Anthony Thomson, Founder & Chairman of Atom Bank, is stepping down after the company completes their latest fundraising; Bridget Rosewell, current non executive director, will assume they role left by Anthony; Mr. Thomson started the digital bank in 2014, raised more than $350mn and has guided the company to a top 10 rating in KPMG’s fintech rankings; “Since having the idea for Atom bank in early 2012, it has gone from being a big idea disguised as a small bank to a big idea and a big bank,” said Thomson in a statement reported by AltFi. Source.
Includes data from the UK, EU and the US; AltFi projects €2.8 billion to be lent in Europe in 2018 and £7.5 billion in the UK; this would represent a year over year increase of 73% and 43% respectively; overall 2017 was a bounce-back year for the marketplace lending industry across the globe. Source
Early last year UK online lender Zopa closed the platform to new investors, they have now re-opened it; investors will be able to invest in both the Core and Plus products, with and without the IFISA; last week Zopa also announced for the first time since 2015 they were raising target investor rates to 4 percent for Core and 4.6 percent for Plus. 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.
Adyen is a payments company based in Amsterdam and currently is valued around $2.3 billion; the company has over 4,000 clients which includes names like Netflix, Facebook, Uber and Spotify; Forbes profiles the company and their co-founder and president, Pieter van der Does. 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.
Skinner shares some of the headlines by mainstream media as Open Banking officially launched in the UK; many were negative and included how consumers should fear the changes; not surprisingly the fintech community are strong advocates of Open Banking; Skinner shares his perspective on these two sides battling, the mainstream banks and mainstream media, and the fintech community and more niche media. Source
The UK saw 5.5 percent fewer startups begin in the last year; startups have found getting funding to be increasingly hard and only 53 percent survive their first three years; most business owners are starting companies on the side and tend to have a full time job as well; the government has tried to help with programs like Start Up Loans which lends money to emerging companies; startup owners not only find business to be hard but end up debt in many cases as they can never really get sales off the ground. Source.
The Open Banking Implementation Entity or OBIE chose regtech firm Contego to support OBIE’s identity proofing and verification processes; Nigel Spencer, head of support services at OBIE, tells Banking Technology that Contego delivered a “bespoke solution that combines automated identity checks with the added security of face-to-face verification” and this made the firm “the obvious choice”.; the company can customize their solution and deliver in real time via API. Source.
Banks have historically been the guardians of customer information, but that has started to change with open banking; opening up information to third parties via customers has led banks to think more and more about security breaches; Now it’s not just about building a wall and not letting anyone in,” said Ram Bose, global retail banking consulting leader at Genpact, to TearSheet. “It’s about building a filter or strainer that lets some things in or out and not other things.”; the UK has regulations that mandate the sharing of info but the US has only set out standards and banks have been doing one off deals; new technologies like AI and machine learning can help to better secure agreements when banks are working with 20 or more potential partners; it is early days but banks can help to set up the standards they use by working together with fintechs and regulators. Source.