Newsletter

There is a new report out today that looks at the impact of generative AI on the workforce and what industries will be most impacted. We have heard before that white-collar jobs, those people with college degrees will be most impacted. This report tries to quantify some of this impact.

The largest small business lender that you may not even know exists is Amazon Lending. The tech behemoth loans out billions of dollars every year to small businesses on its marketplace. Today, we learned about a new fintech partnership Amazon is entering into with SellersFi (formerly Sellers Funding). SellersFi is a seven-year-old small business lending fintech focused on e-commerce platforms. They provide e-commerce merchants with working capital, payments solutions and more.

It is a bold or naïve CEO that prefaces a major announcement with the words, "This will shock the world". New PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said exactly that in his first public interview since becoming CEO. That was a week ago and he was referring to major announcements that would happen at the company's Innovation Day that it conducted yesterday.

It has been almost two weeks since the SEC approved Bitcoin ETFs and we now have some data on the 10 ETFs that have been trading since then. The two biggest and oldest names in finance are leading the way: BlackRock and Fidelity. Each fund has attracted more than $1 billion in inflows.

It was only Thursday of last week when our lead story was about the challenges banks were facing in the Banking-as-a-Service space. Then Friday we learned that Blue Ridge Bank was hit with its second regulatory action in less than 18 months and is now deemed to be in a "troubled condition".

It is a bold or naïve CEO that prefaces a major announcement with the words, "This will shock the world". New PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said exactly that in his first public interview since becoming CEO. That was a week ago and he was referring to major announcements that would happen at the company's Innovation Day that it conducted yesterday.

A $200m equity raise at a valuation double the previous round? No you did not wake up in 2021 this morning, it is (checks watch) definitely January 2024. I was just chatting with someone earlier this week about equity raises and I commented that there seems to be much more activity this month than in January 2023. While we are most definitely not back in 2021, VCs seem to be opening up their checkbooks a little more.

This year has not started well for loanDepot. We first heard the news two weeks ago that the mortgage lender had suffered a cyber attack that shut down critical systems.