#fintechs

[morningstartranslation]

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[jornale]

#cartaodecredito #brasil #bancos #economia #dinheiro #desenrola #fintechs #news #noticias #jornale

[agroemdia]

Com investimento em tecnologia, cooperativas de crédito levam inclusão financeira ao interior

Elas oferecem produtos financeiros personalizados, como empréstimos para investimentos agrícolas e seguros específicos para atividades da agricultura familiar

Felipe Santiago* A agricultura familiar possui uma rica história que remonta há muitos séculos. Ao longo do tempo, essa forma de agricultura tem sido uma importante fonte de subsistência e sustento para inúmeras famílias em todo o mundo. No entanto, esses produtores menores já tiveram que enfrentar desafios significativos quando se tratava de acessar o mercado financeiro. Por muito tempo, os…

[mzaghi]

Webinar state #fintechs #latam 2023 vía #cbinsights (en Campus TEC Guatemala) https://www.instagram.com/p/CoakZGUPi0B/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Url: https://www.slipstreamfinancial.com/ Location: Charlotte, NC - North Carolina 28105. USA

[peterbordes]

An incredible fintech growth & 2022 innovation journey 🚀

Octane Lending's originations grew by 74% with its frictionless digital experience.

- Exceeded $1.2B in Originations - Entered 5 New Markets - Launched 9 New Partnerships

[demostenesbr]

#CidadeDoFuturo - Participei como organizador do evento realizado em conjunto ao aniversário de 469 anos da cidade de São Paulo. Estive presente nos painéis de Startups for Goods, O Futuro das Finanças e alguns minutos no painel DEV Rocks. A correria foi tanta que, esqueceram de tirar a foto oficial do time. Valeu a pena, até 2024! 🎉 #fintechs #startups #saopaulo469anos #sãopaulo469 (at ACSP - Associação Comercial de São Paulo) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn4NDslulUx3j-79Et27j6BzGeYFScg5a7kTDA0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[sanestebanconsulting]

Cual es el futuro de los servicios financieros

En el futuro, las experiencias de cliente inmersivas, fluidas y sin fricciones con un fuerte enfoque de hiperpersonalización y datos abiertos en su núcleo son tres elementos que definirán colectivamente la próxima fase evolutiva de un panorama competitivo

Dias pasados escribí sobre las bigtechs y como estas están enfocando su norte hacia la industria financiera, y como podemos ver, esta industria tendrá un futuro un poco mas dinámico a los 100 años de historia para no ir mucho mas atrás. Estaba pensando que tienen en común los supermercados, las aerolíneas, las redes sociales, las empresas de seguros, las empresas de telecomunicaciones y…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Fintech bullies stole your kid’s lunch money

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Three companies control the market for school lunch payments. They take as much as 60 cents out of every dollar poor kids' parents put into the system to the tune of $100m/year. They're literally stealing poor kids' lunch money.

In its latest report, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau describes this scam in eye-watering, blood-boiling detail:

https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_costs-of-electronic-payment-in-k-12-schools-issue-spotlight_2024-07.pdf

The report samples 16.7m K-12 students in 25k schools. It finds that schools are racing to go cashless, with 87% contracting with payment processors to handle cafeteria transactions. Three processors dominate the sector: Myschoolbucks, Schoolcafé, and Linq Connect.

These aren't credit card processors (most students don't have credit cards). Instead, they let kids set up an account, like a prison commissary account, that their families load up with cash. And, as with prison commissary accounts, every time a loved one adds cash to the account, the processor takes a giant whack out of them with junk fees:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

If you're the parent of a kid who is eligible for a reduced-price lunch (that is, if you are poor), then about 60% of the money you put into your kid's account is gobbled up by these payment processors in service charges.

It's expensive to be poor, and this is no exception. If your kid doesn't qualify for the lunch subsidy, you're only paying about 8% in service charges (which is still triple the rate charged by credit card companies for payment processing).

The disparity is down to how these charges are calculated. The payment processors charge a flat fee for every top-up, and poor families can't afford to minimize these fees by making a single payment at the start of the year or semester. Instead, they pay small sums every payday, meaning they pay the fee twice per month (or even more frequently).

Not only is the sector concentrated into three companies, neither school districts nor parents have any meaningful way to shop around. For school districts, payment processing is usually bundled in with other school services, like student data management and HR data handling. For parents, there's no way to choose a different payment processor – you have to go with the one the school district has chosen.

This is all illegal. The USDA – which provides and regulates – the reduced cost lunch program, bans schools from charging fees to receive its meals. Under USDA regs, schools must allow kids to pay cash, or to top up their accounts with cash at the school, without any fees. The USDA has repeatedly (2014, 2017) published these rules.

Despite this, many schools refuse to handle cash, citing safety and security, and even when schools do accept cash or checks, they often fail to advertise this fact.

The USDA also requires schools to publish the fees charged by processors, but most of the districts in the study violate this requirement. Where schools do publish fees, we see a per-transaction charge of up to $3.25 for an ACH transfer that costs $0.26-0.50, or 4.58% for a debit/credit-card transaction that costs 1.5%. On top of this, many payment processors charge a one-time fee to enroll a student in the program and "convenience fees" to transfer funds between siblings' accounts. They also set maximum fees that make it hard to avoid paying multiple charges through the year.

These are classic junk fees. As Matt Stoller puts it: "'Convenience fees' that aren't convenient and 'service fees' without any service." Another way in which these fit the definition of junk fees: they are calculated at the end of the transaction, and not advertised up front.

Like all junk fee companies, school payment processors make it extremely hard to cancel an automatic recurring payment, and have innumerable hurdles to getting a refund, which takes an age to arrive.

Now, there are many agencies that could have compiled this report (the USDA, for one), and it could just as easily have come from an academic or a journalist. But it didn't – it came from the CFPB, and that matters, because the CFPB has the means, motive and opportunity to do something about this.

The CFPB has emerged as a powerhouse of a regulator, doing things that materially and profoundly benefit average Americans. During the lockdowns, they were the ones who took on scumbag landlords who violated the ban on evictions:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cfpb

They went after "Earned Wage Access" programs where your boss colludes with payday lenders to trap you in debt at 300% APR:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism

They are forcing the banks to let you move your account (along with all your payment history, stored payees, automatic payments, etc) with one click – and they're standing up a site that will analyze your account data and tell you which bank will give you the best deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

They're going after "buy now, pay later" companies that flout borrower protection rules, making a rogues' gallery of repeat corporate criminals, banning fine-print gotcha clauses, and they're doing it all in the wake of a 7-2 Supreme Court decision that affirmed their power to do so:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

The CFPB can – and will – do something to protect America's poorest parents from having $100m of their kids' lunch money stolen by three giant fintech companies. But whether they'll continue to do so under a Kamala Harris administration is an open question. While Harris has repeatedly talked up the ways that Biden's CFPB, the DOJ Antitrust Division, and FTC have gone after corporate abuses, some of her largest donors are demanding that her administration fire the heads of these agencies and crush their agenda:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/

Tens of millions of dollars have been donated to Harris' campaign and PACs that support her by billionaires like Reid Hoffman, who says that FTC Chair Lina Khan is "waging war on American business":

https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/

Some of the richest Democrat donors told the Financial Times that their donations were contingent on Harris firing Khan and that they'd been assured this would happen:

https://archive.is/k7tUY

This would be a disaster – for America, and for Harris's election prospects – and one hopes that Harris and her advisors know it. Writing in his "How Things Work" newsletter today, Hamilton Nolan makes the case that labor unions should publicly declare that they support the FTC, the CFPB and the DOJ's antitrust efforts:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/unions-and-antitrust-are-peanut-butter

Don’t want huge companies and their idiot billionaire bosses to run the world? Break them up, and unionize them. It’s the best program we have.

Perhaps you've heard that antitrust is anti-worker. It's true that antitrust law has been used to attack labor organizing, but that has always been in spite of the letter of the law. Indeed, the legislative history of US antitrust law is Congress repeatedly passing law after law explaining that antitrust "aims at dollars, not men":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

The Democrats need to be more than The Party of Not Trump. To succeed – as a party and as a force for a future for Americans – they have to be the party that defends us – workers, parents, kids and retirees alike – from corporate predation.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/26/taanstafl/#stay-hungry

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[nixcraft]

They say MS-Excel holds the financial world in its grip.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Adam Clark Estes at Vox:

Some people collect coins or stamps. For a time, I collected debit cards. Not stolen ones! Each one of them had my name on them, right below the logo of the latest banking app I’d decided to try out: Venmo, Cash App, Chime, Varo, Current, Acorns. For the better part of a decade, I did all my banking through these apps, enjoying their slick user experience and lack of fees. The problem with every one of them, however, is that they’re not chartered banks. If the company behind the app went bankrupt, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) would not necessarily come to my rescue. This disaster scenario was a hypothetical worry when I eventually settled for Chase and its FDIC insurance. For millions of others, it became a reality earlier this year when a company called Synapse collapsed and froze them out of their accounts. Users of Yotta, a popular savings app with a built-in lottery, and other apps that relied on Synapse to help manage their accounts couldn’t access their money for months. Now, as hundreds of thousands of Synapse customers’ dollars remain in limbo, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) are calling for banking reforms, and the FDIC is proposing changes to its rules.

Still, a growing number of people are embracing these financial technology, or fintech, services. More than a third of Gen Z and millennials used a fintech app or a digital bank as their primary checking account, according to a 2023 Cornerstone Advisors study. So some questions are worth asking: Is it a bad idea to use an app like Venmo as your main bank? Are digital banks like Chime trustworthy enough? The answer to both questions is yes. Venmo is not a bank, and using it as your primary checking account comes with some risks. Some fintech companies, like Chime, are just as big as traditional banks and offer some nice perks. Again, because they’re nontraditional, there are risks. “You’re not going to go back to a world where everybody works with a small bank and walks into a branch,” Shamir Karkal, co-founder of Simple, one of the first digital banks. “The future is just going to be more fintech, and I think we all just need to get better at it.”

Neobanks and money transmitters, briefly explained

The term fintech can refer to a lot of things, but when you’re talking about everyday services for everyday people, it typically refers to either neobanks or money transmitters. Chime is a neobank. Venmo is a money transmitter. They’re regulated in different ways, but because most of these companies issue debit cards, many people treat them like checking accounts. Fintech apps are not the same thing as FDIC-insured banks.

Neobanks are fintech companies that offer services like checking accounts in partnership with chartered banks, which are FDIC-insured. Neobanks sometimes enlist intermediaries known as banking-as-a-service, or BaaS, companies, which are not FDIC-insured. Still, you will often see the FDIC logo on neobank websites, just like you see it stuck to the glass doors of many brick-and-mortar banks. That logo instills trust, and thanks to their partnerships, neobanks can claim some FDIC protections. But because they do not have bank charters, these neobanks and BaaS companies are not directly FDIC-insured. Instead, neobank customers can be eligible for something called pass-through deposit insurance coverage.

[...] Money transmitters, also known as money services businesses, are even further removed from the perceived safety of the FDIC. Put bluntly, if you’re keeping all your money in a Venmo or Cash App account, you don’t qualify for FDIC insurance. Money transmitters are not neobanks or banks at all but rather completely different legal entities that are regulated by individual states as well as the Department of the Treasury. There are certain protections provided by these agencies, but FDIC insurance is not one of them. So when an app like Yotta or Chime says on its website that it’s FDIC insured, it’s not a lie, but it’s not necessarily true either. Venmo, to its credit, admits in the fine print of its homepage that its parent company PayPal “is not a bank” and “is not FDIC insured.” To confuse you even more, however, certain PayPal services that enlist a chartered bank partner, like a PayPal Mastercard or savings account, might qualify for FDIC insurance. Again, it depends.

[...] That doesn’t necessarily mean that all neobanks and fintech companies are untrustworthy. In some cases, the sheer size and track record of fintech companies can instill quite a bit of trust. Chime, the largest digital bank with roughly 22 million customers, scored a $25 billion valuation in its latest round of funding and is planning to go public next year. Venmo’s parent company, PayPal, is widely considered safe and trustworthy. And don’t expect Block, the $42 billion company that owns Cash App as well as its own chartered bank, to fail any time soon. The truth is, even if there is some false sense of security, fintech apps offer certain customers features that big banks can’t or won’t. One thing that’s made Chime and many other neobanks so popular, for instance, is that they don’t charge so many fees. That’s a huge boon to young people as well as people without bank accounts. If a fintech app is your only option, then you might not care so much about FDIC insurance.

“If you’re poor in America and you’re banking at Chase or Wells Fargo, you’re going to get overdraft fees, minimum balance fees,” Mikula explained. “So there is a real need that [fintech] companies fulfill as a result of your establishment banks essentially not wanting to bank poor people because it’s difficult to do profitably.” As many as 6 percent of Americans were living without a bank account in 2023, according to Federal Reserve data. That share grows to 23 percent for those making less than $23,000 a year. The unbanked population, which disproportionately comprises Black, Hispanic, and undocumented people, is at a greater risk of falling victim to predatory lending practices, including payday loans. Some fintech companies also offer short-term loans, though they’ve been criticized for being predatory as well.

If you have Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, or any fintech or digital banking app, be aware: don’t use them as your primary checking account.

[plotsolcharts]

Super big chance in a billion! #SOL price: $165.70 (2024/10/24 03:05:15)