Go-Jek is an Uber competitor and is now looking to lead in the payments sector in Indonesia; the company purchased offline payments service Kartuku, payment gateway Midtrans and a saving and lending firm called Mapan. Source
Jianpu listed on the NYSE on November 16th under code JT; it is the fourth fintech company to IPO in the US in the second half of 2017; others included Quidian, Hexindai and PPDAI; Jianpu is a subsidiary of Rong360 and has an active user base of 95.8 million; the platform has provided 170,000 financial products in more than 350 cities. Source
Randall Quarles, vice chairman for supervision at the Federal Reserve made recent comments about taking a fresh look at regulations; He stated, “History has shown us that, it’s not just a question of where has the risk that we knew moved, but what new risks are developing? I think that in the regulated area … we ought to be looking at what the implications of the growth of fintech ... I think we ought to be looking at cyber, obviously.” Source
Hexindai, a Chinese fintech company listed on the Nasdaq last Friday; according to the article Chinese firms are getting pressure from investors who want to cash out; tightening regulations are also a factor; Qudian, another firm went public last month and Rong360 may be the next Chinese fintech company to go public; Oliver Wyman reports that the market size for consumer lending will expand to $620 billion by 2020 with a compound annual growth rate of 49%. Source
Peter Renton, Founder of Lend Academy reports on the potential of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple being the fintech leaders of tomorrow. Source
Industry experts such as Matt Harris (Bain Capital Ventures), Dan Ciporin (Canaan Partners Partners), Andy Weissman (Union Square Ventures) and others share what 2018 may look across fintech; perspectives included span payments, lending, Amazon vs. JPMorgan, M&A, asset management and funding. Source
Generally banks have the customers but are working with an old tech infrastructure; conversely, fintechs have the new tech, but lack the customers; Tearsheet shares data on how much it costs for large banks and fintech companies to acquire customers and why partnerships often make sense; one personal finance app and lender that is reporting low cost of customer acquisition is MoneyLion; the cost to acquire a customer for them is $5 or less. Source
PPDAI plans for an IPO this month and co-founder Shaofeng Gu owns more than 25% of the business; Ning Tang of Yirendai, a US listed public company, owns 36% of the company; This year three Chinese fintech companies have gone public, raising $2.45 billion; Bloomberg provides data on the rise of the wealthiest billionaires in China. Source
There have been a number of new funding deals closed in recent weeks and CB Insights reported that 278 fintech financing deals were done in the third quarter; Lend Academy provides the interesting mix of companies that have raised debt and equity capital. Source
The options for banks to compete in a changing financial services landscape are to either build, buy or partner; while we have seen a number of banks build their own technology or partner with fintechs, there has yet to be significant acquisitions in the market; an article in Tearsheet highlights how few purchases banks have made and how that compares to the amount of investments in fintech companies. Source