This week, we look at what positive innovations could arise from the pressure cooker of the pandemic. I touch on health care data and privacy, molecular technology, digital work- and play-spaces, and their financial implications. Channeled productively, the next decade could see advances in these fields that we can't yet imagine.
2020 is off to a fast start when it comes to fintech financings and M&A deals as the past week...
Robo 1.0 success Personal Capital was acquired for nearly $1 billion by Empower, a major retirement savings manager. Softbank-backed insurtech darling Lemonade IPOed at less than $2 billion, in a successful fundraise and listing, and has since seen its market cap rise to over $4 billion. The IPO is a landmark for an insurtech industry in desperate need of successes. And PayPal announces the impending launch of crypto trading to its 325 million users. The move isn’t overly interesting in its own right, but the implications for the crypto space are worth exploring.
The current management team at Prosper continues to provide us with pleasant surprises. Today, they announced they have closed an...
The weekly fintech news roundup features stories from Brex, Circle, BlackRock, the DTCC, MoonPay and more.
I examine the unbelievable transformation and restructuring happening in high finance. Global bank HSBC is planning to lay off over 10% of staff, looking at reductions of 35,000. E*TRADE is being acquired by Morgan Stanley, integrating its 5,000,000 accounts and $360 billion of assets into the Wall Street investment firm. Legg Mason and its $800 billion of assets are being folded into Franklin Templeton for $4.5 billion, less than what Visa had paid for fintech data aggregator Plaid and half of what Robinhood is likely valued privately. How do we make sense of these developments? How do we appeal to the heart?
Asset management behemoth BlackRock doubled down on crypto Thursday by filing an application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch the iShares Bitcoin Trust.
The low and middle income consumer has been struggling for decades. And while the pandemic has made things a lot...
This past week saw good news from Coinbase, bad news from Robinhood, JPMorgan is getting intro travel, the CFTC would regulate crypto in proposed new legislation, Equifax had another screwup and more.
UK based payments fintech TransferWise has upped their valuation to $3.5bn with a secondary funding raise of $292mn; the round...