Moody’s Investors Service had previously stated that companies like Ant needed to be more transparent about their asset-backed securities and their criteria for lending; Douglas Feagin, senior vice president of global business for Ant Financial stated, “The demand for these securities is very healthy and continuing to expand. That, at the end of the day, is the ultimate barometer of whether you're giving enough information to investors to invest. I think seeing that demand is evidence that we're sharing the right kind of information with them.”; article discusses the abs market broadly in China which has increased recently. 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.
To join our newsletter community please subscribe here.
Prosper recently published their third quarter results; the company grew originations 6% from the previous quarter to $821 million; reported a net loss of $26.9 million largely due to non-cash charges related to warrants as part of the consortium deal announced this year. Source
A new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that subprime auto loans from nonbank lenders have higher delinquency rates than banks; about 4.4 percent of subprime loans from banks are delinquent while 9.7 percent from nonbank lenders are delinquent; “This suggests that bank auto loans may have some additional layers of underwriting — credit score alone does not explain the gap and divergence in the delinquency rates,” the New York Fed report stated as reported by American Banker. Source.
Goldman CFO Marty Chavez said the bank surpassed $2bn in originations, a mark they were looking to reach by year’s end; the portfolio has an average APR of 12 percent, loans have an average length of four years and the typical amount if for $15,000 as reported by Business Insider; the company estimates they will reach $13bn in lending after three years in operation. Source.
- House Financial Services Committee Approves Legislation to Help Keep Lending Partnerships Between Banks and Online Lenders
- Cinda International Leads Massive Round In Chinese Fintech Company 9f Group
- YieldStreet Surpasses $200M in Originations, Bolsters Leadership Team and Launches New Website amid Period of High Growth
- $15 Million Investment Round Fuels Accelerated Growth at Goji, the Online Home and Auto Insurance Distribution Platform
- Hornets, LendingTree Announce New Multi-Year Founding Level Partnership Highlighted By Jersey Patch
- Active.Ai raises over $8 million in Series-A round
- TransUnion Expands Credit Access to More Americans with Acquisition of FactorTrust
- LendInvest launches into buy-to-let market
American Banker shares their takeaways from their recent conference after hearing from a wide variety of thought leaders in fintech; takeaways include: mobile and mortgages go together, don’t count out banks, the need for simplicity is paramount, small businesses care about digital too and the fintech charter is meh. Source
China and Hong Kong have raised $3.03 billion in proptech since 2013; this is approximately 41% of the total investment in proptech across the globe; the startups are focused on brokerage and leasing, investment and financing, project development and property management; half of the startups are in brokerage and leasing; article shares what has led to the current robust proptech market in Asia Pacific. Source
The price of bitcoin is the highest in Zimbabwe which reached $13,500 at the time of the article being published; this is due to the conflicts happening in the country; for people in Zimbabwe bitcoin is seen as a safer option; the US dollar and South African rand also trade for approximately twice their price in the country. Source
Square has started to allow some of its Cash mobile app users to buy and sell the cryptocurrency through the app; a Square spokesperson said, “We’re exploring how Square can make this experience faster and easier, and have rolled out this feature to a small number of Cash app customers,” as reported by Crowdfund Insider. Source.
One of Ant Financial’s subsidiaries is Zhima or Sesame Credit; it is a private third party credit scoring service and clarified that it does not share user scores or underlying data with any third party including the government without the user’s prior consent; they point out in their response that they also do not monitor the content of users’ social media posts and share how the service works. Source