Finovate Blog

Token issuance and asset servicing platform TokenSoft announced the launch of TokenSoft Investment Accounts today. The new accounts offer financial institutions a way to give their clients who invest in security tokens self-managed investment wallets.

“We’re excited to bring a multi-signature wallet security packaged in a self-controlled, easy to manage brokerage-style experience to the over 100,000 investors using our platform,” said TokenSoft CEO Mason Borda.

The new investment accounts offer investors a more traditional, brokerage-style experience; access to dividend distributions; and automated reinvestment. Additionally, issuers will receive support for compliant security token standards and integrated reporting and disclosures.

“The ability for non-technical individuals to self-custody is going to change the way assets under management models work in traditional finance,” said Jordan Davis, VP of Business Development at TokenSoft. “Wallets like TokenSoft Investment Accounts will put pressure on financial institutions to provide better client servicing, value-add services, and investment management tools to earn investors’ business. People will be able to add or remove service providers from accessing their assets the same way you can add or remove profiles from your Netflix subscription.”

TokenSoft’s mission is to accelerate the adoption of the blockchain in financial markets. The company launched its white-label token securities issuance platform in 2017 to help companies tokenize their assets in an economy that does not have the infrastructure to support such transactions. Below are a few use case scenarios:

• Venture capital firms can tokenize portions of their limited partnership interest
• Banks can tokenize their assets under management, creating a stablecoin
• Startups can tokenize their equity to offer investors and employees fractional ownership

Among TokenSoft’s clients are Andra Capital’s Silicon Valley and Arca Investment Management Firm. The company was founded by James Poole and Mason Borda and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Blockchain-based financing company Figure announced today it has scooped up Asiff Hirji, former COO of Coinbase, as its new President.

In his tenure at Coinbase, Hirji helped the company grow its revenue to more than $1 billion and boost its valuation to $8 billion. He also served as Operating Partner at Andreesen Horowitz and was COO at TD Ameritrade. Prior to those positions, he held senior leadership roles at TPG Capital, Saxo Bank, HP, and Bain Capital.

“Asiff has already been a critical advisor to me on how we manage the growth of Figure in order to drive the transformation of financial services across categories and around the world,” said CEO Mike Cagney. “His deep experience in the financial services industry and his long history of helping companies drive and manage growth are both going to be important to the growth of Figure and the creation of our new merchant bank.”

Figure was founded in 2018 by former SoFi Founder and CEO Mike Cagney. The company provides direct-to-consumer solutions to help consumers optimize their finances via three products, a home equity line of credit, mortgage refinance, and student loan refinance. The company leverages the blockchain to process the loans and offers a simple application process to provide funds in a matter of days, not weeks.

In his new role, Hirji is responsible for building a new bank division that will enable banks to leverage Provenance, Figure’s blockchain-based transactions platform.

“Blockchain will crash the costs of financial services, making products more affordable and available to all. Figure is one of the very few companies actually turning that promise into reality,” said Hirji. “The opportunity now is to scale to more financial products and open this capability to all financial institutions. I feel fortunate to be able to help make the promise of blockchain a reality.”

Since the company’s launch, Figure has now become the fourth largest originator of HELOC loans in the U.S. The company has raised $1.2 billion in combined debt and equity and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Five months. A quarter of a million new U.S. customers.

That’s the news from Berlin, Germany-based challenger bank, N26, which announced this week that it has added 250,000 new customers in the U.S. within five months of its August launch.

Calling American consumers “too reliant on traditional banks,” N26 U.S. CEO Nicolas Kopp suggested that the wave of new U.S. customers was just the beginning. “We’re incredibly proud to have reached a quarter-million U.S. customers in our first five months and we’re just getting started. We have big plans to offer millions of future N26 users a feature-rich, easy-to-use banking experience.”

The challenger bank, which launched in the U.S. last year courtesy of a partnership with Axos Bank, offers its new U.S.-based customers a regulated, FDIC-insured account, a Visa debit card, and basic spending management tools like account activity display, daily spending limits, and automatic transaction categorization. In December, N26 introduced its Perks program for U.S. customers, giving them cashback rewards and discounts for purchases made on their N26 debit card.

N26 gives its customers the ability to open accounts in less than five minutes, transfer money to friends instantly with MoneyBeam, and leverage a tool called Spaces to open sub-accounts to manage savings goals. The accounts have no hidden fees, and accountholders have access to a network of more than 55,000 surcharge-free ATMs. Customers who sign up for direct deposit can access their pay up to two days early.

Gains in the U.S. notwithstanding, N26 points to Europe as the source of most of the growth in its customer base – which reached 3.5 million last summer and now stands at five million. N26 co-founder and CEO Valenti Stalf heralded the five million customer milestone, but suggested the achievement is only a step on the journey the company has set out for itself when it was founded in 2013. “(We) have not forgotten our original mission – to challenge an industry that is ripe for change,” Stalf said. “N26 has proved that banking can be simple and intuitive through the use of technology.”

N26 has raised more than $680 million in funding, with $470 million of the challenger bank’s equity capital coming last year.