Ant IPO by the numbers: it’s bigger than Finland’s GDP - Ant’s IPO puts the company’s valuation at dizzying heights. At about $315b, Ant is worth more than the gross domestic products of Egypt, Chile or Finland. For corporate comparisons, it’s bigger than JPMorgan Chase, the biggest U.S. bank. Ant is larger than payment rival PayPal, media giant Disney and dwarfs Bank of America. It’s three times bigger than tech giant IBM and four times larger than Goldman Sachs. Read more
TikTok and Shopify partner on embedded payments - The integration will allow merchants to create and connect their TikTok business account and launch shoppable video ads directly within Shopify. The merchant simply selects the product they’d like to feature in the video and combine their existing imagery or video with a selection of pre-made templates designed for commerce. Read more
Credit Karma in talks to sell tax-preparation business to Square - The move is meant to head off potential antitrust objections to the personal-finance portal’s pending $7.1b sale to TurboTax maker Intuit. A sale of the unit would require approval from the Justice Department, which is concerned that bringing together Credit Karma’s small but growing tax-preparation business with industry-leading TurboTax would leave taxpayers with fewer, and potentially pricier, e-filing options. Read more
This is Goldman’s bet to break into a $32b industry serving the world’s biggest corporations - Goldman has just released software that allows clients to embed banking services into their own products as part of a push to break into the $32b a year industry managing cash for big corporations. Read more
Getting down with the cool kids on bitcoin - The Economist compares the "Blitz Kids", a mix of art students and urchins who frequented the Blitz wine bar in Covent Garden in the 1979-80 and would go on to shape popular culture, to the oddballs, fantasists and drop-outs who are helping to the oddballs, fantasists and drop-outs who are helping to push Bitcoin into the mainstream. Read more
Could negative rates signal the end of free banking? - The UK has carved out its own peculiar niche the “free in-credit banking model”. Current account customers at HSBC in the UK will look at charging for basic banking services, because it was losing money on large numbers of accounts. Read more
Stripe Climate is a new tool to let customers make carbon removal purchases - Stripe is launching a new tool that clients can integrate to set up automatic contributions that are made as a percentage of each transaction. For now, users of Stripe Climate can't choose how their contributions get invested; they basically mirror the path of those being made by Stripe itself. Read more
For years J.P. Morgan was skeptical of Bitcoin. Now the bank’s analysts say its value could triple, challenging gold - J.P. Morgan’s bullish stance is driven in part by PayPal's recent decision to offer Bitcoin to its customers and Square’s recent move to add $50m of the cryptocurrency to its balance sheet. Another major factor for its position, though, is the demographic trend in which younger generations are choosing Bitcoin over gold. Read more
Fintech startup SoFi gets preliminary approval for U.S. bank charter - Social Finance Inc has received preliminary, conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) over its application for a national bank charter, the company said on Wednesday. Read more
Visa to acquire LatAm API-based payments fintech company YellowPepper - The card issuer giant made an undisclosed strategic investment in the start-up back in May 2018. Now merged, the two plan to offer “a flexible and low-cost platform” which “connects to multiple networks for new flows” throughout LatAm and beyond. Read more
Bitcoin returns to post-bubble levels last seen in early 2018 - Proponents of digital assets say the recent rally isn’t another speculative frenzy among individual investors. They point to rising institutional interest, PayPal's decision to allow customers access to cryptocurrencies and the use of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s JPM Coin to make a payment for the first time. Read more
ECB glitch reduced bank deposits by more than 400b euros - The cash remained in banks’ current accounts, and the balances have since returned to normal. Still, the incident highlights the critical role of the payments infrastructure for the euro area, and the risks that could be posed from a longer outage. Read more
Pandemic creates big audience for wage access fintechs - In spite of rising concerns that the apps could be worse for consumers than the payday lenders they aim to replace, earned wage services have taken off as hourly workers seek quick cash during the pandemic, fuelling an explosion of apps that have either opened for business or raised new cash in the past few months. Read more
One in five holiday dollars will be spent online: Mastercard - E-commerce, already on a tear before the pandemic, will capture one out of every five dollars spent in the U.S. this holiday season, according to a new survey from Mastercard. Read more
An avalanche of fraud buried a small-business relief program - Bloomberg explores how it seemed like everyone made a bogus application to the Small Business Administration’s Covid-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. Professional thieves from Russia to Nigeria cashed in. Low-level employees at the agency watched helplessly as misspent money flew out the door. Read more
NerdWallet acquires Fundera, the go-to small business resource - Through this acquisition, NerdWallet will expand its financial guidance and financing options for small business owners, establishing a stronger foothold in the SMB market and advancing its mission of providing clarity for all of life's financial decisions. Read more
Alliance Data to buy fintech startup Bread for $450m - Alliance Data, which provides customer loyalty services and products like co-branded and private label credit cards, plans to offer Bread's installment payment solutions for its brand partners. Read more |
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