Published
- 09:00 am
OKCoin, a leading fiat-focused digital asset exchange with service in 184 countries, announced today that CEO Tim Byun has been appointed as Global Government Relations Officer (GGRO) of OKGroup. The OKCoin Board has appointed the company’s current Chairman, Hong Fang, to the position of CEO, effective March 31, 2020.
Mr. Byun was instrumental in forming OKCoin’s US entity and opening the company’s first US Office in September 2017, in Mountain View, California. He then oversaw the opening of OKCoin’s US Headquarters overlooking the San Francisco Bay in June 2018. He also spearheaded the research into the company’s European expansion in early 2018, resulting in opening its Malta Office and launching its Euro-book in October 2018. As GGRO of OK Group, Tim will focus on continued geographic expansion and maintaining constant dialogues with governments and regulators worldwide on behalf of OKCoin and OKGroup.
“As we enter a new decade, the crypto industry will truly become more global and ubiquitous with the collaboration of governments, especially those that have evolved from a wait-and-see-approach to developing new regulatory frameworks, such as Singapore, Germany and France,” said Tim Byun, GGRO of OKGroup. “I’ve always believed that working transparently with governments and regulators is vital to helping OKCoin and the overall crypto ecosystem to grow in a safe and sound manner. This new appointment is an exciting challenge and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as our group continues to expand to new territories.”
“I’m also confidently passing on the OKCoin torch to the capable hands of Chairman Hong, who will be appointed as CEO when our transition is completed on March 31, 2020. With her natural leadership skills and her distinguished career in finance and business strategy, I have no doubt that she’ll take OKCoin to new heights and achieve our mission of making digital assets accessible to the world.”
A former Goldman Sachs banker, a growth equity investor, a global citizen and a longtime member of OK Group’s Board of Directors, Hong joined as OK Group COO and OKCoin Chairman in July 2019. She has played a pivotal role in establishing the San Francisco office as the Group’s international headquarters and growing a product-driven global platform, enabling the company to offer fiat-to-crypto trading services in more states in the US and expanding into new geographies.
“I want to thank Tim for his remarkable leadership and contribution,” said Hong Fang. “His strong compliance expertise, balanced approach to business, and strategic thinking has been instrumental for us in establishing our US and European presence among industry volatilities. I’m glad that he will continue to work with us in his new capacity and help us grow.”
“Since OKCoin was founded in 2013, we have been a firm believer in the power of an open financial system empowered by cryptocurrency and its underlying blockchain technology. We want to make it easy and safe to buy and sell crypto assets with fiat anywhere in the world, because that is the very first step (and a fundamental component) to building an open and inclusive financial system. This goal has never changed for us. We are proud that we have always been standing at the forefront of a transformative industry. Now with our international headquarters in San Francisco, we look forward to working with a growing, mission-driven team, continuing to provide safe, secure and compliant fiat on-ramp to crypto assets to our customers worldwide and playing an active role in bringing cryptocurrency into the mainstream.”
- 05:00 am
On 2 March a new collaboration between KBC and software company iController started.
It may sound familiar to you: companies often find it difficult to keep a structured record of which invoices still have to be paid. Moreover, they are often unaware of how to improve their follow-up. In many companies, everything is still done manually, sometimes by means of outdated processes, something that works very inefficiently. The credit management software of iController makes the life of credit controllers considerably easier. The software helps them monitor payments and assess risks. For example, the system indicates when and to whom reminders should be sent, or when the company should take further steps to collect the outstanding balance. As a result, invoices are paid faster and more efficiently, resulting in a better cash flow.
KBC helps its clients to improve and efficiently manage their working capital. Support in the area of credit management is an important part of this. A good cash flow provides more investment opportunities and a solid financial basis. That is why KBC is partnering with iController. KBC will introduce the software to customers who want to optimise their financial processes. Wim Eraly, Senior General Manager Corporate Banking at KBC Division Belgium says the following about the partnership: "We attach great importance to healthy credit management of our corporate clients. Companies that keep a good overview of their financial flows can anticipate faster, invest more efficiently and build on their future with confidence. We are strongly committed to this with powerful working capital solutions, also in cooperation with partners outside KBC. This gives customers a real-time overview and accurate insights on their KBC Business Dashboard. The cooperation with iController fits in seamlessly with this.“
Also iController is very enthusiastic about the cooperation. The Belgian scale-up is strongly committed to a user-friendly total solution for credit management. Peter Janssens, CEO of iController, is satisfied: "We are very happy to enter into a partnership with KBC as a partner. We are convinced that the future of credit control lies with automation, a vision that KBC shares with us. Today, companies are often unaware of the benefits of high quality automation and centralization of credit management. Together with KBC, we want to change that."
- 07:00 am
Crypto-focused exchange software provider AlphaPoint has raised $5.6 million in new funding from unnamed sources.
The firm has powered over 150 customers across 35 countries, serving over a million end-users and enabling 100 million annual trades across the client portfolio.
The new funding will used for platform development and rolling out features like margin trading, integrated advanced brokerage capabilities, and premium liquidity solutions to customers.
"This capital injection enables AlphaPoint to continue delivering on our mission to enable access to digital assets globally. We are still in the early days of adoption and utilisation of blockchain technology," says Igor Telyatnikov, CEO, AlphaPoint.
Meanwhile, the company has added Tim Scheve, president and CEO of Janney Montgomery Scott, to its board and brought in fintech veteran Jan Mayle as an advisor.
- 01:00 am
Italian payments giant SIA has hired JP Morgan as financial advisor for all 'extraordinary transactions' - including a possible IPO.
It said then that it could issue ordinary shares on the Mercato Telematico Azionario market by the summer, although a merger with another payments player was not ruled out.
Reporting its 2019 results, SIA says consolidated revenues rose 19.3% to EUR733.2 million, with gross operating margin (Ebitda) up 28.1% to EUR257.9 million.
- 05:00 am
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Bureau) today announced three steps to advance its strategy on one of its key priorities: preventing consumer harm.
The Bureau is:
• Implementing an advisory opinion program to provide clear guidance to assist companies in better understanding their legal and regulatory obligations through advisory opinions;
• Amending and reissuing its responsible business conduct bulletin, which articulates that the Bureau intends to provide credit to entities for their responsible conduct based on its extent and significance; and
• Engaging with Congress to advance proposed legislation that would authorize the Bureau to award whistleblowers who report violations of Federal consumer financial law.
The Bureau submitted the proposed legislative language to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Senate President Michael Pence, as well as the Chairs and Ranking Members of the authorizing committees in both chambers. It would amend Title X of the Dodd-Frank Act and provide authority to establish a whistleblower award program. The incentive created for employees to report wrongdoing to the Bureau will assist in advancing enforcement cases, especially as it relates to fair lending violations. Under the proposed legislation, in cases where a whistleblower provides voluntary information that leads to a successful enforcement action, the Bureau will be able to pay an award based on a percentage of the monetary sanctions collected in the action.
“These steps reinforce the Bureau’s commitment to preventing consumer harm. Advisory opinions will ensure that companies know what compliance entails and what constitutes a violation. We also want to incentivize whistleblowers to contact us if they believe their employer is not complying with the law,” said Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Kathleen L. Kraninger.
Under the advisory opinion program, parties will submit requests for an advisory opinion to the Bureau via its website. The Bureau will issue additional procedures for how requests will be addressed, including how the Bureau will prioritize requests. To increase transparency and to provide regulatory certainty to all regulated entities and other stakeholders, the Bureau will publish the responding advisory opinion in the Federal Register and on its website. The opinion will include an interpretation of the Bureau’s existing rules. Under a current guidance process, responses to individual regulatory inquiries are generally available to the individual requestor. That process will remain available alongside the advisory opinion program, as will the Bureau’s other efforts to provide clear guidance to the public.
The Bureau originally published a responsible business conduct bulletin in June 2013. Today’s bulletin updates and strengthens the original bulletin and is intended to clarify the Bureau’s approach to responsible business conduct and emphasize the importance of such conduct. Responsible conduct can improve the Bureau’s ability to promptly detect violations, increase the effectiveness of its supervisory and enforcement work, enable the Bureau to better focus its finite resources, and help more consumers get redress. The bulletin identifies four categories of responsible conduct: self-assessing, self-reporting, remediation, and cooperation. If an entity meaningfully engages in these activities, the Bureau will favorably consider it, along with other relevant factors, in addressing violations of Federal consumer financial law in supervisory and enforcement matters.
“Responsible conduct is in the public interest. Entities that build a culture of compliance and engage in responsible conduct support consumer protection and the Bureau’s efforts to both prevent harm to consumers and enforce the law against bad actors,” Director Kraninger said.
- 04:00 am
Assetz Capital, one of the UK’s most impactful business lenders, has surpassed the £1bn mark for lending to SMEs and housebuilders across the UK, just seven years from being set up in 2013.
To celebrate the milestone, the marketplace lender has launched a new one per cent cashback offer for existing and new investors who invest new funds via the platform before midnight on 5th April 2020. Investors who keep these funds invested until midnight on 6th March 2021 will then receive one per cent cashback on the eligible funds, which will be paid directly into the investor’s cash account on 10th March 2021.
Assetz Capital funds its property secured loans through a growing network of more than 38,000 retail and institutional investors, who have earned more than £109m of total gross interest on their investments to date. In addition, around half of the £1bn of lending to date has already been repaid on time by borrowers, thus allowing further lending on new loans to support further economic growth.
Investors can earn target gross interest rates of up to 5.75 per cent in automated investment accounts. Alongside large numbers of retail investors, banks and investment funds also count amongst the investor base who are capitalising upon Assetz’s attractive interest rate returns whilst also delivering much needed finance to the UK’s small and medium sized businesses.
Having reached its last milestone of £500m of lending in June 2018, Assetz has doubled its lending again in just the last 20 months through exceptional demand from businesses and housebuilders alike who are being let down by the banking system.
In September 2019, the company placed 53rd on The Sunday Times’ Tech Track 100 league table for the second consecutive year, having achieved an annual sales rise of 85.77 per cent over three years.
As part of its business lending, Assetz Capital has been a key supporter of the UK housing market, funding a total of 4,846 new homes since its inception. In fact, last year, the firm funded the construction of 1 in every 100 new homes built in the last year, the entirety of the growth in new housing starts.
The firm was founded by entrepreneur Stuart Law and colleagues in 2013 during the fallout of the global financial crisis. He believed that the banks were no longer able to serve their original purpose in that interest rates were at all-time lows and business finance was often inaccessible, and so wanted to provide fairer returns to investors and make a positive impact on the economy through re-enabling lending to credit-worthy borrowers.
In addition to development finance for house builders, Assetz Capital also offers commercial mortgages and bridging loans and has funded most types of business including substantial support for the manufacturing, services, care home and student accommodation sectors.
Based in Manchester, with additional offices in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the firm now employs 110 staff and has 40 people in the field nationwide to meet with borrowers and assess their funding requirements.
In January, the company announced that £100m had been invested through its tax-free Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA) accounts, of which there are currently 5,000. According to the latest findings from HMRC’s Individual Savings Account Statistics (April 2019), Assetz Capital held 23 per cent of the total £366m held in all UK IFISAs at that time.
Stuart Law, CEO and founder of Assetz Capital, said: “Peer to peer lending – having started out as a financial initiative by the Government to help address the huge shortfall in business lending – has now grown to become one of the most viable forms of alternative finance in the UK. In the seven years that we’ve been operating, we’ve continued to see low interest rates and insufficient business lending from the banks, and there are no signs of this changing any time soon. Our peer-to-peer model will continue to support economic growth through UK businesses and housebuilders in 2020 and beyond, and our new 1% cashback offer will provide a welcome boost to our investors looking for a fairer return on their investments.
“What separates us, and other successful lenders, from those who haven’t succeeded over the years, is the deep lending and business experience of our team – we don’t do tick box lending, nor lend by computer algorithms, but instead lend through career-long, real-world experience to sound borrowers.
“Having funded around 1 in 100 new homes built last year and supported many thousands of jobs, we have firmly established ourselves as one of most successful providers of much needed income for investors as well as being a much-needed funder of growing businesses and in turn the UK economy.”
- 04:00 am
Empower, a mobile banking app in the US challenger bank category, has raised $20 million in Series A funding, with participation from Icon Ventures, Defy Ventures, and David Velez, founder and CEO of Brazil's Nubank.
Launched in 2017, the company has attracted more than 600,000 active users to its platform.
This latest financing follows the company's launch of high-interest checking and automated savings accounts at 1.60% APY. Banking services for new accounts are provided by nbkc bank, and users are charged a $6 per month fee for the full suite of PFM tools.
Says Hogarth "We combine human coaching with the latest technology, including AI, to continuously monitor our customers' accounts and provide intelligent alerts, prompts, and analyses to improve their financial decision-making in the moment and build financial literacy."
Tom Mawhinney, general partner at Icon Ventures says most challenger banks are trying to tackle small parts of a more significant problem, like minimising fees or early direct deposit or improving design. "Empower has a broader mission to improve financial well-being and independence through personal impact - and that means giving people a complete toolset incorporating digital plus human mentorship to save more and make their money work harder," he says. "The company is unlocking possibilities on a whole different scale."
David Friend
CEO and Co-Founder at Wasabi
New technologies are upending banking and finance, often in unforeseeable ways. see more
- 01:00 am
Full-service card acquirer and payment service provider, Truevo, has announced the launch of their point of sale solution into the United Kingdom, Ireland and Malta today. Previously, Truevo has specialised in online, mobile and push payment solutions, so this offering marks the broadening of their product range into the card-present industry.
Truevo CEO, David Liu, says, “The Truevo point of sale product provides partners and merchants with a much needed, fast and easy solution. The terminals are some of the best in the market, and the turnaround to receive them is fast. It sounds simple, but providers aren’t offering a solution like this. We’re excited to compete in this space.”
Jon Barras, UK Managing Director, added, “Our POS Sales team has a combined 40 years+ experience in point of sale solutions, so we understand the market intimately and what it lacks. Our Sales team works hand in hand with our Product teams, so we’ve built something that addresses the pains that storefront owners feel when it comes to accepting card payments.”
Truevo is debuting a 24 hour approval period with a terminal dispatched within 48 hours. Today, the average waiting time for business owners is 4 days to 6 weeks, so the turnaround from Truevo is a substantial improvement. Even businesses in higher-risk industries, who usually expect to wait for weeks or months to be able to accept card payments, will receive feedback from Truevo within 4 days.
The company is launching with the A920 terminal from PAX Technology, a sleek device that looks more like an iPhone than a clunky card machine. Truevo is betting that customers will like the modern new look and feel. One thing is for sure, Truevo is enthusiastic about the new offering and will be making a strong push to support SMEs with all their point of sale needs.
- 06:00 am
Nimble, a leading provider of unsecured credit in Australia, has selected Mambu’s market-leading, pure SaaS solution as its new banking technology platform as the company looks to commence its evolution to ultimately offer mainstream digital banking services.
Mambu’s cloud-native platform will allow Nimble to develop innovative lending products in-house, at a rapid pace, while the company begins to explore potential options and experiments with core digital banking product capability.
Nimble, launched in 2005, was the first company in Australia to launch straight-through processing, allowing customers to receive their funds within an hour of confirmation of the loan. It has since provided unsecured credit to more than one million Australian customers and has been recognised for being instrumental in the development of the financial technology industry in Australia.
“While we’ve had enormous success up to this point, we’ve been acutely aware that it was time to diversify and grow the business,” said Nimble’s Managing Director & CEO, Gavin Slater. “To do that we knew we’d need to update and improve our technology, to become more agile and responsive to what our customers need as we make the shift into being able to provide comprehensive banking services. We’ve always had a reputation for being at the forefront of fintech in Australia, so utilising a cloud-based, customisable engine was a strategic goal from the outset.”
Myles Bertrand, Mambu’s Managing Director, APAC, said, “The composable nature of Mambu’s platform will allow Nimble to continue to be exactly that – nimble – at a time when the industry is experiencing tremendous, transformative change. We’re excited to see how Mambu’s cloud-native banking platform will help Nimble evolve into an innovative competitor in the alternative lending market and, eventually, in the mainstream digital banking market.”
The tangible enthusiasm and support from the Mambu team, and their ability to showcase how they can help us achieve our goal, has helped in affirming our partnership going forward.
Jason BarryChief Digital & Innovation Officer, Nimble
Nimble Chief Digital & Innovation Officer, Jason Barry, said, “The tangible enthusiasm and support from the Mambu team, plus their ability to showcase how they can help us achieve our goal, has helped in affirming our partnership going forward. Mambu’s product offerings are scalable and have been very simple to use as we take these initial steps to eventually completely transform our business. We’re able to design products and offerings to meet specific customer needs, with Mambu’s composable banking platform proving to be agile, adaptable and cost-effective. This composable banking strategy is complementary to our own evolving digital platform strategy and is a natural fit with our API-driven design mindset.”
