Quona Capital has raised $141 million for its Accion Frontier Inclusion Fund focused on startups developing solutions for the underserved in emerging markets; investors in the $141 million funding round included Accion, MasterCard and JPMorgan Chase; other existing investors in the fund also include MetLife, TIAA Investments and the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group; current Fund investments include Coins, Konfio and Creditas. Source
Financial reform is an uncertain topic for the fintech industry; Digiday talked with attendees at LendIt USA about their thoughts on the Trump administration's proposed regulatory reform; generally, participants reported that they believe the reform could increase interest from banks in partnering with fintech companies since deregulation gives them more flexibility for credit product expansion. Source
Leading digital transaction management firm eOriginal has been selected to manage electronic documentation processes for Fannie Mae; as a government sponsored enterprise (GSE) Fannie Mae works with lenders nationwide; the eOriginal services will help improve all of the GSE's associated mortgage loan transactions providing support for lenders and loan portfolio services for Fannie Mae; in comments on the partnership, Cindy McKissock, vice president of customer digital experience at Fannie Mae said: "We continually look for ways to help lenders who want to deliver an end-to-end digital mortgage experience. In addition to investing in new eVault infrastructure, we are also simplifying eMortgage adoption by transitioning to the MISMO SMART Doc™ Version 3.0 format in 2017. This will reduce complexity and allow lenders and technology solution providers to adopt eMortgage with greater ease." Source
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based artificial intelligence (AI) platform Kensho has built a solution that can successfully predict market trading and is receiving significant attention from Wall Street; its AI-powered platform helped the company identify currency trends following Brexit that resulted in substantial gains from trades against the British pounds decreasing value; the company has announced a new partnership with S&P Global and has received investment from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, General Catalyst, Breyer Capital and Google Ventures; the firm is led by Daniel Nadler, a Harvard trained Ph.D; its new partnership with S&P Global Market Intelligence will supply new data feeds to power its AI analysis and support its numerous solutions including the Kensho Global Event Database and Kensho's Knowledge Graph; the business is expected to become integrated with Wall Street's mainstream banks, emerging as one of the market's leading solutions for AI-powered trading. Source
Monzo and Revolut alerted customers of an outage due to a processing migration from a third party processor which caused customers to be unable to use cards for transactions; other digital banks affected by the third party processor migration included Starling Bank, Loot, Curve, Pockit and Uaccount; Monzo and Revolut have both reported they will reimburse customers for foreign exchange costs incurred as a result of the outage; Monzo says it has plans to move its processing to an internal unit with transactions processed on the firm's technology. Source
Silicon Valley Bank has a joint venture partnership with Shanghai Development Bank Co. Ltd; the partnership led the bank to open its first Chinese branch in Shanghai in 2012 and the firm has now announced their second location in Beijing; the banking branch in Beijing has 14 employees and will offer services for companies in technology, private equity and venture capital which are a key focus for Silicon Valley Bank globally. Source
LendIt News has launched as a new media brand for LendIt; serving as a unique industry resource, it will provide up to date content and analysis on fintech industry news, giving LendIt followers daily insight on the industry's most important topics and trends; subscribers receive daily industry news emails and insight on global activity. Source
Credit reporting agency TransUnion has announced the launch of a new innovation lab with increase support for client data modeling through broader access to proprietary data and analytics experts; the innovation lab will allow clients to test new models and solve business problems with real time data empowering credit data platforms and solutions across the industry; many companies have already reported success in building new models, analyzing new markets and expanding into new products; the innovation lab is also uniquely positioned to integrate with TransUnion's startup lender development program providing support for new market launches. Source
SoFi is one of the US's fastest growing alternative finance companies; the Financial Revolutionist talks with Mike Cagney about the firm's accomplishments, success factors and future objectives; Cagney provides insight on the firm's recent acquisition of Zenbanx and $500 million fundraising; discusses how these deals will drive growth for the firm and the other areas of the business the firm is working to expand. Source
A husband and wife from Sri Lanka were arrested in Canada for fraud and money laundering; the couple reportedly used fraudulent checks and synthetic identities for fraudulent charges and purchases; both are charged with fraud of CAD5,000 ($3,729) and possession of proceeds obtained of over CAD5,000 ($3,729); the fraudulent charges are an example of the emergence of sophisticated synthetic identities that are more difficult to be detected by fraud prevention systems. Source