Creditas is a Brazilian fintech startup that is now valued at $700 million; the company was originally founded in 2012...
SoftBank’s Vision Fund is planning to invest in the British banking startup according to sources; if it goes through it...
Gen Z is becoming a cultural force, reshaping culture and online society. This is starting to echo in fintech startups and crypto protocols. We explore how financial communities are beginning to congeal into DAOs, their nature and structure, and potential longer terms outcomes. The analysis identifies the differences in Millennial and Gen Z approaches — however imperfectly — to explain the frontier of social tokens and why ShapeShift chose decentralization, while Revolut chose decacorn funding.
DAOs are not socialist communes built for the benefit of humankind. Rather, they are techno-fortresses to defend, and make valuable, exclusive online tribes.
Whereas Millennials dream about a VC-funded unicorn startup, permissioned into wealth with capital from traditionally successful investors, Gen Z and crypto natives dream about bottoms-up community syndicates with trillions to spend on the sci-fi future, unshackled from regulatory overhang and the sins of the 2008 quantitative-easing past.
Another heavy week. It is hard to find the right, or even the interesting, thing to say. I look at why the $2 trillion in US bailouts may not even be enough to stave off the economic damage. In particular, I am alarmed by the large and fast rise of unemployment claims (higher than 2008 peak), estimates that GDP may fall by 20-30%, and the broad impact on small business. Small businesses have 27 days of cash on hand, and power half of our economies through both employment and output. So how do we meet this challenge? What strength should we draw on in the moment of doubt to become the artists of tomorrow?
Uber has entered finance! The end is nigh! The boogeyman is here!
Oh. So what's involved? There's a debit card and a "debit account" powered by Green Dot, the same bank that's behind Apple Pay's person to person service. That means that Uber isn't a bank, but is renting shelf space on one. There's a wallet that will be integrated into the Uber app, within the driver's experience. So tracking your earnings and spending will be a feature that is part of the app -- not unlike what Amazon has had for years for merchants. There is a credit component, letting drivers withdraw money against their payckeck. And there's a Barclays credit card, private labeled for Uber, riding on the VISA rails.
Hear ye, hear ye, beware the disruption and tremble under its glory!
Several SoftBank executives held calls last month to discuss potential legal risks with their large investment into Wirecard so soon...
Bloomberg discusses the inner workings of SoftBank’s fund which includes Apple and Saudi Arabia; many former Deutsche Bank AG traders work at the firm; it has invested in a broad range of companies and is currently the world’s largest private equity fund. Source
SBI Group, owner of SoftBank is investing into the mobile-first bank; SBI Group will also get a seat on Moven's board and the companies plan to form a joint venture in Japan; Moven is also splitting its business in two; one side is the software provider that powers digital banking software and the other is the neobank, MovenBank; Moven also announced that it is in the process of purchasing a US bank. Source
Why are high valuations bad? You've heard me talk about how the trend of Fintech bundling, and the unicorn and decacorn valuations led by SoftBank and DST Global, are creating underlying weakness in the private Fintech markets. Of course, they are also creating price compression and consolidation in the public markets (e.g, Schwab/TD, Fiserv/First Data) across sub-sectors. But public companies are at least transparent and deeply analyzed. Private companies have beautiful websites, charismatic leaders, and impressive sounding investors. Often when you look under the hood, it's just a bunch of angry bees trying to find something to sting.
Blockchain progress through the lens of Binance’s $180MM profit and Greensill’s $1.5B SoftBank raise
Look at the difference between (1) building out the crypto asset class, and (2) operating infrastruture for a blockchain-based digital economy. There are so many little logic pot holes into which you could fall! There are so many things one could believe that make the whole thing make no sense at all! I am anchoring around two primary data points -- a Multicoin report about Binance's financial progress and its massive (though unaudited) $180 million profit in Q3 of 2019, and a post by supply chain company Centrifuge about marrying cashflow financing with the decentralized web.