#300
Magic Eraser

Artivest announces leadership change - Portfolio company Artivest announced this week that Martin Beaulieu is becoming the company's Executive Chairman and CEO, and that James Waldinger, founder of Artivest, will become President of the company. Wishing Martin, James, and the rest of the Artivest team continued success! Read more

Bitcoin's risk-adjusted returns can be considered superior to S&P 500 and gold - According to data from portfolio company TradeBlock, when analyzing the returns of Bitcoin, the S&P 500, and gold using the Sortino Ratio (penalizes only downside volatility when calculating risk-adjusted returns), Bitcoin's returns were highest between August 13, 2018 and August 9, 2019. Read more

Commercial cards: growth on growth, and opportunities for smaller banks - Commercial card use in the US is rising dramatically, with spend volumes of $504.7b in 2018 projected to grow to $847b by 2022 driven by a commercial shift away from paper-based payments. Portfolio company Extend - a virtual commercial credit card issuing platform - has a massive opportunity in front of it. Read more

'It's crazy': Chase Bank forgiving all debt owed by its Canadian credit card customers - JP Morgan Chase is forgiving all outstanding debt owed by users of its two Canadian credit cards to complete its exit from the Canadian credit card market. Affected customers can't believe their luck! Read more

Regulatory hurdles imposed in China continue to hit P2P platforms - More than 80% of China's 6,200 P2P lenders (since 2015) have either been shut down or troubled, according to Shanghai-based researcher Yingcan Group. Zendai, a private Shanghai-based investment company, is the latest to pull out of P2P lending in China, shutting down two P2P lending units worth $1.4b. Read more

"Buy now, pay later" on the rise - Fintech firms enabling "buy now, pay later" services are on the rise, highlighted by Klarna's recent $5.5b valuation. Clever marketing and the benefits to both the store and payment financing provider are part of the surge in popularity, but these services also carry dangers such as consumers spending more than they can afford. Read more

ESG investing sparks race in tech and hiring at asset managers - This year asset managers have bought stakes in ESG businesses, created internal ratings tools and hired specialists to gain a foothold in environmental, social and governance investing as their clients demand that their money is used to do good as well as to generate returns. Read more

Federal Reserve announces plan for real-time payments system - The Fed announced "FedNow," a real-time retail payment infrastructure, that will be available in 2023 or 2024. 90% of the comments that the Fed received in response to a request for comments last November called for the central bank to operate a real-time payment service.Read more

Latin America the focus of Q2 2019 fintech VC investing - According to a CB Insights research report, Latin America became one of the fastest-growing regions for fintech VC investing. In Q2 2019, Latin America fintech VC investing surpassed both China and India, and is already off to a good start in Q3 following the $400m round from Brazil-based NuBank. Read more

U.S. stock market’s consolidated quote system experiences glitch - On Monday the system that feeds real-time data feeds to data providers and is used to calculate index values experienced a processing issue that resulted in some delayed quotes. An example impact of this glitch is that some of Vanguard’s funds appeared to lose as much as half their value on Monday. Read more

Banks near zero hour on $124 trillion of flows - Why do banks charge so much for international transfers? As Bloomberg points out, it’s not like they need to move a sackful of dollars anywhere. It’s just data hopping from one computer to another. Why should it cost $25? Read more

Google announces $1 billion Hudson Square Campus in New York City - Google will grow its existing 7,000-person workforce in New York City to more than 14,000 citing that "New York City continues to be a great source of diverse, world-class talent.” Read more

Silicon Valley is eating the banks’ lunch - Back in 2014, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon warned that Silicon Valley was coming to eat the banks’ lunch. In this FT article is becomes apparent that the technology companies are now starting to "chow down.” Read more

China's digital currency is "ready" - China's central bank announced at the China Finance 40 Group meeting this week that the country will soon release its central bank digital currency. Read more

Tumbling renminbi helps push Chinese into Bitcoin, say traders - A recent run-up in the price of Bitcoin has been attributed to many factors: aggressive monetary easing by central banks, plans by Facebook to develop its own digital tokens, and market manipulation via Tether, another crypto asset. But another force may be giving Bitcoin a lift: demand from Chinese investors. Read more

Finance Forward created to support entrepreneurs - VC firm Village Capital, MetLife Foundation, and PayPal, among others, have collaborated to launch "Finance Forward," a joint venture that will support more than 100 early-stage entrepreneurs building tech-enabled solutions around financial health in the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and India. Read more

Coinbase hack attempt in May highlights rise in attacker sophistication - Coinbase released a detailed report of an attempted phishing attack that occurred in May 2019, and the sophistication of the attack indicates that the attackers were operating with a big budget and an incredible amount of social-engineering effort. Read more