#191
The Road To Zero

New rating agency ranks emerging market banks by financial crime risk - EuroMoney details how a distinguished US Treasury official and an international corporate lawyer linked up to create Sigma Ratings, the world's first global business integrity rating agency. Sigma’s platform is currently in beta and it plans to release the product this fall, providing non-credit ratings for 16 countries and 500 financial institutions. Read more

MoneyLion's Jon Stevenson at InVest 2018 - Video of Jon Stevenson, Head of Wealth Management and Banking at MoneyLion, explaining why he thinks that in less than five years the majority of Americans will receive their financial advice from digital platforms like MoneyLion. Read more

US Treasury issues financial data sharing recommendation - Portfolio company Quovo reviews a Treasury report released on Tuesday. The report focused on the state of fintech in the US and provided recommendations for how to foster further innovation. Notably, the report recognized the benefits of consumer data aggregation and how it has been integral in finance’s technological transformation - a theme central to Quovo's products. Read more

Fidelity rewrites the rules of investing with zero-fee funds - Is the race to the bottom over? Fidelity is now offering mutual funds with zero expense ratio. Fidelity is also offering accounts with no minimum and no fees. Read more

Free Fidelity funds stoke price war in bid to catch index giants - Bloomberg talks about why a company that built an empire on the prowess of its stock pickers has moved aggressively in a world dominated by low-cost products and ETFs. Read more

ICE announces Bakkt, a global platform and ecosystem for digital assets - Bakkt is designed to enable consumers and institutions to seamlessly buy, sell, store and spend digital assets. Formed with the purpose of bringing trust, efficiency and commerce to digital assets, Bakkt seeks to develop open technology to connect existing market and merchant infrastructure to the blockchain. Read more

Square sees profits from bitcoin sales double in Q2 - Mobile payments firm Square said it made $37m in revenue from bitcoin sales in the second quarter of 2018. The company released an unaudited quarterly financial report on Wednesday, which indicated it made gross revenue of $814m, 4.5% of which came from the cryptocurrency buying service added to its Cash App late last year. Read more

In second act, a Silicon Valley CEO opens up about affairs - Mr. Cagney, formerly of SoFi, opens up to the WSJ on his relationships with staff and how he misled the SoFi board of directors about one of the affairs. Read more

China’s retail investors create a playground for data-loving quants - Even BlackRock’s quant arm, San Francisco-based Systematic Active Equities, uses its machines to read almost 1m online posts a day in China, which it says can offer valuable indicators on what the herd of retail investors are planning to do. Read more

Coinbase hires Pershing's head of compliance - The U.S. cryptocurrency trading platform has hired Jeff Horowitz, former global head of compliance at Pershing and previously head of compliance and AML at Goldman, as it looks to legitimize the asset class in the eyes of institutional investors. Read more

Nobody says ‘Zelle Me’: banks struggle to catch up to Venmo - Though Zelle has shown promising early growth, it fell short of its goal to have 33 banks on the network and still runs on plumbing that is more than 40 years old. Read more

Tron Foundation officially completes acquisition of BitTorrent for $120m - BitTorrent, which took the mantle from Napster as a pioneering peer-to-peer protocol for filesharing, has been acquired by Tron - a blockchain protocol with the 11th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization at $2.4b. Read more

Trump administration embraces fintech startups - The Treasury Department provided 80 recommendations, including: a "sandbox" giving regulatory relief to startups, reduction in payday-lending rules, and a fresh look at rules governing fintech investments by banks. The recommendations preceded the OCC's decision to accept applications for special purpose fintech charters. Read more

OCC begins accepting national bank charter applications from financial technology companies - The OCC is now accepting applications for special purpose fintech bank charters. The charter may obviate the need for certain fintech startups to get licensed in each individual state, and/or partner with traditionally chartered banks. Read more

Bitcoin mining company Bitmain hit $1.1b in profits in Q1 2018 - Bitmain, the Chinese bitcoin mining behemoth and ASIC chip manufacturer, reportedly generated over $1b in profit in Q1 2018 alone. The company plans to IPO in Hong Kong. Read more

IEX exchange has wall street fame but no listings - Though New York based IEX, a six year old startup, handles around 2.4% of daily U.S. trading volume, it has so far failed to attract any listings. Companies are loath to switch exchanges, leaving the startup with few options to incentivize switching. Read more