As Europe moves to open banking the US begins testing principles of data sharing between banks and fintechs. 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.
Orchard has been working for a long time on their new platform called Orchard Deals; the platform has been redesigned from the ground up and boasts more than just a secondary market; features include deal listings, capital management, advanced analytics, data services and news & insights; Peter Renton from Lend Academy spoke with Orchard CEO Matt Burton and outlines what’s new in the blog post. Source
Renren is a US listed publicly traded company currently managing a social networking business and a portfolio of financial technology companies; investing in Renren can offer investors exposure to a portfolio of financial technology companies; Lend Academy provides more details in their article; Renren's fintech investment portfolio currently includes some of the industry's top companies; it owns approximately 21% of SoFi and is also invested in Lending Home, Motif Investing and Fundrise; recently the firm announced a separation of its fintech investment portfolio which could offer an even greater opportunity for returns; accredited investors can receive ownership in the proposed spinoff by investing in the stock. Source
P2Bi is an asset-based small business lender; yesterday they announced a new partnership with New Resource Bank; Krista Morgan, CEO and Co-Founder explains how it works: “Businesses that don’t qualify for traditional bank financing are evaluated by P2Bi for a partnership loan based on joint credit policy criteria. Qualified businesses are extended an asset-backed line of credit with capital provided by the bank in a senior secured position, and the P2Bi marketplace in the second position.” Source
Lending Club and Prosper were the first and for a long time the only online lending platforms available to retail investors; recently companies have leveraged Regulation A+ in order to open offerings across real estate and small business lending to retail investors; Lend Academy outlines additional companies open to retail investors including: Fundrise, RealtyMogul.com, Groundfloor and StreetShares. Source
Cumulative issuance for marketplace lending securitization now totals $28.2 billion across 106 deals; Q4 2017 issuance totaled $4.4 billion which was another record quarter; SoFi issued the largest consumer and student lending deals ever; PeerIQ shares other highlights in their quarterly report. 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
Lend Academy provides highlights from PeerIQ's Q1 2017 securitization market report in their article; total marketplace lending securitization issuance for the first quarter was $2.9 billion and all of the quarter's securitization deals were rated by a rating agency; SoFi leads the market in securitizations with nearly $9 billion representing 51% of the market's deal value. Source
PeerIQ released their third quarter marketplace lending securitization report; total issuance for the quarter was $2.6 billion down from $3 billion in the last quarter; SoFi closed two consumer deals and one student deal; Lending Club and Prosper both issued one deal; College Avenue issued their first ever student loan securitization. Source
This month the CFPB announced a new rule aimed at payday lenders to prevent debt traps; Lend Academy outlines the new rules put in place and shares perspectives from several organizations in the short term loan space. Source