The big four US retail banks saw nearly a 20% jump in losses from credit cards in 2017; there are concerns of consumers being able to keep up with their debt; Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo saw a $12.5 billion hit from credit card loans last year, up around $2 billion from a year ago; delinquencies still remain less than half of what they were in the financial crisis; the FT shares other data on credit card issuance, repayments and the profitability of credit cards for banks. Source
Anthony Noto, COO of Twitter, has been offered the position as SoFi CEO. Source
Nomura analyst Dan Dolev says that Square resembles Amazon and Google in the early days of those tech giants; "In 10 years, Square is likely to be a very different company helped by accelerating share gains from payment peers and relentless disruption of services like payroll and HR," Dolev said in a note to clients that was reported by Business Insider; the combination of new business ventures and increasing the number of ways they process payments are twos of true main reasons for the optimism; shares were trading almost 5 percent higher on Friday after the note. Source.
Most financial services firms look to educate users by having a blog or providing some links to resources; Acorns CEO Noah Kerner says the company wants to go further, they have their own online magazine, interviews with celebrities and provide financial how tos; they will also push content to you based upon how you use the app, trying to customize your experience; the big difference they see is when they combine education with the app experience, helping to move education beyond just reading articles. Source.
Fundbox is already operating in an open banking environment allowing third party access to information; “What Fundbox is doing is indicative of this next wave of open banking and leveraging APIs to embed functionality in the longer tail of places where small businesses do work,” said Alenka Grealish, senior analyst at Celent, to American Banker; the company learned from past integration issues and created Fundbox Fuse which is a set of HTML code for lite integration; they announced new integrations with Bookly, AND CO, Billy, Paid and Knowify with the hopes of integrating to thousands of platforms to help democratize access to credit. Source.
Bitcoin exchange Coinbase is reported to have brought in more than $1bn in revenues this past year; according to a report in Recode the revenue figures for Coinbase were supposed to be $600mn but the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas pushed them to over $1bn; the company has also seen spikes in users, with more than 100,000 users signing in over the Thanksgiving day weekend. Source.
Anthony Noto will serve as CEO and Director effective March 1; Interim CEO Hutton stated, “We are simply thrilled to have found someone of Anthony’s expertise and knowledge to lead SoFi. The SoFi board unanimously agrees that Anthony’s deep understanding of technology, consumer, and financial businesses make him the perfect fit to be SoFi’s CEO. We could not be more excited to have someone of his caliber on board.”; Noto has previous experience as COO of Twitter and also worked for Goldman Sachs. Source
A new survey by Bank of America found that 63 percent of millennials are saving money, that is on par with generation X and baby boomers; the survey shows that millennials are a lot more in tune with their financial lives then they are given credit for; the survey also found that millennials are more apt to ask for a raise and they also play into stereotypes by saying they spend too much and don’t save enough when asked by researchers. Source.
Today StreetShares announced a $23 million Series B round; it was led by a $20 million investment from Rotunda Capital Partners, LLC; $3 million came from existing investors; StreetShares offers small business loans and primarily focuses on veteran-owned businesses. Source
Anthony Noto will become SoFi's CEO effective March 1; American Banker outlines the five challenges that Noto will face as he enters his new role; list includes reforming SoFi’s culture, determining when to go public, deciding how to grow, whether to go forward with a bank charter and proving that he has the right background. Source