The Fundrise Income eREIT previously sold out and was closed to new investors; the platform has re-opened the Income eREIT and requires minimum investment of $1,000; the Income eREIT is focused on investments in real estate debt and has posted a 10.5% annualized dividend yield. Source
News Roundup
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Fundrise began its crowdfunded initial public offering (IPO) on February 1; the investment has been oversubscribed and the company has paused the offering due to high demand; it has reported it will increase the available shares to three million from two million; in an updated offering circular the firm says it will offer three million shares at a price of $5.00 which brings the total expected fundraising to $15 million. Source
Fundrise is promoting investment in its Fundrise Starter Portfolio; minimum investment is $500 with a 9.25% annual dividend yield and no advisory fees; the Fundrise Starter Portfolio includes investment in the Fundrise Income eREIT and Growth eREIT. Source
Fundrise has announced a Regulation A investment offering of Rise Companies Corp. which is the parent company of the investment platform Fundrise, LLC; the campaign is currently in a solicitation phase which its website says has generated interest of over $58 million from more than 4,350 users; the investment offering circular was initially filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on December 29, 2016; some details from the most recent amended offering circular include the following: offering of one million shares of Class B non-voting common stock, offer and sale of the shares is limited to investors who have purchased investments on the Fundrise platform. Source
Real estate crowdfunder, Fundrise, has made its investment division into an independent company, RSE Capital Partners; the goal was to separate and focus on the two functions of capital raising - via Fundrise with its eReit platform - and capital providing to real estate projects; RSE will focus on financing real estate deals from $20 million to $100 million, while they examine ways to make terms more flexible. Source
As of January 2017 the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has fully authorized ten peer-to-peer lenders, according to AltFi, while the remainder of the industry operates with interim approvals; AltFi speculates on some of the characteristics of the authorized and interim lenders; of the authorized firms, Folk2Folk is the largest with originations of approximately 100 million British pounds ($120.44 million); the UK's largest platforms including Zopa, RateSetter and Funding Circle still have not been approved; loans from these lenders are primarily unsecured; characteristics identified by AltFi as issues for the FCA include: pre-funding, collective investment, auto-investing and institutional investment. Source
U.S. banking regulators have made new proposals that would allow for banks...
Future Finance has received commitment for £30 million from the European Investment Fund (EIF) to lend to master's degree students supported by the Erasmus+ European program; Future Finance is a student lending platform active in the UK and Germany; Erasmus+ subsidizes career skills-driven education for over 300,000 higher education students across the European Union; EIF's commitment involves loan guarantees that will encourage investing and borrowing on Future Finance's platform; it has launched a "Call for Expression of Interest" targeting additional financial institutions that finance master's degree students crossing national borders in the EU. Source
Technology and financial services innovation continue to create new market opportunities in a number of different ways; leading US tech companies Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple (GAFA) have already begun to introduce financial services and some believe they could significantly disrupt the traditional financial system; the Financial Times outlines current activities from GAFA and also notes similarities to Ant Financial's plans in China; as services from these tech companies continue to expand into payments and other forms of financial services, market speculators believe one of the GAFA companies could even potentially buy a bank; while regulatory constraints and low ROE make this option unlikely, customers have expressed their increasing loyalty and trust in the GAFA companies; a report from Accenture says one in three global banking and insurance customers would switch their accounts to Google, Amazon or Facebook; while buying a bank could potentially be the extreme, given PSD2 changes in the UK and consumers interest overall it is likely that these companies will expand further into new types of payment technologies and fintech services in the near future. Source
Prepaid card manager Galileo Processing has developed a white label digital banking...