Sean Murray: Today on deBanked News, American Express is
acquiring Kabbage? Whattt!!! We've got a word also on Broker
Fair 2021. And tech is making a big bet on New York office
space. It's all coming up. Let's go over to Johny Fernandez.
Johny Fernandez: Hey Sean, so I'm standing right outside the
New York office headquarters of American Express. Now, earlier
this week, it announced that it had purchased an online small
business lender called Kabbage. Now, what has people talking is
its price which has not been disclosed yet, but we do know
that its rival OnDeck recently sold for less than 10% of its
IPO value. And a key distinction in this purchase is that Amex
said that it will not purchase the company's loan portfolio,
but rather its technology data and people. Anna Marrs,
president of Global Commercial Services at American Express
said that the company has been expanding beyond their
commercial card products for years. American Express first
announced a merchant financing program as early as September
2011. And they had been an unspoken competitor of Kabbage
ever since. But in the public relations and technology game,
Kabbage seemed to be winning the war. As a combined force, it
could be a game changer in small business lending. Now this area
of New York City is significant because across the street is the
headquarters of Goldman Sachs, a legitimate fintech player, after
the introduction of Marcus. We also know that if you head down
the block south from here, you'll bump into Convene by
Brookfield Place, which many in the financial world know will be
the home to Broker Fair 2021 deBanked has produced nine
conferences since 2018. Its signature annual event for the
commercial finance industry, Broker Fair, will once again
take place in New York City. And when the industry returns in
person, it's gearing up to come back big. Broker Fair 2021 will
be on March 22 2021 and we will be airing the event live all day
and also conducting different interviews throughout the event.
And if you're interested in learning more about the event,
you can log on to brokerfair.org. That's all for
me now. I'm Johny Fernandez with deBanked News. Sean, back over
to you.
Sean Murray: Thanks, Johny. I myself will definitely be there,
because I'm the host of the whole show. And when the
industry does return in person, well we've got a few surprises
in store for everybody. I want to touch on something that was
raised last time when we talked about Facebook. Facebook, as you
may recall, is acquiring 730,000 square feet of office space
directly across Penn Station. Now we've got Amazon, and Amazon
has recently acquired an entire building in New York. It's the
former Lord and Taylor office on Fifth Avenue. Now Amazon says
that they're not going to be moving anyone in until 2023.
That might be due partially to the pandemic, but it's pretty
clear that tech companies have taken a long term and bullish
viewpoint on office space in New York. Now not everybody is
exactly on the same page here. This tweet is not about office
space, per se, but it's from the co-founder of Morning Brew,
which is a popular finance newsletter, and he thinks that
real estate prices in New York, in the city, are never coming
back to pre COVID levels ever. Now time will tell if he is
right, but as a longtime New Yorker myself, I tend to
disagree with that statement. That's all for today. Thank you
for watching. I'm Sean Murray, with deBanked News.