Another week with no major news from the banking system as the challenges of last month have been kept in check. Making news this week was more trouble for Frank CEO Charlie Javice, Acorns is acquiring GoHenry, Bloomberg is launching a finance-focused ChatGPT, Jamie Dimon’s annual letter to shareholders and Aspiration is laying off more staff. Here are what I consider to be the top 10 fintech news stories of the week.
Frank Founder Faces Criminal Fraud Charges Over JPMorgan Deal from The Wall Street Journal – Troubles are mounting for Frank CEO Charlie Javice. While there are lawsuits in both directions between her and JPMorgan we learned this week that the DOJ and the SEC have taken action against her and her company.
Investing app Acorns acquires kid-focused fintech GoHenry to expand in Europe from CNBC – The fintech M&A action continues with micro-investing app Acorns acquiring teen digital banking app GoHenry. This will give Acorns a foothold in Europe as GoHenry started in the UK and has a strong presence there and recently acquired a French company.
The ChatGPT Of Finance Is Here, Bloomberg Is Combining AI And Fintech from Forbes – Bloomberg is getting into the AI game with the launch of BloombergGPT. It takes the large language model of ChatGPT but adds all of Bloomberg’s proprietary finance data to create an intelligent finance assistant.
Jamie Dimon on Banking Turmoil: ‘This Wasn’t the Finest Hour for Many Players’ from The Wall Street Journal – This week Jamie Dimon released his annual shareholder letter. The 43-page tome provides commentary on the banking crisis, chiding the management of the collapsed banks for failing to do more than the regulatory minimum and he criticized regulators who pushed banks to own U.S. Treasuries.
Fintech Startup Aspiration Plans To Lay Off More Than Half Of Staff from Forbes – More fintech layoffs, this time from Aspiration, the environmentally-focused neobank. The company is letting go 180 employees, this after laying off 100 employees in December. Their pivot to focus on carbon credits does not appear to be working out well.
FinFit and Salary Finance Merge and Integrate Financial Wellness Offerings from PYMNTS – The employee financial wellness space is one with a tremendous amount of potential. FinFit has been providing its financial wellness solutions to employees for more than a decade and they are merging with the U.S. operation of Salary Finance.
An Ode to Privacy: a vision for a U.S. ‘freedom coin’ from Fintech Nexus – The American Enterprise Institute issued a CBDC report recently titled, The Values of Money: Will Tyranny or Freedom Be in Your Digital Wallet? It lays the foundation for a CDBC that has privacy built-in, calling it a “freedom coin”. Only suspicious transactions would require any kind of identity verification.
Kaszek earmarks nearly $1B in new funds for Latin American startups from TechCrunch – Latin America continues to be one of the hottest regions on the planet for fintech even during this recent downturn. Fintech investing pioneer, Kaszek Ventures, has closed two new investment funds totaling $975 million.
Startup launches credit-test tool for small businesses from American Banker – Small business self-help platform Hello Alice is starting to get some serious traction. They have signed deals with JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Mastercard to make their free self-assessment tool available to small business owners to help them understand their finances better.
Google to prohibit personal loan apps from accessing user photos, contacts from TechCrunch – Following some predatory loan practices in India and Kenya Google has decided to ban personal loan apps on its app store from accessing external storage, photos, videos, contacts, precise location and call logs.
Every Thursday at 5pm ET the Fintech Nexus news team and a special guest discuss the news of the week in fintech. Below is the video we posted to YouTube of this week’s show. You can also listen to the show in podcast format.
