News Roundup

This page contains an archive of the Global Newsletter summaries and the weekly fintech news roundups.


Every day the Fintech Nexus news team scours the globe for the most important stories of the day to include in our daily newsletter.


Then every Saturday we bring you our weekly news roundup of the top 10 fintech stories of the week with commentary from Peter Renton.


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After opening a search for a digital lending solution, the American Bankers Association has chosen Akouba; Lend Academy provides details in their article; Akouba offers banks a digital lending software solution for executing small business loans; it primarily works with community and regional banks; the ABA endorsement is a huge win for Akouba and will substantially add to its sales pipeline; the firm has 11 employees and has mainly been working with community banks reporting $500 million to $25 billion in assets; in addition to facilitating new business for Akouba, the ABA endorsement is also designed to help educate the market on advanced solutions for small business online lending; the ABA will be releasing a report on Akouba and the company will be holding a webinar on March 8 to discuss digitizing the small business lending process.  Source

India’s lending network for small businesses has increasingly become reliant on the growing sector of non bank lenders; the non bank market has been steadily increasing loan books by 25 percent per year as bank lending has not increased according to data from Edelweiss Financial Services; access to non traditional forms of data has helped non banks to be able to better asses borrower risk instead of using income taxes which were seen an unreliable. Source.

Lend Academy summarizes the activity of past LendIt PitchIt finalists in their article; a LendIt competition for startup businesses, PitchIt provides finalists the opportunity to present their business in front of a panel of judges and an audience of investors with the goal of receiving new venture capital funding for business growth; since 2015, PitchIt has helped support the success of the many finalists detailed in the Lend Academy article.  Source

Urjanet has raised $20 million in new financing for its utility focused data services business; the firm tracks utility data from 4,000 utilities in 30 countries and plans to expand its data services for utility payments to lenders seeking alternative credit data; investors in the recent funding round included Oak HC/FT, Grotech Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Imlay Investments and the Georgia Research Alliance.  Source

Afterpay and Touchcorp are merging to form NewCo which will provide an advanced solution for merchant network installment payments; Afterpay has steadily grown its merchant network which pays a 4% fee for the installment service; Touchcorp will help provide advancements in payments technology for Afterpay and the integrated services will allow for broader expansion.  Source