Standard Chartered and Ant Financial signed a memorandum of understanding to expand their fintech reach in the Belt and Road Initiative; as Banking Technology reports the details are not flushed out yet but they are looking to broaden access to financial services in countries where the Belt and Road Initiative reaches; the companies have already partnered on funding settlement, FX services and Alipay Wallet. 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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Banks are starting to adopt voice assistants through Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home but don’t foresee wide adoption in 2018; Patrick Kelly, assistant vice president of emerging technologies at USAA tells TearSheet, “What Amazon Echo and Google Home are going to be is yet to be determined. That persona drives the user expectations of those devices. We’ll see them start to evolve next year and see what users expect.”; banks are currently still in the early stages of understanding how the technology will be used in everyday banking; one of the main issues holding back wider adoption is security and authentication. Source.
Personal financial management or PFM apps have become one of the hotter areas in fintech the last few years; but with more companies starting the competition has been steep and now banks are incorporating a lot of the same features within their mobile apps; TearSheet interviewed Jillian Williams of the Anthemis Group about the PFM market; the interview covers how hard it is to differentiate your product when so many similar firms are out there and why are companies still receiving investment from VC’s; other topics include banks offering a similar suite of products, whether or not robo-advisors will add PFM capabilities and what’s next for the market. Source.
After the launch of bitcoin futures at CBOE last week the worlds largest derivatives marketplace, CME Group, launched futures for the digital currency yesterday; some believe the launch of futures on both marketplaces has helped to drove the price to record levels; CME bitcoin futures are based on the CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate which aggregates trading across major exchanges. Source.
Remittances is a huge business with over $600 billion remitted every year; the fintech startups currently leading are WorldRemit, TransferWise and Remitly; the WSJ breaks down the various offerings as well as the other players in the industry; includes data on the remittance market across the globe and trends in the industry. Source
LongFin is a microcap stock which rose 2600% after it debuted last week; the company announced last week it bought Ziddu.com, a blockchain micro-lending solutions provider; the stock has had more than a dozen trading halts after the price gains; LongFin plans to offer services to importers and exporters on the blockchain with the acquisition. Source
Nominations for the LendItFintech Industry Awards Dinner are now open. The dinner will be held on April 10, 2018 at One Market in San Francisco and the event will celebrate 500+ Fintech influencers and innovations and their outstanding achievements in 21 categories. We encourage fintech companies from around the world to apply for the categories that are the best fit. Source
As part of their SoFi ReFi program, SoFi will now offer a six-month grace period for new graduates; typically refinancing student debt has meant that graduates must give up their grace period on loans. Source
- ModusLink Announces Acquisition of IWCO Direct for $476 Million in Cash
- Fiserv teams with TransUnion for loan origination system
- City of London Group to launch challenger bank
- MarketInvoice touts double-digit returns for 2017
- Finiata Closes €18M Financing Round
- BorsadelCredito.it Raises €1.6M in Funding
- Upstart's First SaaS Partner
While the full English report is still in the works KPMG releases their annual Fintech 50 for China; China has become one of the most important fintech markets in the world as some of the largest companies are from the market; they are also one of the most diversified markets as they have leading companies in insurtech, payments, regtech and online lending. Source.