UK based challenger bank Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banking Group announced they would increase minimum salaries by 11 percent in an effort to boost pay to their female workforce; the bank released news that men were paid 37 percent more than women, mostly due to men being in higher paying roles; the bank signed up for the government’s Women in Finance Charter to help increase their proportion of women in senior roles to 40 percent by 2020 and 50 percent in the long term. Source.
Coindesk reports that the initial phase of a token sale for tZERO attracted 2,000 accredited investors; the company may now shorten the time until their token sale; tZERO is an alternative trading system registered with the SEC. Source
Lend Academy shares recent initiatives from Barclays and PNC Financial Services as traditional banks move into the online consumer lending space. Source
- Why Employers Need To Help Workers Deal With Income Volatility
- LendingClub Appoints Patty McCord to its Board of Directors
- Credit Karma adds Gannesh Bharadhwaj as General Manager, Credit Cards
- Runway Growth Credit Fund Successfully Closes $275 Million Equity Offering with Increased Investment from Oaktree Funds
- Assetz Capital launches IFISA wrapper
- Cyberattack brings a cryptocurrency exchange to its knees
- Sallie Krawcheck’s Ellevest Expands Suite of Products & Services
Not only has Ping An been investing in technology but has also started selling technology in areas of online banking, facial recognition, asset management and more; according to Deputy Chief Executive Officer Jessica Tan in an interview with Bloomberg the company wants to get half their earnings from technology; while competition from Tencent and Alibaba is stiff the company believes the combination of data and offline resources can give their products an edge; after seeing presentations in recent months analysts have started raising price targets on the company. Source.
Standard Chartered and Ant Financial signed a memorandum of understanding to expand their fintech reach in the Belt and Road Initiative; as Banking Technology reports the details are not flushed out yet but they are looking to broaden access to financial services in countries where the Belt and Road Initiative reaches; the companies have already partnered on funding settlement, FX services and Alipay Wallet. Source.
Banks are starting to adopt voice assistants through Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home but don’t foresee wide adoption in 2018; Patrick Kelly, assistant vice president of emerging technologies at USAA tells TearSheet, “What Amazon Echo and Google Home are going to be is yet to be determined. That persona drives the user expectations of those devices. We’ll see them start to evolve next year and see what users expect.”; banks are currently still in the early stages of understanding how the technology will be used in everyday banking; one of the main issues holding back wider adoption is security and authentication. Source.
Personal financial management or PFM apps have become one of the hotter areas in fintech the last few years; but with more companies starting the competition has been steep and now banks are incorporating a lot of the same features within their mobile apps; TearSheet interviewed Jillian Williams of the Anthemis Group about the PFM market; the interview covers how hard it is to differentiate your product when so many similar firms are out there and why are companies still receiving investment from VC’s; other topics include banks offering a similar suite of products, whether or not robo-advisors will add PFM capabilities and what’s next for the market. Source.
After the launch of bitcoin futures at CBOE last week the worlds largest derivatives marketplace, CME Group, launched futures for the digital currency yesterday; some believe the launch of futures on both marketplaces has helped to drove the price to record levels; CME bitcoin futures are based on the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate which aggregates trading across major exchanges. Source.
Remittances is a huge business with over $600 billion remitted every year; the fintech startups currently leading are WorldRemit, TransferWise and Remitly; the WSJ breaks down the various offerings as well as the other players in the industry; includes data on the remittance market across the globe and trends in the industry. Source