Bill Miller discusses his $154 million hedge fund MVP 1 and its 30% allocation to bitcoin in a Wall Street Journal article; the fund is up 72.5% this year and according to a letter to investors the fund paid an average price of $350 per bitcoin; while his fund has done well he is aware of the risks that bitcoin could go to zero, providing his perspective in the article. Source
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An article in Bank Innovation explores whether Google’s mobile expansion points to larger fintech ambitions for the company; their Indian mobile payments app called Tez showed growth in the quarter and many companies are moving to Google Cloud including PayPal; Google also opened a payment API in Brazil and is also focusing on partnerships with retailers and merchants. Source
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Ant Financial is putting plans on hold to go public and will continue to invest in a wide variety of startups; Ant is one of the world’s most valuable fintech companies and last raised $4.5 billion in April 2016 giving it a $60 billion valuation; the firm is focused on expanding Alipay beyond the 70 countries it is used and deploying artificial intelligence technology. Source
Orchard stresses the importance of recovery rates in valuing pools of loans; blog post takes Orchard’s US unsecured consumer lending industry data and discusses what loan recoveries are, how they are calculated, how debt holders recover defaulted loan balances, and why recovery rates are so important. Source
CommonBond closed their fifth and largest securitization which contained $248 million of refinanced student loans; the senior tranches were rated by Moody’s, S&P and DBRS and received ratings of Aa2, AA and AA (high) respectively; the deal was four times oversubscribed; according to David Klein, CommonBond CEO and co-founder, “Investor demand for CommonBond paper has never been greater. The strong market reception is a reflection of our pristine credit quality, continued ratings progression, and track record of consistent results. As a programmatic issuer, we look forward to continuing to bring consistently high performing bonds to the market, providing investors with world-class capital deployment options.” Source
Monja shares a list of online lenders in the real estate space; discusses the pull back in construction financing by traditional banks and the continuing rise overall in the real estate construction sector. Source
- Finn.ai Raises $3 Million in Institutional Financing Round
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Lending Club has closed five of its investment funds under LC Advisors; the loans have been sold off to various buyers and the company has rebranded its investment management business to LendingClub Asset Management. Source
The latest securitization of Zopa loans priced tighter than last year’s; it was led by P2PGI and arranged by Deutsche Bank; the senior tranche was rated AA by Moody’s; Jaidev Janardana, Zopa’s CEO stated, “This is a further demonstration of investor and market confidence in our origination and underwriting capabilities. Our ability to originate high quality loans continues to make the Zopa investment asset a distinctive and attractive one to retail and institutional investors alike.” Source