PwC's new Vulcan Digital Asset service will include digital asset wallets, international payment processing, investment/trading services, and eventually point-of-sale and merchant services; platform is currently in pilot mode by an international banking group and a central bank; an airline and other multinational banks are assessing the platform; according to Robert Allen, PwC director and Vulcan lead, "Vulcan is a cloud-based platform that enables banks and corporates to offer a suite of new digital currency related products and services to individual, retail and institutional customers within a trusted, transparent and compliant ecosystem. It is the first of its kind globally and has been created to bring digital assets and currency to the mainstream." 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 agreement was signed by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the People's Bank of China, the intention of the deal is to strengthen regulatory cooperation and boost market access for fintech startups in both markets; the "Fintech Bridge" as it is being called will allow the countries to share information about financial services and help to spot emerging trends in each market. Source
Roofstock, an online marketplace in the single-family rental sector, raised $20 million in Series B funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Nyca Partners, QED Investors and SV Angel; they plan to use the proceeds to ramp up national expansion, invest in product development and roll out an asset management platform as they intend to reach domestic and global investors. Source
Recent research by Juniper Research reports that fintech platform revenues are to reach $10.5 billion globally by 2020, up from $5.2 billion expected this year; factors contributing to the rise are: an acceleration in P2P lending, crowdfunding becoming a viable alternative to traditional lending mechanisms and the deployment of next generation analytics platforms. Source
This year's list is focused on fintech's most powerful dealmakers from the past year, with extra emphasis on partnerships that act not just as funders but also strategic advisors; the fintech sector in particular has taken the term partnership to a new level as these startups need the investment and advisory relationship more than other sectors; Vanessa Colella of Citi Ventures explains, "We are beginning to observe much more of a push toward collaboration - a shift from complete independence to an interest in building tools with established players that happened really quickly in this sector." Source
KYCK! is a Singapore fintech startup focused on compliance technology; the company has announced partnership with IBM for blockchain utilization to improve know your customer capabilities; KYCK! will use blockchain for identity verification and monitoring; partnership with IBM will help increase the security of data. Source
Fund manager, Ben Conway of Hawksmoor, promotes alternative credit as a risk averse investment in the current market; with cash levels reaching 15 year highs according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, many investment managers have significantly increased their low risk fixed income allocations; Hawksmoor says the growing number of alternative credit investments are providing a good area of value across all markets and a strong fixed income alternative. Source
MoolahSense, a marketplace lender focused on small business loans, has received a full Capital Markets Services (CMS) license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS); the MAS license allows the business to offer its loan investments in the country to a broad range of investors including retail investors, high net worth individuals and private funds. Source
Small business, marketplace lender, Kabbage, has announced two new executive hires; the executive hires will focus on technology and data as the company seeks to expand and gain greater market share in online small business lending; Amala Duggirala will join Kabbage as the chief technology officer and Rama Rao will be the chief data officer. Source
