Jeff Garzik helped contribute to the underlying code of bitcoin and is now coming to market with Metronome; "We've really been beating this up on the economic-model side, the engineering side, the legal and tax side," said Garzik, who serves as CEO of Bloq, to American Banker; Metronome does not have it’s own blockchain and has the ability to jump from one blockchain to another; the new cryptocurrency could be appealing to banks because of the flexibility and they are looking to launch in December. Source.
CommonBond closed their fifth and largest securitization which contained $248 million of refinanced student loans; the senior tranches were rated by Moody’s, S&P and DBRS and received ratings of Aa2, AA and AA (high) respectively; the deal was four times oversubscribed; according to David Klein, CommonBond CEO and co-founder, “Investor demand for CommonBond paper has never been greater. The strong market reception is a reflection of our pristine credit quality, continued ratings progression, and track record of consistent results. As a programmatic issuer, we look forward to continuing to bring consistently high performing bonds to the market, providing investors with world-class capital deployment options.” Source
J.D. Power is out with their most recent Small Business Banking Satisfaction Study and small businesses are still dissatisfied with banks; the biggest issue that could increase positive interaction with small businesses and banks is more account representatives; having someone available to speak to SMBs and help them is something that is sorely lacking; banks have seen market share go to fintechs and digital banks in recent years so better serving this key customer group is something the banks need to recognize. Source.
Monja shares a list of online lenders in the real estate space; discusses the pull back in construction financing by traditional banks and the continuing rise overall in the real estate construction sector. Source
- Finn.ai Raises $3 Million in Institutional Financing Round
- Digital bank for teenagers raises $5m in Series A investment round
- Italian peer-to-peer lender launches its own fund, targets €100m raise
- Templum Raises $2.7M in Seed Funding
- Canadian Lenders Association & Innovative Lending Platform Association Launch Smart Box in Canada
- Starqrmarq wins peer to peer lending brief
- State of Small Business Lending: 2017 Spotlight on Women Entrepreneurs
In its annual banking report McKinsey & Co. said there is the potential for 40 percent of revenues that could be at risk by 2025 from firms like Amazon entering the space; Asheet Mehta, one of the authors of the McKinsey report, said in an interview reported by American Banker "E-commerce and tech giants are under pressure to keep increasing revenue, and financial services is a large pool they can go after. We're starting to see that." Source.
Lending Club has closed five of its investment funds under LC Advisors; the loans have been sold off to various buyers and the company has rebranded its investment management business to LendingClub Asset Management. Source
Jianpu Technology, a subsidiary of Rong360, has filed for a $200mn IPO in the US; Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan are bookrunners for the deal; Jianpu is an open recommendation platform for loan and credit card applications; the company has seen revenue jump 112 percent from 2015 to 2016 and thus far in the first six months of 2017 revenue has jumped 170 percent year on year. Source.
FT Alphaville takes a close look at some of the findings from the Financial Conduct Authority report on their regulatory sandbox; the positives include weeding out the more risky ideas and that 41 of 146 applicants were able to make it through the testing phase; the negatives include distributed ledger technology that shows some of the testing is on too small a scale to really understand whether or not it would actually work. Source.
Personal credit and financial management firm Credit Sesame raised $42mn in equity and venture debt; investors include Menlo Ventures, Inventus Capital, Globespan Capital, IA Capital and SF Capital; the capital will be used for growth, hiring, customer acquisition and to build out their machine learning technologies. Source.