In the crazy world of fintech this past week was relatively quiet on the news front. No earth shattering announcements but still plenty of interesting developments. We have PayPal exploring stock trading, the SEC looking at payment for order flow, crypto banks looking to access the Fed payments system and more. Here are what I consider to be the top news stories in fintech this past week.
PayPal is exploring a stock-trading platform for U.S. customers from CNBC – This move is not a big surprise as PayPal has been doing crypto trading for a while and with 10 million new stock traders this year they don’t want to miss a big opportunity.
What Gary Gensler Really Meant With His Order Flow Remarks from Bloomberg – The head of the SEC said this week that a ban on payment for order flow was “on the table” and the pundits were all debating what this would mean.
Crypto Firms Want Fed Payment Systems Access—and Banks Are Resisting from The Wall Street Journal – New state-chartered crypto banks Avanti and Kraken want access to the Fed payments system but not surprisingly traditional banks think this is a bad idea.
Amazon to partner with Affirm on future BNPL options from LendIt Fintech News – This news broke just over a week ago but we dig into why announce the biggest BNPL partnership ever on a Friday afternoon.
The Rise Of Climate-Conscious Consumers: The Climate Change Opportunity In Banking from Forbes – Ron Shevlin’s Cornerstone Partners has produced a report on climate-conscious consumers detailing what they want from their bank. This is a big opportunity for first movers here.
Citizens Bank of Edmond to launch national digital bank with partner Moven from Banking Dive – Jill Castilla’s community bank in Oklahoma is launching a national digital bank to an underserved affinity group (given her background I am guessing it will have something to do with the military).
Funding Circle launches buy-now-pay-later option for SMEs from AltFi – I have been wondering when we would see some BNPL moves in the SME space and it looks like Funding Circle in the UK is adding a new product line here.
ByteDance says it will downsize fintech business, plans to sell stock broker ops from Reuters – Amid tightened scrutiny from the Chinese government, the makers of TikTok is selling some of its fintech operations.
PropTech FinTech HomeLight Nets $363M, Ups Valuation To $1.6B from PYMNTS.com – The biggest funding round of the week goes to HomeLight with $100m of equity and $263m of debt financing.
Jeeves Cross Border Corporate Card Fintech gets $57M Series B from LendIt Fintech News – Even in the frothy world of fintech valuations it is impressive to go from exiting Y Combinator to a $500 million valuation in one year.
