State legislators have voiced opposition to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's (OCC) proposed fintech charter; primarily concerned with nationalized rules that would ease regulations currently in place by state governments and allow payday lenders to evade state rules established for consumer protection; senators have also opposed the national charters suggesting that federal regulators collaborate with state regulators; the OCC's comment period for the proposed fintech charter is open until January 15. 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.
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Options Clearing Corporation has set a three year plan to put their business on a cloud based system; the reason for the move is concerns over cybersecurity; the company clears more than 460mn trades a month and has recently added cryptocurrency futures; cloud based servers are cheaper and more secure than in house IT systems. Source.
Before I started writing this blog I had no idea what an...
Opus Fund Services has released OpusNotes™, a loan accounting services platform for marketplace lending vehicles; in comments regarding the release, Mike Canni, chief operations officer for Opus, said, "This product is the culmination of five years of development, working with the requirements of the world's largest marketplace lending hedge funds and their institutional investors. Delivered through our online dashboard, this is a significant release of the most comprehensive platform available for the provision of administration services for marketplace lending strategies." Source
Orange Bank has already onboarded more than 100,000 customers since launch, only Revolut and Boursorama, Société Générale’s digital banking arm have made more progress in the same timeframe; this continues the wider trend across Europe as digital banking becomes a bigger part of the financial services ecosystem. Source.
Orange Bank, the bank from French Telecom group Orange, was launched a few months ago to help shake up the banking world; with more banking being done on mobile devices and the advent of PSD2 the company thinks it is well positioned to go head to head with banks; they have seen companies like Alibaba and Tencent disrupt finance in Asia and there has been talk of big tech coming into banking too, as a telecom they feel like they were perfectly positioned to make the move; Orange has seen early success and they are looking to soon add consumer lending, mortgages and insurance. Source.
Orca CEO Iain Niblock calls out the mini-bond market after the collapse...
Citing increasing demand Orca has launched a new standardized investment platform that will be focused to financial advisers and broader P2P investors; Iain Niblock, CEO of Orca, stated, "Although P2P investments offer stable, predictable risk-adjusted returns and great diversification for investors, there has been virtually no uptake since financial advisers were permitted to suggest their clients consider P2P products last year."; the platform will focus on interest rates, default rates, subprime rates and a proprietary Orca scoring methodology. Source
Orchard provides insight on monthly trends in P2P lending originations; uses Lending Club's publicly available standard program data for the analysis; finds October has historically been the peak month for P2P loan originations; identifies loan purpose trends for 2015 with debt consolidation notably highest in January; categories with peak lending originations in December in 2015 included major purchase, other and small business. Source
Orchard has announced a new data services partnership with investment bank, Sandler O'Neill; Sandler O'Neill provides investment banking advisory services for clients in the financial services industry; the partnership will provide access to Orchard's full suite of marketplace lending data analytics services for Sandler O'Neill and its clients making Sandler O'Neill a leading investment advisory service for financial institutions considering bank partnerships. Source