Renren, a publicly listed company in the US operates a social media platform in China but has also made several fintech investments; investments include LendingHome, Fundrise, Motif Investing as well as a significant stake in SoFi; a year ago Renren announced plans to spin off its minority venture stakes into a new subsidiary; under the plan retail investors would receive a cash payout, losing their exposure to SoFi; Ryan Roberts, director at MCM Partners stated in the Forbes article, “It certainly looks like Joe Chen is trying to strip the best assets from Renren, particularly SoFi. SoFi is basically the entire value of the company right now, the core business has really deteriorated.” Source
After launching as savings product two years ago the app only bank is approaching £1bn ($1.3bn) in deposits; after disclosing in March they were at 17,000 customers and over £500mn ($663mn) they have seen a significant acceleration in growth; they also reported growth in small business loan applications and mortgages. Source.
Schwab Intelligent Portfolios now boasts $24 billion assets under management and has hired Cynthia Loh, the ex-general manager of Betterment for Business; article reports on Schwab’s robo-advice platform growth, the cannibalization the firm saw with the offering, and what the new hire might mean for Schwab’s future plans. Source
Consumer lenders who are repaid from borrower’s salaries have raised $232mn recently in the UK; Insurer Legal & General are set to announce a $53mn Investment into SalaryFinance for their US expansion; other market leaders in this segment include Neyber who recently raised $179mn in debt financing; the companies have built relationships with more than 50 groups in the UK and tying repayment to salaries helps to keep defaults extremely low. Source.
Funding Circle lead originations for the month of September followed by Zopa and RateSetter; many other originators across Europe are included in the list. Source
According to a form d filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission small business lender Kabbage is in the middle of a $161mn round; the filing shows they have thus far raised a little over $80mn; this round is in addition to the $250 million investment from a subsidiary of Softbank Group in August. Source.
The UK’s biggest robo-advisor has seen assets under management grow to over $798mn and customers exceed 25,000 at the end of 2016; however the company also reported a 5 percent increase in losses and a 10 percent increase in operating expenses; building up scale to eventually make money looks to be the biggest challenge for the growing fintech company. Source.
Ahead of his presentation at LendIt Europe 2017, Richard Peers, Director of the Financial Services Industry at Microsoft discusses fintech with Verdict; provides his perspective on artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, challenger banks, why London is a great place for startups, and what firms can learn from the Chinese market. Source
A consortium of banks including OCBC Bank, HSBC and MUFG along with Infocomm Media Development Authority completed a KYC blockchain proof of concept; the development can make KYC more secure and efficient, as well as help to crack down on money laundering. Source.
Validis simplifies the lending process to SMEs; Validis offers a solution that connects directly to SME accounting packages and allows businesses to share their information directly with lenders; they also have built fraud detection tools that analyze the information to spot anomalies, discrepancies and mistakes; the Validis ’Quality Score’ algorithm allows lenders to monitor the financial health of their borrowers. Source