#352
Fantasy Fintech

Startup co-founded by ex-Goldman trader is first fintech to complete takeover of a national bank - The move by Jiko, which bills itself as a new kind of bank, gives it broad access to the highly-regulated U.S. market. Fintech firms have to choose one of three ways to break into this market: acquire a banking institution, apply to become a chartered bank, or partner with an existing lender. That U.S. regulators blessed the Jiko transaction is significant mostly because of how fundamentally different it is: It’s a consumer bank that doesn’t hold deposits. Read more

Mastercard, TSYS team to expand installment payment offerings - The deal allows Mastercard customers to split transactions into installments before, during or after checkout. It supplements Mastercard’s merchant offerings through API-based solutions, commercial partnerships and acquisitions, the company said. Read more

Total value locked in Defi jumped 85% in August, $8b in assets held - The defi lending platform Aave makes up 21.86% of that value. Another defi project that has been making waves is the Yearn Finance protocol and the native token YFI. Yearn Finance essentially lets users leverage a variety of defi applications like Curve, Aave, and Compound in order to maximize yield or lending schemes. Read more

Amazon's new offerings make India centre of fintech push - Amazon has added insurance and even gold to its menu of financial services in India, to expand its customer base and attract more subscribers to its Prime loyalty program in a battleground growth market. The push ramps up competition as fintech rivals and their deep-pocketed foreign backers struggle for profitability in a predominantly cash-based economy where about 190m adults do not have bank accounts. Read more

Wonder tool yETH promises to supercharge DeFi yields - yETH is a so-called “vault,” which means that users earn yields together. yETH automatically generates the highest interest or “yield” across DeFi protocols when users stake Ethereum holdings. Traders believe that demand could be huge, and may even create a "liquidity crisis" for Ethereum's token ETH. Read more

Fintech startups catering to small businesses are hurting, and that's creating hard-to-ignore opportunities for incumbents to make cheap acquisitions - Fintech lenders have built new, automated ways of assessing businesses and issuing loans, offering small businesses digital and more efficient ways to access funding than walking into a bank branch. That tech is appealing to incumbents, which have been slower to adopt new trends. Read more

Coinbase shuffles board ahead of rumored IPO - The future of Coinbase, including any IPO, is likely to be a bellwether for the crypto industry as a whole. While the industry has grown enormously—the value of Bitcoin in circulation is now worth over $200b—and made inroads into traditional finance, crypto has not entirely shaken its outlaw reputation. Read more

PayPal introduces interest-free buy-now-pay-later product - As online purchases increase and consumers look for more ways to save due to Covid-19, buy-now-pay-later has accelerated in popularity. Read more

DDoS cyberattacks have skyrocketed this year. Just ask the New Zealand stock exchange - On Monday, the operator of New Zealand’s stock exchange, NZX, suffered a massive cyberattack for a fifth consecutive trading day. Unlike the previous four incidents, however, NZX managed to maintain trading on its markets. Read more