Samsung Pay takes on Apple over tap and go
In an approach that distinguishes it from Apple in the contactless payment market, Samsung says banks are welcome to join its digital wallet and it doesn’t want any of their interchange fees or data. Samsung launched Samsung Pay in Australia on Wednesday. The service is live in South Korea, the United States, China and Spain. In Australia, it is available only for holders of Citi and American Express-issued cards. But Prasad Gokhale, vice-president of the mobile division for Samsung in Australia, is confident that each of the big four banks will embrace the platform in the coming months. He said the world’s largest consumer electronics company did “not want to […]
Bitcoin hits two-year high
The price of the digital currency bitcoin hit a two-year high yesterday, trading above $US700 for the first time since 2014, after it jumped 21 per cent over the weekend. The surge came days before an unusual event called the “halving”, an adjustment to bitcoin’s protocol designed to control the creation of new coins. The last time the currency traded at this level — as high as $US719 yesterday, according to data provider CoinDesk — was February 2014, when it was coming down from its December 2013 high of $US1147. Bitcoin, launched in 2009, is a digital currency that runs on a decentralised network of computers and isn’t backed or […]
Australian FinTech marketplace Valiant announces capital raise
Valiant, member of fintech hub Stone & Chalk announced today that the company has completed their seed round capital raising subscription. The $800,000 capital raise was led by fintech venture capital firm Reinventure, supported by H2 Ventures and a selection of prominent angel investors including Mitchel Harad and Vincent Turner. Co-Founders Alex Molloy and Richard Cotton launched the Valiant business loan marketplace in November 2015, with the aim to minimise the angst associated with sourcing, comparing, and securing business loans. Valiant partners with over 26 lenders from across the lending spectrum with more lenders being added monthly. Alex Molloy: “We built the Valiant marketplace to solve a very particular need. Until now, it has been difficult for time poor business owners to quickly […]
Fintech marketplace lender Bigstone launches in Australia
Bigstone, a fintech marketplace lender, announced today the launch of simple, fast and fair funding, offering the best small business loans in Australia. Bigstone was conceived by a team of finance industry experts who saw the future of finance in the smart application of technology to cut out the banking middleman to directly connect borrowers and lenders in a safe and secure lending marketplace. With over 100 years of combined banking experience, Bigstone have taken the closely guarded lending recipes used by banks and added new sources of data and proprietary algorithms to deliver the most competitive small business lending rates in the country for creditworthy small businesses. According […]
Blockchain to revolutionise online transactions
IT’S only been around for eight years, and has started life with a reputation sullied by drug dealers and online vigilantes, but there’s a new technology on the rise which could revolutionise how we transact online. And whether it leaves a swath of destructive disruption among large, incumbent businesses — think banks and share registries — in its path is yet to be seen, although it has been widely predicted. Blockchain is the technological innovation which underpins the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. So far Bitcoin has proven to be unhackable and untraceable — a key benefit if you are, for example, running the world’s largest online drug marketplace, a la the Silk […]
Brisbane Is Playing Host To Australia’s First Cashless Cafe
Do you use your credit card or your phone to pay for your morning coffee, or are you still holding on to that pocketful of coins? Sydney-based coffee roastery and cafe chain Pablo & Rusty’s is opening Australia’s first cashless cafe in Brisbane, ditching the notes and coins in favour of credit cards, phone-based payments and even smart coffee cups. With a number of successful locations already opened across Sydney (which do indeed take cash), Pablo & Rusty’s was planning the opening of their Brisbane store when they had the idea to make it entirely cashless. “We were just thinking through some of the logistics of how to manage cash […]
LoanDolphin fintech dives into banks’ mortgage market
After eight years at Westpac, self-described “ideas guy” Ranin Mendis finally put one into action. Today, a few months after co-founding LoanDolphin with Rod Dutra in February, Mednis says the start-up has distributed more than $50 million of mortgages on its online auction platform, building on the fintech sector’s assault on the $1.5 trillion home loan market. “The mortgage space is a massive market so if you can crack it then that’s obviously a great space to be in,” says Toby Heap, a founding partner at H2 Ventures, which has invested $100,000 in LoanDolphin. “What we really liked about LoanDolphin is they’re tackling it from a pretty fresh perspective.” LoanDolphin […]
Sydney FinTech Valiant announces major partnership with Vow Financial
Valiant, member of FINTECH incubator Stone & Chalk will announce today an official partnership with the Yellow Brick Road Group (Yellow Brick Road and Vow Financial) at the Commercial Conference at The Sheraton Mirage Gold Coast. The partnership grants the Group exclusive partnership access to Valiant’s business loan marketplace platform and its range of non-bank small business lending solutions. Immediately, the Valiant marketplace solves the broker network’s concerns with sourcing, comparing, and securing funding for traditionally hard to finance SMB customers. Alex Molloy, Managing Director of Valiant: “The challenge for brokers is that serving customers in the short term funding space takes an unbalanced amount of time – and for hard to fund customers, […]
