Hi y’all, Cokie and Julie here!

Just popping into your inbox to wish you happy holidays from us at Fintech Today!

Hope you enjoy some much needed time off.

Be safe, be well, and see you in 2021!

The News by Julie VerHage

Pretty light week here, though my neighbors work for Ripple (I’m not joking) and I’ve been avoiding them the last couple of days because the company is in some hot water with the SEC. As an early Christmas present, the SEC filed a lawsuit against the company’s CEO and its chairman for orchestrating securities fraud worth $1.3B. The filing alleges that Ripple's chairman and co-founder Christian Larsen, as well as the company's current CEO Bradley Garlinghouse, raised capital for the business through the sale of XRP in an unregistered securities offering. Not a good look.

We now have nearly 300 Neobanks. Anyone want to create another Neobank with me? According to a recent article from Finextra, there are now ~256 players in this space across the world. All of this while the business model is yet to be fully proven. Like, I get the appeal, especially in a Covid world. But it’s unclear how many of these players can be profitable and/or justify some of the valuations we’re seeing. I have little doubt that a few will. But 256?! Y’all have no chill.

BNPL. This isn’t news, but I highly recommend reading this article from the Atlantic on the Buy Now, Pay Later space and how it and its customers have evolved in 2020.

Bitcoin. Full discloser, I own ~$150 worth of Bitcoin. Apparently, people in Nigeria are way more into Bitcoin than me. This Quartz article is super interesting, with data points like “in the last five years, Nigeria has traded 60,215 bitcoins, valued at more than $566 million” and “Bitcoin trade had its highest spike of 30% this year during the national lockdown in the country and the highest volume traded during the peak of the pandemic.” I’ve always thought of Bitcoin as a far more valuable product/service/whatever you wanna call it, in less developed nations. This definitely doesn’t prove that, but it’s articles like this that at least make me not feel dumb for thinking the way I do.

Kenyan Fintech. One of my personal goals for 2021 is to better understand what’s going on in fintech in other parts of the world (specifically in emerging markets). I feel like there is soooo much opportunity here and it’s even more exciting than the early days of fintech were in the US. For instance, apparently this company (Safaricom Plc.) has been doing a ton for mobile banking in sub-Saharan Africa, and is in talks with other players about expanding its product suit to become a full-fledged financial services platform.