Ep. 257. News. My love affair with Marcus

Fintech Insider Podcast by 11:FS - A podcast by 11:FS

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Our host, Sarah Kocianski is joined by four great guests: Leda Glyptis, Chief of Staff at 11:FS, Joy Macknight, Deputy Editor at the Banker, Helene Panzarino, MD at Rainmaking Colab and Angelique Schouten, Global Board Member at Ohpen to talk about all the latest news in fintech. Including:

First up, ING’s money laundering fine. Dutch bank ING admitted criminals had been able to launder money through its accounts and agreed to pay €775 million ($900 million) to settle the case. Dutch financial crime prosecutors said ING had violated laws on preventing money laundering and financing terrorism "structurally and for years" by not properly vetting the beneficial owners of client accounts and by not noticing unusual transactions through them.

Half a billion stolen from UK banking customers in H1 2018. Industry group UK Finance said £145m of that was due to authorised push payment (APP) scams, in which people are conned into sending money to another account.
But £358m was lost to unauthorised fraud, which includes transactions made without account holders' knowledge.

Funding Circle’s IPO. Funding Circle has set a price range for its initial public offering (IPO) of 440 pence to 460 pence per share. The flotation will value the firm up to around £1.5 billion. The peer-to-peer lender said it intends to raise £300 million from the IPO.

We have a brief comment from Funding Options Managing Director, Ryan Edwards-Pritchard to find out more.

Funding Options’ funding. ING Ventures, the fintech venture capital arm of the Netherlands-based global bank, has taken a £5m minority equity stake in Funding Options. This follows the recent announcement that they're partnering with ING in the Netherlands to help Dutch businesses find the right finance for their situation.

Monzo’s Million Customers. Tom Blomfield, said the "milestone shows that there’s real, mainstream appetite for a bank that’s doing things differently". Monzo now accounts for 15% of all new current account openings in the UK. Monzo customers now spend £12,000 on their cards every minute, the firm said, with £4bn in payments made so far. Monzo's "unicorn" valuation, of more than $1bn (£770m), is expected to be confirmed when it closes its latest round of fundraising, more than four times higher than its valuation less than a year ago.

We have a great comment from Richard Cook, Monzo's Online Community Manager to get a bit of insight into how they reached their milestone.

Cleo picks up $10M in series A fundraise. Cleo, the London-based “digital assistant” that wants to replace your banking apps. “Broke into” the US 6 months ago, and now has 350k US users, and 600k in the UK. Adding 30k new users per week. Big London VCs are already invested, including funders of Skype, Wonga and Transferwise and its latest investor is Balderton Capital.

Open Banking, the US is behind the times. In the United States currently, there’s no legal requirement stipulating a financial institution must make a consumer’s financial data available to a third party in the event that a consumer provides affirmative consent.

Goldman Sachs wants your piggy bank. Goldman Sachs’s US savings bank, Marcus comes to the UK, US savings bank, which was set up two years ago, has been a big success, attracting $20bn (£15bn) of savings. The company offers savers an easy-access online savings account that pays a competitive rate of interest on balances from £1 to £250,000.

Revolut’s Luxembourg licence. Revolut plan to apply for an e-money licence in Luxembourg despite claiming they have no plans to leave London, but to hedge their bets against any impact of Brexit. They have also applied for a banking licence in Lithuania, partly to avoid Brexit disruption.

HSBC tells Welsh singer to send letter in English. Singer Geraint Lovgreen has complained to the Welsh Language Commissioner after HSBC told him they could not respond to his letter because it was written in Welsh. The bank said they could not reply to him because it was written "in a foreign language" and he was asked to "resend your message in English". HSBC, which describes itself as "the world's local bank", insisted it worked hard to provide Welsh language services for its customers and it also worked "closely" with the Welsh Language Commissioner.

All this and so much more on today's episode of Fintech Insider!

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This week's episode was written and produced by Laura Watkins and edited by Holly Blaxill.

Special Guests: Angelique Schouten, Helene Panzarino , Joy Macknight, Leda Glyptis, Richard Cook, and Ryan Edwards-Pritchard.

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