MoneyNeverSleeps: Coinbase Goes Public, Goldman Backs Starling and Apple’s Next Rundle

We’re back with another Money Talks segment this week, and we get into the story of Coinbase going public and the ‘cryptofication’ of fintech, Starling Bank’s big investment from Goldman Sachs, the credit-building appeal and ‘rundle’ potential of the latest Apple Card feature, and buckets more!

MoneyNeverSleeps is sponsored by PAT Fintech, the training partner that demystifies fintech and digital finance for financial services professionals.

MAIN STORIES WE COVERED:

Coinbase Goes Public (Form S1 filed with SEC, 25-Feb-21))

Eoin Fitzgerald zooms out on the bellwether moment for crypto: “One of the most important things about it is this is a company (Coinbase) that’s only nine years old. It’s only taken 10 or 12 years for cryptocurrency to go mainstream. It’s incredible when you think of how far we’ve come with even fintech, and then you have something of this magnitude happening in a short period of time.”

Pete Townsend talking about upside of fintech “Chamath (King of SPACs) looked at some of the numbers and said if you take Stripe out of the fintech unicorns, you’re in the tens of billions of dollars in market cap for fintech. I looked at the top fintech unicorns and it was a lot more than tens of billions – it was closer to $300 billion. That’s about 125 fintech companies that are north of a billion-dollar valuation. If you look at the S&P 500 US Financials index, that’s $4 trillion.”

“What we’re saying is that for those providing fintech propositions, whether they’re tech or they’re regulated financial services players operating as a fintech, there’s a lot of room to grow from $300 billion up to $4 trillion – and that’s just the US players. That’s the upside in this space.”

Starling Bank secures £50m investment from Goldman Sachs (CityAM, 19-Apr-21)

Pete Townsend thinking about the next steps for Starling Banks: “How might they continue to move up the curve beyond banking SMEs into mid-sized corporates? Would they start providing lending and revolving credit? They’ve done really well in getting the SME experience right, because it is a hundred percent digital. They have no branches, you can’t go fill out a form anywhere.”

“When you move that into corporate banking, there’s a lot more to do there, and there’s a lot more demands on your apps to build that out. It would be really interesting to ask Anne Boden about her mindset on expansion by geography vs. expansion by segment.”

Cleared of gender bias, Apple announces Apple Card Family for spouses and teens (TechCrunch, 20-Apr-21)

Plaid raises $425M Series D from Altimeter as it charts a post-Visa future (TechCrunch, 7-Apr-21)

After Bernie Madoff’s Death, Efforts to Recover Ill-Gotten Funds Go On (WSJ, 14-Apr-21 (paywall))

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