In an interview in American Banker, Meiler discusses Marlette’s culture which aims to keep employees informed of the company’s goals; their strategy includes quarterly all-hands meetings with the company’s 100 employees to share what the goals are for the next 90 days; Meiler also shares how the company shifted its focus to profits given the changing environment and how this resulted in $11 million in GAAP profits last year. Source
Square’s stock is up over 200% in the past year; the run up occurred prior to news that the Square Cash app would allow users to buy and sell bitcoin; Square Cash had more than 7 million active users in December of last year; according to the Quartz article, the growth has also been fueled by recent bank partnerships; other successful lines of business include Square Capital which lent out $305 million to small businesses in the fourth quarter of 2017. Source
Banks are beginning to see that marketing Zelle within their own apps can be a challenge; “It’s not a simple feature you can roll out and say ‘try it.’ Explaining all these things means you have to prioritize because there just isn’t enough time so you have to be very selective,” says Mark Schwanhausser, director of the digital banking practice at Javelin and author of a new report looking at this issue, to TearSheet; banks have tried a number of ways to highlight Zelle as part of their banking experience, though the task has not been easy; as the brand grows and customers get accustomed to the difference the job will become easier. Source.
Swift says that blockchain technology is not yet ready to handle the billions in daily cross border bank payments; they recently completed a proof of concept test to reconcile international payments between 34 banks; they said the test went well but that progress was still needed before they can trust the technology to handle the scale; the other aspect to consider is that the 11,000 thousand banks on the Swift system would still need to make upgrades to switch to blockchain based payments. Source.
The platform announced their latest securitization which is a $233.75 million deal; provisional ratings of AAA were given by both Moody’s and DBRS; this is CommonBond’s sixth transaction and they have now securitized a total of $1.22 billion in loans. Source
Digital investment startup M1 Finance drooped their assets under management fees to zero in December; the company plans to make money through back end services and charges fees fopr paper statements, wire transfers and transferring to another brokerage; “It’s taking a similar approach to how the rest of financial services works,” CEO Brian Barnes said to TearSheet. “Banks make money on cash, assets, transaction revenue and the ability to cross sell — the more users, the more assets, and the more money M1 will make.”; the company current holds more than $100mn assets under management. Source.
- BBVA and Visa-backed banking platform solarisBank scores €56.6m in Series B raise
- $9 billion Stripe just bought a payments startup backed by Eric Schmidt as it goes after even larger customers
- Square’s Cash app now supports direct deposits for your paycheck
- Will There be Another Alibaba in Fintech? (LendIt Fintech Blog)
- Today’s Crypto Asset Valuation Frameworks
- Cash for HODL? NY Wealth Manager to Issue Loans Against Bitcoin
UK based digital only bank, Atom Bank, raised more than $205mn from investors including BBVA; the new capital will help the bank further investment in technoloy and business capabilities; BBVA Chief executive Carlos Torres Vila tells the FT, “we are fully aligned with the vision of banking that Atom is pursuing, and the disruption it is already bringing to the UK financial services sector.” Source.
Last year’s batch of Chinese IPOs did not perform well and ended up losing almost $1bn worth of shareholder money; there is an expectation that the number of Chinese IPOs will jump 30 percent in 2018; Qudian, one of the biggest from a year ago, has seen their stock plummet by more than 50 percent; expectations and the Chinese government crackdown on online lending has really hurt the prospects of some companies looking to list. Source.
The main lobbying group for banks, the Consumer Bankers Association, is trying to get the government to add caps on how much graduate students and parents of undergraduates can borrow from the government; caps would force people to go to private lenders and would benefit those with better credit histories; there is also a group of investors trying to get clearer legislation passed for income sharing agreements; changes could result in billions of dollars worth of opportunities for banks and investors as the most recent academic year totaled $107bn. Source.