Hi 5! The top five fintech stories we’re following today

top 5 weekly fintech stories

Digital wallets: lacking growth, getting creative

Accenture’s recent report that POS digital payments haven’t grown at all confirmed what we already knew — namely, the technology is ready, but users aren’t. Still, there’s some movement on the mobile payment horizon. Apple is making a conscious effort to get users comfortable using Apple Pay in ecommerce, and not just in retail. Meanwhile, Walmart’s isn’t twiddling its thumbs, and is now in talks to integrate other digital wallet options into its newly launched retail app.

Online lending’s blurred lines

We’re sometimes quick to draw distinctions between the incumbents and the upstarts. But in online lending, things are getting a bit blurred. A new partnership between Fannie Mae and SoFi shows how fintech partnerships can work. Partnering is starting to look more and more attractive, given that OnDeck is primarily using its own balance sheet to fund growing originations, while Lending Club investors continue to shrug off more losses.

What will those incumbents think of next?

Incumbents partner up with fintechs, they acquire them, they launch innovation labs, and sometimes they do what Bank Leumi did — disrupt itself from within with its new digital bank, Pepper.

Industry leaders share insights on success and fintech trends

It’s rare that fintech CEOs get the chance to really open up about the challenges and delights of their jobs. Tradestreaming’s smooth-talking Josh Liggett got them to share their CEO highs and lows. Other industry experts spoke of the major trends they see impacting fintech and finance.

Software, APIs, and SDKs

If you want to see just how banks, with more open systems and established software connectors, can evolve, here are 7 examples showing the power of banking APIs. Citi is one of the more recent incumbents to join the API fray with its new global API developer hub. In payments, CardFlight chose not to reinvent the wheel. The company built its tech on top of existing payment infrastructure, rather than building out something new. And finally, WTF are SDKs, and why you should care.

 

The future of online lending: 13 top business lenders

list of the best online lenders

When JP Morgan announced it would begin offering loans to its small business clients via a partnership with a fintech startup, the market took notice. Instead of building its own online lending offering, the biggest US bank chose to partner with OnDeck, whose stock price spiked almost 30% upon the announcement. Those following what’s happening in online lending have witnessed billions of dollars of debt and equity that’s poured into the space over the past couple of years.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, banks have tightened lending criteria and that’s provided an opportunity for technology and service startups to step in. In the aggregate, though these firms have enabled billions of dollars of lending to small businesses over the past few years, they’re merely a speck on the entire map of lending, paling in comparison to their offline competitors.

These startups have generally taken 2 different approaches:

  1. marketplace lending: Popularized in the consumer space, companies like Lending Club have created vast marketplaces of lenders and borrowers. While Lending Club has entered into the SMB lending space, there are other pureplays like Lending Circle that have made SMB lending their bread and butter.
  2. balance sheet lenders: these companies aren’t acting as brokers but actually underwrite their own loans to SMB borrowers. It gets a little more complicated as institutional lenders like Victory Park provide lending facilities to these online lenders. Whether they’re lending out their own equity or someone else’s cash, balance sheet lenders are assuming the underwriting risk.

Here’s a good breakdown of the space by Orchard Platform, which built and services some of the underlying marketplace lending technology for the platforms and the institutional lenders participating in this form of credit.

 

Orchard Platform's map of online lending

As we’ve seen in the robo-advisory space, the online lending marketplace appears to be splitting into two:

  1. pureplay startups that are taking incumbent banks head on competitively
  2. companies that provide enabling technology to the existing banking infrastructure to work with banks to develop their own online lending offerings

Most of the lending that’s happening online is unsecured. There is a growing focus on invoice financing and there’s been a lot of interest on creative solutions that provide more security than plain vanilla credit.

Companies like PayPal and Amazon are lending to merchants on their platforms as all payments run through their shopping charts. As startups and incumbents invest more in the online lending space, ecommerce companies have an interesting role to play in the industry. In this market, everyone can be an online lender.

The market opportunity is vast and growing quickly. Online SMB lending was about $9B in 2015 and expected to rise to over $80B by 2020, according to Intuit. New technology promises to make capital more inclusive, streamline to process for assessing creditworthiness, and to cutdown on the paperwork and waiting time typical of traditional lending.

Here are the top online small and medium business lenders that should be on your radar.

5 trends we’re watching this week

5 trends in finance this week

[alert type=yellow ]Every week at Tradestreaming, we’re tracking and analyzing the top trends impacting the finance industry. The following is a list of important things going on we think are worth paying attention to. For more in depth trendfollowing, subscribe to Tradestreaming’s newsletter .[/alert]

1. Goldman, JPMorgan Seen as Fintech Winners While AmEx Suffers (Bloomberg)
Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan will probably benefit most from the coming wave of financial technology disruption, rather than being supplanted by startups driving the change, according to a new survey.

2. 2015 Automated Platform Performance Review: Betterment vs. Wealthfront (Meb Faber)
Meb Faber with some good analysis on how Betterment performed this year vs. Wealthfront (and where Schwab and Vanguard come in). Hint: roboadvisors are neither “safe” nor are they one-size-fits-all.

3. Inside J.P. Morgan’s Deal With On Deck Capital (WSJ)
As part of the deal, OnDeck won’t put up any capital and will get fees to originate and service loans for J.P. Morgan, many with a value up to $250,000, previously considered too small to move the needle at the big bank. OnDeck also can use data it gleans from the partnership to improve its lending models. “We think it’s a watershed partnership,” said OnDeck CEO Noah Breslow.

4. Microinsurance Is The Answer To The Insurance Industry (TechCrunch)
In the wake of Lemonade’s giant seed round, the tech industry is buzzing thinking about the potential of disrupting insurance. Whether it’s peer to peer models or microinsurance, Silicon Valley is coming.

5. Nasdaq Linq Enables First-Ever Private Securities Issuance Documented With Blockchain Technology (Nasdaq)
Transaction by Chain.com Marks Significant ‘Proof of Concept’ and Major Step Forward in Use of Blockchain. Blockchain Holds Potential for 99%.