JPMorgan Chase and the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) announced their 4th annual Financial Solutions Challenge to help improve the financial health of underserved communities; for the first time the competition will focus on entrepreneurs of color, women and individuals with disabilities; "The FinLab believes that diversity among leaders and teams also leads to more inclusive products and services with the potential to scale to millions of customers,” explained the press release that accompanied the announcement. Source.
JoinedNov. 30, 2016
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Todd is the host of PitchIt: the fintech startups podcast, a weekly interview show featuring emerging fintech founders and leading venture capitalists. He is responsible for leading the content team which covers fintech through daily & weekly email newsletters, editorial, virtual events, and in-person conferences. He has been covering fintech, banking, and venture capital for more than 15 years, including speaking regularly at industry events.
Online lending data and analytics platform PeerIQ announced their latest offering, a consumer credit suite backed by TransUnion data; the suite includes TransUnion’s depersonalized consumer credit data from the year 2000 to present day; users of the suite can see credit trends, vintage analysis, benchmarking analysis and more. Source.
The company is calling their strategy the digital everything model, which includes new mobile features and back office operations powered by the blockchain; “We’re not going to lose our financial discipline because we have to make an investment that we have to do or want to do,” CEO Jamie Dimon said when asked about their approach to the tech investment; branch expansions, investments in big data solutions and more were also discussed during the investor call as reported by American Banker. Source.
KPMG reports that fintech investment in Asia was $3.85bn in 2017, a significant drop from the more than $10bn invested in 2016; China was the biggest reason for the drop as the country saw only $1.3bn of investment in 2017; “Increasing government controls and regulations over fintech in China have kept many investors on the bench during 2017,” the report explained; one optimistic data point was corporate investment jumped in Q4 to 31 percent of overall deals. Source.
According to a new study by Accenture 7 out of 10 consumers would be reluctant to share their Information with third party providers; Citi recently published a study pointing to three main reasons that wide scale adoption will take longer; reasons include slow consumer adoption, fragmented market for new open banking services and the ability for payment providers to adapt to new rules; thus far open banking has been slow but big banks like Lloyds Banking Group and RBS have made big tech investments anticipating the change will happen over time. Source.
One of China’s largest e-commerce companies has launched a blockchain and AI focused accelerator named AI Catapult; the company said they were looking to test real world applications of their technologies at scale; the initial batch of companies include companies from all over the globe focused on dat, e-commerce, trading, wealth management and more. Source.
New York State Senators held a roundtable last week for NY based blockchain companies to give their opinions on the BitLicense; the BitLicense is seen as being too restrictive, especially for startups, and the listening session was meant to get industry points of view before making reforms; one of the biggest complaints is the current regulations are too one size fits all; it is a good sign to see legislators engage the community but NY’s Department of Financial Services was not invited and so there is skepticism that any change will actually occur. Source.
Online lending has been maturing the last few years with more companies reaching scale and some beginning to be profitable; banks have diversified their partnerships with online lenders and in some cases have launched their own online brands; one of the big shifts in the last few years is that banks and fintech companies are not seeing each other as enemies anymore, they can and do exist together through a number of different means. Source.
Varo Money has ramped up their marketing campaign to position themselves as a better option than the banks; the fintech company is not going directly at the banks in their ads as some other fintechs have done, they are instead highlighting their own offering; their ads can be seen on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest; they are also focusing on their customers overall financial lives, empowering their users to understand what they make and how they can spend wisely. Source.
Bank of America is the second big bank, following JPMorgan Chase, to announce a big expansion of branches; the bank plans to open more than 500 branches over the next 4 years and hire over 5,400 people; they also said they will redesign more than 1,500 branches with new technologies and layouts; the focus of the plan is to establish more branches in mid sized markets that are typically dominated by regional banks. Source.