Alternative Finances

Alternative Finances
CFPB’s Change Of Payday Lending’s Heart?
August 29, 2017

The final payday lending rules are coming, but reporting by The Wall Street Journal over the weekend suggests that they may not take quite the toll on the lending industry as once thought. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), it seems, is considering proposals that would scale back the rule’s scope....

Alternative Finances
Venture Capitalists Wary Of Online Lenders
August 21, 2017

With an early string of alternative lenders having a tough go of it, startups looking to raise money are having to show how they will avoid the woes of the online lenders before them. According to a news report in CNBC, BlueVine CEO Eyal Lifshitz said...

Alternative Finances
The Score On Tencent’s Credit Scoring
August 15, 2017

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...

Alternative Finances
Startups Still Struggle Finding Funds (Fueling Online Lending’s Growth)
August 10, 2017

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...

Alternative Finances
The Russian Connection (To Alt Lending Globally)
August 08, 2017

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...

Alternative Finances
New Deal Could Cut Prosper Marketplace’s Value By Two-Thirds
August 04, 2017

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...

Alternative Finances
LendKey And Unlocking A Generation Of Borrowers For Small Banks And Credit Unions
July 25, 2017

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...

Alternative Finances
Affirm Challenges Retailers, FIs To Practice ’Honest Finance‘
July 21, 2017

“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...

Alternative Finances
Renaud Laplanche’s Second Act
July 18, 2017

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...