Aussie fintechs forge closer ties with London
Australian and British fintech start-ups, regulators and government bodies will look to deepen ties this week as ASIC chairman Greg Medcraft, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Cyber Security, Dan Tehan, and ASX deputy CEO Peter Hiom lead a fintech trade delegation to London. The trip, arranged by the Australian British Chamber of Commerce with support from the Australian Trade and Investments Commission and UK Department for International Trade, will involve Australian-based startups including AgriDigital, Timelio, Neu.Capital, PayDock, Sharesight, Tradle, Splend and Edstart. The group will visit the London Stock Exchange, Amazon and Level 39 in Canary Wharf, which houses more than 200 fintech companies. It will receive briefings from […]
Emerging fintech star Afterpay lands major contract with Myer
Afterpay, the “take now, pay later” platform that’s quickly forming partnerships with some of Australia’s biggest retailers, has secured a two-year contract with Myer. The publicly-listed payment platform, which lets shoppers receive products immediately from participating retailers and then pay Afterpay for their purchases through a number of instalments, announced to the Australian Securities Exchange yesterday that it had entered into a two-year agreement with the department store to allow shoppers to use the platform when shopping online at Myer from May. Afterpay managing director Nick Molnar told SmartCompany this morning the deal is another step in the company’s quest to dominate the Australian retail market. “I think with a department store like Myer, […]
Australia’s $2.2 trillion super pot drives record ETF demand
Australia’s $2.2 trillion superannuation savings pot is fuelling record demand for exchange traded funds. The number of self-managed super funds holding such investments surged to a record 100,000 in September, according to a report from BetaShares Capital and Investment Trends. SMSFs worth $635 billion are stoking hunger for income-producing assets and drove a 31 per cent surge in the number of Aussie investors who used exchange traded funds last year. Exchange traded funds (ETFs) are a type of investment that can be bought and sold like shares, tracking assets such as commodities, currencies, bonds or market indices such as the S&P/ASX 200 up and down. The interest in those funds […]
Fintech set to reshape financial services despite slump
Global fintech investment’s boom year of 2015, when all the planets aligned and the hype factor reached its peak, was always going to make activity levels in subsequent years look feeble by comparison. Even so, the 47 per cent slump in funds invested in 2016 to $24.7bn, revealed yesterday in KPMG’s Pulse of Fintech publication, is eye-opening. Both macro and micro forces are at play. With the former, the uncertainty created by the Brexit vote, the schism between new US president Donald Trump and the tech community, a perceived economic slowdown in China and significant fluctuations in exchange rates all conspired to make investors more cautious. At a more micro […]
Blockchain and others will transform financial advice
The potential for distributed ledger and associated technologies has fundamental, long-term ramifications for financial planning businesses. Planners need to be across these innovations now so that when commercial solutions that use these technologies hit the market, their businesses are ready to embrace them. Distributed ledger technology is a way of recording information that makes it easy to verify. Blockchain, which is the system that records how the virtual currency Bitcoin is stored, is one application of this technology. Shortened Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) transaction settlement times will likely be the first real change to the market from Blockchain. Last year, the ASX invested $14.9 million to acquire 5 per cent […]
Scott Morrison to tell global finance leaders Australia backs fintech
The federal government wants to see the fintech sector “grow big, to thrive and deliver benefits for consumers and the economy”, Treasurer Scott Morrison will tell global central bank governors and finance ministers on Wednesday. In a speech to a high-level G20 conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, Mr Morrison will say fintech can boost banking competition and facilitate access to new forms of finance. He will also tell leaders of the global economy that Australia is “strongly pursuing” blockchain technology, and wants to unlock the “enormous untapped potential of Australia’s data”. After the Productivity Commission in November called for consumers to receive a “comprehensive right” to their data, which would allow […]
International share trading made easy for financial advisers by Macrovue
Macrovue, Australia’s first global thematic brokerage and trading platform, has taken the wraps off a new global share trading solution aimed at easing complexity, time, and costs for Australian financial advisers and their clients. Sid Sahgal, Macrovue CEO said: “We offer the flexibility to create, trade, and rebalance share-based portfolios built from scratch by advisers, choosing from 20,000 securities and ETFs listed on over 18 global exchanges.“ Mr Sahgal noted that a surprising number of advisers are still using manual trading systems (paper and telephones) to buy and sell global stocks. “Our platform features paperless client on-boarding, one integrated trading platform for global and domestic stocks, powerful […]
CBA accused of blocking fintech Acorns in password row
Commonwealth Bank of Australia has sent alarming emails to thousands of its customers who are engaging with fintech start-ups, warning that sharing internet banking passwords could invalidate the protection CBA provides from losses on accounts relating to fraud. But Acorns, which is competing with the banks’ retail wealth divisions, says CBA’s communication is designed to slow its rapid growth and thereby reduce competition. CBA is “cloaking with security messages a way of being anti-competitive to the whole fintech industry,” said George Lucas, chief executive of Acorns in Australia. “It is strategically targeted at fintechs they now see are growing, and we are a major driver of that.” Acorns, a US-based company that helps users invest spare change in exchange traded funds, has been growing its Australian users at around 2500 each week to around 130,000 since its local launch in February. Around 70 per cent […]
