According to a paper by the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) blockchain technology should be adopted by China’s secondary loan market; as CoinDesk reports the paper came out of a trip made by the regulator to their counterparts in the UK and France; European banks are putting together a program to test blockchain technology for the issuance of syndicated loans; the CBRC also considers blockchain technology to potentially be helpful for automating compliance. 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.
Citing low usage numbers by customers and retailers the payments company says they will end all bitcoin related payments by April 23rd; "Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense," Stripe product manager Tom Karlo wrote in the announcement reported by Business Insider; the volatility of price and mining fees also played into the decision by Stripe and has been cited by others as an issue that needs be be addressed. Source.
According to the Financial Times 2018 Global Alumni Survey graduates explained they thought finance was taught the best but fintech was near the bottom of the 18 subjects; one of the main reasons for the bad scoring is that fintech is not offered at many schools; Schools are trying to grapple with how to cover the term fintech as it could mean many different things; Schools that do teach courses on fintech see that students want to learn about it and hopeful to see it offered more. Source.
A new survey by Bank of America found that 63 percent of millennials are saving money, that is on par with generation X and baby boomers; the survey shows that millennials are a lot more in tune with their financial lives then they are given credit for; the survey also found that millennials are more apt to ask for a raise and they also play into stereotypes by saying they spend too much and don’t save enough when asked by researchers. Source.
Bitcoin exchange Coinbase is reported to have brought in more than $1bn in revenues this past year; according to a report in Recode the revenue figures for Coinbase were supposed to be $600mn but the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas pushed them to over $1bn; the company has also seen spikes in users, with more than 100,000 users signing in over the Thanksgiving day weekend. Source.
Orange Bank, the bank from French Telecom group Orange, was launched a few months ago to help shake up the banking world; with more banking being done on mobile devices and the advent of PSD2 the company thinks it is well positioned to go head to head with banks; they have seen companies like Alibaba and Tencent disrupt finance in Asia and there has been talk of big tech coming into banking too, as a telecom they feel like they were perfectly positioned to make the move; Orange has seen early success and they are looking to soon add consumer lending, mortgages and insurance. Source.
Fundbox is already operating in an open banking environment allowing third party access to information; “What Fundbox is doing is indicative of this next wave of open banking and leveraging APIs to embed functionality in the longer tail of places where small businesses do work,” said Alenka Grealish, senior analyst at Celent, to American Banker; the company learned from past integration issues and created Fundbox Fuse which is a set of HTML code for lite integration; they announced new integrations with Bookly, AND CO, Billy, Paid and Knowify with the hopes of integrating to thousands of platforms to help democratize access to credit. Source.
Most financial services firms look to educate users by having a blog or providing some links to resources; Acorns CEO Noah Kerner says the company wants to go further, they have their own online magazine, interviews with celebrities and provide financial how tos; they will also push content to you based upon how you use the app, trying to customize your experience; the big difference they see is when they combine education with the app experience, helping to move education beyond just reading articles. Source.
UK based p2p lender RateSetter has decided to no longer accept unsecured small business lending applications; the company said it will limit commercial lending to property and asset backed loans; “we have a clear framework around which to grow our commercial finance volumes and continue to deliver access to healthy returns to investors,” said Rhydian Lewis, founder and CEO of RateSetter, to AltFi. Source.
Nomura analyst Dan Dolev says that Square resembles Amazon and Google in the early days of those tech giants; "In 10 years, Square is likely to be a very different company helped by accelerating share gains from payment peers and relentless disruption of services like payroll and HR," Dolev said in a note to clients that was reported by Business Insider; the combination of new business ventures and increasing the number of ways they process payments are twos of true main reasons for the optimism; shares were trading almost 5 percent higher on Friday after the note. Source.