Downloads of Square’s Cash App are pulling further ahead of Venmo, according to research by Instinet. While the fintech firms’ apps each get installed on millions of phones every month, a sizable chunk of Square’s growth appears to come from lower-income customers on the margins of traditional finance.
The triumvirate of China’s biggest tech giants has long been known by the acronym BAT, short for Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. Together, they’ve dominated search, e-commerce, and social media, respectively, helping them become the most valuable listed Chinese companies. But now, it’s more accurate to refer to China’s top tech firms as ATM.
Join Quartz reporters John Detrixhe and Matthew De Silva as they discuss Facebook’s white paper on Libra, a new digital currency the company is supporting.
Financial regulators have spent centuries working on ways to contain banks, making sure their services are fair and they won’t crash the economy. As big technologies companies like Facebook and Tencent tread deeper into finance, these watchdogs are going to have to expand the way they oversee the financial system.
Algorithmic fintech lending is less discriminatory against minorities than traditional loan officers, according to a recent study of US mortgages. The findings signal hope that technology could provide financing that’s more fair, but the research also underscores how widespread discrimination remains.
Could Libra, the Facebook-led cryptocurrency finally announced today, disrupt Visa and Mastercard?
Facebook has finally revealed plans for a cryptocurrency called Libra, one of the worst-kept secrets in the history of virtual money.
Jack Dorsey is best known for co-founding Twitter, the micro-posting website that now has around 330 million users around the world. In 2009, the computer programmer also co-founded Square, which was originally designed to help small businesses accept credit cards.
Uber, the cash burning ride-hailing service, is reportedly making a big push into financial technology. It’s a move that Asian mobility companies have been adopting since at least 2015.
For some three years or more, a group of banks has been working on a distributed-ledger system for settlement, researching the feasibility of using blockchain to replace traditional back-office operations. The project is behind schedule—a limited launch was reportedly expected to have taken place in early 2018—but even more financial institutions have joined the effort, which recently raised £50 million ($63 million).
Mobile money is getting a boost in Europe: A new initiative plans to make six of the region’s smartphone wallets interoperable with each other, creating a total network of 5 million users in 10 European countries, from Finland to Portugal. The burgeoning system could potentially pose a challenge to the Visa and Mastercard card-payment duopoly.
The International Monetary Fund thinks big technology companies are going to dig deeper into the financial sector—a shift that could modernize things like payments and loans for millions of people. But it also raises concerns about data privacy and the concentration of power among a small number of mega-corporations.
The world’s largest economies took a step toward effectively taxing tech giants like Facebook and Google, by compiling rules that would close loopholes used to avoid corporate taxes. Such a crackdown could make it harder for multinational tech firms to reduce their tax burden by booking profits in countries that have low tax rates, according to Reuters, citing a draft communique by G20 finance ministers, who are meeting in Japan.
Investors are snapping up US government bonds, a sign they’re worried the economy is slowing and increasingly expect the central bank to take action to keep it from stalling.
The US crackdown on Huawei was bound to have unintended consequences. Some of them are starting to come to the surface.
The US and Mexico have come to an agreement that defuses, for now, Donald Trump’s latest tariff bomb. Mexico says it will deploy its national guard, with a focus on its own southern border, to restrain migration. People who are seeking asylum via the US’s southern border will be returned to Mexico while the US accelerates its processing of those claims.
Financial technology startups are booming. How long will it last?
Facebook thinks making payments should be as easy as sending a photo. But rolling out that service for more than a billion users isn’t something the social network’s executives think it can do on its own.
Goldman Sachs says it has usually offered the highest interest rates in Britain since its Marcus savings accounts launched in the country. This helped it attract about 2,000 accounts in the first hour it was available, and more than 250,000 since starting out in September.
Castlebay in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides is exceptional in many ways. More than half of the population speaks Gaelic, the nearest airport features the world’s only cockleshell beach landing strip, and the 15th-century Kisimul Castle was sold to the state in 2001 for £1 a year and a bottle of whisky.
Plaid isn’t just a pattern used by Scottish clans that goes back 3,000 or so years. It’s also the name of a technology company that has been building data links between US banks and financial upstarts since 2012. Now the San Francisco-based company is rolling out its services in the UK, Europe’s hub for fintech startups.
Money costs more when you’re poor. That’s often the case when transferring money abroad, getting a loan, or opening a bank account. In the UK, it can even extend to withdrawing cash from an ATM.
TransferWise is now tied for fifth place among Europe’s most valuable private companies. The money-transfer service announced in a statement today it raised another $292 million, valuing the company at $3.5 billion.
A German fintech started a service in 2013 that helps Europeans shuffle their money around the continent to the highest-yielding savings account. Now, the company plans to bring its technology to the US within the next six to 12 months, which could provide a boost to community banks by connecting them to a bigger pool of savers around the country.
