FinTech

UK robo-advisor Munnypot goes live

Munnypot, a new service offering clear, affordable online financial advice to all is live from today. Munnypot’s founders aim to help close Britain’s financial advice gap, which affects 16 million people1, by making high quality advice available to everyone. Munnypot is an online savings and investment service giving anyone straightforward automated financial advice in a language they can understand, at a fraction of the cost of most financial advisers. The service requires a minimum investment of £25 per month and/or a £250 single investment amount. It provides an intuitive WhatsApp style ‘chat-based’ user-interface that advises people on their savings and investment decisions. Conversational and jargon-free questions, coupled with state of […]

DETAIL
Jan
12

With TravelersBox, turn foreign change at airports into digital currency and iTunes credit

It’s a dilemma that travelers have faced for decades: You’re heading home from a foreign country with a handful or two of spare change. It’s not enough to exchange or buy something at the airport, so what do you do with it? TravelersBox hopes to answer that question. The company has kiosks placed in 10 countries around the world, including Turkey, Georgia, Italy, the Philippines, Israel, and Japan. Users feed their spare change into the machine and can choose to have it converted into a number of useful digital items, from iTunes credit to Starbucks gift cards to PayPal deposits. TravelersBox machines aren’t the first of their kind. In 2015, […]

DETAIL
Jan
12

A Siri for Your Finances? Digit Says Trust Me

The fintech startup is working on algorithms to help you manage your money. Late last year, just in time for Christmas shopping, Rachel Rhoads got a nice surprise. One of her secret savings accounts had grown to $900 behind her back. Rhoads, a 37-year-old Los Angeles-based sales director for a jewelry line, has an account with Digit, a financial technology company with an algorithm that tracks users’ income and spending patterns. It painlessly spirits small amounts of money out of checking and into a savings account every two or three days. “I just thought it was such a good idea, to set it and forget it,” said Rhoads, who says […]

DETAIL

LandlordInvest gains ISA manager status from HMRC

LandlordInvest has been approved by HMRC as an ISA manager, paving the way for the launch of its Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA), Peer-to-Peer Finance News has learnt. The peer-to-peer lender, which specialises in buy-to-let mortgages, gained full authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority in early December, following a 24-month application process. The platform will be making an official announcement regarding its HMRC approval later today. The IFISA is a tax-free wrapper around P2P investments heralded as a game-changer for the industry. It is hoped that the ISA brand will open the sector up to a wider range of retail investors, who might have not considered P2P before. At present, just […]

DETAIL

Octopus gets FCA authorisation

OCTOPUS Choice is the latest peer-to-peer lending platform to be granted full authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), just nine months after launch. The property lender has attracted almost £45m from lenders and funded 75 deals since it launched last April. Richard Wazacz, head of Octopus Choice, said authorisation now opens the door for the firm to launch its Innovative Finance ISA later this year. “The incredible demand we’ve witnessed in the nine months since launch underlines the level of interest for this sort of investment – and the authorisation that the FCA has now granted us will no doubt give renewed confidence to our fast-growing base of investors,” […]

DETAIL
Jan
11

Robo advisor Scalable reaches £100m of assets

Shortly before Christmas the start-up reached €100m of assets under management in 10 months, making it among the fastest growing robo advice companies. Wealth manager start-up Scalable Capital has past £100m AUM, with assets growing at nearly £5m a week, co-founder and CEO Adam French said in an interview. The firm, which uses automatic algorithms to manage the risk of portfolios on a daily basis, has over 2,500 customers and reached €100m AUM on Dec. 14, 2016. “Reaching this milestone so quickly underlines the trust our clients put into us,” said French. The Munich-based company has an office in London, which French overseas, and also passports into Austria through its […]

DETAIL
Jan
10

US clearing house moves to blockchain

Swaps processing platform for distributed ledger. US post-trade provider, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), will use blockchain technology to rebuild a platform that processes US$11 trillion worth of credit default swaps each year, the company said. IBM and technology startups Axoni and R3 CEV have been selected to work on the project which is set to kick-off this month, the DTCC said. Project management and integration services will fall to IBM, which will also contribute distributed ledger technology expertise. Axoni’s AxCore DLT protocol will form the basis of the platform. AxCore will be submitted to the Linux Foundation’s HyperLedger project and become open source once the DTCC implementation […]

DETAIL
Jan
10

JPMorgan-backed InvestCloud buys London fintech Babel for $20 million

A London software company that helps process trades for wealth managers and stockbrokers has been snapped up by Californian fintech InvestCloud for $20 million (£16.4 million). Babel Systems, founded in 2008, helps with middle and back office processing of equities, bonds, and funds, and works with the likes of robo-advisor Nutmeg. The company’s founders and angel investors have spent around £6 million developing its product. Los Angeles-headquartered InvestCloud, founded in 2010, builds software for finance companies to help their interactions with clients online. JPMorgan is one of over 600 customers and the investment bank took and undisclosed stake in the business last September. It has raised over $100 million (£41.1 […]

DETAIL