The credit card business used to be much more profitable for banks;...
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.
To join our newsletter community please subscribe here.
Here are the most read news stories from our daily newsletter today:...
Veteran of IBM’s Deep Blue launches AI-based cybersecurity company What does a...
Bitcoin reported substantial gains in 2016, increasing 120% and 57% in the last three months of the year; on January 1 the cryptocurrency exchange rate versus the dollar increased to over $1,000; equity strategist, Christopher Wood of CLSA notes that trading in China has concurrently been high with trading on the China BTC Bitcoin Exchange increasing from Rmb 1 billion ($140 million) in September to Rmb 27.8 billion ($4 billion) in December; in an article from Asia Times, the source also reported that China accounted for 42% of Bitcoin's trading in the first six months of 2016; one factor significantly affecting the increased trading volume has been the weakening of China's currency causing increased interest in foreign investments. Source
Originators are beginning to look at launching their own captive funds; at LendIt USA 2017 we hosted a panel featuring Cross River Bank, Freedom Financial, Money360, Credibly, UBS and Clifford Chance to discuss this idea; the originators on the panel talked about their current funds, if they have launched one, size, structure and how they currently view the idea of this vehicle in the long term; the panelists focused on diversification of funding sources; in good times it is never hard to get loan purchasers but when markets tighten how can you make sure you are prepared; they also talked about when setting up this funding vehicle should you manage it yourself or should you find a third party fund manager; how do conflicts of interest come into play when the originating company is then investing in the loan and servicing the loan; there are still many questions when it comes to setting up a fund like this, as more firms look to this option we will better understand how to answer these questions in the future. Source
Go-Jek is an Uber competitor and is now looking to lead in the payments sector in Indonesia; the company purchased offline payments service Kartuku, payment gateway Midtrans and a saving and lending firm called Mapan. Source
E-Trade says they are going on a hiring spree for financial consultants...
Adyen is a payments company based in Amsterdam and currently is valued around $2.3 billion; the company has over 4,000 clients which includes names like Netflix, Facebook, Uber and Spotify; Forbes profiles the company and their co-founder and president, Pieter van der Does. Source
Marketplace lender, Peerform, has been acquired by Versara Lending; Versara is a New York City-based consumer lender seeking to expand its lending business in consumer loans; Peerform will enhance the lending capabilities for Versara and Peerform Founder Mikael Rapaport will join Versara Lending as a senior vice president. Source
Seeking to be more involved in auto financing, the firm has launched Clearlane; the platform has been developed from the firm's acquisition of BlueYield; the integration and enhancement of the acquired business has resulted in a simplified customer experience and broad range of offerings; the platform includes over a dozen finance providers offering consumers auto financing and auto loan refinancing options with various opportunities identified for expansion. Source
