Peter Renton reviews his 2017 marketplace lending predictions and shares projections for 2018. Source
The company may go public as soon as late autumn; sources state that the company will exceed a £1 billion valuation; investment banks are expected to be in place by spring; Funding Circle would be the first p2p lender in the UK to go public. Source
According to Recode, Mike Cagney is back with a new startup and is pitching to investors such as Peter Thiel and others who backed SoFi; he is reportedly looking to raise around $25 million for the new company which may focus on HELOCs. Source
TearSheet put together 5 interesting charts helping to provide greater explanation to certain areas of fintech; the charts include where and how banks spend on innovation, Goldman Sachs job listing, ethical concerns in using AI, mobile wallet traction and the top reasons for borrower dissatisfaction; the charts helped to reveal that Goldman is working hard to become a technology company, mobile wallet traction is quite low and interest rates by online lenders is the second biggest reason for borrower dissatisfaction. Source.
The Trump administration is looking to potentially name the chair of the National Credit Union Administration to lead the CFPB; J. Mark McWatters has been seen as being a bigger credit union advocate over banks; bankers are concerned because his public record has indicated he lobbies more for breaks that favor credit unions over banks; while a decision is yet to be made bankers are hopeful that the administration will consider those from the banking community as well. Source.
While on the surface Affirm’s business may appear to be focused on lending and payments, the company can also help merchants in marketing; the company has large amounts of data on who is buying products, what they are buying and where they are buying; with this information they plan to offer their merchants more services in the future; Tearsheet shares more on Affirm’s plans. Source
Open source projects have started at Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase in the past year, there is a thought that this is the start a new wave of open source banking; Accenture found that 99 out of 100 payments executives at banks said they plan to make big open banking investments by 2020; open source projects like Linux has help the tech industry develop into what it is today; banks like CBW Bank, who is run by former Google engineer Suresh Ramamurthi, already have a marketplace where developers can build banking apps using their APIs; open source banking can also help to keep banks more secure as the big tech giants have been helped a lot by using open source applications. Source.
Lend Academy shares some of the biggest news stories of the year; includes Mike Cagney departing SoFi, the Cleveland Fed retracting their report on “p2p lending”, Prosper’s $5 billion deal, Renaud Laplanche’s new venture and more. Source
Business Insider takes a look back at one of the biggest trends in finance from 2017; Initial Coin Offerings or ICOs have become one of the main ways for companies in the blockchain space to raise capital; more than $3.5bn was raised using this method; some of the top raises include $153mn by The Bancor Protocol, $232mn by Tezos and $257mn by Filecoin. Source.