Also:

• 🏳 The PSD2 deadline is closing

• 👮‍♂️ The golden age of fraud

• 📉 How to break NASDAQ

• ⛓ Perfectly ridiculous cryptocurrencies

• 🤔 Interesting opinions

🤑 Crowded refinancing

Norwegians have 151 billion NOK in unsecured debt, according to the latest figures from the Debt Register. Everyone who offers consumer loans is fighting for these 151 billion NOK. Therefore, the space is rather crowded at the moment. Finanstipset is one of these actors helping to refinance unsecured debt with a mortgage. Last week they secured 7 million NOK for expanding to Sweden and Finland. Defero is in the same space allowing people credit checking themselves and offer cheaper loans. Defero has now pivoted after their revenue rose sharply when they launched a service that monitors the dark web and notifies customers if they are exposed to ID theft. Ironically the savings app Dreams is also betting on refinancing unsecured debt after discovering that their third most popular savings goal was becoming debt-free. After years of significant losses, Dreams believes they now finally have cracked the revenue code. Is this market too crowded, or have all the actors found their niche to be profitable? I guess the real winner, in this case, no matter the outcome, is Google Adwords.

🏳 The PSD2 deadline is closing

• The PSD2 deadline is closing on Friday. According to Fintech Norway, few banks are ready. Link

• Ten surprising things that rely on AI. 63% of banks reported that they used AI for fraud detection. Link

• Signatures on screen are a comic misunderstanding of digitization. Link

• 11 FS has written a report on rebuilding financial services from the inside. The report is for you if you're trying to explain the intricacies, challenges, and potential of financial technology to your team and management, or you're trying to understand it. Link

👮‍♂️ The golden age of fraud

• DNB receives a fee of NOK 400 million from the Norwegian Financial Supervisory Authority for inadequate AML compliance. Link

• We're entering the golden age of fraud. Link

• Banks with more women on their boards commit less fraud. They found that banks with more female directors faced lower and less-frequent fines for misconduct, saving those institutions $7.84 million a year, on average. Link

📉 How to break NASDAQ

• Berkshire Hathaway's stock price is so expensive it broke NASDAQ data feeds. Apparently, the feeds transmit stock prices as int32, which means that the highest number they can handle is $429,496.7295. NASDAQ has scheduled a fix for May 17th. Link

• Bank credit officers are more likely to approve loan applications earlier and later in the day. At the same time, 'decision fatigue' around midday is associated with defaulting to the safer option of saying no, according to a new study. Link

⛓ Perfectly ridiculous cryptocurrencies

• Matt Levine on Dogecoin: "Financial news in 2021 is incredibly stupid, sure, but I can take pleasure in it. But Dogecoin … man, [...] Just imagine traveling 10 years back in time and trying to explain this to someone; just imagine what an idiot you'd feel like. "There's going to be this online currency that people think is a form of digital gold, and then there's going to be a different online currency that is a parody of the first one based on a meme about a talking Shiba Inu, and that one will have a market capitalization bigger than 80% of the companies in the S&P 500, and its value will fluctuate based on things like who is hosting 'Saturday Night Live' and whether people tweet a hashtag about it on the pot-joke holiday, and Bloomberg will write articles and banks will write research notes about those sorts of catalysts, and it will remain a perfectly ridiculous content-free parody even as people properly take it completely seriously because there are billions of dollars at stake." Link

• Five genuinely useful things crypto can do in 2021. Link

🤔 Interesting opinions

• Is Klarna ready if Sbanken disappears? Many wonder who will take on the Sbanken customers who refuse to join DNB. The timing is perfect for a Swedish outsider, says Petter Solerød in Cicero Consulting. I wouldn’t bet my money on it, considering they need at least a mortgage solution and support for eFaktura etc. But there are still two more milestones left for challenger-banks looking for dissatisfied Sbanken customers: When DNB gets final approval to buy the stocks and when DNB ditches the Sbanken brand. Link

• "This is how software eats the world: by taking business functions one at a time, turning them into well-documented API calls with useful error messages (but infrequent errors) that can be chained together with arbitrary complexity and then run with minimal human involvement [..] And Stripe is supplying the crucial payments layer, and a growing set of adjacent products, to make it happen.". Link

• "Banks are seen as "ruthless capitalists," but the level of inefficiency, incompetence and wasted effort within them is mind-boggling." Link

• A podcast covering Visa's business model, unique history, and potential threats from other businesses and macroeconomic forces. Link

🥺 Don't keep it a secret!

Like what you read? Please pass it on to your friends and colleagues! They can sign up here: nyhetsbrev.stacc.com

Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X