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.
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.
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.
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.
Anthony Noto, COO of Twitter, has been offered the position as SoFi CEO. Source
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
BB&T announced last week that they were committing $50mn to fintech; the company plans implement what they are calling intelligent automation; plans include AI & machine learning, robotics processing automation, chatbots and virtual assistance & conversational commerce according to TearSheet; the company also announced they are looking at transforming branches and looking to move as much of their business to the cloud. Source.
PayPal’s CEO Dan Schulman has written an article in the Wall Street Journal; he believes that while technology generally has improved the lives of many, the potential of applying technology to expanding financial services is still unrealized; most people manage their money the same way they did years ago and fees paid by Americans still total $170 billion every year; Schulman believes that collaboration is key to achieving universal financial health. Source
In this week’s PeerIQ Weekly Update the company covers the recent spate of bank earning reports, securitization news and issues another round of hiring updates; banks have seen a continued drop in fixed income and commodities trading revenue, picking up the slack has been lending and wealth management; Citigroup and Morgan Stanley had strong reports while Goldman Sachs and American Express missed the mark; SoFi is issuing a $720mn securitization deal, Moody’s rated the A classes AAA; PeerIQ also lists five new hires stemming from the $12mn round last summer. Source.
Yahoo Finance launched a new savings app called Tanda which allows groups of five or nine people to save money; the app pools money from the group each month and each member of the group gets access to the pool at different months; the company charges a fee on the first two payouts but offers a bonus to users who can wait for the money; the pool can reach $2,000 and Tanda has partnered with Dwolla to vet users. Source.