Australian Fintech and Startups
volt acquired Australian Mortgage, signalling their push into their Banking-as-a-service and mortgage strategy. This follows after AFG took a stake in them a few months back. Link
New fintech: Techlend - the ‘Afterpay for home loans’. Commercial and bridging loans at decent rates. Link
Beforepay underwent a massive rebrand (pre-IPO). Link
Crypto & DeFi
The Australian digital finance industry wants a Senate committee to create a Digital Autonomous Organisation (“DAO”) entity as part of the corporations act. The idea is that you can use DeFi to replace a board of directors for corporate governance. Super cool. Link
Visa approved the issuing of a crypto-based debit card ‘CryptoSpend’ to sit on Visa’s payment rails. Link
The Federal policy framework on crypto & blockchain launched a new round of consultation. Link
Big Tech
Apple Pay Later - Apple Pay’s BNPL product - was announced. BNPL is being commoditised and is increasingly being seen as a feature over a product. Apple makes 15c per $100 purchase, so there’s no additional charge on the merchant for accepting the BNPL product (unlike APT, Zip - who dropped ~10% on the day of the news). They are offering (a) a ‘Pay in Four’ product and (b) a monthly revolving line of credit - all underwritten by Goldman Sachs. Best part - Apple Pay is already accepted at 85% of US retailers - so it’ll be a frictionless experience for customers and merchants. Will we see it in Australia? Probably not, for a long time. Link
PayPal launched their ‘Pay in Four’ this week to dull some of the noise on the above. Link
Netflix is adding video games to its platform. Google tried this with ‘Stadia’ (whereby the processing power to run the game was done in the cloud, without needing hardware), however that was shut down toward the end of last year. Netflix’s main metric is active subscriber count, so this creates lockin amidst an ocean of streaming services. Gaming is all about big titles, so I can imagine this is an incredibly expensive strategy (and may even have the potential to have ‘Netflix Original’ games). Link
Banking as a service platform ‘Railsbank’ raised $70m. Link
Potpourri
F45 listed on the NYSE at a valuation of ~$2bn. I bet the investors are pumped. Link
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Jimmy’s Notes
Check out the poddy I do at work, talking to industry experts on trends in the Australian Fintech industry. Fintech Connect by Basiq 🎧
Happy lockdown weekend.
These views are mine only and not Dan Andrews, or my employer
Trivia
(a) What are the four longest rivers in the world, ordered by length?
(b) What is the only vowel that not used as the first letter in a US state?
(c) After Antarctica, what is the most sparsely populated continent?
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Trivia Answers
(a) Nile, Amazon, Yangtze, Mississippi
(b) E
(c) Oceania