The Victory Park Capital Specialty Lending Fund reported a net total return of -1.47% for the fourth quarter of 2016 with its marketplace loan investments dragging on total return; while reporting a loss for the fourth quarter, the fund says "…there has been further progress in the reallocation of capital to balance sheet investments"; the fund increased its balance sheet investments to 51% of the fund's net asset value in the fourth quarter, up from 22% at the beginning of the year; firm continues to reallocate its fund and is also buying back shares. 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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The UK government has released a white paper discussing its real estate property development initiative; UK P2P lenders continue to support the initiative through alternative funding for real estate borrowers; the government will also manage a 1 billion British pound ($1.25 billion) fund for financing specialized real estate developers; the UK is targeting 200,000 new homes. Source
Think Finance cites Morgan Stanley's 2015 estimates for the marketplace lending industry which predict global marketplace lending will reach $290 billion by 2020; in their featured blog post they report on five key areas for platforms to achieve long term success; credit modeling, platform costs and differentiation are a few of the factors they focus on; Think Finance offers a full suite of services to online lenders to help them achieve success in branding, marketing, risk underwriting, portfolio management, loan originations and many other related lending services. Sponsored Blog Post
Float will offer credit lines for US consumers in California and Utah; based in Los Angeles the company also announced a $3 million funding round from finance and tech industry angel investors; the company plans to expand to all 50 states over the next six to 12 months. Source
MarketInvoice has launched a new product for invoice discounting; MarketInvoice Pro provides an open funding line through new technology that will make invoice financing easier and faster for businesses with an ongoing need for funding; to support the new product growth, MarketInvoice recently received a 7.2 million British pound ($9.04 million) investment from MCI Capital and Northzone Partners; with the launch of MarketInvoice Pro the firm plans to double its lending for 2017 with targeted loan originations of 2 billion British pounds ($2.51 billion). Source
Lendio reported record growth in loan originations for the fourth quarter and full year of 2016; firm is one of the leading online multi-lender services for small business loans in the US; in the fourth quarter it facilitated loan originations of $70 million and in 2016 loan originations from the platform were more than $240 million. Source
A report from P2P lender BondMason says wealth managers are becoming more aware of and comfortable with marketplace lending investments; over half of wealth managers would now recommend marketplace lending investments as an alternative to mainstream cash products; institutional investors are also increasingly allocating to marketplace loans with over half of the product's investments attributed to institutional investors. Source
Goldman Sachs's Marty Chavez has helped lead the bank to new levels of automation which have been revolutionizing the financial services industry; Chavez provides details on how the bank's equity trading desk was consolidated from 600 employees to two traders; automation has also evolved significantly for currency trading and investment banking; Chavez sees the trend continuing with more computer engineers replacing traders and investment banking tasks involved with transactions such as initial public offerings also becoming automated. Source
BNP Paribas, France's largest bank, is doubling down on their investment in technology; the bank plans to invest 3 billion euros ($3.2 billion) over the next three years; the bank stated they want to "build the bank of the future by continuing to grow the businesses and implementing an ambitious program of digital transformation, new customer experience and cost savings"; the investment will be directed towards tech labs, company incubators and internal app development. Source
Citizens Bank has partnered with the Opportunity Network to provide increased support for business owners; the Opportunity Network is an innovative business-to-business networking platform; it includes 13,500 CEOs and reports approximately $35 billion of deal flow; through the business-to-business platform, businesses can connect with deal support for a number of activities including mergers, acquisitions and new market expansion. Source