Venmo currently accounts for about 39 percent of PayPal’s digital p2p payments business; PayPal and Venmo only charge users a fee when they use their credit cards, though Venmo has started to diversify their offerings to help PayPal’s bottom line; Venmo has expanded Pay with Venmo and started a instant cashout service which both have fees associated with them; they have seen fast adoption with both and the hopes are that a breakthrough year is coming soon. 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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- Kabbage Announces Partnership With TaxSlayer to Offer Small Businesses Access to Lines of Credit Up to $250,000
- Personal Capital Launches Socially Responsible Investing
- Autobooks Raises $10M in Series A1 Funding Round
- Ratesetter launches IFISA offer
- Former Keller Williams CEO Chris Heller joins loanDepot brand family as CEO of mello Home
- Lenders to allow Airbnb income on mortgage forms
- SharesPost Launches Unit Focused On Initial Coin Offerings; Hedge Fund Executive John Wu To Lead Group
There are unique tax implications when it comes to investing in marketplace lending and investors should consider investing through an IRA; LendingClub is currently offering a bonus for IRA investments and is working with a new preferred custodian. Source
VersaBank is a small Ontario-based bank and is planning to have digital vaults available by June to customers around the globe; the bank hired a cybersecurity expert to lead “VersaVault”; digital assets will be stored on servers all over the world; the bank won’t know what is inside and won’t be able to access the contents. Source
Christine Farnish, the chair of the P2PFA for the past five years, is stepping down and is being replace by Paul Smee. Source
Overstock has been building out their FinanceHub for the past few months to include Overstock credit cards and insurance products, loans by LendingTree, Prosper and SoFi, a robo-adviser for automated investing and a discounted trading platform; Raj Karkara, Overstock VP of loyalty and financial services, tells TearSheet, “Consumers don’t want to sit and sign 50 documents, they just want to go online and get through the steps they need to take to move forward.”; the moves made are part of a broader strategy for the retailer to become a full service fintech firm that caters to their clients needs. Source.
The UK fintech sector has shaken off the worries of Brexit to take in the second highest amount of capital from VC’s in 2017; they have overtaken China and only trail the US in terms of VC funding; according to data from Innovate Finance UK fintech investment was up 153 percent in 2017 from the year earlier; 24 per cent went into challenger banks, 21 percent into money transfer and foreign exchange, 17 percent into alternative lending and financing and 11 percent into personal finance/wealth management; VC investment globally reached $14.4bn across 1,824 deals, representing an 18 per cent decrease from 2016. Source.
The UK recently visited China on a trade mission and signed a number of fintech deals worth more than $1.8bn; the deals are looking to create a deeper partnership between the nations and potentially create more than 850 jobs; deals include Innovate Finance and NIFA's memorandum of understanding, CurrencyCloud and X-Transfer's partnership and UK fintech R5FX's collaboration with Shanghai Clearing House. Source.
Recent research shows that younger consumers are uncomfortable with carrying credit card balances; consumers are more comfortable with products like personal loans that are more transparent and easier to understand; there has been an increased interest in point of sale financing; one company driving this trend is GreenSky which partners with banks to fund loans; the proportion of consumer loans going to point of sale financing has increased significantly at banks that partner with GreenSky including Regions, Synovus and Fifth Third. Source
Radius Bank in Boston has been partnering with fintechs for the last few years in an effort to build relationships for the long term that benefit the bank and fintech company; “We’ve built a culture inside this company that believes in the future of virtual banking, and the demands clients are going to put on us to be an Amazon-like experience for them,” says Radius CEO Mike Butler to American Banker; the bank is looking to use fintech companies to build this experience as they are unable to build all of this in house. Source.