UK based Pia, personal investment assistant, is testing their new aggregator platform to help people find the best digital wealth advisor; “We spent time speaking to people who said we need to launch a product that’s far more accessible, interesting and engaging for somebody that doesn’t have a lot of investing experience and don’t know where to start,” said co-founder James Mackonochie to TearSheet; the difference between Pia and a typical aggregator site is they will use an AI powered chatbot to customize the user experience. 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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Deepak Lalit, Managing Director of LendIt Advisors reviews the public companies attending LendIt and their recent track record. Source
- CoinList Raises $9.2M in Series A Funding
- Liquid FSI Adds Key Board Member
- LendingTree Personal Loan Offers Report – March 2018
- LendingTree Mortgage Offers Report – March 2018
- Five Ways for FinTech Lenders to Achieve ROI on a Loan Pricing System Investment (ProBank Austin)
- Enhancing the Business Value of Loan Pricing Systems (ProBank Austin)
- Stripe launches a new billing tool to tap demand from online businesses
- Will fintech realize its potential for financial inclusion?
We’ve seen Goldman Sachs enter a variety of consumer banking verticals over the last few years; now the bank has hired a senior JPMorgan Chase engineer to build cash management tools, deposit accounts as well as other products for big companies; commercial banking could bring even more deposits into the business and also help boost revenue; they will compete with other big names such as JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Source
Walmart has expanded their money transfer service to over 200 countries and all their U.S. locations; the expansion is through a partnership with Moneygram; Walmart’s move comes after recent news of Amazon expanding their financial services options for customers; “Money transfer services are like bread at the restaurant for Walmart; it’s negligible revenue for them,” said Daniel Ives, chief strategy officer at GBH Insights tells TearSheet. “The broader strategy is to build up that product arsenal on the consumer side — every Walmart customer globally is an Amazon customer that could be taken away.” Source.
A recent report by Bain & Company just shares how successful Amazon could be if it were to enter banking; according to the report: "We could imagine Amazon's banking services growing to more than 70 million U.S. consumer relationships over the next five years or so — the same as Wells Fargo, the third-largest bank in the US. Although many retail bankers and observers have pegged the nimble fintech start-ups as the likely disrupters, it has become clear that established technology firms pose a bigger threat.”; the CNBC article shares several of the advantages Amazon would have in banking, products they could expand into and some of the talks that are already taking place with banks. Source
The company securitized $2.6 billion in Q1 2018, representing a 35% increase over the prior year period; three transactions took place, two student loan deals and one consumer loan deal; medical residency loans were included for the first time in SoFi 2018-B Notes; SoFi is a top-ten ABS sponsor, coming in at seventh. Source
The implementation of GDPR is around the corner as it starts in May across Europe, while most of the regulations will benefit robo advisors the compliance costs could rise significantly; users will be able to ask for all data related to them and all data a rival adviser might have on them, getting this done correctly and efficiently will take time; the customer benefits are high, startups on the other hand might end up getting a lot more costs then anticipated. Source.
Some UK fintech firms are beginning to look at opening offices in other locations across Europe to appeal to young software engineers; Brexit has hurt the market for software engineers in the UK; while the initial evidence is anecdotal UK fintech companies like Curerencycloud are beginning to feel the pressure; Mike Laven, chief executive of Currencycloud, tells the FT, “We understand passporting, regulation and compliance and it will cost us money, but we will sort that out. To me, the London fintech issue is more around having the right people and having very easy access to that.” Source.
2018 has not been kind to the digital currency as it is down 50 percent against the dollar and the first quarter is the second worst on record; regulation, a clampdown in Asia hurting volume and the big price run up in late 2017 have all hurt Bitcoin; the prevailing thought about making fast cash has gone away as the price has dropped; the price today stand just below $7,000, down from a high of $20,000. Source.