Innovate Finance and the Financial Conduct Authority have published a preview report on the UK Fintech Sandbox with a full report planned for May 2017; the preview report provides insight on the benefits of fintech sandboxes and how they can promote innovation while also helping to facilitate regulation. 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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Bpifrance has invested in a co-financing fund managed by the Lendix platform; the investment from Bpifrance brings the fund's investments to EUR90 million; the fund invests in loans for French and European companies borrowing on the Lendix platform. Source
The SME Loan Fund has a new fund manager, SQN Capital Management, and is changing its name to the SQN Secured Income Fund; it is planning to issue up to 250 million new shares to increase assets under management and improve liquidity; it will continue to invest in loans from origination platforms and finance companies however its investment policy will divert from investing in GLI Finance affiliated platforms and will now focus its investments primarily on a range of secured wholesale loans. Source
Consumer online lender 4finance has announced it will be using FICO TONBELLER Cloud Solution to monitor for anti-money laundering; the new solution will help the firm comply with the 4th EU Anti Money Laundering directive; 4finance is a European online consumer lender operating in 17 countries with total loans of over EUR4 billion ($4.24 billion) since its founding in 2008. Source
Fleximize is a SME revenue-based finance provider; offers financing from GBP250,000 ($310,000) unsecured and GBP500,000 secured ($621,000); funds from the facility will be used to increase lending capacity; anticipates GBP100 million ($124 million) in funding by 2019; lending in 2016 was GBP40 million ($49 million), up 132% from 2015; company also plans to expand their product set and tech platform. Source
Broadridge Financial Solutions, J.P. Morgan, Northern Trust and Banco Santander have reported a blockchain solution for increased transparency in proxy voting; the pilot solution can provide daily reporting on proxy voting throughout a company's proxy voting period; the solution is built on the Ethereum blockchain platform and can also provide for enhanced proxy voting analytics. Source
Crowdlending platform Lend raised CHF3.5 million ($3.47 million) from Polytech Ecosystem Ventures and other angel investors; the round will help the platform to continue building out their brand, upgrading their automation and increasing their marketing spend for Switzerland; Lend launched in January of 2016 and has thus far funded 300 loans; in addition to the funding Lend was also able to secure two new team members, Dr. Stefan Jaecklin, former head of Oliver Wyman Switzerland, and Dr. Luzius Anderegg, senior software developer at software company Ergon Informatik. Source
Consumer borrowing increased by $15.2 billion in February, according to a report from the Federal Reserve; credit card borrowing increased by $2.9 billion helping total credit card debt outstanding to increase to $1 trillion; auto loan and student loan borrowing also increased in February by $12.3 billion. Source
Goldman Sachs is estimating a 500% return on its initial investment of $550 million in credit data provider TransUnion; the investment began in 2012 when Goldman Sachs bought TransUnion; since then TransUnion has gone public with shares opening at $22.50 on June 25, 2015 and currently trading at $38.23; Goldman Sachs has also earned $50 million from TransUnion's IPO and debt underwriting; additionally, Goldman Sachs is reporting a number of other advantages from the investment including support for its newly launched consumer lending platform Marcus which is a client of TransUnion. Source
The National Internet Finance Association has announced the establishment of a P2P Finance Association; the Association will be led by the People's Bank of China, China Banking Regulatory Commission, China Securities Regulatory Commission and the China Insurance Regulatory Commission; the Association will seek to improve the industry and promote its development. Source