Just about two years ago, Ant Financial announced it was launching its own consumer credit scoring model: Sesame Credit. It was a big deal. Sesame Credit was designed to leverage “big data” technology and customer behavior analytics to help make credit more available to millions of...
While startups and small business are often (rightly) hailed as the engines that power growth in the American economy, when it comes time to secure funds — the situation gets tricky. Stated simply, ten years out of the financial crisis and small business lending remains...
ID Finance Co-Founders Boris Batine and Alexander Dunaev were far from newcomers to the world of finance when they started up their business in 2012. Long before founding a data science, credit scoring and digital finance company, the Russian-born and U.K.-educated entrepreneurs met while working abroad...
Once a unicorn, always a unicorn? In Silicon Valley, maybe not so much these days — online P2P lender Prosper Marketplace is considering a financing round that could drop its value to somewhere around $550 million. Not chump change, to be sure — but a...
For value, the Federal Reserve estimates that a college grad will make about $830,000 over the course of a lifetime; the Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workforce estimates the value at around a cool million. A big payout to be sure, but one...
“Finance is pretty broken.” So started Affirm’s Co-Founder and CEO Max Levchin’s remarks at his firm’s first-ever AFFIRMation conference for its retail partners in San Francisco yesterday. Levchin, by his own description, has spent his career in financial services and founding companies — “some of which succeeded, some...
F. Scott Fitzgerald is often quoted as the source behind the phrase, “there are no second acts in American life.” But as we all know and have witnessed, American lives are full of second, third and, in some cases, even fourth acts. Just ask any entrepreneur. Which leads...
There’s nothing like that new car smell. And the fun of driving a new car off the dealer’s parking lot. But the process of getting there is anything but fun, especially if one is financing a car. Even when the process has gone swimmingly and the...
Square’s quest to evolve past its original incarnation as a payments processing firm for small merchants is apparently set to expand into consumer lending. According to WSJ reports, CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey has begun quietly circulating word among its SMB customers that it is...