Top 10 Fintech News Stories for the Week Ending November 21, 2020

Here are what I consider to be the top 10 most important fintech news stories of the past week.

New Google Pay app update offers more ways to pay, save and get insights into your money from CNBC – The tech giants keep coming. Today Google launched an updated GooglePay app that brings money management features and, more importantly, the ability to open a digital bank account with Citi or StanfordFCU with more coming soon.

Affirm just made its IPO filing public, providing the first detailed look inside the breakout ‘buy now, pay later’ fintech startup’s finances from Business Insider – This week Affirm revealed its IPO documents showing their revenue growth and how integral Peloton has been to that growth.

PNC Financial Services to Buy U.S. Arm of Spain’s BBVA for $11.6 Billion from The Wall Street Journal – PNC is using the bulk of its proceeds from its sales of BlackRock stock to build a nationwide footprint and leapfrog US Bank to become the fifth largest retail bank by assets.

DOJ gives Mastercard the green light to acquire Finicity for $825 million from FinLedger – While the Department of Justice is fighting the Visa-Plaid deal they have given the green light to Mastercard for their Finicity acquisition.

How Chime Is Dominating Digital Banking (And All Of Banking) from Forbes – Chime has become the biggest digital bank in the US in terms of number of customers. Ron Shevlin looks at why they are doing so well.

Chase Bank Enters Buy Now, Pay Later Market with Flexible Payment Plan Options for Purchases Over $100 from Crowdfund Insider – The buy now pay later segment is the hottest niche in lending this year and the 800 lb gorilla has just entered the fray.

Uber Teams With Marqeta To Issue Global Cards from PYMNTS – Marqeta is already partnering with Uber Eats but this week they announced a global partnership with Uber to provide them payments and cards infrastructure.

Trump nominates Brian Brooks for head of OCC from FinLedger – Brian Brooks has been acting head of the OCC for several months but the president has now nominated him officially. He is certainly the most fintech-friendly bank regulator ever.

PayPal Partners with Even, a Salary On-Demand Platform, so that Employees Can Get Paid Early to Meet Expenses from Crowdfund Insider – After investing in Even earlier this year PayPal is now rolling out earned wage access via Even to their employees.

The Ten Biggest Stories Covering Ten Years of Fintech from Lend Academy – This week marked ten years since I started writing about this industry. I marked the occasion with a retrospective looking back at the biggest story I covered each year.

 

  • 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.