UK challenger Picnic Bank to address 'fintech for good' - FinTech Futures

Picnic Bank, a UK start-up focused on ‘fintech for good’, is set to launch its small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) lending platform in September, before rolling out its fully licensed banking service sometime next year.

Whilst Picnic Bank lends to SMEs, earning interest on the loans, and taking referral fees from partners, it intends to build its bank in the background. But upon launch in September, it will be offering payment cards alongside its lending service until the full bank comes into play.

Once the bank is built, the start-up will look to offer three account tiers. The first will be a gamified, ‘eco-concierge’ to inspire users to live greener lifestyles. The second will be a ‘fintech for good’ toolbox, with features such as overdraft alerts – West points out that UK consumers needlessly waste £2 billion a year on overdraft fees. The third account in Picnic Bank’s suite will be focused around debt rebuilding, specifically to help those loaded with student loan debt, or debt due to losing a job.

The toolbox will also offer a guarantor to bring account holders back into the clear if they go into a negative balance. As well as Picnic Bank’s own features, the toolbox will offer services from a series of partners such as Better.com, a fintech eliminating fees from the UK mortgage process, Omnipresent, a German fintech which builds impact funds, Pynk, a social investment platform, and Fundsurfer, a crowdfunding and investment platform.

A number of other fintechs are either starting up, or are adapting their offering to the ‘fintech for good’ space. UK challenger Kestrl is set to launch later this year with an ethical banking offering which would track carbon emissions through open banking and allow users to donate through an integrated charity donation platform.

Netherlands-based challenger bank bunq, which has been around since 2015, revamped its banking app at the beginning of this month to allow users to donate to charities in the app and create their own local charities which they can invite other members to.

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UK challenger Picnic Bank to address 'fintech for good' - FinTech Futures

Picnic Bank, a UK start-up focused on 'fintech for good', is set to launch its SME lending platform in September, before its fully licensed banking service.

Startup Ideas: Low salary earners need innovative FinTech solutions for their financial needs

The salaries/wages the average Indian regular employee is earning could look like pittance to the urban eye. The earnings of as many as 45 per cent of regular workers in India were below Rs 10,000 per month during the survey period (2017-18), the PLFS (Periodic Labour Force Survey - https://lnkd.in/gUi8sW6) data showed. Around 12% of workers were paid less than Rs 5,000 a month.

So, there are many millions of regular employees who are in the pay bracket of Rs 5000 to Rs 25000 per month in India. These employees, though require money every week for their day to day expenses, have to wait get till the end of the month or first week of next month for their salaries / wages.

This situation gives a scope for startups to start "pay as you earn" concept, wherein these employees are paid every week in advance by a fintech startup with nominal interest arbitrage and startup is paid directly by the employer after the end of month. Here, the scope for bad debts is very low. Think over it guys and girls out there.

All the best!

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How much do the salaried really earn? Here are the most detailed findings yet

The issue of jobs - or rather the lack of them - has dominated India's economic discourse for quite a while. But while the headline employment/unemployment numbers routinely grab the headlines, there is another equally important set of numbers - who gets paid how much - that doesn't usually draw similar attention.

Startup Ideas:- The gig economy of street vendors and hawkers throws opportunities for FinTech startups for a win-win situation

According to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, there are 10 million street vendors in India, with Mumbai accounting for 250,000, Delhi has 450,000, Kolkata, more than 150,000, and Ahmedabad, 100,000. Most of them are immigrants or laid-off workers, work for an average 10–12 hours a day, and remain impoverished. In India, street vending makes up 14% of total (non-agricultural) urban informal employment.

These street vendors or hawkers require daily finance, which is now provided by nearby private money lenders at at an exorbitantly high interest rates as high as 10% daily. For example, a hawker requires Rs 1000 for the day, he gets Rs 900 in the morning after deducting that day’s interest. In the evening, he has to deposit Rs 1000 with the lender. This routine repeats everyday. There is also a rent for trolly used for business as well.

Covid times impacted these communities very hard. Govt announced a package where these small vendors will get a working capital loan of Rs 10000 with a moratorium of 1 yr.

So, there is a tremendous scope and market opportunity for startups to provide FinTech solutions to these micro retailers so that it is a win-win situation for both.

All the best!

Behaviour analytics firm Symend raises $52M to help mediate when customers are at risk of defaulting on payments

Source: TechCrunch

With unemployment growing at a worrying rate (in North America), we’re seeing a lot more people finding themselves in hot water when it comes to their finances. Today a startup that’s built a platform to help identify and help those users when they find themselves unable to make payments is announcing a very large growth round of funding to meet new demands for its services.

Symend, a Calgary, Canada-based company that builds behavioural analytics into customer engagement products to identify customers having trouble with their bills, and then suggests alternatives to keep them from defaulting altogether, has picked up $52 million in funding, a growth round that it will be using to help it handle a massive boom in its business.

The company has been around since 2016 and has to date “treated” (its term for customers that it has touched and interacted with) some 10 million customers, on behalf of its enterprise clients. But its current funnel is such that CEO Hanif Joshaghani, who co-founded the company with Tiffany Kaminsky (the chief strategy officer), estimates that they will have treated 100 million customers by the end of this year.

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Symend raises $52M to help mediate when customers are at risk of defaulting on payments

With unemployment growing at a worrying rate, we're seeing a lot more people finding themselves in hot water when it comes to their finances. Today a startup that's built a platform to help identify and help those users when they find themselves unable to make payments is announcing a v...

Greensill acquires Colombian FinTech Omni to turbocharge growth in Latin America (Latam)

GREENSILL CAPITAL (UK) LIMITED, a SoftBank-backed global supply chain finance company, is acquiring Colombia-based start-up, OmniLatam, to drive the company’s growth in Latin America, Bloomberg reports.

OmniLatam provides working capital to small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) which supply large companies in Chile and Colombia. With the help of its new owner Greensill, OmniLatam is looking to expand to Brazil and Mexico.

OmniLatam makes credit decisions based on data collected from documents such as invoices and tax returns, as well as looking at a borrower’s clients, employees, and sales.

Greensill, which landed two hefty investments from SoftBank’s Vision fund last year coming to roughly $1.45 billion, offers loans which companies can use to pay their suppliers with.

Last year, Greensill delivered $143 billion in financing to more than eight million customers and suppliers across 175 countries. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, volume in the first four months of 2020 more than doubled from a year earlier.

Key takeaway:-

- Building up a digital profile of companies is easy in Latin America, because the region is more advanced than many others when it comes to providing electronic data for corporations.

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Greensill acquires Colombian fintech Omni to turbocharge LatAm growth - FinTech Futures

Greensill Capital, the SoftBank-backed global supply chain finance fintech founded by Lex Greensill, is acquiring Colombia-based digital financing start-up Omni Latam to drive the company's growth in Latin America.

IIFL helps bridge the funding gap for India's fintech startups

IIFL (India Infoline Group), a Mumbai-based financial services company which offers home loans, gold loans and business loans, has launched #IIFLDisrupt – an initiative to help prop up India’s early-stage fintechs during the #coronavirus crisis.

The firm, whose wealth management arm holds roughly $24 billion in assets under management, says it can help founders in one of three ways: it can invest, offer mentorships, or become a fintech’s first client. None of the aforementioned options are mutually exclusive.

As well as helping founders directly, IIFL says it will also give accelerator and incubator partners across India access to funds, and help them facilitate proof of concept testing – which could also lead to IIFL becoming a first client for some of the start-ups.

The programme lists the areas it will help start-ups in: wealthtech, insurtech, robo-advisory, transaction technology, distribution of mutual funds (MFs), wealth management, digital content, lending, data analytics, and payment solutions.

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IIFL helps bridge the funding gap for India's fintech start-ups - FinTech Futures

India Infoline (IIFL), a Mumbai-based financial services company which offers home loans, gold loans and business loans, has launched #IIFLDirupt - an initiative to help prop up India's early-stage fintechs during the coronavirus crisis.