Financial Inclusion

What Does Phone Usage Say About Creditworthiness?
December 01, 2015

So, how does a firm evaluate credit when dealing with a population without access to standard credit monitoring or mainstream banking products that tend to help build credit? For an emerging number of Silicon Valley firms, the answer is increasingly a simply question: How do...

Alternative Finances
Australia’s Tyro Payments Snaps Up $72M
November 30, 2015

Tyro Payments has just landed $72 million in new funding from Tiger Global, TDM Asset Management and Atlassian Cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes to continue its quest to disrupt traditional banking down under. Tyro specializes in debit and credit payments and currently processes POS payments for 14,000 Australian...

Alternative Finances
Did The CFPB Strong-Arm Ally Bank Into A Settlement To Push Anti-Discrimination Regs?
November 25, 2015

So, what does a federal watchdog — say the CFPB — do when it wants to crack down on discrimination in lending but knows that the legitimacy of its methods for doing so will be roundly questioned? Well, it seems, in the CFPB’s case, the winning...

Alternative Finances
Mighty Marketplace Monetizes Lawsuits
November 10, 2015

Americans are often portrayed as a fairly litigious group of people – so much so that the term “lawsuit millionaire” is pretty well-established. Most prominently featured in comedy movies, the “lawsuit millionaire” is typically portrayed as an essentially likable oaf that literally bumbled his way...

Treasury Takes A Close Look At Online Lending
November 09, 2015

According to official Anjan Mukherjee, the U.S. Treasury Department is in the early phases of an analysis of the online lending industry, sometimes called alt-lending. This follows a July 2015 request for information, which has yielded hundreds of responses, according to Mukherjee. “Just because we...

Financial Inclusion
Affluent Americans Significantly Out-Borrowing The Poor
November 06, 2015

When it comes to securing loans, wealthy Americans are blowing their middle and lower class counterparts away. Boosted underwriting standards brought on by the financial crisis (itself brought on by profligate lending) has seen wealthy Americans holding more of the nation’s mortgage, credit card and...

MasterCard Helps Kenyan Farmers Access Capital
November 05, 2015

MasterCard Labs’ first innovation event in Kenya has come away with some agricultural ideas. Having launched MasterCard Labs for Financial Inclusion — an initiative that MasterCard stated was designed to impact the lives of more than 100 million people around the world “by developing practical and...

Alternative Finances
CFPB’s New Congressional Drama
November 03, 2015

The CFPB found itself in the middle of another brouhaha last week, this time over allegations by a government watchdog group that congressmen who’ve tried to scale back its hold over payday lending must have been paid bribes by payday lenders. Their rationale is that...

A Profitable Lending Club Surprises Wall Street
October 30, 2015

After some months of questions surrounding Lending Club’s future on the public markets and what it might mean for other high-profile startups as they enter the IPO orbit, the alternative lending powerhouse has delivered a surprisingly profitable performance in Q3. Lending Club clocked $950,000 in...