State regulators are planning to offer a licensing process for money-service businesses which will include fintech firms; this will allow business to operate across multiple states; the initial pilot will be offered in seven states; Charlie Clark, agency deputy director and director of consumer services at the Washington Department of Financial Institutions stated, “This is something that we can do to create licensing efficiencies with these companies, hopefully help get them off the ground and it doesn’t sacrifice consumer protection.” Source
The new entity will work with businesses in a variety of ways; under “catalysts” internal consultants will help with problem solving and will include the eXellerator innovation lab; “Investments” will include their minority investments in a variety of companies; they have previously invested in Ripple and Paxata; “Ventures” will focus on their investments in new technology. Source
[Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Alexander Prokhorov. He is a managing partner and co-founder of FinSight Ventures,...
An article in Tearsheet discusses how VCs are more interested in funding companies looking to improving legacy financial systems; Patricia Kemp, partner at Oak HC/FT responded to a comment about the prospects of consumer facing fintech in 2018 stating, “The largest category of successful fintech are the ones that are helping the banks get there.”; while there are still opportunities for new consumer solutions, it is just as important to innovate on back-end systems. Source
Lend Academy shares some of the biggest news stories of the year; includes Mike Cagney departing SoFi, the Cleveland Fed retracting their report on “p2p lending”, Prosper’s $5 billion deal, Renaud Laplanche’s new venture and more. Source
There are plenty of financial apps on the market today spanning all aspects of personal financial management. There are apps...
In this guest post Alexander Prokhorov from FinSight Ventures shares what trends his firm is focused on in 2018. Source
Cleaver stated, “If we fail to act on fintech, we are setting ourselves up for problems down the road. Not because the fintech folks are evil…but because we are behind the curve.”; Cleaver also discussed the importance of understanding what is going on in fintech so the proper safeguards can be put in place; he proposed that fintech companies should speak before the Financial Services Committee and that more meetings should be held. Source
Let’s Talk Payments shares several charts about the fintech ecosystem from 2017; includes the most funded fintech segments, the location of fintech startups around the globe, an analysis of the payments ecosystem and more. Source
Skinner revisits the predictions he made at the beginning of 2017; he discusses the rise of insurtech, regtech, PSD2, blockchain and more in his blog post. Source