Alipay and Marqeta partner on real time payment processing for Chinese travelers visiting North America; Marqeta’s platform will facilitate payment processing at retail locations across the continent; Jason Gardner, CEO of Marqeta tells Crowdfund Insider, “The Marqeta platform will ensure a seamless user and merchant experience across the U.S. that Alipay’s customers need when traveling and shopping abroad.” Source.
The proposed relationship would allow Chinese consumers traveling to the US to use their Alipay Mobile Wallet; Pablo Simone, head of product and strategy for Chase Merchant Services stated, “We are always looking for ways to deliver more value to our merchants and bring them closer to their customers. A relationship with Alipay would create opportunities that enable Chinese tourists to transact in a way they are familiar with.”; it is estimated that four million Chinese consumers will visit North America this year. Source
CircleUp facilitates equity investments in consumer good companies; Rory Eakin, Co-Founder and COO of CircleUp discusses how they conduct due diligence, their unique data analysis tool they have built in house and the new debt product they are piloting. Source
While speaking at an event at Georgetown Law School Acting OCC Head Keith Noreika defended the proposed fintech charter; Mr. Noreika also took questions on the fear of commercial companies being granted banking charters; “A national bank charter is a special thing, and the OCC will not undermine its value by granting charters to companies that are not ready to meet our admittedly high expectations” said Noreika. Source.
This month the CFPB announced a new rule aimed at payday lenders to prevent debt traps; Lend Academy outlines the new rules put in place and shares perspectives from several organizations in the short term loan space. Source
Building off of the $70mn funding round from the summer Betterment is now reportedly worth $1bn; the $1bn mark is significant as it denotes that a company is considered a unicorn; the valuation makes Betterment the first robo advisor to reach unicorn status; the company currently has over $11bn in assets under management. Source.
The article aims to answer whether big banks are still interested enough in potential mortgage loan customers to repeatedly follow-up and whether marketshare has anything to do with follow-ups; author applied for home loans with nine different lenders and shares data on their follow-ups over a two week period; Quicken, Citigroup and loanDepot round out the top three for total number of follow-ups. Source
PayKey, a mobile banking fintech, raised a $10mn series B round led by MizMaa; other investors include SBI Group, Digital Ventures, SixThirty, Fintech71 and The FinLab; the company plans to use the funds for global expansions and further product development; PayKey has a mobile banking keyboard that allows users to complete actions without opening the specific bank app. Source.
Clearbanc provides revenue-based financing to online businesses; a new program launched with Facebook will give Facebook’s 5 million merchants in Canada and the US access to $500,000 in financing; advertisers who have been working with Facebook for 6 months and have positive economics on ad spends will be able to apply through Clearbanc’s Chrged program and connect their Facebook Ad account. Source
Consumer lending Platform Affirm is looking to move beyond lending and into the financial advice space; currently Affirm works with retails to offer consumers a credit option when making a purchase; they are exploring ways to help customers better understand their debt and offer a way to help them reduce interest payments; Affirm has lent over $1bn to date Source.