Technology Companies

PayPal today launched a new service, called Business in Box, aimed at bringing more U.S. small business owners to its payments platform.

As a business owner, I rarely log into my business bank account. They make it too hard for me to log in, and when I do, the level of capability doesn’t reflect the jobs I have to do on a day-to day-basis. We are hugely busy building our company, 11:FS, and I can’t be bothered with something that doesn’t give me basic insight and isn’t at all connected to my personal banking.

A new class of startups is using bitcoin and the blockchain to drastically lower fees as they try to grab a share of the remittance market from old competitors like Western Union.

New data from the Federal Reserve shows small businesses aren’t taking to FinTechs as much as they’d hoped. Reports Thursday (April 13) said the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a survey that found small traditional banks scored an 80 percent satisfaction rate with SMEs, followed by credit unions and big banks, scoring 78 percent and 61 percent satisfaction rates, respectively.

China’s Ant Financial Services Group has said it wants to increase operations in Japan and is actively seeking a partner there.

Ant, the financial services subsidiary of Jack Ma's e-commerce giant Alibaba has been spreading its influence to the south with recent ventures in Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and The Philippines. On a global basis the company upped its offer for for U.S. money transfer service «MoneyGram International» $1.2 billion bid 

It’s been more than 25 years since Bill Gates dismissed retail banks as “dinosaurs,” but the statement may be as true today as it was then. Banking for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has been astonishingly unaffected by the rise of the Internet. To the extent that banks have digitized, they have focused on the most routine customer transactions, like online access to bank accounts and remote deposits. The marketing, underwriting, and servicing of SME loans have largely taken a backseat. Other sectors of retail lending have not fared much better.

Online lender Spotcap and national aggregator eChoice have simultaneously released two digital tools to assist clients and brokers with small business lending.
Spotcap’s offering is an online portal to help explain and bring further awareness to the different non-bank lending options available for small and medium sized businesses (SMEs).

CreditEase Wealth Management, an arm of Chinese fintech giant CreditEase, has today unveiled investment deals worth $30m with OnDeck and LendingHome. The money comes from CreditEase Wealth Management's Offshore Private Credit Fund (OPCF), which raised $80m from its high net worth Chinese clients in late 2015.

Launched in September of last year by Tunde Kehinde and Ercin Eksin, also founders of Nigerian online logistics startup Africa Courier Express (ACE), Lidya aims to improve access to credit and finance for Africans by using technology to help individuals open accounts, build credit profiles and access credit.