#293
Ze Germans Are Coming!

Extend Co-Founder, COO, and CMO speaks at FORTUNE Brainstorm Finance Conference - Extend was featured at FORTUNE's Brainstorm Finance Conference Thursday in Montauk, NY. CMO, Guillaume Bouvard, spoke on a panel about mobile wallets and the future of payments. Read more

MoneyLion featured by Benziga as way to help improve credit scores - MoneyLion is featured on Benziga as an online bank that can help improve consumers' credit scores. Not only are ML Plus users able to get access to a 5.99% line of credit, but loans are deposited in seconds. Read more

Plaid announces Quovo-based investments API - Quovo made headlines this week, as Plaid (who acquired Quovo earlier this year) announces Investments: an API based on Quovo that enables customers to pull investment data into their apps. Read more

Reonomy to become CoreLogic's preferred commercial real estate data partner - Reonomy announced a partnership with CoreLogic, a provider of residential and commercial property data, to become its preferred commercial real estate data partner. Read more

Meet the British mobile banks showing the US how it's done - Monzo's CEO and founder Tom Blomfield thinks "the US financial system is a decade behind Europe." pointing out that, "it’s very hard to send money from one US bank account to another.” In the UK, a Faster Payments Service (FPS) has existed since 2008. Read more

Goldman Sachs executive says legacy retail banks are ‘screwed’ - “There are two kinds of incumbent banks: There are banks that are screwed, and there are banks that don’t know they’re screwed,” said Adam Dell, founder of personal finance app Clarity Money, that was acquired by Goldman Sachs in 2018. Read more

Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency and Calibra digital wallet - After nearly a year of speculation, Facebook has finally unveiled its plans to create a cryptocurrency, which will be called Libra and debut in 2020. The company also announced Calibra, a new subsidiary that will build a digital wallet for Messenger, WhatsApp, and a standalone app on iOS and Android. Read more

UnitedHealth to buy Equian for $3.2b - UnitedHealth Group agreed to buy health-care payments firm Equian from New Mountain Capital for about $3.2b. Equian provides healthcare payment processing services. Read more

Equifax and FinTech Sandbox announce collaboration - Equifax, a global data, analytics and technology company, will offer commercial and consumer data that will help FinTech Sandbox to develop new products. FinTech Sandbox is a non-profit that serves the financial sector. Read more

Advisor skepticism over ESG beginning to wane - Last year, ESG funds attracted record net flows attracting nearly $5.5b in net new money, to $161b. Interest is strongest among millennial investors. Read more

Banks to fight over $18t held by the poorest of the rich - People with assets of $250k to $1m are set to become a new battleground for the world’s financial firms, as declining margins push them to seek out pockets of wealth further down the scale. Read more

Interactive map of remittance flows worldwide in 2017 - Pew Research Center just published a terrific interactive map of worldwide remittance flows - an estimated $625b was sent by migrants to individuals in their home countries in 2017, a 7% increase from 2016. Read more

Congress members express concerns over Facebook's Libra - Congress members, including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, called for the tech company to testify and push pause on the project. Read more

Nevada to try limited banking for cash-heavy pot industry - The Nevada state treasurer’s office will “set up a three-year pilot program” to ease some of the burden for businesses who have to pay employees with envelopes of cash and drive to government buildings with duffel bags of cash to pay state taxes. Read more

Ripple agrees to sizable MoneyGram investment - Ripple, the startup behind the XRP cryptocurrency, has agreed to invest up to $50m in MoneyGram, the giant money-transfer service. Read more

Insurance discussions at an autonomous vehicle summit - Insurance, an emerging topic in the self-driving car industry, was discussed at length at The Information's AV Summit. When there is a collision involving a driverless robotaxi, who is liable? Read more

Ron Suber, former head of Prosper, gives his thoughts on the future of finance - Ron Suber, the former head of Prosper, who also built and sold Merlin, was recently a guest on a Rebank podcast "The Golden Age of Fintech with Ron Suber." Ron gave his "30,000 feet view" of fintech and discussed the change in the mindset of large incumbents over the years. Read more

Algorand Foundation raises over $60m in token sale - Singapore based blockchain platform raised over $60m in a token sale conducted on CoinList. The Algorand Foundation is the first organization to conduct a fully transparent global auction on its own blockchain platform. Read more