Fintech Nexus Newsletter

Small business lending is more complicated than consumer lending. Both have term loans and lines of credit but in small business you also have SBA loans, revenue-based financing, merchant cash advances, venture debt, equipment finance, invoice factoring, asset-based financing and more. This leaves a lot of room for unscrupulous lenders to charge hidden fees on some of these products.

Yesterday, the SEC announced that it is suing Kraken for operating as an unregistered securities exchange. This follows similar actions in June against the two largest crypto exchanges, Coinbase and Binance.

The UK has published a number of proposals for stablecoin regulation and how to bring the digital asset into the economy.

The long-awaited new overdrafts rule from the CFPB was unveiled today. Since Rohit Chopra took over as head of the CFPB in 2021, they have made it clear that they were going after overdraft fees and this proposed rule is the culmination of those efforts.

Every quarter TransUnion releases its Credit Industry Insights Report. Their latest issue, released earlier this month, has some very interesting data.

Yesterday, the OCC issued new guidance for banks, addressing the risks of buy now pay later lending. The guidance focused on the popular "pay in 4" segment of BNPL.  Not surprisingly, the national bank regulator recommended tight oversight of third-party servicers, the importance of transparent loan terms and fraud mitigation.

Yesterday, Apple shared details on Apple Card usage for the first time. The card was introduced in 2019 and since then it has acquired 12 million users, not a bad effort in less than five years. Users earn Daily Cash rewards when they use the card and Apple reported that the total for 2023 was over $1 billion.

We haven't written about Silicon Valley Bank in almost a year, but the saga of the third-largest bank collapse continues. SVB's parent company, SVB Financial Group, had $2 billion on deposit at its bank subsidiary. When the FDIC made it clear that all depositors would be made whole, one would assume that included the $2 billion of the parent company's money.