Online lending has been maturing the last few years with more companies reaching scale and some beginning to be profitable; banks have diversified their partnerships with online lenders and in some cases have launched their own online brands; one of the big shifts in the last few years is that banks and fintech companies are not seeing each other as enemies anymore, they can and do exist together through a number of different means. Source.
News Roundup
This page contains an archive of the Global Newsletter summaries and the weekly fintech news roundups.
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Auxmoney is an online lending platform based in Germany; the platform grew origination volumes by 75% in the year to €316 million across 40,000 loans; the company now has lent around €700 million across 100,000 loans to date; last year auxmoney announced a partnership with digital bank N26 to expand their borrower base; auxmoney was profitable for the first time in the second half of 2017 which sets them apart from many platforms. Source
Rakuten acquired a bitcoin wallet startup in 2016 which now has led to the creation of a new cryptocurrency called Rakuten Coin; the new borderless coin is built on their existing loyalty program which will help consumers buy products across Rakuten’s services and markets; the company hopes the loyalty points will increase transactions from people across the globe. Source
New York State Senators held a roundtable last week for NY based blockchain companies to give their opinions on the BitLicense; the BitLicense is seen as being too restrictive, especially for startups, and the listening session was meant to get industry points of view before making reforms; one of the biggest complaints is the current regulations are too one size fits all; it is a good sign to see legislators engage the community but NY’s Department of Financial Services was not invited and so there is skepticism that any change will actually occur. Source.
One of China’s largest e-commerce companies has launched a blockchain and AI focused accelerator named AI Catapult; the company said they were looking to test real world applications of their technologies at scale; the initial batch of companies include companies from all over the globe focused on dat, e-commerce, trading, wealth management and more. Source.
The WSJ reviews Goldman’s push into consumer finance; the company first started offering loans under the Marcus brand which is the new branding for their savings account; Goldman has higher aspirations though with more initiatives in point of sale, wealth management, budgeting tools, insurance, mortgages and car loans; the company is also working with Fortune 500 companies to offer bank accounts as an employee perk; beyond their internal efforts they have also been active in acquiring fintech companies. Source
According to a new study by Accenture 7 out of 10 consumers would be reluctant to share their Information with third party providers; Citi recently published a study pointing to three main reasons that wide scale adoption will take longer; reasons include slow consumer adoption, fragmented market for new open banking services and the ability for payment providers to adapt to new rules; thus far open banking has been slow but big banks like Lloyds Banking Group and RBS have made big tech investments anticipating the change will happen over time. Source.
KPMG reports that fintech investment in Asia was $3.85bn in 2017, a significant drop from the more than $10bn invested in 2016; China was the biggest reason for the drop as the country saw only $1.3bn of investment in 2017; “Increasing government controls and regulations over fintech in China have kept many investors on the bench during 2017,” the report explained; one optimistic data point was corporate investment jumped in Q4 to 31 percent of overall deals. Source.
The company is calling their strategy the digital everything model, which includes new mobile features and back office operations powered by the blockchain; “We’re not going to lose our financial discipline because we have to make an investment that we have to do or want to do,” CEO Jamie Dimon said when asked about their approach to the tech investment; branch expansions, investments in big data solutions and more were also discussed during the investor call as reported by American Banker. Source.