Chinese credit card management firm, 51 Credit, has raised $84 million in Series C+ funding from Harvest Capital and Yintai Group, this is soon after they secured $310 million from Series C funding; the fundraising will help the company establish its own investment fund targeting fintech companies; in total the firm has raised $444 million in equity capital; according to Sun Haitao, 51 Credit CEO, the fund will be launched within a year, and will focus on asset management, data and credit services. Source
Square is starting to take on the look of a full service bank as their Cash App has helped to...
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US regulators plan to continue their enforcement of crypto, leaving the industry without much needed clarity. However, FIs carry on adoption.
Wirecard was once seen as one of the hottest fintechs in Europe and as recently as last week their share...
The warning signs were very apparent for Wirecard, not only did the Financial Times do numerous articles on the fintech...
Mark Gould, Chief Payments Executive for Federal Reserve Financial Services on the rollout of FedNow
When FedNow launched last July there was a lot of pressure on the Fed to get this move into instant payments right. The head of FedNow, Mark Gould, shares how the rollout has gone.
Companies like TransferWise, Venmo and PayPal have forced banks in Europe to look at creating their own affordable real-time payments service; the idea is in the early stages but it shows the effect that fintech players can have on the traditional banks; the service would also look to head off the increased competitive threat from open banking which is set to begin in early 2018. Source.
Providing customer service is expensive, particularly when it comes to payments. And people prefer to do self-service anyway as long as you give them easy options.
Off the recent news about Stripe's fundraising round, payment companies across the board are seeing growth and increased investor interest; Adyen BV, WePay, PayPal and Square are just a few of the other, well positioned names who are benefiting from the sector wide growth; Square's stock price rose on news of the Stripe fundraising; as online lenders have struggled, payment firms have only continued a pattern of growth, even more evident by the recent holiday sales numbers that showed 109 million people shopped online, more than the 99 million who went to the stores. Source