Since launching in 2007, OnDeck has provided over $7 billion in capital to more than 70,000 customers in 700 different industries across the United States, Canada and Australia; creating a new type of commercial loan product for small businesses has been the company's focus since the beginning; its loans support small business activity in the regions it lends and its partnership with JPMorgan is an industry leading example of collaboration between fintechs and banks. 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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American Express' Pay It Plan It mobile feature allows for installment payments on purchases of over $100; the mobile feature is associated with a customer's American Express card; the company says Pay It Plan It is available now on several consumer credit and co-branded cards and cards issued after June 1 will have the feature added by 2018. Source
SuperMoney reviews the new US consumer lending platform founded by Renaud Laplanche; firm is an online lender focused on personal loans, also offering consumer credit monitoring and education for its customers with benefits for high quality borrowers; SuperMoney outlines the platform's underwriting standards, application process, and pros and cons versus competitors. Source
Rating agency DBRS has reviewed 12 US SoFi securitization transactions encompassing 36 different classes; the rating agency has upgraded 12 classes and confirmed 24; according to the agency, the confirmed classes are performing within expectations and the credit enhancement levels for the upgraded classes are sufficient to cover their new requirements. Source
Podcast talks with former SEC Enforcement Division attorney Nick Morgan; Nick Morgan says the SEC is reviewing all types of cases and using the Howey Test to determine whether the deals are considered an offering of securities; explains that the Howey Test considers whether the expectation of profit relies on efforts of investors and also says that the investigations center around whether the investors are passively investing or actively involved in creating value; Morgan also noted that the SEC's resources are limited given the vast number of ICOs being offered and reports that the investigations will likely focus first on any fraudulent activity with potential investigation efforts also on exchanges that encompass the inclusion of many ICOs. Source
Peerform has been around the marketplace lending space since 2010; they are the third oldest platform behind Prosper and Lending Club; since 2014 a lot has happened at the firm including the acquisition of the company late last year by Strategic Financial Solutions; the firm has three products today: marketplace loans, direct pay consolidation loans and debt negotiation loans; the company recently formed an investment partnership with Random Forest Capital which focuses on data science and machine learning; article discusses how the two companies have partnered, overhauling Peerform's APIs and creating proprietary credit models. Source
Reports on the efforts of Kevin Karrels at First Tennessee, a bank with $29.4 billion in assets; joining the digital team, Karrels was involved in ensuring that the bank caught up with digital market competition; American Banker outlines factors involved with the digital initiative including the replacement of vendors with D3 Banking and the implementation of D3 Banking's online and mobile banking technologies. Source
During the week I share the latest marketplace lending news on Twitter...
Andy Taylor previously co-founded marketplace lending platform SocietyOne; his new venture Douugh is a personal financial app; it uses a virtual assistant called Sophie to help users manage their finances; much like other apps, users input their financial accounts; users can interact with Sophie, asking questions like "How much did I spend on food this week?"; the app will also provide context around whether the amount spent is higher than usual and also aid users in setting up spending targets; the company is in beta for the rest of the year and will officially launch in February of next year; they hope to eventually make Sophie accessible via Alexa and Siri. Source
The market for initial coin offerings (ICOs) has seen quite the rise in 2017 as investors have been pouring billions into blockchain based startups; these large fundraisings have been done without any real regulatory oversight until recently; in July the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a report stating that the offering by the company DAO was a securities offering; Chinese regulators issued statements over the past few months stating their intention to look at the market and this past weekend they deemed ICOs illegal in China; while companies have been able to secure vast amounts of capital there has also been increased cases of theft and fraud; the coming regulatory wave is sure to change how market participants act. Source