The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) has granted PayPal a conditional Bitlicense to partner with New York State-chartered Paxos Trust Company to allow its customers to buy and sell cryptocurrencies.
Read MoreFidelity-owned financial planning tech firm eMoney Advisor has rolled out a new financial planning and wellness app called Incentive. The platform is made for financial advisers who will use the tool to help their clients.
Read MoreThe Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation reported that in 2019, 5.4% of American households were unbanked, the lowest rate since 2009.
Read MoreGlobal investment management company T. Rowe Price has appointed Raymone Jackson as head of diversity and inclusion.
Read MoreU.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told a forum on digital payments hosted by the International Monetary Fund that it’s more important for the U.S. to get a central bank-backed digital currency right than to be the first country rolling it out.
Read MoreJPMorgan Chase launched Chase First Banking, a fee-free account to allow Chase customers to offer their children bank accounts. Chase’s kids account rollout follows the footsteps of fintechs seeking to create financial tools for parents seeking to teach their children budgeting and personal finance management habits, while offering capabilities to send payments to their kids, set spending limits, and receive alerts on account activity. Chase First Banking doesn’t include overdrafts, check writing, ACH transfers or wires, positioning itself as an educational and convenience banking tool for parents. Chase First Banking completes the circle of Chase’s products for young people, including Chase High School Checking and Chase College Checking, paths to help create a customer for life as needs change over time. Fintechs, including Current and Revolut have also introduced kids accounts. It’s telling that Chase chose to collaborate with Atlanta-based fintech Greenlight, which specializes in accounts for financial products for kids, instead of building the product internally.
According to Lindsay Davis, director of Caliber Intelligence "Chase is partnering for two reasons. The first is previous attempts to build the tech in-house have fallen short of customer expectation. The most notable failure was Finn, its neobank the firm shuttered just one year after launching. Another reason is deposits are at record levels during the pandemic which are the lifeblood of a bank. Fintech apps have also surged in popularity among next-gen customers and many are or have plans to get into digital banking which puts deposits at risk for bulge bracket banks. By partnering with fintech Greenlight, Chase can accelerate the time-to-market versus building the product in-house."
Payment processing giant Stripe has acquired Nigerian payments company Paystack, a 5-year-old company whose tech stack allows businesses to accept payments on websites and mobile apps.
Read MoreBanks’ fraught relationship with data aggregators got a little more tense this week because of a patent infringement lawsuit brought by TD Bank against aggregator Plaid.
Read MorePoint-of-sale lender Klarna, a global company worth $10.6B, is in hot water with a U.K. privacy watchdog over unsolicited emails it sent to some consumers encouraging them to use the point-of-sale loan offering despite never having used it.
Read MoreU.K.-based challenger bank Revolut, which has 13 million customers, plans to apply for a banking license in California, CNBC reported.
Read MoreJPMorgan Chase launched Chase First Banking, a fee-free account to allow Chase customers to offer their children bank accounts.
Read MoreLufax, one of China’s largest digital investment management platforms, filed paperwork for a U.S. IPO this week. It joins Chinese financial services firms Ant Group and JD Digits, the fintech arm of digital retail marketplace JD.com, both of which went public earlier this summer.
Read MoreDigital banking platform Greenwood seeks to serve communities traditionally ignored by the financial sector, particularly Black and Latinx communities.
Read MoreWells Fargo announced that it is cutting more than 700 jobs in commercial banking.
Read MoreThe Financial Revolutionist is weekly newsletter and blog focused on the torrid pace of financial innovation. Today, thanks to the exponential rate of technological change, explosion in global trade and new regulations ushered in by the Great Financial Crisis, a new financial revolution is under way. In this battle, virtually every aspect of the greater financial services sector is subject to rigorous challenge. With the Financial Revolutionist, we are aspiring to create a boots-on-the-ground and highly opinionated assessment of important financial innovation developments in the past week.
