City A.M. recently visited Funding Circle’s offices and highlights the stark differences from other financial institutions; the company has a relaxed office with various games typical at many startups; as the company has grown they have made sure to maintain a healthy culture which empowers employees to make decisions and be creative; Funding Circle’s co-founder James Meekings discusses workplace culture, the problems they are solving for small businesses and some of the early challenges the company when they lacked data for underwriting. Source
News Roundup
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Seed offers small businesses of all stripes the ability to open an account in less than 5 minutes on their website or mobile app; they now offer banks software to help them digitize account openings; they are one of a handful of fintech companies offering banks a white label solution to increase small business deposits; Seed comes with KYC procedures but has the ability to adapt to the bank as they know banks need customization. Source.
UK based startups and big banks have been pushing their online investment advisors through ads as they try to gain new clients; after seeing some of the startups have early success big banks started to get into the market this past year; the upcoming ISA deadline on April 5th has companies pushing their marketing spend in recent months with hopes it will pay off in new customers and cash. Source.
Funding Circle led originations for the month with 125 million Euros; total originations for the month were 454 million Euro across the platforms tracked; Mintos and Twino both reached significant milestones originating 500 million and 250 million Euros respectively. Source
Content marketing has become a widely used trend among financial firms to build brand awareness about products; what most companies find is cutting through the noise is quite hard as most companies share content that can seem the same from the user perspective; some are trying different techniques like having users write content or testing different visuals; companies need to figure out the types of pieces that work best for their particular segment. Source.
The company reported an increase in profits and sales last year which were helped by growth in the Nordics and Germany; Klarna processed €18bn in transactions last year which was an increase of 42%; the company partnered with Asos, Topshop and JD Sports in the UK to drive further growth; in the US they have partnered with Microsoft. Source
MasterCard and Facebook Messenger have teamed up to bring Nigerian small businesses digital payments and banking; 98 percent of Nigerians use cash when transacting with businesses; businesses message a Masterpass QR bot on Facebook Messenger to help enable QR code payments; the partnership is then supported by Nigeria’s Ecobank and Zenith Bank by setting up those businesses with accounts at the banks; the biggest hurdle in a partnership like this is the consumers or small businesses cannot transact with one another and so adoption is slow, though the partnership hope to solve that issue. Source.
Both Marlette and LendingClub now have their own securitization platforms which has broadened their investor base; Sid Jajodia, chief investment officer at LendingClub spoke at the Structured Finance Industry Group’s conference in Las Vegas this week and discussed the importance of brining LendingClub’s loans in-house; he also spoke about their new whole-loan structured product announced in December as well as changes that might make sense for the company in the future; Karan Mehta, head of capital markets for Marlette discussed changes they are making to their whole-loan program. Source
Jason Gottlieb, a partner at Morrison Cohen, told Crowdfund Insider that, in his opinion, “Despite its firm view that most (and maybe all) ICOs were unregistered securities offerings, the courts have not yet decided whether the “coins” or “utility tokens” are truly securities.”; the reports point to the SEC investigating at least 12 ICOs and their gatekeepers; regulators have been increasing their understanding of the space in the last year as the ICO market has taken off. Source.