Banks have historically made money on overdraft fees, out-of-network ATM fees, fees for not maintaining a certain minimum balance and more; this fee structure has helped give banks a bad name; big tech companies and fintech startups have garnered a better reputation for upfront fees for a simple service and transparency around other fees; “It’s important to let consumers understand what you’re offering, what the fee structure is — and be abundantly clear about it — and then you can build trust,” said Jay Shah, CEO of Personal Capital to TearSheet; studies show that customers are not turned off by fees, but are annoyed when they hear of free checking then see ACH transaction fees or overdraft fees; banks need to begin to understand what their customers want and how much they are willing to pay for it in a clear way. 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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- Ezbob Raises £15M in Expansion Capital
- Elevate Appoints Former PayPal, loanDepot Executive Brian Biglin as Chief Credit Officer
- GLI Finance scores £50m funding line from HoneyComb fund
- Western Union Opens Tech Center In India
- Nissan Motor Acceptance Corporation Announces New Way to Finance from Your Mobile Device
- SEC Halts Alleged Initial Coin Offering Scam
Kabbage will now offer lines of credit up to $250,000; this is the largest credit line available from any online lender; Kabbage will expand its customer base to larger businesses with the higher credit lines; Kabbage also shared results of a survey sharing where small businesses plan to invest in 2018. Source
The new CEO of the Innovative Lending Platform Association has written an op-ed focused on the Madden decision and how it could be fixed by Congress to better serve small businesses. Source
Only five days after announcing they would enable bitcoin and ethereum trading Robinhood saw more than one million signups; Robinhood has made its name on zero commission stock trading and plan to roll out the new feature in five states first; “We see millions of trades a day. In our brokerage industry there is no excuse for down time. We plan on bringing that mind-set to the crypto space,” said Robinhood Co-Founder Baiju Bhatt to Business Insider. Source.
Blockchain ETFs have received a lot of interest over the last two weeks and have raised almost $260 million; however, Bloomberg explores that the makeup of these ETFs contain many household names such as Cisco, Intel, Nvidia and IBM; thus, investors may be paying a high price to invest in stocks they could easily purchase themselves. Source
In an interview with Tearsheet Bradley Leimer, managing director and head of fintech strategy at Explorer Advisor & Capital says companies are underestimating content; most VC’s focus on who can be the next Robinhood or TransferWise when there is plenty of opportunities in the market; companies can use customer data to better educate and better target consumers for a specific financial product; there are a lot of interesting companies in the market who can find their niche to perform and offer consumers more choose. Source.
Investing startup Wealthfront is adding a new feature to their Path platform to help users with home buying; “With the introduction of Path’s home planning service, our clients can now easily plan for all of their major life milestones — from saving for their children’s future to one day retiring — with just a few taps on their phone,” said Andy Rachleff cofounder and CEO of Wealthfront to Business Insider; the new feature will use real estate dat from Redfin to help users explore the housing market and see whether or not they can afford a home. Source.
UK listed information and analytics group Relx bought online ID verification company ThreatMetrix for more than $800mn; the move will help to beef up Relx’s LexisNexis Risk Solutions unit; ThreatMetrix has built a database of 1.4bn unique online digital identities in more than 180 countries; Mark Kelsey, the head of Relx’s risk and business analytics division, tell the FT, “Bringing ThreatMetrix together with our own strengths in physical identity attributes will give our clients across all forms of commerce and geographies a more reliable, comprehensive approach to fraud and identity risk management.” Source.
ABN Amro, ING and Rabobank were the victims of DDoS cyber attacks this past weekend; all the banks saw their websites become unavailable or would run extremely slow; the companies have released statements that their services are now fully restored and that clients’ details were not compromised. Source.