After opening a search for a digital lending solution, the American Bankers Association has chosen Akouba; Lend Academy provides details in their article; Akouba offers banks a digital lending software solution for executing small business loans; it primarily works with community and regional banks; the ABA endorsement is a huge win for Akouba and will substantially add to its sales pipeline; the firm has 11 employees and has mainly been working with community banks reporting $500 million to $25 billion in assets; in addition to facilitating new business for Akouba, the ABA endorsement is also designed to help educate the market on advanced solutions for small business online lending; the ABA will be releasing a report on Akouba and the company will be holding a webinar on March 8 to discuss digitizing the small business lending process. 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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There have been a lot of executives recently who have expressed their opinions about cryptocurrencies; while many people agree that the technology behind bitcoin has huge potential, there are a wide variety of opinions about cryptocurrencies; Lend Academy shares quotes from Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan), Larry Fink (Blackrock), Mike Novogratz (Galaxy Digital Assets Fund), James Gorman (Morgan Stanley),Axel Weber (UBS), Christine Lagarde (Head of the International Monetary Fund) and Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs). Source
Lend Academy provides a resource for new investors in Lending Club and Prosper; their article includes five basic principles for investing in the platforms; the five key elements for investing include: 1) diversify investments 2) expect defaults 3) keep cash balances low 4) automate investing and 5) avoid taxes by investing through an IRA. Source
Lend Academy provides insight on achieving success from this year's Fintech Woman of the Year finalists; highlights include visualizing success, setting goals and learning from experiences; the article also includes a link to a recent Exchanges at Goldman Sachs podcast where Goldman Sachs' global co-head of the Industrials Group in Investment Banking shares her career advice. Source
In December the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its proposal for a fintech charter with an open comment period until January 15; the OCC has received numerous comments which can be found here; Lend Academy and LendIt submitted a response in favor of the fintech charter; their response outlines the difficulties online lenders have in complying with different rules in each of the 50 states; suggests nationalization of regulation would make platform operations more efficient and help the industry to broaden the benefits it can offer to financial inclusion and other nationwide initiatives. Source
Marketplace lending investments offer limited options for investors seeking to save or invest for their children; Lend Academy provides details in their article; currently UTMA accounts are the only investment vehicle; created from the Uniform Gifts to Minors Act, these accounts can be opened for children under a specified age with irrevocable contributions; the assigned minor owns the assets in the account however they cannot gain complete control of the account until a specified age. Source
GreenSky offers a unique type of point of sale financing and has just closed a $200 million round. Source
Lend Academy reports on the intersection of banks and marketplace lending in their article; Zopa, the industry's first P2P lender, is leading the way again; it is now the first P2P platform to seek a bank license; SoFi also says it has plans to take deposits and has been leading the market in product expansion; at the same time digital banks are becoming more prevalent and fintech partnerships are occurring industry wide. Source
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has published details on its fintech charter in a 16-page supplement to its existing OCC licensing manual; the fintech charter supplement addresses capital requirements, liquidity, financial inclusion plans, consumer protection and the application process; Lend Academy provides an analysis in their article; the release of the fintech charter will now be followed by an open comment period which ends on April 14; also noteworthy is that Thomas Curry's term as comptroller ends on April 9 however he can serve until a replacement is confirmed. Source
As with past conferences LendIt aims to bring new speakers to the conference; this year LendIt has confirmed Ash Gupta (President of American Express), Harit Talwar (CEO of Marcus) and Thomas Curry (Head of the OCC) among many others who are new to LendIt; the agenda will also include the leaders in online lending with representation from companies such as Lending Club, Prosper, OnDeck and loanDepot; the conference will be the largest for the industry to date with a 100,000 square foot exhibit hall, featuring over 200 companies; LendIt will end the conference with the first ever industry awards dinner. Source