Alternative Finance news and trends

Paycheck-to-Paycheck Consumers Turn to Loans as Savings Safety Nets Fray
Consumer Finance // July 05, 2022

Personal savings serve key purposes, chief among them as a financial safety net. But runaway inflation has started to eat away at consumers’ cash reserves, which spiked when government stimulus was abundant — and are now getting more and more difficult to replenish. As credit...

Despite Risks, Crypto-Backed Mortgages, Loans Gaining Traction
Cryptocurrency // June 30, 2022

There’s been talk about people buying real estate with cryptocurrency for some time, but a new report from banking giant Citi finds that crypto-backed mortgages have been gaining ground for reasons that suggest loans collateralized by digital assets will have a growing place in the...

Why FinTech Struggles To Combat The $1.5 Trillion Trade Finance Gap
B2B Payments // July 16, 2021

Trade finance has become a popular target of FinTech innovators looking to disrupt what has been, for decades, a manual, paper-based process. Traditional banks are unsurprisingly not always invested in revamping their own trade finance operations. The costs associated with acquiring, underwriting and managing a...

Funded FinTechs Look To Get More Capital In The Hands Of SMBs
B2B Payments // July 16, 2021

Whether through embedded lending, small business credit cards or trade finance portals, this week’s newly funded B2B FinTechs are largely looking to get more capital into the hands of companies. But it was a challenger bank targeting SMBs that landed the top spot with its...

Interviews & Exclusives
Could Income Share Agreements Displace Payday Loans?

May 29, 2019
Income sharing is not a common method of financing as of 2019 — though, as of late, it has begun to get much more interest from investors and innovators, particularly in the context of student loan financing. The basic structure of the program in a student income share agreement is that an investor essentially fronts […]

What Smart, Conversational AI Adds To Credit Scoring

February 26, 2019
Traditional credit-scoring models have not had it easy in the court of public opinion over the last few years. The complaints vary in their specifics, but all revolve around a basic...

AltFin’s Bumpy Ride Into An Uncertain 2019

December 28, 2018
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” -Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens’ famous starter to A Tale of Two Cities, as...

Avant Brings SaaS Lending Tech To Banks

October 02, 2018
Avant is best known among its financial services peers as a FinTech firm, founded to throw automation and an artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced underwriting process at the problem of creating accessible,...

Quick Reads
SumUp Raises $100 Million to Offer Merchants Cash Advances

August 09, 2023
SumUp has raised a $100 million credit facility to launch a merchant financing solution. The British company’s Cash Advance tool offers advances of up to £20,000, based on merchants’ payment history and repayable via payment acceptance using SumUp’s card readers.  According to a release emailed to PYMNTS, SumUp says the launch is happening “at a […]

Survey: Quarter Of Americans Open To Banking With Big-Tech Firms Like Amazon, Apple And Google

July 01, 2020
Despite the surge in mobile payments and online banking, no one is predicting the disappearance of traditional banks and their brick-and-mortar branches.  But one thing is clear: Americans would be...

Housing Savings Startup StepLadder Raises £1.5M

October 25, 2019
A London-based startup named StepLadder, aimed at helping the millennial generation afford a down payment for a house in the U.K., has raised £1.5 million in seed funding. TechCrunch is...

FinTech Startup Qupital Raises $15M For Chinese Expansion

March 28, 2019
FinTech startup Qupital announced that it has closed a $15 million Series A, led by CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund (CEFIF). The funding also had participation from Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs...