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
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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Today Apple officially revealed the Apple Card which is made possible through...
The National Consumer Assistance Plan from the three major US credit bureaus was created following a 2015 settlement and seeks to improve credit reporting accuracy; it will exclude tax liens and civil judgments that do not conform to reporting agency standards; exclusion of these two items is likely to help consumers receive a slight increase in their credit score; medical debt is also being excluded until 180 days after the delinquency; VantageScore and other credit agencies are also taking some new factors into consideration when calculating credit scores including trended data and number of accounts. Source
Rocket Internet is looking to make an investment push into fintech and...
A recent review done by the International Monetary Fund found Chinese Banks face capital shortfalls, in particular medium and small banks; the IMF stated that China should consider boosting risk-weighted assets by 0.5 to 1 percent in the next 12 months; Jin Zhongxia, China’s representative on the IMF’s executive board said the assessment was for the most part correct but that they have already begun implementing remedies; the IMF said the problem is manageable but laid out a set of potential reforms to improve the shortfalls going forward. Source
Startups like Propy, ShelterZoom and RealBlocks have begun letting people buy and sell real estate using the blockchain; Eric Piscini, principal, banking and technology consulting at Deloitte tells American Banker, “Maybe banks will be leaner because they won’t need to have as many people as they used to, to manage those processes.”; using blockchain technology can help to make the entire process of buying or selling real estate more efficient; banks will need to focus on other value added services outside of just lending and servicing; the power of blockchain technology is beginning to be felt all across the financial landscape. Source.
The UK government now has three schemes including the Coronavirus Business Interruption...
UK based challenger bank has raised over $96mn as they eye European...
Caitlin Long, chairman and president of Symbiont, talks about why blockchain technology is ideal for syndicated loans; syndicated loans are some of the most complexly structured loans in the credit market; they involve multiple originators for a single loan and add significant balance sheet capital for corporations; blockchain could help reduce the syndicated loan deal funding process currently averaging over 20 days; it could also streamline documentation and loan processing providing significantly improved transparency and also supporting better loan market trading activities; Caitlin will be speaking about blockchain and its integration with loans at LendIt USA 2017. Source
Here are the most read news stories from our daily newsletter today:...