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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Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William Dudley said the U.S. central bank is starting to think about adopting its own digital currency; while talks are in their infancy Mr. Dudley does see the value in the technology behind bitcoin; he doesn’t see bitcoin being a rival to the dollar as it is currently to unstable. Source.
Ally Bank, Goldman Sachs GS Bank and Sallie Mae Bank are all paying much higher rates for deposits which can put brick and mortar competitors in a tough spot; banks typically lag a bit when it comes to rates so their current loans can reprice and profits are not hit; though they could lose deposits if they wait to long to raise rates as customers will move to the better rate; Fitch Ratings released a report Wednesday showing online bank rates were 1.18 percent versus brick and mortar rates of 0.075 percent. Source.
Writing a guest post on FT Alphaville Victor Basta, the managing director of Magister Advisors talks bout the struggle digital banks face in making a profit; digital banks have certainly made a name for themselves and offer a better product to the consumer; rising customer acquisition costs and the tough scaling of affiliate agreements are just two of the reasons these banking startups will find it a challenge to reach profitability; the future looks like potential acquisition of digital banks for technology or merging with other fintechs to form a stronger conglomerate. Source.
Goldman Sachs head of commodities research, Jeff Currie, told Bloomberg TV that bitcoin is a commodity though with less liquidity than gold; he explains, “"It's a commodity. A security, by definition, has a liability attached to it. Take a dollar bill, it has a liability to the US government. Commodities do not have liabilities.”; similar to gold it is not backed by a government or a company but is significantly more volatile. Source.
China’s fintech market has been booming in recent years and now the industry has another concern regarding data privacy; Zhang Yi, chief executive of iiMedia Research, told the FT, “For the most part, these platforms aren’t selling data as their main business or they wouldn’t be able to survive. But employees who manage the data are the main source of data leaks.”; data is being sold on the black market and in most cases it comes from employees of the lender; most lenders say they sell data to third parties but the practice is opaque and not regulated very well. Source.
Junheng Li, founder of an independent research firm focused on Chinese companies provides an update on lending in China with the recent news of tightening regulation. Source
The fund expects to provide a dividend of 15p per quarter by the end of the second quarter of 2018; this would represent a yield of 7.8%; the fund shared that it had a pipeline of attractive yielding assets of £400m and will increase share buybacks. Source
Credit Suisse has taken a majority stake in the startup TradePlus24 in a Series A-1 financing round; TradePlus24 is based in Zurich and helps SMEs increase their working capital by leveraging their domestic and export receivables; Credit Suisse recently announced a $200 million revolving credit facility with Kabbage. Source
Lend Academy features two companies, Landed and Fundrise, who are taking a unique approach to building to new homes and providing down payment assistance. Source