UK fintech ‘unicorn’ Ebury heads to Australia
British fintech firm Ebury has set up shop in Sydney, having identified the Australian market as a good foothold for southern hemisphere expansion.
Apple is becoming a formidable financial technology company
A growing anxiety for bank executives is how and when big tech companies will encroach on their turf. During its quarterly earnings call yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave some insight into the company’s progress in becoming something of a fintech player: Apple Pay transactions tripled from a year earlier, to more than 1 billion. Cook said that was more than Square and exceeded mobile transactions via PayPal. The worry for finance executives is that payments are just the beginning. Alibaba affiliate and fintech giant Ant Financial expanded from payments and into wealth management. According to analysts at research firm Bernstein, the Chinese company now runs a robo-advisory service that […]
GBST, Superestate launch digital super product
The mobile accessible fund will provide Superestate with a secure, member-oriented platform allowing greater communication and engagement with its members.
Aussie cryptocurrency exchange to trial BPAY’s Osko
Cryptocurrency exchange BTC Markets is trialling BPAY’s Osko service as a way to speed up conventional fiat deposits from customers. The company said it would support Osko, which runs as an overlay on Australia’s new payments platform (NPP), which went live in mid-February. The billion-dollar NPP allows banks to send payment messages in real time to each other via the Reserve Bank. In a brief statement, BTC Markets said it would trial Osko for deposits only, but that it expected the service to also support withdrawals within a few months. Osko presents an opportunity for cryptocurrency exchanges to support much faster deposits of fiat currency into their ecosystems, which can […]
Spendher bitcoin buying app launches in Australia
You don’t see instant verification, quick transfers and no daily limits, even for new customers, too often. A new cryptocurrency app called Spendher has launched in Australia. Unusually, it offers instant customer verification and no limits other than a whopping $100,000 per transaction. Unless you’re a big spend(h)er aiming to plonk down more than $100,000 on bitcoin, you won’t run into any limits at all. This is made possible with a fortuitous combination of timing, including the changing of rules around the InstantID system which Spendher uses. To get instantly verified, users can simply enter their details for on-the-spot verification rather than uploading photos, writing out statements or dealing with […]
Fintech Stake launches Christmas gift cards for US shares
Forget movie or David Jones vouchers for Christmas — Aussies can now gift shares in some of the world’s largest companies, from Tesla to Amazon or Apple, to their loved ones. Stake, the Aussie shop for shares, today became the first company in Australia to offer gift cards for US company shares, allowing recipients to redeem them for US shares or Exchange-Traded Fund (industry jargon for leaving it to the experts) of their choice. After massive customer demand and a successful beta launch, the gift cards provide people with a viable alternative to socks and undies. And now the whole family can benefit too: Stake has also launched Stake Kids, […]
Facebook’s Messenger payments looms over Australia’s big banks
Facebook’s challenge to Australia’s big banks is coming as early as next year, when the social media giant is expected to introduce peer-to-peer payments within its Messenger service, hot on the heels of local banks’ expected launch of their own P2P payments network. In July, The Australian Financial Review revealed Facebook had been awarded a patent to allow it to launch Messenger payments in Australia, which will allow users to pay family, friends and groups once they have linked up a bank-issued debit card to their social media account. More than 13 million people use Facebook Messenger in Australia each month, a figure that will have local banks – who […]
