Coinbase has acquired Earn, a startup that allows for sending and receiving or digital currency for microtasks; Finovate reports the deal to be worth $100mn and Earn CEO Balaji Srinivasan will now serve as Coinbase’s first CTO. Source.
Business Insider recently sat down with with Lori Beer, JPMorgan's chief information officer, about the bank’s strategy for working with companies in the fintech market; they have chose to work with fintech firms of all different sizes through a residence program for younger companies to partnership or acquisitions with maturing companies; the bank sees fintech as a core component of their offering. Source.
NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has launched a fact finding mission into 13 cryptocurrency exchanges; the information requested focuses on the use of bots, outages, consumer protections, and other issues. Source.
Bank of America’s digital investment product, Merrill Edge, has seen their assets under management grow with the help of branches to serve clients; Merrill Lynch has plans to add 600 new investment centers within Bank of America branches to help with this strategy; the combination of using technology and human advice for high net worth clients is a growing trend among bigger banks as they compete with new robo entrants. Source.
Marcus has originated more than $3bn of loans since inception, recently it has become know that more than 10 percent of the loans were sub prime; they have said this is a natural evolution of the loan business and they are being very selective in approving of applications. Source.
Online solar lender Wunder Capital has raised $112mn, 90 percent of which is debt with 10 percent being equity; Cyrus investments led the capital infusion and Wunder chief executive Bryan Birsic said, “The debt component is going to blow out the lending opportunity.” Source.
American Banker puts together a slideshow on the key trends in digital banking; some of the trends include more customers using digital payments, digital banking adoption is increasing globally, consumers are not happy with PFM options offered by banks and overall banks are still highly trusted for managing money. Source.
The move by Goldman Sachs into retail banking with Marcus has been a big shift for the bank and thus far has paid off; speaking to CNBC Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein talked about their move to consumer lending, their expansion of digital banking with Marcus and the focus on developing in house technology. Source.
Federal Reserve Vice Chairman for Supervision Randal Quarles told an International Monetary Fund forum that he didn’t think ILCs were problematic; applications should be reviewed and granted based on the strength of the application; this is a shift for the Fed as they have said in the past that ILCs were an issue and that Congress should consider cracking down on them. Source.