Fintech Focus Roundup For December 19, 2020

Chase Digital's Allison Beer On Disruptive Trends

The coronavirus pandemic accelerated digital finance trends.

That’s according to Allison Beer, the head of Chase Digital, JPMorgan Chase & Co’s digital banking and innovation arm.

Over her career in financial services at American Express Company, in addition to other startups and nonprofits, the Yale University alumnus witnessed and acted on disruptive trends firsthand.

Digital banking is top of mind for Chase, she said.

“My team spans everything from payments, to all of our digital products and channels,” she said of producing inclusive technologies alongside a diverse group of talent.

“The focus for us is just what are the trends that customers are embracing, and how do we apply them to our business?”

IPO Experts On The Path To The Markets, SPACs

Companies want to go public because "it sounds great," said David Bukzin, Marcum LLP's vice chairman and National Services Line leader, who led a Benzinga Global Small Cap Conference discussion on the subject.

"You can get liquidity and raise additional capital,” he said.

Nico Pronk, CEO at Noble Capital Markets, and Jack Cassel, vice president, new listings and head of private capital markets at Nasdaq, echoed Bukzin’s remarks, suggesting there’s a lot of momentum heading into 2021.

“I’m bullish as well. A lot of it is driven by the liquidity in the marketplace,” Pronk said.

“As long as the Federal Reserve keeps rates near zero, there will be continued demand from the investor community for new public offerings.”

Narrowing The Public And Private Asset Delta

A massive delta exists between public and private assets.

That’s according to Solomon Tesfaye, the vice president of business development and capital markets at tZero Group Inc, a subsidiary of Medici Ventures, the venture capital arm of Overstock.com Inc.

After spending a career in investment banking, venture capital, and operations within the industrials, technology and health care industry, Tesfaye told Benzinga he joined tZero to bring high-quality assets onto the firm’s private secondary market platform and to form strategic partnerships.

How QuantaVerse Saves You Time, Money

Legacy anti-money laundering (AML) technologies — transaction monitoring systems — historically generate about a 95% false-positive rate.

That’s according to David McLaughlin, who founded QuantaVerse in 2014 to help institutions identify, stop and prevent financial crimes.

“There’s a huge false-positive rate, and every alert with a traditional TMS has to be investigated by a human,” he said. “It’s a very manual process, with lots of unfulfilling work.”

QuantaVerse filters through the noise of institutional, government, public internet and unstructured deep web data to significantly improve compliance.

“We’re the only company that is focused on the problems; we lower the number of false-positives, automate the investigations that are happening around the alerts, and we do so in a way that actually lowers the risk of the organization, by finding instances of risk that the TMS may be missing.”

Sustainable Growth With Fundamental Income

Fundamental Income is a multi-faceted investment firm specializing in the identification and creation of investment strategies rooted in sustainable income and predictable growth.

The company is led by seven partners with a combined 50 years of experience and $15-billion of cumulative transaction history.

In the simplest way possible: Fundamental Income is an industry specialist, focused on the net lease real estate sector via two strategies, one public and one private.

Exclusive: Chatting With A Hollywood Pro

The pandemic devastated the global economy, forcing businesses and content providers to rethink their marketing and communications strategies.

In unpacking how the biggest personalities and organizations like Lionsgate, DreamWorks, AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc, Facebook Inc, and others are capitalizing on pandemic disruptions and scaling reach, Benzinga chatted with Craig Greiwe, the chief strategy officer at Los Angeles-based marketing and communications agency Rogers & Cowan PMK, a division of Interpublic Group of Companies Inc.