Top 10 Fintech News Stories for the Week Ending January 23, 2021

In was another super busy news week with some major financings. a blockbuster IPO and a merger divorce. Here are what I consider to be the top 10 most important fintech news stories of the past week.

LendingClub Receives Final Approval for its Acquisition of Radius Bank from Lend Academy – It ended up taking less than 12 months to get approval for the first acquisition of a bank by a fintech lender.

Scoop: Chime’s fee income from Axios – While I saw some dispute on the exact numbers on Twitter, it appears that Chime derives a good chunk of its revenue from ATM fee income.

Plaid launches FinRise, an incubator for underrepresented fintech founders from TechCrunch – Plaid is launching in incubator targeted at startups led by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).

Jamie Dimon says JPMorgan Chase should absolutely be ‘scared s—less’ about fintech threat from CNBC – The CEO of this country’s largest bank gave us a quote for the ages about how large banks should think about fintechs.

Monzo founder Tom Blomfield is quitting the digital bank after asking execs for “help” from Sifted – The founder of one of the leading UK digital banks is calling it quits, saying he no longer enjoyed his job.

Fintech Expert Discusses how We can Best Understand 100x Revenue Multiples for Affirm, Checkout.com, Rapyd, Other Financial Tech Giants from Crowdfund Insider – Lex Sokolin shared a Twitter thread that unpacked his reasoning for the crazy high valuations of fintech companies recently.

BlackRock Gives 2 Funds Go-Ahead to Invest in Bitcoin Futures from Coindesk – In yet another sign of more mainstream acceptance of cryptocurrency the world’s largest asset manager will allow two of its funds to invest in bitcoin futures.

TransferWise reportedly appoints Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to steer it through LSE float from AltFi – One of the most successful European fintechs is moving closer to an IPO.

PPP Covid-19 Small-Business Aid Reopens With 60,000 Loans from The Wall Street Journal – The PPP is off to a slow start, although that was intentional, as community financial institutions had first go at the relief money.

Goldman’s consumer bank will take longer to break even, CEO says from American Banker – Goldman Sachs reported earnings this week with all kinds of information about Marcus.

  • Peter Renton

    Peter Renton is the chairman and co-founder of Fintech Nexus, the world’s largest digital media company focused on fintech. Peter has been writing about fintech since 2010 and he is the author and creator of the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the first and longest-running fintech interview series.