Financial wellbeing

This article was originally published in February 2021. In light of a looming cost-of-living crisis, soaring inflation and spiralling interest rates, we feel it’s more relevant now than ever. So, after a bit of tinkering, we’ve republished it. Enjoy.

2020 has seen plenty of fintech M&A - LendingClub buying Radius Bank, Intuit acquiring Credit Karma and of course with Visa buying Plaid. You might think the current crisis would reduce activity but it could create more opportunities.

If I’d told you six months ago that you could guarantee an affordable electricity supply for your home, you wouldn’t have cared.

The digital banking scene in Southeast Asia is hot right now. Over the past two years, it’s experienced some rapid changes. Changing regulations have triggered a mass of new players entering the market.

There’s a lot of positivity, creativity and excitement within game developer communities. People are flocking to games for entertainment and there have never been more tools to create them.

Providing the best service to have the largest market share. That’s what banks want to be and want to have. And for a very long time they did.

We’ll say it till we’re blue in the face - FS companies need to do more to improve their users’ financial literacy. And that goes for kids too.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Rob Frohwein, the CEO and co-founder of Kabbage, for the 11:FS Connection Interrupted podcast. Rob has plenty of stories to fall back on when discussing how his co-founders and he were able to start a company in the midst of the 2008 financial crash (great timing by the way Rob). They were able to successfully implement their concept of providing funding to small businesses and consumers online. As of the beginning of 2018 Kabbage has served 125k customers and made over $3.5 billion in loans.

There’s so much to look forward to in 2022. It’s the Year of the Tiger. There’s a World Cup in November. And, of course, the sands of insurtech will keep shifting.

Despite being hailed as transparent and secure, the cryptocurrency industry has been beset by fraud, scams and general crisis in recent months.

Financial literacy, it’s a silent pandemic. Gen Zs need all the help they can get. This is taken from our Unfiltered newsletter. Subscribe now for a no BS, uncensored analysis of fintech news and hot topics delivered to your inbox each fortnight.

TL;DR – It’s a textbook bubble, consult your financial advisor, only invest what you’re willing to lose, and no, I don’t know when the bubble will pop, nobody does – heck, it might have already happened.

The second episode of our brand-new video series, Decoding: Banking as a Service, is here! If you missed it (or any of the others) catch up here. Here’s a rundown of this episode if you prefer reading to watching 📖

Banking in Canada is expensive. Incumbent banks apply charges on just about everything, from transaction fees for sending money to monthly charges for just having an account open.