It’s (almost) official: Passive funds have just about reached parity with actively managed ones in the US stock market. “This is a milestone that has been a long time coming,” Kevin McDevitt, a senior analyst at Morningstar said in a statement. “The trend toward low-cost fund investing has gained momentum.”
“France is maybe the best place to start a company,” said Jean-Rémi Kouchakji, co-founder of PayinTech, a Paris-based fintech firm that was among the 9,000 startups at the Viva Technology conference this year. Paradoxically, he said, it’s a difficult place for small- and medium-sized companies to thrive, a necessary step for building a corporate titan.
Should Facebook be broken up? Despite her reservations about the massive social network, the EU’s competition commissioner, one of the few people with the authority to pursue such an aggressive action, doesn’t think it’s the best way forward.
Vehicle emissions regulations are meant to promote clean air and reduce carbon dioxide in order to combat climate change. In Europe, aggressive new rules are also a direct response to a massive diesel-emissions scandal, accelerating the shift to electric vehicles, said Renault CEO Thierry Bolloré.
When someone offers you something for free, it’s a good idea to ask a few follow-up questions. When someone offers to pay you to use their service, it’s wise to ask even more, tougher questions.
There’s so much money gushing out of West Texas these days that even a deadly highway doesn’t keep people away. The fracking boom is shredding a key stretch of asphalt that runs from Pecos—site of the world’s first rodeo—through a former ghost town and into New Mexico. But even as the carnage piles up, businesses are blossoming like cactus along US Highway 285.
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.
