Lending Club has a new deal for investors to earn United miles; last year the initial program awarded 1 mile for every $2 invested; now investors will earn 1 mile for every $1 investors; the program is open to new and existing investors and is valid until January 9, 2018. Source
The FT has seen regtech as one of the fastest growing areas of fintech with a surge of applications to their Future of Fintech awards; new regulations such as the EU’s Mifid II rules, increased compliance and KYC checks by financial institutions looking for more cost efficient ways to verify customers has helped to bring new startups into the market; fintech has moved well beyond lending and the diversification of the market continues to grow. Source.
While announcing earnings for Q3 Wells Fargo and Bank of America both revealed how important digital channels are to their bottom line; BofA saw mobile banking users jump 11 percent, mobile usage grew at 19 percent and digital payments grew 9 percent in the past year; Wells Fargo saw digital usage grow 2 percent and digital sessions grow 6 percent; the digital trend shows how much banks businesses are changing. Source.
The blockchain startup has now raised a total of $110mn after taking in $40mn in a series B round; Jefferson River Capital led the funding round, which also included new and previous investors; in addition to the fundraising they hired Clyde Rodriguez, a former Microsoft executive, as chief information officer and chief technology officer for engineering. Source.
Initial results from a congressional investigation shows that minority business owners are more likely to seek a loan from a fintech firm and potentially pay a higher fee; Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) wants to further explore whether or not these lenders are aggressively targeting these borrowers and offering higher rates; the investigation has focused on online lenders and their underwriting practices for emerging minority owned businesses. Source.
According to data from FT Partners, the third quarter brought the highest financing deal count ever with 412 transactions; banking (including p2p lending) and payments had the most deals in the quarter; transactions of note include Softbank’s $250 million investment in Kabbage and raises by Toast Inc. and Raise Marketplace. Source
Person to person payments growth was about 67% and accounted for 13.6 million transactions; According to CEO Brian Moynihan the bank processed half a billion dollars in a single week; other banks including Wells Fargo are also reporting increases in person to person payments; Bank of America is also planning to release a mobile offering for auto and home loans along with its AI assistant; Bank of America spent $2.25 billion on tech initiatives in the first nine months of 2017. Source
RateSetter was the last of the “big three” p2p lenders to be authorized after a two year wait; both Zopa and Funding Circle were authorized in May, 2017; RateSetter will now be able to launch their Innovative Finance ISA; Founder and CEO Rhydian Lewis stated, “Authorisation has been a long but positive journey during which we have learnt a lot, improved our infrastructure and implemented important changes, notably making the business more transparent. Transparency is vital to our business because our customers need to understand what we do to appreciate the risk of lending on RateSetter.” Source
IBM announced a partnership with Stellar.org and KlickEx Group to help small businesses in underdeveloped countries participate in global trade; the partnership will focus on financial transactions across borders and currencies; this will allow businesses in these areas to get access to IBM’s scale and bank partnership network. Source.