Renren is a US listed publicly traded company currently managing a social networking business and a portfolio of financial technology companies; investing in Renren can offer investors exposure to a portfolio of financial technology companies; Lend Academy provides more details in their article; Renren's fintech investment portfolio currently includes some of the industry's top companies; it owns approximately 21% of SoFi and is also invested in Lending Home, Motif Investing and Fundrise; recently the firm announced a separation of its fintech investment portfolio which could offer an even greater opportunity for returns; accredited investors can receive ownership in the proposed spinoff by investing in the stock. 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 new client house branch will allow retail, business and private banking customers to enjoy coffee and receive personal service; “A client house to me should feel like home,” comments Erik Van Den Eynden, CEO of ING Belgium, to Banking Technology; the branch has all the banks’ typical functions and meeting rooms complete with screens for video conferencing; the company will attempt to open about 15 by end of 2020. Source.
Robinhood is currently undergoing a new fundraising deal that values the company at approximately $1.3 billion with investment from DST Global; the undisclosed funding will add to previously raised capital of $66 million; the firm offers commission free trading on US stocks and has also launched a premium Robinhood Gold option for faster money transfers and margin trading. Source
CME Group announced today that they plan to offer bitcoin futures by the end of the year which is a change from what they said just a month ago; others like Cboe Global Markets said earlier in the year it plans to do the same by early 2018; the move by exchanges will open up the bitcoin market to professional traders and institutional investors. Source
There has been a merger trend in banking the last few years...
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The FIBC was founded in 2012 and holds a conference in Japan; Applications for their FinPitch competition are now open; event will include pitches from 30 organizations to a global audience; the event takes place on March 2, 2018 in Tokyo. Source
German Digital bank N26 has raised $160mn to fund their U.S expansion plans; Tencent and Allianz were lead investors in the round and it could set the stage for a future IPO according to N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf; “It's a good round to be as independent as possible,” Stalf said to TechCrunch. “This funding round really brings N26 to a pre-IPO stage. I think we see a clear path to a very sustainable company with this funding round. Maybe in the next five years there will be an IPO.”; the bank currently has eight staff members in NY and customers have been signing up on the waiting list since October 2017. Source.
Starling is a challenger bank based in the UK; Boden speaks about Starling, open banking and how she came to discover fintech which in turn led her to founding Starling; Boden previously worked in executive positions at UBS, ABN Amro, RBS and AIB; Starling was founded in 2014 as an app-only bank; in an interview Boden stated: "…and in 2014, I started the journey to build a bank. And it's been a long process because you don't just build a bank overnight. We've done things the hard way in that I'm a big believer that things that are worth doing are things that tend to be quite hard – because easy things anybody can do." Source
MarketInvoice has reached a 1 billion British pound invoice funding milestone; in the past 14 months it has financed 500 million British pounds of invoices; just recently reaching the 1 billion British pounds funding milestone, it reported invoices funded of 958,029,836 British pounds as of October 31 with a total loan amount of 765,451,443 British pounds; the company has been in business since 2010 with a total of over 20,000 transactions; it currently offers loans of 10,000 British pounds to 3 million British pounds for company invoices. Sources