Content marketing has become a widely used trend among financial firms to build brand awareness about products; what most companies find is cutting through the noise is quite hard as most companies share content that can seem the same from the user perspective; some are trying different techniques like having users write content or testing different visuals; companies need to figure out the types of pieces that work best for their particular segment. 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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Funding Circle led originations for the month with 125 million Euros; total originations for the month were 454 million Euro across the platforms tracked; Mintos and Twino both reached significant milestones originating 500 million and 250 million Euros respectively. Source
UK based startups and big banks have been pushing their online investment advisors through ads as they try to gain new clients; after seeing some of the startups have early success big banks started to get into the market this past year; the upcoming ISA deadline on April 5th has companies pushing their marketing spend in recent months with hopes it will pay off in new customers and cash. Source.
Seed offers small businesses of all stripes the ability to open an account in less than 5 minutes on their website or mobile app; they now offer banks software to help them digitize account openings; they are one of a handful of fintech companies offering banks a white label solution to increase small business deposits; Seed comes with KYC procedures but has the ability to adapt to the bank as they know banks need customization. Source.
City A.M. recently visited Funding Circle’s offices and highlights the stark differences from other financial institutions; the company has a relaxed office with various games typical at many startups; as the company has grown they have made sure to maintain a healthy culture which empowers employees to make decisions and be creative; Funding Circle’s co-founder James Meekings discusses workplace culture, the problems they are solving for small businesses and some of the early challenges the company when they lacked data for underwriting. Source
“Bitcoin, for us, is not stopping at buying and selling," Square CEO Jack Dorsey told analysts on their earnings call as reported by Business Insider. "We do believe that this is a transformational technology for our industry and we want to learn as quickly as possible."; bitcoin has yet to effect Square’s earnings as they have only recently started crypto payments; they currently include a margin to account for the volatility of bitcoin; shares were down slightly after releasing earnings. Source.
JPMorgan Chase is the only U.S. bank with scalable businesses in every payments vertical; the bank has been investing and partnering heavily the last few years into payments innovation; they see checking accounts as checking and payments accounts; they have made moves into digital wallets, p2p payments, order and pay ahead apps and recently partnered to allow customers to send an receive electronic payments and invoices; the bank sees payments and banking as one in the same and with the recent news of their heavy tech investment for 2018 more innovation looks to be on the way. Source.
Samsung’s new Galaxy S9 is marketed as having a better camera and can take clear pictures in low light; the technology could solve one of the bigger facial recognition issues which is poor quality pictures in low lighting; thus far banks have been slow to adopt the new technology as they have yet to be comfortable wit the way it currently works; with Samsung and Apple continuing to improve their cameras and a younger generation of customers increasing, facial recognition will soon be an important piece for all banks. Source.
American Banker has published a rebuttal to a recent article about the “Madden fix bill” by Steve Astrada; article discusses how the bill will increase access to credit and benefit customers instead of increasing predatory lending; it also shares the consequences of the Madden decision and reviews the details of the case. Source