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.
Palantir Technologies is known for using big data to tackle tough problems like counter-terrorism analysis and measuring financial risk at mega banks. Since 2012, a group of veterans from the Silicon Valley company have taken on an equally daunting task: taking the misery out of the home mortgage process.
In 2017, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said bitcoin was a “fraud.” Five months ago, one of the bank’s managing directors told Quartz that the blockchain technology underlying bitcoin may not make payments faster. But today, JPMorgan said it launched a pilot project that uses blockchain for business-to-business payments, using a token it dubs JPM Coin. CNBC first reported the news.
Digital competition is shaking up the banking business. This can be an opportunity for people looking to boost the rate they get on savings.
How Britain’s departure from the EU will play out next month is anyone’s guess. Surprisingly, investors appear unfazed by the uncertainty when it comes to financial startups.
Did you know Brits spend an average of £50.56 ($65.15 ) at online florists for Valentine’s Day? Or that jewelry sales for the big day are expected to decline in the US this year? For payment companies with access to spending data, pitching these insights to reporters is a clever way to win attention.
A peculiar thing about cryptocurrencies is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to figure out their actual value, despite having a market capitalization thought to be around $120 billion or more.
BB&T’s deal with SunTrust Banks is the biggest bank acquisition since the financial crisis in 2008, and the lenders’ executives have taken care to position the combination as a “merger of equals.” In practice, such deals are very seldom truly equal, but the companies’ plan to create the sixth-largest US bank comes pretty close.
Right now is the best time ever for a fintech company to raise funds: venture capitalists poured a record $40 billion into finance startups around the world last year, as a growing stampede of unicorns look to reinvent the business of money.
Ripple, a seven-year-old company that uses blockchain technology for payments, has grand ambitions to revolutionize the way banks send money to each other internationally. Whether it gets anywhere close to reaching such a lofty aspiration remains to be seen, but it has at least succeeded at pumping competition (and attention!) into a sleepy corner of banking.
For a demonstration of how political upheaval ripples through the financial system, look no further than the market for initial public offerings (IPOs). Stock offerings dried up almost completely last month in the US and Europe, and things weren’t much better in the rest of the world, as well.
The nuclear arms controls that have been in place since the end of the Cold War appear increasingly strained. The US said yesterday (Feb. 1) that it will withdraw from a landmark treaty for such weapons that it signed with the Soviet Union in 1987. Russia responded today by saying it will also suspend its obligations under the agreement.
The centuries-old British Museum is the biggest in the UK and contains the Rosetta Stone, a collection of Egyptian mummies, and some of the oldest known artifacts of human history. And now it finally—this time officially—has a Banksy.
Virginia’s Democratic governor Ralph Northam is facing widespread calls to resign after what appeared to be a racist photo of the former Army doctor and pediatric neurologist emerged online.
If Apple really wants to give companies like PayPal a run for their money, it needs to give Americans want they want: old-fashioned plastic cards.
Deutsche Bank, at least by Deutsche Bank standards, reported some good news today: Executives touted that they’ve met or exceeded recent goals, and the German lender posted its first annual profit since 2014. But meetings with analysts and journalists suggest that many think the only way forward is a shotgun wedding with another bank.
When it comes to financial technology companies, Ant Financial is in it own league. The affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba raised $14 billion in venture capital last year, not far from the $15.9 billion for all fintech investments in the EU and US in the same period. A key question is whether the growth of the world’s most valuable fintech firm is an anomaly or a sign of things to come from China.
For lovers of large-denomination paper money, Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff is enemy No. 1. His book, The Curse of Cash, outlines the case for getting rid of as much of paper money as possible, and larger notes in particular, because of the role cash plays in money laundering and tax evasion.
A lasting debate since the last financial crisis is whether banks are still too big to fail. In the US, there are fewer of them and they are indeed bigger than before the panic in 2008.
