A new bill from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) would turn post offices...
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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New York state’s Department of Financial Services has given approval for Gemini...
Token-as-a-Service (TaaS), co-founded by Konstantin Pysarenko, Ruslan Gavrilyuk, Dmytro Chupryna and Maksym Muratov, will offer a blockchain fund through an initial coin offering (ICO); the fund will issue tokens which represent a proof-of-membership; the fund will perform a cryptographic audit to track trading activity; TaaS is also developing a new blockchain analytic platform called Kepler that will provide data similar to Bloomberg; according to founder Konstantin Pysarenko: "The overall aim of TaaS is to deliver long-lasting innovations in the blockchain industry. And, we believe that TaaS and Kepler are on track to revolutionize the journey of investing in cryptocurrencies and tokens forever and we are excited to watch it all unfold." Source
The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance’s new report Entrenching Innovation showed that the UK online alternative finance market grew 46 percent in 2016; investors surveyed by the report said that online platforms offering debt based products were on equal footing to that of typical fixed income assets but more transparent; industry veterans say this points to the long term chances of the market and its wider acceptance in broader financial services. Source.
The new rule forces lenders to to assess whether borrowers can repay the loans and limits rollovers, where customers take out new loans to repay old ones; the new rule is likely to face legal challenges and is primarily focused on loans under 45 days. Source
There is an interesting movement in the fintech space where some challenger...
China has developed a new Chinese village called Yuhuang Shannan which it has designed for the hedge fund community; a quiet village an hour from Shanghai offers a newly designed community tailored to the hedge fund industry with local office space, an elementary and an after work club for financiers; the number of hedge funds has been increasing in China and 1,000 hedge funds and private equity funds are registered in the village with assets under management of approximately 580 billion yuan ($84 billion); it's likely that hedge funds could become more prevalent in China and the village is receiving ongoing support from the government which currently includes a 30% tax bill subsidy. Source
Income Share Agreements (ISAs) are slowly growing in popularity as an alternative...
Toast aims to make cross-border payments easier and cheaper for migrant workers living overseas; the Singapore-based startup closed the $2.5 million pre-Series A round with Aetius Capital, 1776 and Pepper Group; historically, migrant workers have relied on services like Moneygram or Western Union to send money back to their families; company works with existing local remittance stores and kiosks and originally set out to use blockchain and bitcoin to power the service; CEO Aaron Siwoku stated they aren't going to replace banks and traditional lenders, but want to be meaningful partners with people who have distribution. Source
The new head of the OCC, Joseph Otting, reaffirms the agency’s support of the fintech charter. Source