Providing credit to the underserved is something a lot of companies attempt to achieve; 138 million people in the US need access to credit and most of these individuals are concentrated in nine states; when it comes to credit there isn't a lot of options for non prime consumers; at LendIt USA 2017 James Gutierrez of Insikt discussed expanding access to credit where the consumer gets a personal touch to their experience; at his previous firm James offered face to face loans in Latino supermarkets to the underbanked; his experience there allowed him to bring that personal interaction to a digital platform without losing the intimate feel; Insikt is able to scale in a quicker fashion but still provide credit where the consumer knows they are getting an option that suits their needs. 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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Online consumer lender 4finance has raised $325 million from an issuance of bonds; the bonds are senior unsecured, five-year fixed rate notes issued with a 10.75% yield at par; the firm will use the proceeds for debt restructuring, business development and corporate management. Source
Karun Thareja, Faircent's chief marketing officer, talks about the firm's business model and technology; the firm is one of the largest peer-to-peer consumer lenders in India and offers its investors annual returns ranging to 20%; it has built a comprehensive loan operating system with integrated client relationship management technology and lead generation channels; recently it has been focused on client acquisition through Facebook which it has integrated with its platform for customer communication. Source
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
UK-based P2P lending platform Assetz Capital has announced a promotional interest rate increase for investors in its 30 day access account; investors will receive a 4.75% rate of interest for up to 90 days after investment through May 11; the promotion adds 50 basis points to the current rate on the account with interest paid monthly. Source
Forbes has released its 30 Under 30 Asia 2017 list of top venture capitalists and fintech entrepreneurs; the list includes fintech entrepreneurs managing P2P lending platforms in India, Philippines, China and South Korea; some of the top entrepreneurs in marketplace lending include Zhang Xiaoliang, cofounder of Beijing Kuaikuai Network Technology, and Wang Zeng, founder of Mujinnong. Source
Orix Corporation and its affiliate Yayoi Co., Ltd. have launched a new online lending business; the platform will focus on lending to small businesses in Japan; the service will seek to utilize big data and artificial intelligence to develop an advanced credit underwriting model for lending. Source
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released its 2016 small business credit survey yesterday and the data shows some bad news for online lenders; big banks, small banks and credit unions all scored higher on the survey than online lenders when it comes to access to capital; one of the more telling pieces of data from the report was that online lenders scored lower than banks on transparency; fintechs did score higher on speed of application and ease of process; not all bad news but still points out the advantage that banks have when it comes to cost of capital. Source
The Financial Conduct Authority's P2P lending standards have caused only 40% of P2P loans to be covered under the HM Treasury's 36H regulation; 36H regulation is a compliance factor that P2P firms are concerned with; the differing definitions involve the matching of the loans; the complex process of institutional pre-funding and subsequent loan matching has been a factor resulting in discrepancies between the loan matching definitions from the 36H regulation and the Financial Conduct Authority's definition. Source
Several reports have recently pointed to China as the world's leading country for fintech innovation and adoption; in the first nine months of 2016 over 50% of global fintech investments went to China and the country is reporting the world's four largest fintech unicorns; overall, China has a number of unique factors fueling its fintech growth; some of the main factors include regulatory initiatives and tech savvy underserved consumers and SMEs driving demand; the country is also reporting corporate banks with higher comparative ROEs and greater willingness to invest in digital; additionally, the country's top e-commerce businesses, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, are also significantly influencing fintech growth with growing businesses and investments in payments as well as new technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence; P2P lending is one of fintech's dominant categories with China leading Asia-Pacific market development and reporting 99% of P2P transaction volume, a total value of $101.7 billion in 2015 and over 4,000 P2P lenders. Source