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Meeting consumer preferences in an evolving financial services landscape
Financial services have changed significantly over the past few years, but so have consumer needs. The pandemic triggered a migration towards online experiences, creating a fertile competing ground for new fintechs and established players looking to capture more customers.
Speaking at Tearsheet’s Acquire Conference last week, Erika White, Affirm’s VP of marketing and communications, said that money has always been a delicate matter for people, and everyone has a different relationship with their finances. But for most people, it’s a source of stress and anxiety. Looking at consumer insights, Affirm found that the average consumer worries about money six times a day.
Quick take: Piermont Bank eyes embedded business with Unit partnership
Piermont Bank, a New York-based digital commercial bank, has announced a new partnership with Unit, a banking as a service provider, to expand its offering and add product capabilities that enable fintechs to embed more banking products.
Unit’s technology enables fintechs and non-bank firms to build and launch bank accounts, cards, payments, and lending products. With Unit, Piermont can sit behind these services for clients, as the institution provides core banking services like compliance, deposit capability, and lending.
By expanding its platform offerings, Piermont can help clients determine the right API partner for their use case, maturity stage, and product needs.
This week in Bankchain: Crypto-backed cards and global blockchain investment trends
Our new Bankchain Newsletter gives you a bird’s eye view of all that’s happening in the world of crypto and DeFi. Subscribe now to stay in the know on all things crypto.
Crypto-backed cards have become one of the world’s fastest-growing card categories. They offer consumer and commercial cardholders a number of benefits such as reduced or waived foreign conversion fees, near-real-time transactions, rewards, and multi-currency features that allow them to move between crypto and fiat in a simple and secure way.
Payment processing firm i2c recently released a report which finds that crypto card programs are growing much faster on average than traditional cards and have seven times less attrition when compared to non-crypto programs.
Just look at the charts
- Galileo had significant growth in Q4 2021
Source: Galileo
2. Do you need blockchain?
Source: CA Riddhi Jain
Today's stories
China pushing ahead with digital yuan
China will soon approve the third batch of localities set to launch trials of its digital yuan currency (Reuters)
Founders aren't happy
Mercury, which describes itself as a bank for startups, restricted several accounts linked to African tech startups (TechCrunch)
Schwab sets foot in crypto ETFs
Charles Schwab’s asset management arm is looking to join the crypto ETF fray, following industry heavyweights like BlackRock and Fidelity Investments (Blockworks)
Genesis Digital eyes clean energy mining center
Genesis Digital Assets plans to start a new self-hosted bitcoin mining data center in Sweden with up to 100 megawatts of power capacity (CoinDesk)
How Lido raises the stakes for crypto investors
Lido is the market leader for Ethereum liquid staking, representing over 80% of market share in the space (TechCrunch)
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