Fintech Focus For May 18, 2021

Quote To Start The Day: “All the arrows are pointed in the right direction, so let’s get back to life.”

Source: Andrew Cuomo

One Big Thing In Fintech: In light of the commission-free trading revolution and COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, inexperienced participants flooded the market, actively speculating with the use of short-term, risky strategies.

The problem with risky strategies: investors are quickly worn out when things turn bad.

More and more, as DIY investors go back to work and become less aggressively involved in the market, the demand for long-term investment tools has risen. Founded in 2017, Passiv is one fintech provider benefitting from this change in trend.

Source: Benzinga

Other Key Fintech Developments:

• Metromile, Hippo partner on policy.
• Fidelity expanded advisor platform.
• Investing platform Rally adds $30M.
• Coinbase offering $1.25B in debit.
• Partisia raises $20M for DLT tech.
• Clair teams with MetaBank, Galileo.
• Temenos adds digital asset trading.
• Amount raises $99M at $1B value.
• P2P firm Mamo raises $8M round.
• AI-powered Jerry has raised $38M.
• Fintech Marqeta plans to go public.
• Telda adds $4M in pre-seed round.
• BoA eyeing blockchain settlement.
• FDIC eyes crypto bank use cases.
• DeFi platform Zapper raised $15M.
• Optimizing payments inside APAC.

Watch Out For This: It’s a Wall Street nightmare. You score hundreds of millions of dollars on a trade and you just can’t get paid.

That’s what Goldman Sachs Group Inc. faces in a transaction pitting its traders against Mexico’s dominant power company, championed by none other than President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, according to people with knowledge of the matter. At issue: roughly $400 million the Wall Street bank believes it’s owed from a natural-gas trade that went wild when a deep freeze hit Texas in February.

Source: Bloomberg

Interesting Reads:

• A warning on COVID case increase.
• In-car voice recognition battle heats.
• Report: Electrification of everything.
• Why media and telecom don’t mix?

Market Moving Headline: Famed investor Michael Burry on Monday revealed in a regulatory filing a short position against Tesla worth more than half a billion.

Burry, one of the first investors to call and profit from the subprime mortgage crisis, is long puts against 800,100 shares of Tesla or $534 million by the end of the first quarter, according to the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Source: CNBC