PayPal launches Pay Monthly BNPL offering - The new offering lets customers space payments over a long period of time, giving them “greater flexibility and even more choices to pay for the items they want and need." Customers can make purchases between $199 and $10,000, dividing the cost into payments over a six-month to two-year period, with the first payment due one month after purchase. Read more
U.S. home equity hits highest level on record—$27.8t - The increase is another consequence of a red-hot housing market. Double-digit price gains have driven some would-be homeowners out of the market. At the same time, rising home values are boosting the finances of the Americans who already own them. Read more
Uber and PayU team up to break LatAm's cash habit - Uber Core Payments Lead Maria Jose Cornejo and PayU CEO of Global Payment Mario Shiliashki used Latin America as a case study in how cash is slowly ceding ground to digital in emerging markets, introducing digital ways to pay and be paid. Expanding into new markets in other countries is the way many big companies got big. Yet even after the pandemic and digital shift that it triggered, digital payments are far from ubiquitous in some large markets, like Latin America, where cash still rules and digital has its work cut out. Read more
Circle announces new euro-backed stablecoin - To start, EUROC will be issued as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, the firm said, "with support for additional blockchains expected later this year." Read more
Brex, which started out serving startups, now says it is ‘less suited to meet the needs of smaller customers’ - Three months after announcing it would make a big push into software and enterprise, fintech giant Brex is apparently abandoning the very segment it started out to serve – small and medium-to-sized businesses. Read more
The SEC war on greenwashing has begun - There’s now little doubt that the US Securities and Exchange Commission actually means business in its bid to crack down on misleading claims by managers of ESG funds. Under Chair Gary Gensler, officials have been demanding that money managers explain the standards they supposedly use to classify ESG-labeled funds. When the examination division spots potential misconduct, it typically alerts the agency’s enforcement unit for further investigation. Read more
Starling snaps up £500m mortgage book in shift from Covid loans - Starling Bank is buying the loan portfolio from specialist lender Masthaven. The acquisition will help Starling to diversify lending away from the government-backed Covid loans that constitute most of its assets. Read more
Charles Schwab paying more than $186m in settlement over robo-adviser business - The Securities and Exchange Commission said Schwab’s robo-adviser portfolios kept between 6% and 29.4% of assets in cash, instead of investing the money in stocks or other securities. The practice made money for Schwab’s affiliated bank, which lent out the cash, and the investment adviser made “false and misleading statements” in regulatory brochures about the conflict of interest, the SEC said in a settlement order. Read more
Consumers racking up more debt to pay off BNPL loans - More than two in five buy now, pay later (BNPL) customers borrowed money to make repayments, Citizens Advice has found, fueling fears of a looming credit crisis among cash-strapped consumers. Younger shoppers were most likely to borrow to pay off BNPL purchases. The types of borrowing included overdrafts, borrowing from friends and family, loans and payday loans. Read more
High-net-worth individuals have over half their wealth in IRAs and 401(k)s - The majority of U.S. adults (74%) don’t think they’ll ever become a high-net-worth individual themselves, defined as having at least $1 million in investable, or liquid, assets, but retirement investing — something we all have access to — actually plays a major role in many high net worth individuals' portfolios. Read more
YaaS: A framework for evaluating yield-as-a-service - There are some core questions that are useful to answer when evaluating YaaS propositions: 1.) How does the solution work? 2.) Where does the yield come from? 3.) What types of risks exist vs what risks have been disclosed? 4.) What is the state of the macroeconomic environment? 5.) What is the state of the regulatory environment? Read more
China's central bank accepts Ant's application for financial holding company - The People's Bank of China's (PBOC) expected approval of the plan is the latest sign that Ant, a tech giant with financial businesses stretching from payments to wealth management, is poised to emerge from a regulatory crackdown. Read more
What were all those 6,200 Coinbasers doing anyway? - Coinbase revealed it was firing 1,100 people — about 18% of its staff — on the back of a hiring freeze, retractions of job offers, and an employee revolt. At the same time Crypto competitor FTX crowed about having only ~300 employees prompting the question by the FT - what do all the Coinbasers actually do? Read more
Influencers abandon TikTok Shop in latest blow to UK ecommerce venture - TikTok influencers in the UK are dropping out of the company’s ecommerce programme, complaining of poor pay, long hours and promoting cheap products, in the latest signal that the company’s “livestream shopping” model is struggling to take off worldwide. Read more |
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