Securitization continues to grow for the marketplace lending sector. As they do at this time every quarter PeerIQ released their Securitization Tracker. It showed another strong quarter with $4.3 billion of total issuance. This total was up 34% from Q1 2017 but down slightly from the record total in Q4 2017. Source.
Banks know they need to update legacy technology, but investors are beginning to question at what cost can the banks innovate versus making profits; ensuring they stay competitive when it comes to technology, though keeping costs from skyrocketing is a tightrope more second and third tier banks are trying to navigate every day. Source.
There is a growing competition brewing in the payments space and Affirm is look to stay near the top as they recently announced the move into financing small ticket purchases; the move comes after Visa and MasterCard made similar announcements; the payments space has become a highly competitive market where customers look for the simplest, most transparent way to make a purchase of any size. Source.
Banks can take a lot of lessons from Facebook in regards to the ongoing data problems with Cambridge Analytica; as data sharing becomes commonplace in banking, banks and their partners need to ensure information is kept secure and not used for nefarious reasons. Source.
Last week the sixth annual LendIt Fintech USA conference took place in San Francisco. Here are Peter Renton’s thoughts on some of the ideas that were shared by the keynote speakers as well as a summary of the rest of the event. Source.
Rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act is a welcomed sign by banks like Ally Bank who does not use branches and misses out on benefits awarded to banks with branch networks; focusing on where banks lend would be a better way to assess potential credit instead of where the bank is physically located. 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.
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.
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.
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.