Dopay, the UK based payroll technology for the emerging markets has raised a $2.4m pre-series A round, led by Techstars Ventures and...

The FT is bearish on AI's ability to outperform human traders. The FT believes that until scientists develop a truly intelligent...

CEO of Dataminr, Ted Bailey, was interviewed by TechCrunch at Davos.  The interview touches on a number of topics, including Ted's...

Hedge Funds are increasingly turning to engineers and data scientist to create artificially intelligent traders. These new programs are...

Visa Europe has reported a surge in contactless payments. The payment network's contactless transactions grew year on year by 250%. This...

Betterment's new 401(k) platform is officially open for business. This announcement is a bit of a PR stunt as the platform already has 50...

PitchBook, the Seattle based, research and data company raised $10m on a $160m valuation in a Series B round. The round was led by...

Is Davos out of touch with with reality? According to the Huffington Post,  "Davos has become a place to homogenize executive...

Fintech was the most overused buzzword at Davos this year. The excitement and concern over the disruption by fintech startups was...

Vestorly, the content marketing company for financial advisers, raised a $6m Series A, led by Sigma Prime. 

Another mega round from China. WeBank, which is 30% owned by Tencent, is raising a $450m round on a $5.5b valuation. This is the online...

Most cyber conferences showcase a clash between the suited up spy agency types, and the laid-back looking hackers. In Israel, where cyber...

Very interesting read on the state of the U.S. economy in the 19th century, when the U.S. was considered an emerging market, and the...

Austin-based The Zebra, a “Kayak for auto insurance” startup, has secured $17m in Series A funding led by Ballast Point Ventures. With...

YCombinator recent's demo day featured Vest Financial, an investment advisor that provides options-centric products. Now only a few...

Global insurance giant Prudential has poured $350m into LeapFrong Investments, a fund focused on selling services to emerging markets....

The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent. When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is...

Insurers are already accessing data on driver speed, acceleration, braking and the deployment of airbags through downloaded apps and M2M...

The race to develop mobile payment systems across Africa is spawning a new generation of tech entrepreneurs from finance and farming to...

Well before the advent of the microprocessor and the supercomputer, Prof. Minsky, a computer science educator at M.I.T., laid the...

Google's DeepMind has comprehensively beaten a human champion playing Go, the board game which has been dubbed the world’s most complex...

With the stock market float of Metro Bank, the UK’s original challenger bank, less than a month away and IPO documents imminent, Vernon...

Geoff Ralston, a partner at Y Combinator, sets out in this blog post his starter guide to raising a seed round.

Nutmeg has raised $50 million in funding from investors including Sir Charles Dunstone, the Carphone Warehouse founder, Balderton Capital...

The International Organization of Securities Commissions, one of the world’s most powerful markets regulators, has urged financial...

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is pushing for a crackdown on high-frequency trading on the CME's cattle futures market by...

People.io, Digi.me and CitizenMe are all looking to reward consumers for trading their personal information (e.g. bank transaction data)....

With the 2016 stock market correction in full swing both CNN and CNBC have been referring to Openfolio's benchmark data to see how the...

Saxo Bank has moved into the fast-expanding robo-advisory market with a full-scale digital investment platform for retail investors in...

The Word Economic Forum gathered this week in Davos, where the flagship debate was unsurprisingly on the future of  financial...

Artificial Intelligence isn't just smart machines as we have seen in the Terminator and Matrix. AI is quickly becoming THE technology for...

Digital Asset Holdings (DAH), the blockchain company led by former JP Morgan banker, Blythe Masters, raised more than $50m in a...

Net-a-Porter took money from Richemont back in 2002 when raising money for their unprofitable eCommerce company was tough. They agreed,...

App Annie released its 2015 retrospective report. The report has great insights on developments in the app ecosystem. In 2015,...

Venture capital investors in the US typically only invest in the UK if a startup changes its corporate structure, establishing a US...

Rocket Internet, the German internet company that is famous for building "copy cat" tech companies has raised $420m in a new fund...

Accenture believes the insurance industry will move to embrace the blockchain within the "next few years". As expected, Accenture...

San Francisco-based direct lender LendUp has secured $150m in Series B funding led by Google Ventures and SV Angel. Structured as an...

Hyper inflation in Caracas, Venezuela has created nightmares for tasks that should be simple. For example, a $3 cup of coffee cost 2,200...

Twenty year startup veteran Brooks Pettus joins portfolio company, Reonomy to take on position of Chief Operating Officer. Pettus will...

Bill Gates was interviewed by Bloomberg to discuss his view on mobile banking in emerging markets. BKash, a Bangladeshi mobile banking...

Flywire (formerly peerTransfer), a provider of cross-border payment solutions, acquired Toronto-based ScholarFX, a processor of tuition,...

Mastercard's President of International Markets, Ann Cairns, and Transferwise's CEO, Taavet Hinrikus, discuss the increasing digitization...

Palo-Alto based, BlueVine raised a $40m Series C to provide credit lines for small businesses. The round was led by Menlo...

In this podcast, Don Duet, the Co-head of the Tech Division at Goldman Sachs explains how the bank thinks of itself as tech company.  

Questis, a South Carolina based financial wellness platform, secured $2.8m in Seed financing. The round was led by Capital A Partners.

WeLab, an online lending platform based in Beijing and Hong Kong, secured a $160m Series B. The round was led by Khazanah, with...

Portfolio company Mighty Group offers a tantalizing proposition: earn 25% to 30% interest on an asset that has zero correlation with...

China based publicy traded e-commerce giant - JD.com, secured $1b in fundin led by Sequoia Capital China, China Harvest Investments and...

Although fintech has quickly become an indispensable subset of the tech industry, the diversity in the sector undeniably lags behind...

Always exciting to see a portfolio company mentioned in a list of tier one sector focused startups for 2016! CBinsights put together this...

When Bitcoin developerMike Hearn, declared Bitcoin a failure and sold his Bitcoins the price of the currency fell 10% in a single...

PolicyGenius' CEO, Jennifer Fitzegerald, explains how new technologies will impact our insurance policies. Jennifer believes that...

Jemstep, one of the first online automated investment platforms, has been acquired byInvesco. The deal illustrates the continuing trend...

Metlife’s divestiture highlights the strain of government regulations on firms deemed “systematically important.” While the populist's...

Investors withdrew $207b from money managers in 2015, while pouring $414b into passively managed funds, highlighting a sea of change in...

In the final quarter of 2015, investors zeroed in on seed stage funding, participating in 52 deals with an average deal size of $7.2...

Financial technology is all grown up. This year SXSW Interactive, the popular tech conference, has decided to embrace the sector for the...

Mambu, a Germany-based SaaS banking platform secured $8.7m in Series B financing.  The Mambu platform enables banks to rapidly...

The three biggest digital wallets for one click checkouts are PayPal's OneTouch, MasterCards MasterPass and Visa's Visa  Checkout....

Starling, a UK based digital bank raised $70m from Harald McPike, the founder of QuantRes, a Bahamas-based quantitative investment...

MoneyBox, a UK startup is setting up an automated-investment mobile app has closed a $3 million seed round. Backing comes from Samos...

Picwell, a recommendation engine for health plan selection, has raised $3 million in Series A funding. The investors were BlueCross...

Republicans and Democrats alike are blasting Wall Street for being too big to fail, rampant “fraud,” and absent of any ethics, leaving...

AlleyWatch breaks down the top 10 funding rounds for fintech startups in 2015. Congrats to our portfolio company, Artivest, for making...

After shutting down its Lens Store (a feature allowing users to buy photo filters) Snapchat continues to search for ways to monetize. The...

CoinDesk was acquired by Barry Silbert's DCG. The new subsidiary will continue the three existing offerings: the trade publication...

The FT provides a brief history of the Bowie Bond. It seems the artist had a prescient view of the creative destruction the internet was...

Did David Bowie lay the intellectual first steps in coming up with a novel solution to today’s student debt crisis through securitizing...

in 1998 Bowie was envisioning something we all now take for granted with his ISP BowieNet - that link between popstar, Twitter,...

We had to dig deep for this one, an article from March 2000 in Forbes. “People don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘Gosh, I’m really...

We have been following the growing number of Wall Street veterans who have left the suites and large corporation to join growing fintech...

New York based insurance discovery and purchase platform, PolicyGenius, secured $15m in Series B financing led by Revolution Ventures.

Over the past few months Sberbank, HSBC, StateStreet, Goldman, BNY and CME have all seen corporate venture talent leave to join...

Brad Feld (Managing Partner at Foundry Group) blogs about his firm's experience of running a syndicate on AngelList and why they are...

Berlin, Zurich and Barcelona based FinanceFox just raised $5.5M from Salesforce. Apparently the Insurance comparison App is built...

According to a 2014 survey, an average off-grid household in Kenya spends about 75¢ a day on energy, or $272 a year—$164 on kerosene, $36...

Bowie was a pioneering figure in music finance when, in 1997, he became the first rock star to “securitise” future profit on royalties...

Google estimates the current cost of the equipment on its Google driverless car (excluding the car itself) is US$150,000. This includes...

Toronto-based lending marketplace, Lendful, secured $15M in venture financing led by Alterna Bank. This financing is billed as one of the...

Hamburg-based consumer banking startup, Deposit Solutions, secured €6.5m in Series A financing led by German venture capital firm FinLab,...

We agree with portfolio company, Quovo, that the answer is undoubtedly - no! The growing number of consumers using personal financial...

Portfolio company, Openfolio, does it again. The company just released its second  report on what the year looked like for the "real...

We have highlighted in the past the importance of how Bitcoin is governed and how Bitcoin’s transaction processing power should be scaled...

Toast, the Boston based, point of sale tool raised a $30m Series B, the round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from...

Gem, a Venice, California based blockchain platform provider,secured a $7.1m Series A, led by Pelion Venture Partners and participated in...

Nubank, the Brazilian digital bank, raised a $52m Series C, led by Founders Fund. Sequoia Capital, Kaszek Ventures and Tiger Global...

Our friends at Wharton FinTech break down the opportunity for fintech startups to disrupt the insurance industry. 

Investors poured an industry record $236b into Vanguard's mutual funds during 2015, the latest evidence of a shift away from money...

Together, 15 of the top investment banks employ almost 70,000 people in London. Cost pressures could see many of them move out of the...

Venminder, a leading credit union and bank vendor management software and services firm, completed a $4m Series B led by Bain Capital...

Since 2010, venture investors have invested more that $2b into insurance startups. These startups are rethinking the 

Great article by the Financial Times describing the shift in the Israeli tech ecosystem, where the "build to exit" strategy is slowly...

David Jones, GMof Global Digital and eCommerce at Blackhawk Network (formerly GiftCardLab) is excited by the acquisition as it adds "

Congrats to David Klein and the team at CommonBond for securing a $275m warehouse line from Macquarie and Barclays. With the new loan...

Lending startups are having success partnering with the banks. For example JPM partnered with OnDeck, Wells partnered with CAN, and...

Venture investor, Chris Lynch, argues that AngelList syndicates are more helpful to an early stage startup than an accelerator. The...

The public's image of bankers has never been strong.  The latest  negative influence on the banks' image comes from Michael...

Now the case is over and Ross Ulbricht is behind bars, Wired Magazine has dug deep into how a 29yr old idealist built a global drug...

After 13 years, 3,200 pages and hundreds of millions of dollars in set-up costs, a new era has dawned in insurance. The Solvency II...

It isn't all going to be plain sailing in blockchain land. DAH could be the first canary in the coal mine as they go out to close $35...

There are stronger arguments in favor of bitcoin in 2016 than against it. 

The bear case: 1) Reputation;  2) Still no killer...

58 tornado touch downs, historic flooding in the north of England, the Mississippi Valley and European windstorms called Desmond and...

Prices for property catastrophe reinsurance in the UK fell by between 10% and 15%. In Europe prices fell by between 5% , according to...

Despite the fanfare, UK challenger banks have delivered a return on equity of 18.2% on average in 2014 (vs 2.1%, from the mainstream...

Bitcoin transactions per day more than doubled; Bitcoin became more global; Bitcoin volatility decreased; The price of bitcoin went up;...

Cawley was the first person to realize the commercial potential of issuing credit cards in the name of sports teams, charities, trade...

Nasdaq claimed to have broken new ground on use of blockchain with a share sale last week that used a system based on the technology....

DueDil's platform pulls together data from thousands of sources including company websites, financial filings, news reports, registry...

Fascinating long form article on Sweden where bills and coins represents only 2% of the country's economy vs. 7% in the US. Parishioners...

The tech giants such as Amazon, Google and Apple will continue their expansion into financial services from their payments beach head,...

A 75 page survey by Magister Advisors detailing how Bitcoin and Blockchain have fundamentally diverged from one another over the last 12...

Mike Morris, CEO and co-founder of Slide, was interviewed in the lead-up to Christmas on Bloomberg Radio. In the short interview (mp3...