Monzo has grown its customer base over five times in one year and used different methods that help keep that base coming back; they ask for community feedback, open the company for equity crowdfunding rounds so users can invest and they host small, intimate events; 80 percent of their growth is word of mouth, the remaining 20 percent is through ads on Facebook and Twitter; “The biggest challenge is that we’re growing very fast — our customer and employee numbers are growing fast — we want to keep the customer focus, how we operate a transparent customer growth approach, and how we do that at scale,” as Tristan Thomas, Monzo’s head of marketing and community, tells TearSheet. 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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As stock market volatility increased the trading app Robinhood saw deposits jump 20 percent; "We saw a large spike in transaction volume and trading activity on the platform today," a spokesperson told Business Insider. "Retail investors deposited 20% more funds into their Robinhood accounts today than they did on Friday.”; this is a trend the company has seen before, in late 2016 the Dow dropped 8 percent because of issues in Asia and the app saw their biggest net deposits ever. Source.
According to a 2018 identity fraud study, victims increased 8% to 16.7 million US consumers in 2017; this is a record since Javelin Strategy & Research began tracking data in 2003; as chips in cards have become more prevalent, fraud has continued to move online; the research highlighted the increase in intermediary accounts being created by fraudsters which could include PayPal and Amazon accounts; article shares further data on trends in identity fraud. Source
In this guest post Tobias Briegel explores the intersection of blockchain technology and real estate. Source
- Ohpen Raises $31 Million to Support Global Expansion
- Trunomi Closes $3.5 Million Round from CloudScale Capital
- Renaud Laplanche Joins LendItFintech USA 2018 As Keynote Speaker
- LendingTree Personal Loan Offers Report – January 2018
- Movement Mortgage Implements CompenSafe to Automate LO Compensation
- Senmiao Technologies Proposes Terms For $14 Million U.S. IPO
- Winklevoss Brothers on Bitcoin Price, Cryptocurrency Regulation (Video)
State regulators are planning to offer a licensing process for money-service businesses which will include fintech firms; this will allow business to operate across multiple states; the initial pilot will be offered in seven states; Charlie Clark, agency deputy director and director of consumer services at the Washington Department of Financial Institutions stated, “This is something that we can do to create licensing efficiencies with these companies, hopefully help get them off the ground and it doesn’t sacrifice consumer protection.” Source
There are differing beliefs on payday loans and how far regulation should go to protect consumers; to better answer the effects of payday lending on consumers many people turn to research; results of a study done in 2014 are now in doubt after a watchdog group found that $30,000 of grant funding came from a payday-industry-backed organization; since these types of studies help shape policy it has brought into question how deep these types of studies should be evaluated. Source
Aspiration has taken their marketing aim directly at some of the biggest banks by offering what they see is a better product and experience; “We’re not going after these banks for the sake of it, we’re talking about their actions and their approaches versus ours,” said CEO Andrei Cherny to TearSheet; the company does not charge ATM fees or monthly service fees and investments are done on pay what is fair basis; Aspiration is going beyond just the user experience by donating 10 percent of revenue to charity and focuses on whether customers spend at companies that are ethical and sustainable. Source.
Lloyd’s Banking Group and Virgin Money recently banned customers from using their credit cards to buy cryptocurrencies; customers will still be able to use their debit cards to buy cryptocurrencies but for fear they could go into debt they do not want credit cards being used; other card issuers like Barclays and Mastercard say they are reviewing the crypto space but no decisions have been made. Source.
Citizens Bank of Edmond Oklahoma is a one branch bank who has begun turning their extra space into a co working space for business clients; the space is now called Vault 405 and includes wireless charging stations, conference rooms and a podcast studio; CEO Jill Castilla tells Tearsheet, “The office space will be just as beneficial to the bank beyond loans and deposits, it’ll make us a better small business.”; this isn’t the banks first foray into innovation as they were ahead of their time on social media, video teller machines and mobile payments. Source.