Daily news Archives - Page 121 of 140

SoFi Launches Social Trading Investing Platform

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 14, 2020
Categories: Daily news, SoFi

SoFi has spent the past few years broadening its focus. What launched as an alternative lending company has emerged as a platform that provides a deeper breadth of banking services including insurance, checking accounts, credit score monitoring, investing, estate planning, and small business financing.

After building all of these tools, SoFi began focusing on building something different– community. The fintech offers a membership program with a range of perks including career coaching and financial planning.

Today, the company is leveraging its community in the launch of social trading and investing features. The new capabilities allow users to share their investment portfolios and discover and follow the holdings, watchlists, and activity of fellow members who opt in to the feature.

“According to SoFi’s research, about 70% of SoFi Invest member respondents indicated that they regularly (at least weekly) discuss their investments with family members, peers, or colleagues,” said SoFi CEO Anthony Noto. “Our new social investing features not only help us live up to our name of Social Finance, but provide ways for investors to see specifically what members on the platform are doing with their investment decisions, discover new investment ideas, and see how they stack up in their investing performance. Given the importance of investing early and consistently, we are thrilled to be able to provide a more informative, engaging, interactive mobile investing experience rooted in building better investing habits.”

To encourage social interaction, SoFi’s new tools allows users to comment on and react to the others’ trades and compare their performance on dynamic leaderboard.

For privacy purposes, participation is optional and members are not automatically enrolled. Additionally, the amounts of investment portfolios are hidden from other users.

If you’ve studied fintech for any length of time this should sound familiar. U.K.-based eToro launched its CopyTrading platform in 2011. This social investing platform is different from SoFi’s in that it pays top investors when others copy their trades.

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Greenlight to Power Chase’s New Bank Account for Kids

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 13, 2020
Categories: Chase Bank, Daily news, JP Morgan Chase

When it comes to payment and savings account services designed for minors, most large banks have stayed on the sidelines. In fact, much of the development has come from fintechs that layer kid-friendly tech on top of existing bank accounts.

This bank-fintech partnership is exactly what Chase is relying on for its new bank account for kids that it is launching this week in collaboration with Greenlight, a company that provides financial tools for children. The new offering, Chase First Banking, aims to help parents manage allowances, complete and check off chores, monitor spending, and help kids save towards a goal.

“Families are juggling so many more responsibilities today than ever before,” said JPMorgan Chase Head of Digital for Consumer and Community Banking Allison Beer. “To help, we’ve made it easy for parents to manage kids’ allowances, keep track of chores and teach important financial skills from within the Chase Mobile app.”

The accounts have three features that encourage kids to earn, spend, and save. The Earn function allows parents to set allowances and assign chores and allows the child to check off when each chore has been completed. The Spend tool provides kids with their own prepaid debit card that they can use to shop at stores that their parents have approved. Parents have ultimate control of the card and can lock or freeze it at any time. The Save function helps the child set aside money toward a goal and allows parents to move funds, as well.

Chase First Banking accounts, which are aimed at grade school children, are available for free to Chase retail deposit account customers. The bank already offers checking and savings accounts tailored to high school and college-aged users.

Founded in 2014, Greenlight competes with startups such as Oink and FamZoo. In addition to the Earn, Spend, and Save features offered with Chase, Greenlight’s B2C offering, which costs $5 per month, also offers a Give tool and will soon launch an Invest feature. The company rebranded earlier this year which helped it double its growth and set it on track to double again by the end of the year. Late last year Greenlight raised $215 million. The company is valued at $1.2 billion.

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Square Buys Bitcoin; Coinbase and the Call for “Mission-Focus”

By David Penn Posted on October 9, 2020
Categories: Alumni News, Coinbase, Daily news, Square

When we asked a dozen-odd fintech founders and CEOs what they thought was a bigger deal: AI or Bitcoin, during our FinovateFall 25 in 5 Q&A series, the number of respondents more excited by the former than the latter was sizable. But bitcoin fans made their preference known, suggesting that the brightest days for cryptocurrencies were definitely still ahead of us.

We suspect those bitcoin bulls were buoyed by this week’s news that digital payments company Square has invested $50 million in bitcoin. The approximately 4,709 bitcoins purchased by the San Francisco, California-based company represent a fraction of Square’s total assets – around one percent, as of the end of Q2 2020 – but it is not the first time the company has expressed interest in the cryptocurrency. Via its Cash App, Square has offered bitcoin trading since 2018, and a year later, the company launched Square Crypto, a unit dedicated to supporting open source work on bitcoin. But this week’s investment marks the firm’s first financial investment in BTC.

Square CFO Amrita Ahuja explained the investment in part by expressing optimism about bitcoin’s adoption worldwide, saying that it has “the potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future.” Ahuja added that Square anticipated participating in the adoption of bitcoin “in a disciplined way.”

It is likely worth noting that Square founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is a big supporter of bitcoin. In 2018, Dorsey said he believed bitcoin – or a similar cryptocurrency – would become the world’s single currency at some point in the not-too-distant future. CNBC’s coverage of Square’s investment noted that other tech-savvy fintechs, such as Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital use cryptocurrencies like bitcoin as a hedge.

As the Black Lives Matter-inspired social justice movement swept through the Western world this summer, corporations went into overdrive with efforts to show their support for ending racial discrimination. Many of these initiatives were outwardly directed toward potential customers, potential future employees, investors, the media, the public at large … But many of these attempts to show support were more inwardly directed, with companies encouraging their own workers to make their concerns with regard to social justice issues known – even, if not especially, in the workplace.

Unique among this trend was Coinbase, whose CEO Brian Armstrong not only took a different tack to politics in the workplace, but also put the company’s money behind its Keep Your Politics to Yourself policy. Armstrong made headlines weeks ago when he wrote in a blog post that, because Coinbase was a “mission-focused” company, “We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.” Moreover, he added that if employees disagreed with Coinbase’s policy of leaving politics at the front door, he was happy to offer them a relatively generous severance (including up to six months of pay depending on tenure) if they decided to leave.

“Life’s too short to work at a company that you are not excited about,” Armstrong wrote, requesting his employees decide whether to stay or go by the end of September. And with Armstrong’s Wednesday deadline come and gone, it appears that 60 workers, approximately 5% of the Coinbase’s workforce, have taken the deal.

The move has been controversial, with others in the technology community – including Jack Dorsey of Square and Twitter – suggesting that a healthier environment could be achieved if companies like Coinbase embraced the challenge of these kind of conversations. But, at this point, Armstrong seems at a minimum happy that the policy did not result in what would have easily been the worst possible outcome. “I’ve heard a concern from some of your that this clarification would disproportionately impact our under-represented minority population at Coinbase,” Armstrong wrote in a follow-up blog post. “It was reassuring to see that people from under-represented groups at Coinbase have not taken the exit package in numbers disproportionate to the overall population.”

It will be worth watching to see if other companies – in or out of tech – take a similar strategy.

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Venmo Ships Credit Card Offering

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 6, 2020
Categories: Daily news, Venmo

Venmo is one step closer to being a full-service bank competitor with today’s news. The PayPal-owned company is rolling out a credit card offering that is available to select customers starting this week.

The Visa-branded card, which is issued by Synchrony Bank, offers many features one would expect to pair with a mobile-first account, such as an app-based virtual card for online shopping, tools to track spending and rewards, and the ability to pay off the card balance from within the app. The cards, which pander to a mostly millennial user base, also offer five unique color designs.

One feature specific to Venmo’s new credit card is the use of a QR code printed on the card. Similar to Venmo accounts, users can scan their friends’ unique QR code to send or request money. This QR code technology, along with an embedded RFID chip that enables users to tap to pay, provides an (almost) contactless payments.

Another unique feature is the way the Venmo card handles rewards. Instead of offering a pre-determined rewards category or even allowing users to choose which category they’d like to receive rewards for, Venmo rewards consumers based on the categories in which they actually spend.

To do this, the company separates customers’ spending into categories such as dining, travel, bills, health and beauty, grocery, gas, transportation, and entertainment. Venmo rewards users 3% cash back for purchases made in the category in which they spend the most, 2% cash back for purchases in the second-highest spending category, and 1% cash back on everything else. The rewards cash is automatically transferred to the user’s Venmo account at the end of each period.

The card adds to Venmo’s existing offerings, including a robust P2P payments ecosystem and its Mastercard-branded debit card launched in 2018. Venmo plans to market the new credit card to its 60 million active users, a built-in audience comprised of its target market.

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Square’s New Ordering Tool Sets Tone for the Future of the QR-Code

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 2, 2020
Categories: Daily news

Square announced this week it has released a new ordering tool for restaurants this week.

The new self-serve ordering tool, which boasts a contactless experience, allows diners to place their order on their mobile device. The service doesn’t use complicated technology, but leverages a QR code that links the customer to the restaurant’s mobile-optimized ordering page.

Once the customer inputs their order, it is received by the restaurant’s point of sale platform and is sent to their kitchen. When the meal is ready, the staff brings out the food. The self-ordering technology minimizes human contact, limits error, and improves efficiency by removing wait times.

QR code technology has re-emerged as a promising tool for payments and ordering. The technology had fallen out of favor around 2012 with the advent of NFC and BLE communication technologies. With recent concerns around the coronavirus, however, we’ve seen an uptick in QR code usage. Just yesterday InComm announced partnerships with five QR and barcode payments processors that will facilitate point-of-sale payments acceptance at retailers across Japan.

Square’s self-serve ordering is available now for Square Online sellers in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia.

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Is XRP the new ESG? Ripple Takes Carbon Neutral Pledge

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 1, 2020
Categories: Daily news, Ripple

Payments network Ripple announced a move today that will make its climate change activist users happy. The company has pledged to be carbon net-zero by 2030 and to decarbonize public blockchains.

“The blockchain and digital asset industry will play a critical role in building a sustainable future for global finance,” the company said in a blog post. “We, as an industry, need to come together to dramatically reduce our collective environmental impact as broad adoption takes hold.”

Ripple plans to decarbonize public blockchains in partnership with the XRP Ledger Foundation, Energy Web, and Rocky Mountain Institute. To achieve this goal, the group is using Energy Web’s EW Zero, an application to find and source emissions-free renewable energy. EW Zero provides an open-source tool that enables any blockchain, not just Ripple’s XRP Ledger, to decarbonize by purchasing renewable energy in local markets in partnership with Energy Web Foundation.

In addition to this, Ripple announced it is:

Measuring its own carbon footprint and reducing it by purchasing clean, renewable energy for its offices and business activities
Investing in carbon removal technology with the goal of removing all of its emissions by 2030
Driving new research with the University College London (UCL) and the National University of Singapore to evaluate energy consumption across digital assets, credit card networks, and cash; and understand environmental impact of crypto adoption

Cryptocurrencies don’t have the same negative environmental impacts as paper currencies, which contribute to pollution, deforestation, and a large carbon footprint. The mining techniques that cryptocurrencies require, however, consume large amounts of energy. This is especially true with Bitcoin. Ripple reported that XRP is 61,000x more energy efficient than Bitcoin, which last year consumed almost as much energy as the country of Portugal does on average.

Ripple is the first major player in the crypto space to make a move like this but it likely won’t be the last. According to a report by Morningstar, over the past three years Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) index funds have doubled in both number and asset size. Ripple’s new environmentally friendly approach will likely piggyback on the success of ESG investing.

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Gusto Launches Challenger Banking Service

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on September 30, 2020
Categories: Daily news, Gusto

Is there room for another challenger bank aimed at serving the underbanked? Payroll, benefits, and HR solutions firm Gusto thinks so.

The San Francisco-based company announced the launch of Gusto Wallet today. Exclusive to employees of the 100,000+ businesses that use Gusto’s payroll services, the mobile wallet offers direct deposit, banking tools, savings accounts, and access to emergency funds.

Among the benefits of Gusto’s new account are savings goals, a debit card with free ATM withdrawals, and a unique feature called Gusto Cashout. The new tool allows employees to access money in between paydays. The amount borrowed comes with no fees and no interest, and is repaid automatically from the employee’s next paycheck.

The accounts are aimed to promote financial wellness. In addition to the Gusto Cashout feature, Gusto pays a higher-than-average return on savings goals. Users can earn 0.34% APY on up to five goals. And in order to help encourage accountholders to save, Gusto Wallet offers users the ability to automatically route a portion of their paycheck into their savings accounts.

Like most U.S.-based challenger banks, Gusto is partnering with an incumbent to power its accounts. The company has teamed up with Kansas City, Missouri-based nbkc bank to back its accounts. Other fintechs that use nbkc bank to offer challenger banking services include Betterment, Joust, and Truebill.

Unlike most challenger banks, however, Gusto Wallet has direct deposits built into its design. Most banks fight hard to get their users to directly deposit their paycheck into their account by using expensive promotions and incentives. My personal bank once offered me $300 to sign up for direct deposit. Gusto, however, doesn’t need to do this, since payroll deposit is built into its mobile wallet and it is limited to users whose employers pay them via Gusto’s payroll service.

Along with the Gusto Wallet launch, the company also announced today it is helping small businesses set up health reimbursement accounts via a program called QSHERA.

While Gusto’s Cashout feature may be appealing to the lower income, underbanked population, the company may need to add another feature or two to compete with popular challenger banks such as Chime and Dave. For example, Chime offers fee-free overdrafts, and pays 1% APY on savings goals and Dave helps users build their credit score via a partnership with LevelCredit.

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Bitpanda Raises $52 Million in Round Led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on September 29, 2020
Categories: Daily news, Funding

Digital asset platform Bitpanda announced a round of venture funding today. The $52 million Series A round marks the largest Series A round in Europe so far this year.

The round was led by Valar Ventures, a VC firm backed by Peter Thiel. Today’s investment, combined with Bitpanda’s $51 million ICO last year and undisclosed venture round last year, brings its total funding to over $103 million.

As part of the agreement, Andrew McCormack and James Fitzgerald from Valar Ventures will join Bitpanda’s board. “With their extensive track record in growing digital champions like PayPal in its early years and supporting Peter Thiel during its IPO and eventual sale to eBay in 2002, we are more than confident in the choice,” Bitpanda CEO and Co-founder Eric Demuth said.

The company will use the funds to promote geographical expansion. Specifically, after its successful launches in France, Spain, and Turkey this year, Bitpanda plans to expand to more European countries before year-end.

The investment will also be used to “bring the Bitpanda platform and all our services to a new level.” The company has already slated new products for launch, including a new stock trading tool which will launch in 2021.

Much of Bitpanda’s focus is on financial empowerment and the democratization of investment. “Bitpanda will become an investment platform for asset classes for everyone,” Demuth said. “We will provide education, empower our users to take their future into their own hands and remove all those barriers that prevent people from taking part.”

Founded in 2014, Bitpanda has seen significant growth this year, boosting its client base to more than 1.3 million. Additionally, the company has brought on more than 70 new employees this year and plans to boost its total workforce to more than 300 by the end of this year.

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FIS and The Clearing House Help Bring Real Time Payments to Small Banks

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on September 25, 2020
Categories: Daily news, FIS

Financial services company FIS announced this week it has partnered with The Clearing House (TCH) in an effort to bring real-time payment processing and settlement to small-to-mid-sized banks and credit unions.

FIS will help its core banking system clients quickly and cheaply connect to TCH’s RTP network, a payments infrastructure that enables instant payments settlement and immediate availability of funds for banks participating in the network.

“As a long-time partner with The Clearing House, we are excited to see the RTP network continue to grow and to be working with banks across the United States to take advantage of the speed, power and scalability of real-time payments,” said FIS EVP, Head of Financial Institutions Payment Solutions Royal Cole. “We’ve designed our new managed service to ease the process of connecting to this emerging platform for small-to-mid-sized banks and credit unions that lack the resources of their larger competitors.”

Among FIS bank clients already participating in TCH’s RTP network are St. Louis, Missouri-based First Bank; and Nano Banc, a relationship-based bank headquartered in Irvine, California.

FIS was founded in 1968 and made major news headlines last year when it acquired Worldpay for $34 billion.

The Clearing House launched its RTP scheme in 2017. Today the RTP network’s real-time payment capabilities are accessible to banks that hold 70% of U.S. demand deposit accounts (DDAs). The network currently reaches over half of all U.S. DDAs.

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New Funding Takes Robinhood’s Series G Round to $660 Million

By David Penn Posted on September 23, 2020
Categories: Daily news, Funding

A little over a month after announcing a $200 million investment from D1 Capital Partners as part of its Series G round, the Millennially-targeted stock trading app Robinhood is back in the fintech funding headlines with another $460 million in new capital raised. The investment gives the company a valuation of $11.7 billion, and brings the Series G’s total to $660 million.

The company’s total funding stands at $2.2 billion.

The financing comes from a quintet of investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, DST Global, Ribbit Capital and 9Yards Capital. A Robinhood spokesperson said that the funds will be used to support Robinhood’s core product as well as “new offerings like cash management and recurring investments.”

Robinhood has been on an impressive fundraising pace this year, locking in more than $1 billion in 2020 alone as a rapidly advancing stock market – and the blunting of sports gambling due to pandemic restrictions – have brought new investors and traders to the platform. Robinhood offers commission-free trading in stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and options via Robinhood Financial, as well as the ability to buy and sell cryptocurrencies with its Robinhood Crypto platform.

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Robinhood has more than 13 million users. Earlier this month, the company announced a set of updates on its options trading offering, giving investors and traders greater control over exercising options, and adding improvements to the early assignment process, as well as enhancing both education and eligibility criteria for options trading. In August, Robinhood introduced a pair of new Chief Compliance Officers – Norm Askhenas for Robinhood Financial and Kelly Zigaitis for Robinhood Securities – who are veterans of Fidelity and Wells Fargo Advisors, respectively.

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Virgin Money Goes Live on Experian’s Pre-Qualification Platform

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on September 22, 2020
Categories: Daily news, Experian

Virgin Money announced today it has become the latest brand to join Experian’s pre-qualification platform.

The deal means that Virgin Money will now appear on Experian’s panel of lenders that are aggregated on lending websites and advisor platforms to help prospective borrowers check their eligibility and make informed decisions on their home purchase.

“Going through a lengthy mortgage application just to be turned down can be frustrating for everyone involved, not least the buyer who has found their dream home,” said Lisa Fretwell, Managing Director of Data Services, at Experian UK&I. “By checking eligibility at the beginning of the journey, potential customers can see which mortgages they are likely to be accepted for based on their financial circumstances, while at the same time avoiding damage to their credit score.”

Ultimately, Experian’s solution offers an automated decision based on credit history. If the system accepts the borrower, they will see details of the maximum amount they can borrow.

Borrowers can find Virgin Money’s mortgage products on pre-qualification platforms including Mortgage Gym, New Homes Group, Mojo Mortgages, Property Pal Mortgages and Iress Xplan Mortgage.

Experian offers a range of tools to help lenders make more informed decisions more efficiently in a way that safely leverages consumer data. Among these tools is Experian Lift, which the company launched last year. Experian Lift is a suite of credit score products that combines traditional credit, alternative credit, and trended data to provide a holistic picture of consumer creditworthiness.

Tools like these are especially useful in today’s economic environment, when uncertainty persists throughout many areas of consumers’ lives.

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More Fuel for the BNPL Fire: Affirm Raises $500 Million

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on September 18, 2020
Categories: Daily news, Funding

In a series G round, buy-now, pay-later company (BNPL) Affirm brought in $500 million, bringing the company’s total raised to $1.3 billion.

Leading the round were Durable Capital Partners LP and existing investor GIC. Other returning investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Wellington Management Company, Baillie Gifford, Spark Capital, Founders Fund, and Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC also contributed.

Affirm Founder and CEO Max Levchin referred to the new round as a “vote of confidence” that will help the company advance its mission “to build honest financial products that improve lives.”

Along with the funding announcement, Affirm also unveiled an interest-free and fee-free bi-weekly payment product for transactions over $50. The new product aims to help Affirm’s tools compete with credit cards. “Affirm is now an even more attractive payment option for everyday wants and needs,” Levchin added. “We can also now better support merchants who offer smaller ticket items and bring their customers a more transparent, flexible way to pay.”

Affirm’s BNPL tools reach 6.5 million shoppers across the U.S. and Canada. The company has 6,000+ merchant partners in the U.S., including brands such as Walmart, Peloton, Oscar de la Renta, Audi, and Expedia.

Affirm’s funding comes days after Klarna unveiled its $650 million raise, which brought its total funding to $1.4 billion and boosted its valuation to $10.6 billion.

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