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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George Popescu is the founder of LendingTimes, a publication dedicated to the online lending industry; he also serves as CEO of Lampix, an augmented reality company that offers a product creating 'smart surfaces'; the company announced it had crossed $4.5 million in funding through an ICO in minutes. Source
StreetShares is an online small business lender that focuses on veteran-owned small businesses; company has hired a new chief product officer, Heather Tuason; Tuason previously was the senior vice president of small business at Capital One; Tuason stated: "I am proud to be part of an organization so focused on serving its members and in awe at the military drive and passion demonstrated by the StreetShares team each and every day. Veterans have sacrificed so much, and I'm honored to help them build businesses that drive our economy. It's time for veterans and the military community to have fully mobile, fully digital, next-generation financial products." Source
Join LendIt on Monday, August 14 at 2:00 PM EST for a webinar about blockchain technology and insurance; the webinar will discuss how blockchain can streamline operations for wealth managers and insurance back office operations; presenters include Jayant Khadilkar, global head of analytics and technology at Tiger Risk, and Ryan Rugg, business development at R3. Source
LendInvest's retail bond began trading on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) this week, with the offering raising GBP50 million ($65 million) and promoted as the first to be issued by a fintech company; the underlying assets in the bond portfolio include property loans issued by the LendInvest platform; Christian Faes, co-founder and CEO of LendInvest, said: "We launched the bond program to make our asset class available to retail investors through an LSE listed offering because it is a well-established, robust structure that offers customers considerable protections. However, whilst the bond was popular with retail investors, some of the city's largest institutional investors also made significant investments."; the retail bond is the first in a multi-year GBP500 million ($650 million) bond program for LendInvest. Source
Funding Circle has rebranded with a new website and logo; the rebranding is centered around a focus on expansion and growth; in regards to the rebranding, Chief Marketing Officer Darryl Bowman said, "We are hugely passionate about helping thousands more businesses and investors across the world and today's rebrand is the next step on this journey."; since launching the firm has facilitated loans to 32,000 businesses and estimates it has helped support the creation of approximately 80,000 jobs. Source
Landbay will add Positive Lending to its distribution network; Landbay has a comprehensive suite of services for its intermediaries and is also supporting them in advance of the UK's September PRA portfolio landlord changes; Landbay is a UK specialist buy to let mortgage lender authorized by the FCA and involved with the P2PFA as one of its members. Source
The firm recently launched in Ireland with a peer-to-peer platform lending model that integrates a borrower's social network in the lending process; it has received Financial Conduct Authority approval and says the additional funds will help it to launch in the UK; the firm is seeking GBP2 million ($2.60 million) in equity funding and will also potentially add more debt funding; Oli Cavanagh, founder of Flender, says he expects most of the funding to come from institutional investors. Source
51 Credit Card, in cooperation with Harvest Investment, has launched an investment fund with RMB1 billion ($150 million); 51 Credit Card in particular favors companies with good online lending users, big data and traffic acquisition capacity. Source (Chinese)
JD Finance has announced the establishment of a venture capital fund, called ThousandTree Capital, to invest in early-stage companies (angel or A round) in the consumption field; JD Finance will hold minor shares in the startups; the investment decision will be to some extent driven by the data accumulated in the JD ecosystem. Source (Chinese)
Banks are starting to experiment with different customer service chatbots like Facebook Messenger and Twitter; with this move comes potential security risks and the question of risks for the customer; The Conversation points out that a research report by The Centre for Communications Interface Research (CCIR) shows that customers are willing to give up some security for convenience; chatbots will need to provide a sense of convenience and a sense of trust to ultimately be widely accepted by the broad consumer; additional research by the World Retail Banking Report shows that while consumers are accepting their banking life being digital they are still looking for face to face interaction with more complex problems; finding the right balance is the key as more banks move into fuller digital offerings. Source
