Financial trading startup Alpaca has raised $1.75 million from private market venture capitalists; company is using artificial intelligence and database technology to develop software as a service for investment market traders; current products include AlpacaAlgo with over 25,000 user built trading algorithms; platform has executed over $100 million in transactions. Source
News Roundup
This page contains an archive of the Global Newsletter summaries and the weekly fintech news roundups.
Every day the Fintech Nexus news team scours the globe for the most important stories of the day to include in our daily newsletter.
Then every Saturday we bring you our weekly news roundup of the top 10 fintech stories of the week with commentary from Peter Renton.
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Watch live today at 2:30pm ET as LendIt Fintech International Innovator of the Year award winner Imad Malhas, CEO, IrisGuard talks about financial inclusion, technology, and refugees at the World Bank Group Meetings. Source.
The UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) released a discussion paper on blockchain that looked to better understand the new technology and how it can be used in financial services; key takeaways from the paper include the ability to cut costs and remove certain back office operations to streamline processes and increase the speed of reconciliation; while there are many potential benefits, the FCA still wants to ensure the risks don't outweigh the benefits; the FCA is also looking at how they might regulate blockchain, they typically regulate the application of technology but to ensure what they are calling "sensible development" they might consider regulating the actual ledger technology. Source
Ticket Camp, one of Japan's most popular ticket marketplaces, has announced it will accept bitcoin payments starting on August 17; the website's bitcoin payments are processed by one of Japan's largest bitcoin exchanges Coincheck; Japan started to recognize bitcoin as a legal method of payment in April 2017. Source
Charles Schwab’s decision to cut trading fees to zero on October 1st...
In an opinion piece, William Mougayar who wrote, "The Business Blockchain" provides thoughts on initial coin offerings (ICOs); dozens of startups are planning ICOs and funds are also feeding an investment and speculation frenzy according to Mougayar; he notes that ICOs are a good alternative funding model but warns of potential issues outlined in the article. Source
U.S. small businesses make up 47.3 percent of the private workforce according...
CreditEase was China's first P2P lender, founded in 2006; since its founding the firm has been expanding its services to wealth management and robo advice; Ning Tang, CreditEase founder and CEO, provides his insight on the business and the online lending industry in an interview; highlights how the company plans to expand its business lines through partnerships while also managing regulatory controls. Source
Indian banks are working with fintech startups to develop technology similar to what is used in markets like Africa and China; the banks hope to use social data and online shopping habits to underwrite borrowers; FICO recently began to offer credit scores in India using alternative data and there are many startups working on similar efforts. Source
Recent news on consumer lending players IEG Holdings Corporation, OneMain Holdings, Lending Club, Ally Financial and TransUnion is outlined in a press release; of interest is IEG's announcement and offer to purchase all outstanding shares of OneMain and Ally's recent agreement to support contracts from Carvana, an online auto retailer that also operates vehicle vending machines; according to the press release, "Ally will make up to $600 million available to Carvana over the next 12 months through financing and bulk purchases of contracts." Source