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acquisition

Toronto-Dominion Bank Announces Acquisition of Wells Fargo’s Canadian Direct Equipment Finance Business

Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD Bank) announced on Thursday it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Wells Fargo’s Canadian Direct Equipment Finance business. TD reported that the acquisition of Wells Fargo’s Canadian Direct Equipment Finance business is expected to add scale and capabilities to its existing Canadian Equipment Financing business and expand its presence in core markets.

“Wells Fargo’s Canadian Direct Equipment Finance’s direct origination model is expected to allow TD to better serve a more diverse set of business customers in need of competitive equipment loans, leases, and customized financing services.”

TD Bank further revealed that Wells Fargo’s Canadian Direct Equipment Finance business has a 25-year operating history, which includes the acquisition by Wells Fargo of GE Capital’s Canadian Equipment Finance business in 2016. The business, which has approximately C$1.5 billion in assets and over 120 employees, provides loans and leases covering a full range of commercial equipment for businesses across Canada.

While speaking about the acquisition, David Pinsonneault, Executive Vice President, Commercial and Industrial, Canadian Business Banking, TD Bank Group, stated acquiring the Canadian Direct Equipment Finance business, it will expand TD’s competitive position in the Canadian’ equipment finance industry as well as build on TD’s customer service.

TD’s purchase of Wells Fargo Canadian Direct Equipment Finance business is expected to close in the first half of 2021, subject to receipt of regulatory and Competition Act approvals and clearance, and satisfaction of other customary closing conditions. Terms of the acquisition agreement have not been disclosed at this time.

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Plaid Has Decided to Terminate Pending Acquisition By Visa & Remain An Independent Company

Plaid, an open banking platform, announced on Tuesday it has decided to terminate its pending acquisition by Visa and will remain an independent company. The latest news on the acquisition was made just a little over two months after it was revealed that the U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit in federal court pertaining to the acquisition.

As previously reported, Visa announced in January 2020 it was planning to acquire Plaid for $5.3 billion. In purchasing Plaid, Visa was reportedly to jumpstart its push for digital prominence. Kelly called the acquisition a “natural evolution” as it connects consumers with digital financial services. At the time Al Kelly, CEO and Chairman of Visa, stated:

“The combination of Visa and Plaid will put us at the epicenter of the Fintech world, expanding our total addressable market and accelerating our long-term revenue growth trajectory.”

At the time of the lawsuit’s announcements, Visa refuted the suit:

“Visa strongly disagrees with the Department of Justice (DOJ), whose attempt to block Visa’s acquisition of Plaid is legally flawed and contradicted by the facts. This action reflects a lack of understanding of Plaid’s business and the highly competitive payments landscape in which Visa operates. The combination of Visa and Plaid will deliver substantial benefits for consumers seeking accessto a broader rangeof financial-related services, and Visa intends to defend the transaction vigorously.  As we explained to the DOJ, Plaid is not a payments company. Visa’s business faces intense competition from a variety of players – but Plaid is not one of them. Plaid is a data network that enables individuals to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they use to manage their financial lives, and its capabilities complement Visa’s. Together, Visa and Plaid will deliver better digital experiences and more choice for consumers in managing their money and financial data. Visa is confident that this transaction is good for consumers and good for competition.”

Speaking about Plaid remaining an independent company, Zachary Perret, Co-Founder and CEO of Plaid, shared:

“Since founding Plaid 8 years ago, we have been maniacally focused on expanding access and improving financial outcomes for consumers, developers, and financial institutions – and the intent of joining Visa was to accelerate that work. Unfortunately, the pace of a multi-year regulatory review is not compatible with the fast-moving realities of a startup – and delaying close another year or more is not in the best interest of our customers, the financial system, or consumers themselves.”

Perret further revealed despite the struggles that happened in 2020 globally, the past year has been one of exciting growth for Plaid, with hundreds of new banks joined the Plaid platform, and more than 4,000 companies turned to the platform’s service as the infrastructure to support their businesses, including many of the largest Fortune 500 companies who are focused on bringing digital financial products to their customers. In regards to his 2021 predicts, Perret added he expects the year to be more of the same as 2020.

“In addition to our ongoing focus on helping companies of all sizes deliver digital financial products, we have made significant progress in the ways that we work with financial institutions. Delivering on the promise of open finance is in everyone’s best interest, and we’ll be working in lockstep with our customers and financial institutions to bring this to fruition globally.”

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Lending Data Fintech dv01 Acquires Pragmic Technologies, Closes $6 Million Series B

dv01 has acquired Pragmic Technologies, according to a note from the company. The acquisition follows a $6 million series B3 financing round led by Pivot Investment Partners and joined by new strategic investor, AGNC Ventures, LLC, an affiliate of AGNC Investment Corp. (Nasdaq: AGNC), a residential mortgage REIT with over $97 billion in assets.  dv01’s total financing to date stands at $34 million, with past investors including Quantum Strategic Partners Ltd., Jefferies Financial Group Inc., OCA Ventures, Illuminate Financial Management, Ribbit Capital, and Regions Financial Corp.

dvo1 explains that Pragmic’s algorithms will provide investors with intra-month performance insights on agency MBS (mortgage backed securities), helping investors better optimize their portfolio management and hedging processes in a market that trades $65 trillion a year. dv01 will also be able to combine its understanding of loan-level data within securitizations with proprietary analytics to provide ESG ratings for structured products.

dv01 is a top Fintech providing deep data on the online lending sector. Pragmic Technologies is an early-stage company that is “reimagining” data infrastructure of the agency MBS market.

Charlie Oshman and Memo Sanchez, Pragmic Technologies’ founders and co-founders of commercial real estate data analytics company Reonomy, will join dv01.

“Unlocking real-time performance data in agency MBS will be a massive paradigm shift for a market that trades $65 trillion a year,” said dv01 Founder and CEO Perry Rahbar. “With this acquisition, we are at the forefront of building a proprietary data infrastructure that will significantly enhance our offerings across all structured products, in addition to agency MBS.”

dvo1 notes that the market for data-driven ESG investments has surpassed $40 trillion. With the addition of Pragmic Technologies, dv01 will be in a better position to combine its understanding of loan-level data within securitizations, with external data sources and proprietary analytics to work with partners to provide the first true ESG ratings for structured products.

Oshman called dv01 the ideal partner to “revolutionize the agency market.”

“With our combined resources, we will provide unmatched market transparency and quickly develop a dominant agency MBS business line to complement dv01’s non-QM, consumer unsecured and student loan coverage.”

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European Commission Agrees on €7.5 Billion Budget for Digital Europe: Goal is to improve Europe’s Competitiveness in the Global Digital Economy

The European Commission (EC) has come to an agreement on the €7.5 billion budget for the Digital Europe program. The goal is to “improve Europe’s competitiveness in the global digital economy and achieve technological sovereignty.” The EC said it seeks to support the digital transformation that will “guarantee high-quality public services benefiting citizens and businesses.”

The political agreement was reached today (December 14, 2020) with formal approval by the European Parliament and Council anticipated to take place soon with the program starting in January 2021. The budget will span a time period from 2021 to 2o27.

The plan is wide-ranging touching many different sectors of the European economy. A draft “Orientation” for 2021-2022 was previously published outlining potential goals:

  • Making Europe a top supercomputing region globally through the acquisition of at least one exascale supercomputer by the end of 2021, upgrading existing supercomputers and extending the use of advanced computing to industry, including SMEs;
  • Setting up and making accessible Europe-wide data spaces and testing and experimentation facilities for artificial intelligence in the areas of health, environment/climate, mobility, manufacturing and energy;
  • Enhancing cybersecurity by deploying a pan-European quantum communication infrastructure and supporting the set-up of a certification scheme for cybersecurity products;
  • Addressing the shortages of digital experts in the EU through dedicated Master’s programmes for artificial intelligence, advanced computing and cybersecurity;
  • Providing SMEs and public administrations access to the latest digital technologies by setting up a network of Digital Innovation Hubs;
  • Ensuring a successful digital transformation of health and care services with the EU-wide deployment of innovative and cost-effective data-driven tools and services based on technologies like AI and data analytics;
  • Making ICT products and services sustainable, by prioritising their energy efficiency as well as climate neutrality, reparability, lifespan and recycling;
  • Deploying open, interoperable, trustworthy urban digital platforms tailored to communities’ needs, offering easy standardised access to new datasets, and the large scale roll-out of AI- driven services in Smart Energy, Smart Mobility, waste and secondary resource management, industry and (re)manufacturing, healthcare and e-government.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) impacts most sectors of industry including financial services. Other areas of focus overlap with the Fintech realm.

Blockchain is frequently mentioned in the draft. For example:

“Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) should be seen as a crosscutting enabling technology that can support the validation of transactions, the development of data spaces and empowerment of citizens, public services and businesses to control and share access to data in a trusted, distributed, secure, transparent and verifiable way.”

The allocation of the budget has been segregated as follows:

  • €2.2 billion – Super computing
  • €2.1 billion – Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  • €1.7 billion – Cybersecurity
  • €580 million – Advanced Digital Skills
  • €1.1 billion – Ensuring wide use of digital tech.

The info sheet may be downloaded or viewed below.

Digital Europe Program factsheet 2020 12 14

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New Report Highlights Strong Quarter for DeFi Project Yearn Finance 

Yearn Finance has been one of the shining projects in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space for 2020. This week, investors and industry insiders glimpsed into some of its financial details. DeFi community members compiled an informal report on Yearn Finance for its first operational quarter. Most notably, it showed that the project had paid a significant portion of its revenues to stakers.

Healthy Finances as Yearn Finds Its Footing

The report is yet to be audited and hasn’t gotten any cosigns from Yearn Finance or its creators. Spanning August 20 to October 20, it shows that the DeFi protocol generated $3.79 million in net income.

Most of the protocol’s revenues came from its yVault product offerings, with the yUSD vault alone accounting for 68 percent of the total revenues. The yETH vault, which was introduced in September, generated $545,000, although it was eventually suspended to mitigate risks and losses. While the yETH vault remains closed, Yearn plans to relaunch the service in the coming months when it releases updated vault versions.

The financial report added that most of the vaults’ revenues had come from withdrawal fees that users pay. It also pointed out that a new fee structure will be implemented soon. The feature will notably involve a 20 percent performance fee for upcoming vaults. This structure should push revenues considerably going forward.

All in all, Yearn Finance appears to be doing fine financially. It had gross profits of $4.14 during the quarter, with most of its $306,000 in operating expenses going to security and administrative costs. The protocol also paid out some funds in audits and bug bounties, as well as grants to developers and contributors in its ecosystem.

Things Could Get Better

Of course, the big news for Yearn Finance this month has been the protocol’s impressive acquisition spree. In the last two weeks, Yearn Finance has either merged with or acquired several other DeFi protocols as it looks to increase its user base and value proposition.

The spree started on November 25, when Yearn announced that it had acquired Pickle Finance, a yield farming and trading platform. The move will help Yearn Finance bolster rewards for yield farming activities. It will also help Pickle Finance, which recently suffered a devastating hack that resulted in the loss of $20 million in DAI.

In the following, days, the leading DeFi protocol announced deals with insurance market coverage provider Cover, lending protocol Cream Finance, and savings and lending protocol Akropolis.

The last announcement has been a partnership with SushiSwap, a top decentralized exchange (DEX). The partnership will see both firms share resources and collaborate on launching new products. They also expect to see a surge in the respective total value locked.

These partnerships should help Yearn improve its user base and revenues.

New Report Highlights Strong Quarter for DeFi Project Yearn Finance 

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