Funding Circle and Zopa both discussed the rationale for becoming a bank at the AltFi Europe Summit; Funding Circle's Samir Desai talked about three ways online lenders are collaborating with banks and said, "We at Funding Circle have no plans to launch a bank."; comparatively, Zopa is taking the opposite approach and Jaidev Janardana discussed the firm's bank expansion, noting that the firm will be focusing on savings deposit accounts and will be using deposits to fund loans. Source
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The China market is bigger than the US and they tend to move much faster; Emmanuel Daniel of The Asian Banker compares China today to 1971-1984 in the US when regulation was just beginning to be put in place; Credit China is an example of a successful P2P lender in China, now valued at $3 billion; Yew Kiat Phang speaks about the company, sharing how they initially were a traditional lender, constrained by capital and customers with single revenue streams; the company took a broad approach to fintech, first obtaining a third party payment license; company reported $12 billion in 2016 on their P2P lending platform; their payment gateway saw $30 billion in flow for 2016; Yew Kiat Phang shares other details on the company in the video. Source
Kabbage is reportedly considering an acquisition of small business online lender OnDeck; S&P Global analyzes a potential merger between the two firms which has high value deal prospects including combined 2016 SME loan originations of $3.82 billion, costs savings from similar balance sheet and securitization funding sources, and similar success in technology licensing partnerships, overall resulting in increased margins, earnings and more competitive terms to borrowers; the valuation metrics and negotiation factors are the main constraints to a potential deal; the minimum enterprise value reported by S&P Global is $291.7 million which is below its current market cap of $372.4 million and far below its original IPO valuation of $1.3 billion; key factors to watch for 2017 will be OnDeck's forecasted EBITDA and fundraising obtained by Kabbage. Source