Fintech Focus For March 18, 2021

Quote To Start The Day: First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.

Source: Aristotle

One Big Thing In Fintech: Founded in 2020, TradeUI is a fintech specializing in low-cost stock and option insights. The firm was founded after its founder saw the need for comprehensive stock and option-based trading alerts.

“Typically, when you try to get into a trade, you match up a bunch of things like technical analysis and the news,” the firm's founder said in an explanation on how he intends to improve access to actionable market insights. “I’ve been backtesting for years and the idea was to … build a tool that helps you find trades formatted in a way that anyone can use.”

In the simplest way possible: TradeUI is a provider of low-cost unusual options activity alerts, as well as technical and fundamental analysis tools that help traders follow the smart money.

“It’s a tool to help you take high-confidence, more successful, lower-risk trades.”

Source: Benzinga

Other Key Fintech Developments:

• Feedzai intros AI fairness tech.
• Kraken may go public next year.
• Investors warm to Lending Club.
• Grayscale adds to crypto trusts.
• Bitpanda becomes Euro unicorn.
• VC Group 11 closes a new fund.
• Coinbase files revised S-1 form.
• PFOF poses conflicts of interest.
• Fiserv used unclaimed domain.
• DepositLink raised $3M for tech.
• Diem raises $5.5M seed round.
• Capitolis teams with AcadiaSoft.
• Blend strengthens homebuying.
• Score grew RCM-X partnership.
• MX bolstering financial insights.
• Morgan Stanley adds BTC offer.
• Robinhood adds deposit bonus.

Watch Out For This: More than half of U.S. small businesses are fully reopened as local or federal pandemic shutdowns ease, according to a report from Kabbage, an American Express Company-owned fintech providing business cash flow solutions.

Source: Benzinga

Interesting Reads:

• Truth about how much to work.
• How small business survived.
• IRS to delay US tax deadlines.
• How to blow up your new Jeep.
• Bank branches will turn extinct.
• NFTs: What should you know?
• Banks place billions into China.

Market Moving Headline: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues continued to project near-zero interest rates at least through 2023 despite upgrading their U.S. economic outlook and the mounting inflation worries in financial markets.

The decision, which came on a volatile day for investors with Treasury yields surging ahead of the announcement, masked a growing number of officials who saw liftoff before then -- though Powell stressed this remains a minority view.

“The strong bulk of the committee is not showing a rate increase during this forecast period,” Powell told a virtual press conference Wednesday following a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, adding that the time to talk about reducing the central bank’s asset purchases was “not yet.”

Source: Bloomberg