UK based challenger bank Monzo announced what their plans are for 2018; three specific areas they wanted to highlight were launching a feature to help customers manage bills, ending their prepare program and helping customers to switch to their payments platform; as the company continues to build out new features they said they plan to keep updating clients on a month by month basis. Source.
The UK's National Association of Commercial Finance Brokers (NACFB) has lifted insurance restrictions for its brokers; it will now provide insurance coverage to its brokers for all P2P loans; "Peer-to-peer lending is booming and it's fantastic that our members can now use it as much as they like, safe in the knowledge that they enjoy protection arranged by NACFB Insurance Services," said Paul Goodman, NACFB chairman. Source
UK based digital bank OakNorth reported an annual profit of $149mn, becoming the first digital bank to do so; in their second year of full operations the bank has seen their loan book triple in size and deposits double in size; Rishi Khosla, OakNorth chief executive, told the Financial Times, “we build them for profit and on strong foundations so as you grow you’re scaling a real business rather than what happens to a lot of fintech where you just keep building for top-line or number of customers, but don’t necessarily have the strongest business model.” Source.
Challenger bank Chetwood has acquired core banking vendor Yobota.The two firms were founded alongside each other in 2016 but developed as separate entities...
In an interesting use case Santander has become the first company in the world to use blockchain to make it...
Gamification is increasingly being used in financial products with great success, but to what cost to the customer?
Chris Skinner’s new book called Digital Human will be launching this month; he sat down with Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays Bank UK, and Li Wang, Head of Alipay and Ant Financial for EMEA at his London book launch; in this blog post he shares video of the panel which took place; some of the highlights include Ashok sharing how Barclays has been able to adapt over the 300 years it has been in business and the certainty he has that they will be able to adapt going forward; Li shares how each employee at Ant generates RMB100 million or over £10 million in revenue per year, a stark contrast to efficiency at banks. Source
GLI Finance has shared that one of their fintech investments as part of their Fintech Ventures portfolio is at risk...
UK based Arrowgrass will offer investors fintech exposure through a new vehicle listed on the AIM Market; the $97mn IPO named TruFin, is the first time investors will have access to one of the country’s p2p platforms in Zopa; “Listing on AIM will allow us to provide further capital to our subsidiaries and scale faster, and take advantage of any developments in the current financial services market,” said Henry Kenner, chief executive officer of TruFin plc, to AltFi. Source.
New CFPB chief’s memo to staff: Enforce law, but don’t presume guilt 2019 could be the year CRA deadlock ends...