The Curo Group targets underbanked consumers through WageDayAdvance in the UK and Speedy Cash in the US; they went public on Wednesday at $14 a share and were up more than 2.4 percent in their first day of trading; the former head of the CFPB led a Industry crackdown on payday lenders but new leadership points to those restrictions being lifted; the company charges about $25 per $100 borrowed and are backed by private equity group Friedman Fleischer & Lowe. Source.
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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.
The Futures Industry Association, the main futures industry group, is sending a letter to the CFTC expressing concerns over bitcoin futures; the FT saw a draft of the letter and it states that they did not allow for proper public transparency and input; futures brokers are concerned over holding more risk and have expressed concerns to the FT that they will not immediately clear the products. Source.
Coinbase has been the top cryptocurrency exchange for the US market as it’s process makes signing up and buying bitcoin simple; they have seen accounts jump from 5.5 million to more than 13 million in less than a year; their success has not been without growing pains with a number of outages occurring and customers lodging complaints that no one was available to help them; recently they also came to an agreement with the IRS to hand over records of customers involving more than $20,000 which was a compromise from a year long battle. Source.
Bittrex customers are unable to withdraw money from the cryptocurrency exchange and they have not heard from the company as to why this is occurring; the main issues appear to be involving verification of identities when they try to withdraw the money; the issues have been going on for close to 30 days for some customers and the company said the issue has only affected a small number of accounts. Source.
Deposit Marketplace Raisin has seen their investor count top 100,000, bank partners top 40 and deposits cross $4.5bn; the bank partners are in 18 different european countries and customers hail from 32 different countries; with interest rates so low their deposit marketplace offers savers a significant boost in interest and they have seen customers earn more than $41mn in excess interest thus far. Source.
RateSetter saw pre tax losses jump to $31mn from $7.1mn due to a bad loan to an advertising company; RateSetter also saw revenues jump by 38 percent as well as increases in customers and borrowers; the bad loan was absorbed by the lender as they explained it fell outside their credit policy and it was unfair to put the losses on their investors. Source.
FICO CEO Will Lansing said some banks are confusing customers by using a different score which he has dubbed Fako; VantageScore, the company behind the alternative scores, says their scoring is used by thousands of lenders for credit decisions and FICO is upset over competition; FICO is the most widely used credit scoring method as trillions worth of loans have been extended using FICO; JP Morgan Chase and Capital One both use VantageScore to help customers stay alerted about their credit health and not necessarily to underwrite loans. Source.
Open banking is around the corner in the UK and recently the CFPB released guidelines on data sharing that has banks concerned about cybersecurity; Kathryn Petralia, chief operating officer of the online lender Kabbage believes banks and Fintechs should be held to the same standard regarding data; concerns over data include responsibility on data breaches, encryption and entry points for hackers; as data sharing becomes the norm both banks and fintechs will need to protect themselves at many levels. Source.
Companies like TransferWise, Venmo and PayPal have forced banks in Europe to look at creating their own affordable real-time payments service; the idea is in the early stages but it shows the effect that fintech players can have on the traditional banks; the service would also look to head off the increased competitive threat from open banking which is set to begin in early 2018. Source.
UK Based Starling Bank has been granted approval by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority to offer financial products; the new authorizations will allow the bank to offer mortgages, consumer loans, ISAs and other investment products; they are the first mobile only bank to be granted such permissions. Source.