Briefs: Yodlee flap, Whole loan sale by Pepper, Porges steps down at DirectMoney, HashChing pitches

Banking Day staff
  • Controversy over the use of the Yodlee "screen-scraping" method to access bank accounts by fintech gets reheated in the Financial Review. George Lucas, chief executive of Acorns in Australia is the agent, and the context a warning to customers emailed by Commonwealth Bank on Thursday, cautioning the use of such a service - a rather common customer choice - may breach the bank's terms. In April, Fintech Australia, a new lobby group for financial services start-ups, said it formed an "open data subcommittee" to push for changes to the ePayments Code to make it clear that bank customers can give passwords to fintechs without banks having to provide approval.
  • Lender and loan servicer Pepper Group has sold a A$400 million portfolio of mortgages in a "whole loan sale" - its second such sale this year. It sold another $400 million portfolio in March. Pepper uses the whole of loan sale process, which involves transferring economic ownership to the buyer, as an alternative to issuing residential mortgage-backed securities. It said in a statement that it expected to execute further whole loan sales.
  • Stephen Porges has stepped down as executive chair of DirectMoney. He will be replaced by John Nantes, who is chief portfolio manager of Adcock Private Equity. Nantes was previously group head of financial services at Crowe Horwath, one of Australia's largest providers of services to self-managed superannuation funds. He has also held executive positions at St George Bank and Colonial State Bank. Porges will stay on the DirectMoney board as a non-executive director.
  • Bluestone may help open up a new category of mortgage finance aimed at entrepreneurs, especially of the start-up variety. "Where a borrower has more than 20 per cent equity in the start-up, the lender will assess the serviceability of the borrower based on their share of business earnings instead of payslips to meet the responsible lending requirements," mortgage originators HashChing chirped in a media release on the initiative. The home loan "is available to start up business owners with no credit scoring," Mandeep Sodhi, chief executive of HashChing wrote in a media release on Friday.