Venmo started out in 2009 as a way for founders Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail to pay each other without having to exchange cash or write a cheque. The first prototype worked over SMS, Andrew and Iqram would send notes alongside the cash to keep track of payments. While SMS functionality died with the app launch in late 2010, the social element of Venmo remains one of the app’s core features. In early demos, Venmo founders proposed it as a way for musicians to sell songs and merchan...| Business of Apps
Before Robinhood, anyone who wanted to invest in stocks would be charged between $5 to $10 a trade. They also needed to invest a minimum of $500 to open an account. Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt (co-founders) had previous experience building these systems and saw the extraneous costs as little more than gatekeeping people out of investing. “We are not setting any account minimums, which we think unlocks a market of investors who couldn’t do this before,” said Bhatt to CNBC at launch. ...| Business of Apps
In the late 90s, paying for things online still had a stigma attached to it. There wasn’t any assurance that goods would be delivered or that faulty payments would be recovered. It was wild west and PayPal was one of the first payment solutions to try and civilise it. PayPal was formed when two companies, Confinity and X.com, merged. Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX fame, was CEO of this combined company for a time. As he would in the future, he zoned in on the vision of PayPal’s future and...| Business of Apps
Challenger banks in the UK took flight in the mid-2010s, accelerated by legislation from the EU and UK government which welcomed new competition in the industry. In a two year period, Revolut, Starling and Monzo were launched, with an aim to win customers through better mobile experiences. At the time, mobile banking in the UK was a nightmare, some banks were still struggling with the web. Starling Bank was the first on the scene in the UK, launched in 2014. Tom Blomfield, the founder of Monz...| Business of Apps
The finance app industry is a multi-sector behemoth with thousands of businesses new and old trying to make financial processes easier on mobile. In the past decade, we have seen in the introduction of payments through near-field communication, commission-free stock trading, the birth of cryptocurrency and buy now, pay later apps. On top of that, many of the old financial institutions have integrated their systems onto mobile. Almost every bank has a mobile app nowadays, and has implemented n...| Business of Apps
Cryptocurrency has been in development since the 1980s, but the launch of Bitcoin in 2009 by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto was the first bit-currency to catch on outside of academic circles. At its core, cryptocurrency is a decentralised digital currency, which is usually backed by a public ledger (blockchain) to verify transfers, mint new coins and secure individual coin ownership records. For the first few years, Bitcoin enthusiasts mined the currency and tried to get it accepted ...| Business of Apps
Binance is the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, responsible for several trillion dollar crypto volume every year. It was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, who previously worked for Blockchain.info and as CTO of OKCoin. Launched in Hong Kong, it quickly became one of the leading exchanges, but from the get-go faced increasingly restrictive regulations which forced it to migrate servers and headquarters to Malta. Binance has one of the widest selections of alt-coins available on ...| Business of Apps