Over the last 6 quarters (1Q 2015 to 2Q 2016), corporate venture arms have invested more than $6 billion into nearly 200 different fintech deals. The pace has remained stable, with roughly 30-35 rounds per quarter. Recent moves so far this year indicate that corporate investors have been seeing strategic benefits and remain committed to… Read More

Anyone with a passing familiarity of fintech recognizes the big names: LendingClub and Prosper in consumer lending, OnDeck and Kabbage in small business lending, Moven and Simple in mobile banking, PayPal and Dwolla in payments, etc. However, most people are not aware of the banks that operate behind the scenes, enabling these fintech companies to… Read More

Last week, Elon Musk unveiled the second part of his Master Plan for Tesla (part one here). He is often considered to be a visionary due to his ability to create and execute a long-term (10 years +) vision, whether it is PayPal, SpaceX, SolarCity, or Tesla. Part two of his plan (including pickup trucks,… Read More

Happy Friday! Europe continues to pull ahead of the US in terms of progressive banking regulations. In the past week, two new digital banks have been awarded banking licenses. Starling Bank received its UK banking license and will launch in January 2017. It has taken 18 months for the bank to complete the licensing process,… Read More

The full-scale “destruction of banking” narrative is getting weary. Disruption is happening, but the hype of 2015 has cooled. This is not an invalidation of the importance of fintech companies, but merely a resetting of expectations to more sustainable business models. Take SoFi, for example. SoFi has been one of the most aggressive fintech startups… Read More

a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen is well-known for his saying that software is eating the world. To illustrate his point that software and technology are changing industries rapidly, he provides common examples: Amazon > Borders, Netflix > Blockbuster, etc. The entire nature of the retail and media industries have changed over the last 15 years thanks… Read More

This week is a deep-dive into Citi’s fintech efforts. After losing the banking innovation headline war over the last few years, the big banks have been stepping up their game. Here is how one mega-bank is fighting back… Fortune recently published a feature with a great inside look into Citi FinTech, the team inside of Citi’s… Read More

Midland v Madden: Marketplace lenders continue to follow the Midland case, which questions “Whether the National Bank Act, which preempts state usury laws regulating the interest a national bank may charge on a loan, continues to have preemptive effect after the national bank has sold or otherwise assigned the loan to another entity”.   As a… Read More

Mary Meeker released her Internet Trends 2016 report this week. As always, it is packed with tons of data and insights. While there are many applications to financial services buried in the pages, my biggest takeaways are below. You can also watch Mary present her report at Code Conference 2016. No other news this week – at least for… Read More

LendingClub: An update on the continuing saga of LendingClub. While there have been multiple reports of investors pausing loan purchase and the tanking share price, a Singapore investment group stepped in and bought a nearly 12% stake in the company, with call options for another 6%. The share price has since been stable in the $4 range… Read More