Today, more than ever, Americans need access to credit. Credit is the gateway to broader financial empowerment, enabling individuals to build their financial identity, borrow money, and purchase assets like a home or a car. While the need for credit continues to grow, the majority of existing consumer credit products haven’t changed much in decades. Credit cards and consumer financing solutions look mostly the same today as they did in 2000. Meanwhile, traditional models for credit scoring are pretty limited in assessing true risk — especially for younger and underbanked segments. …

This summer, we shared a post about why we thought Moov was a special company with a special goal: building a community of FinTech developers and product experts. You could think of Moov as a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) company or an embedded payments company, but there are many of those being built right now…and not a heck of a lot of differentiation that separates them.

Instead, imagine a community of experts who 1) told you what tools and resources they needed, 2) helped build the tech products requested by their fellow community members and 3) tested and validated those products at…

If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s to not make predictions…but we couldn’t help ourselves. We’ve taken a shot at 10 things that might happen as a result of new leadership in the White House.

1. New policies and regulation accelerate open banking
   A focus on consumer financial empowerment — especially for underbanked and unbanked population segments — will drive greater portability of financial data and support for alternative models that challenge the dominance of main street banks.
2. New stimulus increases consumer spending and stabilizes SMBs With the potential to control both houses of Congress and the White House, Democrats are…

In our last post, we talked about the changing nature of healthcare payments and the impact of COVID on accelerating industry transformation. We analyzed key pain points facing patients, providers, and payers as each confronts new challenges driven by cost, technology, regulation — and a global pandemic. In this post, we look at potential solutions and emerging models to address these challenges and pain points.

What can we do?

Many of the innovative tools & platforms needed for patients, providers and payers to navigate the current health & market crises have been available for some time. Tools like digital billing, text-based communications, and cloud…

Earlier this year, we created a medium post that shared a note we sent our portfolio CEOs with strong words of support for the Black community and our intent to fight for racial equality. Since then, we have undertaken several initiatives to put these words into action and attempt to make a real and measurable difference. So what have we been doing?

Making our voices heard

1. Signed the NVCA & Venture Forward #VCHumanCapital Pledge
2. Joined the FinTech Equality Coalition
3. Discussed our beliefs and intentions with our portfolio company leadership as well as our limited partners (investors in our funds)

Donated…

This is the first part in a three-part series looking at the intersection of healthcare and financial services

At Commerce Ventures, our focus within the healthcare industry pertains primarily (though not exclusively) to the financial service interactions between industry participants as well as the technologies that enable them. Access to and affordability of healthcare is increasingly becoming a critical component of Americans’ financial lives — with recent reports suggesting U.S. households are spending 11% of their annual income on healthcare.

Many of the healthcare commerce trends we’ve observed over the last few years have reinforced our belief that there are…

Who is Commerce Ventures?

Commerce Ventures is a venture capital investment firm based in San Francisco that focuses on early-stage investments in startups helping to digitize retail and financial services. Since our inception in early 2013, we have raised more than $100 million in assets and have invested in over 60 startups companies, including several of today’s category leaders like Bill.com (IPO), Forter, InAuth (Acquired by Amex), Marqeta, MX, Narvar, SessionM (Acquired by Mastercard) and Socure. As a team of 7, we work hard to find exciting investment opportunities, help our portfolio companies grow and succeed, and move our ecosystem forward in positive ways.

What is the CV Access Fellowship?

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This week, MasterCard announced the acquisition of Finicity for $825M. The acquisition will be seen by many as a response to Visa’s $5B acquisition of Plaid earlier this year (click here for our view on the deal). Both companies provide open banking capabilities, enabling banks to securely expose certain data elements; equipping FinTech start-ups to create new products leveraging those elements; and empowering individuals to easily sign-up for new products.

Both acquisitions will also fuel a broader shift in the US banking market. This shift is centered on the portability of consumer financial data and the emergence of alternative models…