Hu Liang, former director at State Street Bank and Trust's Emerging Technologies Center, tells CoinDesk he is building "the first large-scale institutional infrastructure specifically targeted towards crypto assets"; the company will be an infrastructure platform to provide software and hardware to connect with institutional order and execution management systems; he is looking to eliminate large buyers of cryptocurrencies having to create on the fly technology solutions to make their orders; Liang tells CoinDesk, "I am building a traditional financial services application that can serve the needs of anybody looking to be involved in crypto assets, whether that's holding it for the long term, whether that's trading it for the short term, whether that's transforming it or using it for a rail for something else." 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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A report from Citi Global Perspectives and Solutions, titled "Education: Back to Basics" says student loan default and delinquency rates are down from 14.7% in 2013 yet still high at approximately 11% which is comparable to peak mortgage crisis delinquency rates of 11.5%; report also provides additional comparisons of the current state of the student loan market to the mortgage market crisis; notes that the student loan market overall is $1.41 trillion compared to $8.6 trillion for mortgages, making high student loan defaults less significant than a mortgage market crisis. Source
WSFS Financial, which is the parent company of WSFS Bank, announced a Private Student Lending Solutions offering; the new offering will expand their current consumer business and they believe this will help bridge the gap created in the student lending space; WSFS is partnering with leading technology provider LendKey to leverage their application, disbursement and servicing of the loans; Rick Wright, WSFS executive vice president and chief retail banking officer, said, "We want to be that valued resource that customers turn to when they start the difficult process of figuring out how to fund college." Source
Join LendIt for a webinar about blockchain technology and how it can streamline operations for wealth managers and insurance back office operations; register here for the August 14 webinar at 2:00 PM EST; presenters include Jayant Khadilkar, global head of analytics and technology at Tiger Risk, and Ryan Rugg, business development at R3. Source
SoFi reported record earnings and loan volume in the second quarter with revenue of $134 million, adjusted EBITDA of $61.6 million and loan volume of $3.1 billion; in earnings comments, SoFi's CEO, Mike Cagney, was more optimistic about a public offering, mentioning it as a part of a long term plan involved with the search for a new CFO; Cagney also discussed options for offering banking products and said he was optimistic about the approval of the company's application for an industrial loan charter. Source
Goldman Sachs has been offering more products to a wider range of consumers; this started with the acquisition of the online deposit platform of GE Capital; the firm is competing aggressively on their deposit rates to grow this base; in 2016 they launched Marcus, their online lending platform, and now have a new lending product called GS Select; product offers loans backed by investment portfolios for individuals that have a Fidelity financial adviser. Source
At LendIt USA 2017, Lang Di CEO Gabriel Hai hosted a panel themed how fintechs are changing the way that Chinese people bank; one approach is to use big data technology to reach the individual credit market; panelists agree that China's fintech platforms are more willing to cooperate with traditional banks, as the banks have a more friendly regulatory environment and sufficient cheap money, whilst platforms are at advantages of bringing new technologies to the cooperation; however, Zhou Xinming, CEO of Hexindai, pointed out that China's fintech companies' customer base is more of individual investors rather than institutional investors, and the former are still not financially sophisticated. Source
Lend Academy talks with Jeffrey Chen, CEO of ZhongAn Insurance; firm has seen great success in insurtech in China, issuing billions of small dollar value insurance policies through the internet; Chen talks about the insurance products offered through the platform, how they have scaled the business, some of the innovative technologies they are using and their goals for the future. Source
TNG FinTech Group Inc. is close to closing a Series A funding deal that will add $60 million in new capital for the firm and bring its valuation to $500 million; the firm offers global money transfers, foreign-exchange transactions and bill payments; following the funding round it will be one of the highest valued fintechs in Hong Kong; it plans to use the funding to expand its business internationally through acquisition of companies with remittance licenses in Singapore, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia and the UK. Source


