LTV.
It also offers buy-to-let mortgages for individuals from 2.09% to 60% LTV, while it accepts applications from first-time landlords if they have a residential mortgage.
Connect now has a panel of more than 100 lenders, with Octane, West One and Funding Circle being added this year.
The Mastercard Foundation today announced that its fifth annual and largest Symposium on Financial Inclusion (SoFI) will take place in Accra, Ghana, on November 7 – 9, 2017. The Symposium champions the idea that, to achieve greater financial inclusion, financial service providers in developing countries must do more to meet the needs and expectations of people living in poverty.
Each year since 2013 the Foundation has convened hundreds of industry professionals to focus on barriers to greater financial inclusion around the world.
This year’s event will reflect on progress made over the past five years, explore challenges that still lie ahead, and plan how to expand and deepen financial inclusion for the world’s most underserved people.
Keynote Address II: Dr. Ernest Addison, Governor, Bank of Ghana
The Mastercard Foundation first awarded the Clients at the Centre Prize in 2015 to the Swedish mobile microinsurance firm BIMA. Last year, the Prize was presented to the South African international remittance company, Hello Paisa. Each year draws nearly 100 applicants from companies around the globe. The three 2017 finalists are:
Jumo, a large-scale, low-cost financial services marketplace that uses behavioral data from mobile usage to create financial identities for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises;
ftCash, one of India’s fastest growing financial technology ventures which aims to empower micro-merchants and small businesses with the power of digital payments and loans; and
Destacame, a free online platform that empowers users by giving them control over their data to build their financial capabilities and to access financial products.
