Since first appearing on the e-commerce scene in 2005, this Swedish company has been exacerbating online shopping addictions and helping retailers combat #cartabandonment. With 60 million unique customers, flexible payment options, a vault of transaction data, and a new shiny banking license, Klarna has big plans on the horizon.
Finance
Lending Club: Platform Success but P2P failure?
Lending club founder was able to build a robust lending platform against significant headwinds, but it's unclear if the resulting product matches the initial vision of a "peer to peer' marketplace.
Ripple, the disruptor to the forty years old cross-border payment system
Ripple uses blockchain technology to disrupt an old industry – cross-border payment
EcoCash – How a telco turned a cash crisis into a cash cow
In the face of a cash crisis, Econet, Zimbabwe's largest telco, introduced a mobile digital payment solution that saw the company become a market leader in the provision of financial services.
No Signs of Surrender at This Retail Bank
Many have prophesied the death of retail banking – and while the traditional retail model may be dead, at least one traditional bank is changing to keep up with the times.
Planet: Disrupting Space by Democratizing Digital Imagery
Planet is using hundreds of tiny satellites to capture real-time imagery of earth's entire surface, and their data imaging software can help answer the questions that you and millions of others are asking.
AR/VR, Bloomberg and Financial Services
Compared to other industries, applications of AR/VR in financial services are few and far in between. Below I will give a quick overview of the applications, their challenges, opportunities and zoom in on my former employer, Bloomberg, and its experiment […]
Is FICO outdated? ZestFinance: An Alternative to the FICO Credit Score
In 2010, roughly 8.3% of US consumers, or 19 million people, were considered ‘unscorable’ by FICO, a credit rating service whose models serve as a key underpinning of the US system for assessing credit worthiness.[1] Included in this contingent of unscorable consumers are those lacking a credit history, read: millennials, who represent an untapped market opportunity for lenders. Also excluded from FICO are the underbanked, those who lack bank accounts and primarily transact in cash. Not only are the underbanked denied access to loans based on typical FICO filters, but they must resort to predatory alternatives, such as payday loans, whose prohibitively high interest rates trap them in a vicious cycle of deep indebtedness that is difficult to dig out of. Has the FICO score become an obsolete filter? And can a lender step in to provide loans to these underserved segments where traditional banks have neglected to do so – and profitably?
Black Knight Financial Services – Leveraging Mortgage Data & Analytics
Black Knight Financial Services (BKFS), primarily known for offering a workflow management tool for servicing mortgage loans for large banks and other institutions, has recently aggregated and expanded its capabilities in data & analytics, looking to create and capture value […]
Square: A Winning Playbook for Data & Analytics Monetization
Square has brought millions of transactions online by providing an easy way for SMBs to accept credit cards instead of cash. Subsequently, the company has designed a business model that leverages this powerful data in an elegant way.