Petal’s new credit card will focus on the 65 million people who lack credit history for a traditional card; they have been working for three years on their product which uses AI to predict a consumer’s creditworthiness; the company raised a $3.6 million seed round last September and followed with a $13 million Series A in January of 2018; the partnership with WebBank will allow Petal to make the card available nationwide which they anticipate will happen over the next few months. 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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Coinbase announced they will add support for ERC20 tokens, the technical standard behind ethereum blockchain tokens; they don’t have plans to add any new token yet but is building out their technology to do so; "This is an infrastructure upgrade that will enable us to support many more assets in the future," a Coinbase representative told Business Insider.; the company did caution that they will wait regulatory clarity before adding any assets. Source.
David Lin, Head of Credit at PayU gives his take on expanding credit and how this looks in practice with their investment in Kreditech. Source
Tencent and Alibaba have built firms that enable them to write significant checks and have crowded out private equity and venture capital firms; SoftBank is the only other regional player on a similar level; they are not always driven by returns like traditional investors and this allows them to define success differently; some private equity firms are beginning to wonder if they are beginning to abuse their power; if a company receives investment from one of these giants they are also not held to the same pressures of a traditional investor like going public; these giants are helping to push innovation across the region and globe, but many are starting to ask at what cost. Source.
Banks have begun to implement new technologies to help verify who the customer is, though the new GDPR rules in Europe could complicate usage; the General Data Protection Regulation, which will restrict how companies collect and store data, allows for customers to ask for their data to be removed and non compliance results in huge fines; banks have started to slowly add new technology but they are still figuring out where to limit storage; new companies are trying to sell services into bank that allow them to collect information but store it in a certain way to be compliant; with new technology being developed so rapidly, governments need to ensure they keep up with innovation and clearly tell the market how to comply. Source.
The new venture called Spring Labs will use blockchain technology in building a network which will allow lenders, banks and data providers to pay each other for access to consumer information; CEO Adam Jiwan gave insight into the problem they are trying to solve stating, “Utility companies or social-media companies or asset managers do not provide data into the existing credit-bureau system. In the existing ecosystem, financial institutions or lenders give up that information to a centralized party — a credit bureau — only for the financial institutions to buy it back in a synthesized form.”; the firm aims to have Avant, the online lender, be its first strategic partner. Source
Speaking at the Development High-Level Forum, CEO Eric Jing called Blockchain, “the cornerstone of trust for the digital society in the future.”; while Jing is bullish on the long term outlook for blockchain technology he also curbed enthusiasm stating that it isn’t ready for a “large-scale outbreak”, comparing the current speculation similar to the internet bubble; he also shared that the technology will be more applicable in the next 2-3 years and that there were still some challenges to overcome. Source
Rishi Khosla, chief executive and co-founder of OakNorth, told CNBC that eventually the company plans to make the move into China; "It is going to be a market that we will go into. It's just a question of when and how rather than if," Khosla explained at a fintech event last week.; talk of a move comes after China’s new central bank head said he is willing to open the market to foreign companies; OakNorth has said they are in discussions with a variety of countries across the globe about expansion plan. Source.
Prosper originated $2.9 billion in 2017 and now has surpassed $11 billion in total loans. Source