Robo advisors have been increasingly gaining market share however Morgan Stanley says they are not likely to overtake incumbents; in a research note the bank says it is predicting a $6.5 trillion market globally for robo advice by 2025; despite the initial growth and market opportunity for robo advisors, the competitive landscape shows investors will still demand human advice; as a result, the hybrid model for robo advice is expected to emerge in the next wave of innovation for the industry; Betterment provides a market leading example of a hybrid model with its new Betterment Plus and Betterment Premium services announced in January. 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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The New York Times reports that 7 of Libra’s partners are quite...
During the week I share the latest marketplace lending news on Twitter...
FinTex Chicago is launching Currency on June 1; Currency is a new initiative from the nonprofit group that will provide a new resource for startups; Currency will be located at WeWork on 20 W. Kinzie Street and will potentially rent some of its 32-desk space; Currency is expected to be a gathering place for fintech startups, academics, regulators and established firms in Chicago, according to Jason Henrichs, co-founder of FinTex Chicago; Currency and its partners also plan to share online resources and offer programming on the fintech regulatory environment. Source
LendingPoint is a near prime lender; in the interview the LendingPoint team discusses how their algorithms work to take thousands of attributes to determine which ones are most predictive; the company is now partnering with hospitals for patients to obtain credit on the spot; LendingPoint originated around $28 million in loans in October with about 60% of applications coming through mobile devices. Source
Hyperledger has added seven new members bringing its total membership to 135; new members include CollectorIQ Inc., Korea Exchange, Shanghai Onechain Information Technology, Shenzhen Forms Syntron Information, The State of Illinois, The Netherlands Organization for applied scientific research (TNO) and 1worldblockchain; the new members will help to support the consortium's goal of developing blockchain solutions and creating an open standard for distributed ledgers. Source
Adam Fisher, head of macro investing at Soros Fund Management has received approval to trade cryptocurrencies but has not begun trading them according to sources; Soros recently spoke at the World Economic Forum in January stating that cryptocurrency is a typical bubble, but was more bullish on blockchain technology; his family office as of Q4 2017 had a significant stake in Overstock.com. Source
Federal Reserve Vice Chairman for Supervision Randal Quarles told an International Monetary Fund forum that he didn’t think ILCs were problematic; applications should be reviewed and granted based on the strength of the application; this is a shift for the Fed as they have said in the past that ILCs were an issue and that Congress should consider cracking down on them. Source.
David Kimball became Prosper's CEO in 2016 after serving as CFO for the firm; in February the firm signed a deal with a consortium of investors committing a potential $5 billion in loan investments for the platform over the next two years; Kimball talks about the firm's business, his perspective on fintech and his experiences as CFO and CEO. Source
At the SFIG 2017 conference on Monday, PeerIQ announced a new data partnership with 1010data; according to the press release the partnership will now offer the industry's only integrated cloud platform with self-service data management and analytics; users will now have access to even broader capabilities for loan data analysis through 1010data's Insights Platform which includes an analytical function library, pre-defined reports and queries through 1010data QuickApps and the ability to overlay consumer credit and econometric data with marketplace loan data analysis. Source