The Startups: Who’s shaking things up (Week ending January 31, 2016)

fintech startups shaking things up

[alert type=yellow ]Every week, Tradestreaming highlights startups in the news, making things happen. The following is just part of this week’s news roundup. You can get these updates delivered direct to your inbox by signing up for the Tradestreaming newsletter.[/alert]

Startups raising/Investors investing

Is VC the right money for fintech? (TechCrunch)

Citi Ventures invests in working capital marketplace, C2FO (Finextra)

College Ave Student Loans scores $20m (PE Hub)

Blockchain Capital raises $13m for second fund (CoinDesk)

Leftover currency converter TravelersBox raises $10m (Reuters)

Social investing startup SprinkleBit raises $10m (TechCrunch)

Dopay, payroll company for the unbanked, raises $2.5m (PE Hub)

MIT spinout Insurify raises $2m to replace insurance agents with robots (TechCrunch)

The Startups: Who’s shaking things up

NYT: How roboadvisers stack up against each other (NY Times)

How Robinhood became the first financial app to receive an Apple Design Award (Let’s Talk Payments)

Robo-advisor Betterment launches business platform (Finextra)
Betterment, the largest automated investing service, is launching Betterment for Business. This comes the same week as President Obama is expected to introduce a budget plan making it easier for small businesses to form retirement plans for their workers.

Broken TransferWise all “smoke and mirrors”? (The Memo)

Moven partners with loan refinancers, Payoff and CommonBond (Bank Innovation)

Spare change investment platform, Acorns launches education site (Bank Innovation)

Tencent’s WeChat Wallet lands in Hong Kong, beating Apple Pay to market for mobile payments (South China Morning Post)

The Startups: Who’s shaking things up (Week ending November 7th, 2015)

fintech companies making news this week

[x_alert type=”success”]Every week, Tradestreaming highlights startups in the news, making things happen. The following is this week’s news roundup. You can get these updates delivered direct to your inbox by signing up for the Tradestreaming weekly newsletter.[/x_alert]

List of the top 10 roboadvisor CEOs (Tradestreaming)
Tradestreaming Tearsheet: Everyone’s talking @ #roboadvisors and automated investing platforms. Leading startups in the space have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and are managing billions of dollars in AUM. But, who are the CEOs running these firms? Who are the people behind this whole industry? Here are 10 of the best.

What will be the most valuable fintech companies in 2020? (Disruptive Finance)
Tradestreaming Tearsheet: Who will be the most valuable Fintech companies of 2020? Here’s an (educated) guess. More importantly, will the largest Fintechs still be focused on niche areas or will they expand into other sectors (like the largest global financial services companies have done)?

Opening up access to new investors in litigation finance (Tradestreaming)
Tradestreaming Tearsheet: Online finance isn’t just making plain vanilla investing/lending more efficient and cheaper to the end users – it’s also opening up entirely new ways to invest and entirely new investable assets available to the average investor. Tradestreaming’s interview with Jay Greenberg of @lexshares – he’s opening up litigation finance to everyone. Can this be an asset class that eventually everyone holds in their retirement portfolios?

Interview with TransferWise’s Taavet Hinrikus and Kristo Kaarmann (Business Insider)
Tradestreaming Tearsheet: The international money transfer startup became one of London’s few ‘unicorns’ in January when Silicon Valley’s Andreessen Horowitz invested. “That makes us here think, ok, we’re probably also at a very special point in time where we’re seeing the birth of whatever number of new global financial services companies.”

Xignite Records 50 Billion Financial Data API Calls per Month (bobsguide)
Tradestreaming Tearsheet: Xignite announced that in July it served more than 50 billion API requests from its market data cloud platform, breaking all previous company records and making Xignite among the top API cloud providers in the world. As fintech enables further unbundling of data and services, Xignite and others in the space are riding the trend.

The fintech Silk Road – what we can learn from China (Jessica Ellerm)
Tradestreaming Tearsheet: “Banks often look at disruption in terms of product impact, in other words, how general FinTech (including distributed ledger technology, P2P lending, third-party payments, etc.) will disrupt. In reality, the biggest threats lie in the changing structure of global markets.”

Kickstarter surpasses $2 billion in pledges (The Verge)
Tradestreaming Tearsheet: Kickstarter announced that more than $2 billion has been pledged in total on the platform. It took the company nearly five years to hit the mark but revenue growth is ramping. Has crowdfunding become a standard way companies finance new products in our age?

Invoice2go gets $15M to compete more directly with Square and PayPal (VentureBeat)
Tradestreaming Tearsheet: Invoice2go has provided small businesses with one tool—a simple way to create an invoice and send it to clients. Now, with $15 million in new funding, the company is preparing to expand more deeply into the small business product territory. Square and PayPal should probably be paying attention.