Capital markets

Young businesses often prefer banks, especially community banks, over online lenders. However, traditional lenders need to make quicker decisions, simplify the application process and make other improvements, these customers say.

Fifth Third’s new chief legal counsel, Jelena McWilliams, might be changing jobs again and Australia’s first female bank CEO tells all in a memoir. Plus, the advantage with female founders, and young feminists on the rise.

San Francisco-based startup UnifyID is developing an “implicit authentication” platform that requires no conscious actions by users to authenticate identities, and it’s just closed $20 million in fresh funding to support its growth.

Christine Duhaime, an anti-money-laundering attorney in Toronto, lays out the reasons banks should become early experts (and assist) in initial coin offerings. She also lays out the risks, especially in the wake of the SEC’s report suggesting some ICO tokens are really securities.

The agency’s new classification of “initial coin offerings” is yet another affront to the efforts by fledgling companies to raise funds.

Visa's recent leading of a $25 million investment round in Marqeta is an unusual move for the card network, which has most recently focused its investments in merchant acquiring technology companies.

Startups and open-source software projects have raised $1.3 billion this year through initial coin offerings. The real boom may still lie ahead, fears of a bubble notwithstanding.

CircleUp is offering lines of credit to early-stage consumer brands, which can often only get financing at high interest rates.

The federal agency's investigative report concludes that crowdsales of blockchain tokens known as initial coin offerings may need to comply with securities laws.

Just as pre-crisis success was illusory, so too might be expectations that banks could ever regain that type of profit growth again.