During the week I share the latest marketplace lending news on Twitter...
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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China represents 18.5% of the total world population and its business commerce has been growing rapidly; it also reports the four largest fintech unicorn valuations, Ant Financial, Lufax, JD Finance and Qufenqi; Matt Burton from Orchard Platform reports on these statistics and more in a recent blog post also highlighting the emphasis on mobile payments and technology services for the underbanked and unbanked; while China's fintech sector has shown exponential growth, the government is now increasing its focus on financial protection which is expected to improve the quality of fintech businesses; in the blog post, Burton also provides a list of companies he is watching by region in Asia. Source
Originators are beginning to look at launching their own captive funds; at LendIt USA 2017 we hosted a panel featuring Cross River Bank, Freedom Financial, Money360, Credibly, UBS and Clifford Chance to discuss this idea; the originators on the panel talked about their current funds, if they have launched one, size, structure and how they currently view the idea of this vehicle in the long term; the panelists focused on diversification of funding sources; in good times it is never hard to get loan purchasers but when markets tighten how can you make sure you are prepared; they also talked about when setting up this funding vehicle should you manage it yourself or should you find a third party fund manager; how do conflicts of interest come into play when the originating company is then investing in the loan and servicing the loan; there are still many questions when it comes to setting up a fund like this, as more firms look to this option we will better understand how to answer these questions in the future. Source
The bank has seen behavior in the unsecured personal loan market getting out of control; lenders are trying to battle each other to offer cheaper loans in an uncertain time; Paul Lynam, chief executive of Secure Trust, said, "The competition becomes excessive; lenders tend to continue to fight for market share, which means lower pricing."; this is not the first time Secure Trust has pulled back on unsecured consumer loans; in 2006 they ceased originations only to come back in 2009. Source
Goldman Sachs leads off the news this week with some bad news and some good news. Step raised a huge debt round (eschewing equity), BNY Mellon is getting into crypto, which makes Custodia Bank very unhappy. And of course, there were plenty of crypto stories to round out the news.
After launching as savings product two years ago the app only bank is approaching £1bn ($1.3bn) in deposits; after disclosing in March they were at 17,000 customers and over £500mn ($663mn) they have seen a significant acceleration in growth; they also reported growth in small business loan applications and mortgages. Source.
During the week I share the latest marketplace lending news on Twitter as it...
Orange is a large French telecom company located in France; users will be able to create an account in an Orange store or completely online; service will be open to non-Orange customers; there will be no monthly fees provided users use their attached payment card; Orange has also partnered with IBM's Watson to provide user support and is also working to add insurance products and loans to the service. Source
In this week’s PeerIQ Industry Update they cover the growing turmoil in...
UK firm Populous is seeking to provide a new innovative approach to invoice financing using blockchain technology; the firm plans to utilize smart contracts for invoice financing operations which will lower costs and also provide safer and more secured investments with competitive yields; the platform has been in development for 24 months and plans to launch in May 2017. Source