Issue #338 November 18th, 2021

Gwera Kiwana and Ewan Silver meet Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, correspondent for the Financial Times, and David Jarvis, Founder and CEO of Griffin. They will discuss fintech news, highlighting how this topic is always more popular among people and news sources.

The competitive intelligence source for digital financial services, Keynova Group, shared its findings on traditional banks: to respond to pressures from low-fee digital neobanks, they are making it easier for customers to open new accounts and improving assistance for customers.

On January 19, 2022 Amazon will block payments with Visa credit cards in the UK. Customers will be able to use Visa debit cards issued by different firms, but Visa’s fees are the reason for this decision.

We host 3 pitches and 1 panel together with our speaker from europe and beyond. It will be all about how retail investors can access new forms of investments by the help of technology that have been available only for institutional investors or wealthy people before like Investing in land, ventures and collectibles!

Changpeng Zhao announces that even if Binance is now taking a compliance-friendly approach and made KYC processes mandatory for global users, customers responded surprisingly well in terms of user retention - the platform lost only 3% of its users.

The number of fintech firms is rising each and every day, but avoiding to take care of the ever-changing regulatory environment can be extremely costly - not only for these firms.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, people started spending more time on social media. But now these platforms are popular not only among young users: they are attracting all generations, and not only for entertainment. They are becoming a source for financial information, and making people change their financial habits.

ClearScore shared its data on lending products: fintech firms are overtaking traditional banks, and this is making those firms even more popular among people.

The fintech lender Oportun Financial Corp. bought the online banking platform Digit to improve its AI and digital capabilities, but Ethan Bloch will continue to lead Digit.

Ron Kalifa, chairman of Network International, said that even if the UK is a leader in fintech, it may lose its position because of a gap in professionals’ skills related to data analysis and technology.

Voyager, a US firm, announced that it will issue a crypto-based Mastercard debit card that will allow users to automatically convert USDC. This crypto is a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, and it also allows to earn rewards thanks to its staking mechanism.