Credible is a multi-lender focused on student loans; company announced the addition of the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority (MEFA) to its platform which now includes six refinancing lenders; MEFA will provide student loan refinancing through its MEFA Education Refinancing Loan; the MEFA Education Refinancing Loan is available in all 50 states, has a minimum of $10,000 and includes both fixed and variable interest rate options with the majority of rates ranging from 3.31% to 6.85%. 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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Artificial intelligence innovation is an important focus for many companies in 2017. Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Company has taken a lead in the insurance market with its announcement to replace 34 workers in its payment assessment department with an IBM Watson artificial intelligence solution. The firm says the Watson system will improve productivity and save approximately 140 million yen ($1.21 million) per year. This is one of the first times we've seen a public announcement of how employees have been replaced as a direct result of artificial intelligence. Source
The Innovative Lending Platform Association (ILPA) has released SMART Box for small business lending disclosure and transparency; Lend Academy provides more details and insight from Kathryn Petralia of Kabbage in their article; the SMART Box is intended to provide standardized pricing, cost of capital and verbiage that borrowers can use for credit analysis and comparison. Source
The current definition for accredited investors was established back in 1982; since...
Monzo has 200,000 people using its salary advance feature UK SMEs chasing...
The panel explores the spectrum of responsible online credit; discusses what is clearly irresponsible lending and what are some of the borderline cases of credit being deemed responsible; panelists discuss the many of things to consider when it comes to responsible lending including sales tactics, APRs, transparency and loan stacking/debt traps. Source
Amazon has been in the news lately for their continued push into banking related services but they are not the only ones making the push; TearSheet looks into three big name retailers also pushing their businesses into finance; Rakuten is Japan’s largest e-commerce site as their footprint includes video on demand, mobile messaging and they also operate the largest online bank in the country; Overstock.com has been building a marketplace for financial services named the FinancHub; two of the U.K.’s largest grocers, Sainsbury and Tesco, have opened banks via joint ventures. Source.
During the week I share the latest marketplace lending and fintech news...
As the date for open banking nears Banks and their digital only challengers are bracing for a new era of banking in Europe; writing an opinion piece in AltFi Lewis Hill of Instinctif Partners explains how digital only banks will need to explain their value proposition to the consumer to take advantage of the new rules; banks are still struggling with legacy technology and poor consumer ratings; the time is now for challengers to truly disrupt the incumbent players. Source.