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 […]
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 […]
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,” […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Cards, ATMs, POS will be redundant by 2020 in India: NITI Aayog
Amid the big push being given to digital transactions post-demonetisation, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant today said cards, ATMs and POS machines would become redundant in the country by 2020. “….India is in the midst of huge huge disruption in the world of both financial technology and in terms of social innovation (there is) huge huge innovation and this disruption will enable India to leapfrog…,” he said. “…and by 2020 my view is that in the next two-and-a-half years, India will make all its debit cards, credit cards, all ATM machines all POS machines totally irrelevant,” Kant told a session at Pravasi Bharatiya Divas 2017, a three-day mega event of […]
US needs to lead digital currency revolution, or other nations will
While the U.S. is consumed by understanding the Russian hacking into its presidential election, the other global power is claiming silent victory in a worldwide cryptocurrency competition. Currently, China is the biggest entity mining bitcoins, claiming 70 percent of all mining equipment globally. Computers, known as “miners”, solve complicated mathematical algorithms, provide hashing power, keep record of transactions and get awarded by a bitcoin. The miners are rewarded with bitcoins for solving challenging cryptographic problems that verify other bitcoin transactions worldwide. At the beginning of the blockchain revolution, bitcoin mining was easier; algorithms were less complicated. Over time, algorithms become more complicated and soon there will barely be any algorithms […]
