Fintech

Ron Suber is President of Prosper, one of America’s first and largest peer-to-peer lenders. Who is the typical user of Prosper? Prosper is an online marketplace for credit that offers access to consumer loans. We focus on three types of borrowers. The first is the person who wants to consolidate high-interest debt with a loan that…

Through the years, I’ve seen a few changes in finance and technology.  We’ve seen dress-down Friday move to dress-down everyday (if you’re a Fintech firm); we’ve seen borders and barriers breaking down between ethnicity and sexual preferences; and we’ve seen globalisation of activities.  But the one thing we haven’t seen enough of is diversity of…

I was recently interviewed by Emerging Markets Review just before travelling to Korea in July.  The interview lasted a while, but stunned me when they produced the magazine with yours truly front page and centre.  Rather than saying anything more, here's the interview which you can download as a PDF if you prefer.   The global…

I’ve discovered lots of lists of Fintech unicorns.  The main list is from Jim Bruene; there's a nice list that is from a European's perspective by Bernard Lunn;  and a UK list published by me the other day.  In fact, in preparing some charts yesterday, I scraped the list of Unicorns and valuations as of last week…

I find it interesting that so many bloggers on Fintech deride the banks for being slow, clueless or stupid.  So many blogs talk about how banks don’t do this, don’t do that; fail at this, fail at that; have no idea, cannot change; are stuck in the past or have their heads up their arse. …

It’s mid-summer and quiet, but there is some interesting stuff still happening, particularly when we talk about Unicorns.  Do you believe in Unicorns? Unicorns, in technology terms, are companies with valuations of more than $1 billion that have launched since 2000.  There are quite a few of them out there including Uber, Airbnb, Twitter, Whatsapp,…

Since asking a while ago who will be the Uber of banking, I’m fed up with everyone talking about the Uber of banking.  For example, two headlines caught my eye this morning: Visa Invests in Stripe to Prep for the 'Uberization' of Retail; and Will Uber be the Uber of banking? Both stories are interesting, and demonstrate the…

One of my good connections via social media is Huy Nguyen Trieu.  Huy writes a regular blog at Disruptive Finance, as well as being a Managing Director for Macro Structuring at Citi.  He posted something in the last week that I felt was worth re-posting here as a guest blog.   The One Chart you Need to…

I have this mantra in my presentations about payments.  Payments is being attacked by Fintech startups like Klarna, Square, Stripe, Alipay, PayPal (Venmo, Braintree) and more.  In fact, according to VentureScanner, it’s the second most active area for investors after lending (P2P and crowdfunding) … … and the most mature sector for new competition to traditional…