The new head of Ant Financial's international operations, Douglas Feagin, helped ink a deal with 930,000 merchants across Europe to help Chinese travelers use Alipay; Doug Feagin explained to the Financial Times why the deal was done: "120 million Chinese travelers went abroad in 2015 and that's growing at 18% a year. The vast majority of whom use Alipay."; Alipay has now expanded into India, Europe and Southeast Asia; it is still looking to go public in the near future. Source
Allica Bank has acquired approximately 2,000 SME customers and about £600m of associated lending from AIB Group (UK) Plc.
The new lending target is double Allica’s £500m target for last year, which the SME challenger bank says it topped by offering over £540m to British SMEs.
Last week, the crypto market cap dipped below $850 billion for the first time in almost 18 months. However, the recent jump in digital assets like Solana, Cardano and Polkadot has pushed the total market cap of cryptocurrencies to above $900 billion.
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COVID-19 has brought challenging years for SMEs. With inflation rates at an all-time high, alternative lenders become key to their survival.
AltFi Data is the leading public provider of data for the marketplace lending industry; its data platform, AltFi Data Analytics, aggregates data from originators in the UK, Europe and the US; AltFi Data manages indices and publishes analytics reports with support from the data platform; the addition of data from Prosper will make the platform's reporting more robust for the industry. Source
Marketplace lending data analytics provider AltFi Data has partnered with Lendix and will incorporate the lender's data on its analytics platform; AltFi Data is a leading performance data provider for the marketplace lending industry providing a single methodology for calculating platform performance across all lenders; its data reporting includes a range of attributes and data points including net returns, benchmark comparisons, originations, lending rates and charge-off rates. Source
AltFi Data has raised new capital and formed an advisory board; the new initiatives will help AltFi Data launch new products, increasing analytical tools and market transparency; the board’s advisors bring experience in market data and investing. 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
Amazon is working with Barclays on new accounts that allow customers to access installment plan payments in the United Kingdom shopping on on amazon.co.uk.