Hi all, Julie here.
It was so much fun meeting dozens of you at our event with Green Dot earlier this week! The Texas fintech scene is booming ;) Check out Community Highlights below for pics. And thanks to everyone that attended my payments panel with Orum’s Stephany Kirkpatrick and Bain Capital Ventures Matt Harris last night! The full recording is on our YouTube channel.
Lastly, head over to Fintech Today Jobs where we’ve just dropped a number of jobs from great companies like Stripe, Plaid, Ramp, Square and more!
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The News
Square Checking and Savings Products Coming
Square looks to be preparing to launch a checking and savings account product for its customers. New code discovered by Bloomberg (Mark Gurman is amazing at this) in a recent app update for the iPhone references these accounts and integration into Square’s existing debit card for businesses. The news itself isn’t surprising, but just how close Square is to launching something is interesting. Obviously if Square was going to go through the headaches of applying for and getting a banking charter, they were going to look at offering these types of services. Also interesting is that the code appears to show that Square is planning to offer a 0.5% interest rate for its savings account through 2021. Funds from sales processed through Square will be immediately available to spend in the checking account.
Public Gets Into Audio
Who needs Clubhouse when you have Public? The social investing service is launching live audio within its app for people to discuss news, analysis, and other financial and investing topics. Rather than letting just anyone host a chat though, it will start out by having select moderators on the platform hosting ~3 events each week. Is this the new trading floor?
Apex Clearing Goes Instant
Apex Clearing, the brokerage that works with a slew of fintech companies like SoFi, Stash and Firstrade, is going to start giving customers access to their funds immediately after the sale of securities, as opposed to the traditional two day clearing period. As Fintech Today Community member Alex Gillette points out, this doesn’t mean regulations are changing yet, but places like Cash App have already been doing this for a while by essentially fronting the money to customers. AKA: you need a large balance sheet to do stuff like this.
Tiger Is Back
I think it has been 3-4 issues since we last talked about Tiger funding a company, so it was about time they did something again. E-commerce fraud prevention company Forter is the most recent company I’ve seen get funding from them, hitting a $3B valuation after raising $300M. According to the company, it processes more than $250B in online commerce transactions and protects customers from fraud, identity theft and more, doubling the number of merchants using it over the past year.
Klarna’s New Board Member
Buy Now Pay Later giant Klarna announced that Roger Ferguson Jr is joining its board. Ferguson is a former Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve and served on President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. I see this more broadly as a sign that a number of companies in our space that I remember covering from their early days, are hitting massive scale and becoming just as important as many of the public companies we’ve known for years.
Community Highlights
Julie VerHage-Greenberg is the co-founder of Fintech Today, where she focuses on editorial content and brand. Prior to joining, she was Bloomberg’s first fintech reporter, covering Robinhood from before it was a billion dollar company, breaking the news that Plaid was acquiring Quovo, and interviewing executives on Bloomberg TV and at several large conferences.
