The US will soon have a new stock exchange: government watchdogs have approved (pdf) the application for Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), a trading platform backed by prominent Silicon Valley names. The company says its rules are meant to reward investments and business strategies that focus on the long term.
Ant Financial is a big story with the potential to get even bigger. But keeping up with the Hangzhou-based fintech giant isn’t always easy. As a private company, it doesn’t provide quarterly public filings. The firm’s executives are regulars on the conference circuit, but they tend to stay on message. To get useful information, you have to dig a little deeper.
Fraser Howie and co-author Carl Walter wrote Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise, a seminal book on the creation of China’s state-owned banking behemoths. Howie thinks the country’s fintech upstarts like Ant Financial, for all of their newfound clout, are still beholden to the brittle foundation of their old-economy predecessors.
Tencent and Alibaba—China’s tech superpowers, with a combined market value of almost $1 trillion—have clashed repeatedly since they were created in the earliest days of the country’s internet economy. Some 20 years later, one of the most important pieces of turf is still up for grabs: Control of the Chinese digital wallet.
When Ant Financial added a money market fund to its payment app, few people expected it to become the biggest in the world a couple of years later. Its runaway success is a sign of China’s financial potential, as well as a deep and worrisome imbalance within its $13 trillion economy.
China loves it. Wall Street fears it. Washington wants it to go away. Meet Ant Financial, the fintech company that’s worth about twice as much as Goldman Sachs.
JPMorgan Chase churned out record revenue and profit for the first three months of the year, defying analysts who were expecting a wobbly first quarter. The biggest US bank’s surprisingly buoyant figures, the first major release of earnings season, signal that performance from corporate America could be more robust than expected.
Goldman Sachs, in addition to running one of the world’s storied investment banks, is also an avid investor in financial startups. As venture capital money pours into the sector and valuations climb, the bank thinks there are bargains among the companies that don’t make the headlines.
Apple formally announced the details of its widely expected credit card today, which will offer things like cash back rewards, a whizzy app, and a titanium card with no numbers on it. While many of the features Apple is touting aren’t necessarily new or innovative, it is pitching something that’s increasingly rare in the digital world: privacy.
Ant Financial is expanding rapidly outside of its home market, mainly to serve legions of big-spending Chinese tourists already familiar with its platform. A key question is whether the company, which is valued at more than Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley combined, will pursue Western consumers as well.
The UK parliament’s vote to rule out a “no-deal Brexit” gave Brits the opportunity to find out how many MPs thought the economic carnage that would come with abruptly quitting the EU was worth the price.
Britain’s decision to leave the EU risks damaging the UK economy, especially its vital financial sector. But surprisingly, one of the best-performing European financial stocks since the Brexit referendum in June 2016 is a pillar of the UK’s financial sector: the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).
Philadelphia is on its way to becoming the first major US city to ban cashless stores.
Startups have spent the past decade trying to reinvent everything from taxis (so far so good) to squeezing juice out of fruit and vegetables (facepalm). Lately, entrepreneurs have been giving consumer debt a digital makeover.
As part of Japan’s drive to embrace electronic payments, Mizuho and about 60 other banks have launched a new digital wallet called J-Coin Pay. But contrary to what you may have read about it, it doesn’t use crypto.
Cash usage in Britain is on the wane, and the infrastructure to support it is becoming unsustainable. To avoid leaving behind millions of people who depend on physical notes and coins, the country’s cash systems require a radical overhaul, according to the latest findings of the UK’s Access to Cash Review.
Online lender Social Finance is rolling out a slew of new features, from commission-free brokerage to zero-fee exchange traded funds and crypto trading. But buying and selling securities, of course, is not free. So how does SoFi plan to make money?
The market capitalization for Adyen, the payment company based in Amsterdam, has surged almost 50% this year to around $22 billion. That’s about that same as the latest valuation for Silicon Valley-based Stripe, another darling of the fintech scene.
For entrepreneurs running a financial technology company in the UK, there’s no shortage of money these days. Venture capital investment into the sector set records all over the world last year, and Britain was no exception. But could there be too much of a good thing?
Even by lofty fintech standards, OakNorth is soaring. The London-based startup bank’s $440 million funding round, led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, was the biggest ever for a European firm of its kind. Less than four years since it launched, the company is profitable and valued at $2.8 billion. OakNorth says not one of its customers has ever defaulted, or even had a late payment.
Some of America’s biggest tech companies are pairing off with the country’s biggest banks.
For marketing purposes, cryptocurrency packs a wallop for the world’s mega banks. Their PR departments carefully place announcements about crypto projects and blockchain trials with preferred, high-profile news outlets that run glowing stories about them.
Cash usage is shrinking in Britain faster than in most places, and the debate about what to do about it is getting louder. That’s important because, like just about every country where digital payments are taking over, the UK doesn’t have much of a plan for what happens next.
The UK’s investigations into so-called fake news and disinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms have attracted keen interest in Russia. Moscow IP addresses (pdf) were the top visitors to a British government webpage discussing a report published last year, followed by London and then Saint Petersburg.
