High Five! The top 5 fintech stories we’re following today

1. How Wells Fargo launched online loans in 9 months
It took Schwab 6 months to launch its entry into roboadvisory, the Schwab Intelligent Portfolios. It did it by pulling together a multi-functional team from across the company, getting people excited about the project by positioning it as the future of the firm. It was a great demonstration how an incumbent financial institution can counter what’s going on in fintech startup land with its own form of innovation.

Now, here’s how Wells Fargo launched its own online lending product using similar tactics. It took Wells Fargo 9 months to launch its own online lending product. Here’s how the firm went from zero to everything to create a competitive offering.

2. Walmart Pay and the overcrowding of the mobile payment market
With the success of the Starbucks app (21 percent of all its transactions — some 16 million consumers use the app), many retailers are busy working on their own form of payments. Walmart, certainly, showed interest as a big driver behind an industry consortium (MCX) that intended to do an end-around of the credit card companies.

So, people were genuinely surprised when Walmart launched its own payment app through 600 of its stores. Are we entering an era where every retailer will have its own payment app? Maybe but Tradestreaming’s Hadas Tayeb breaks down what’s happening in retail payments land and what that may mean for the consumer.

3. Alibaba now 3rd largest money market fund in the world

It took less than a month for Chinese ecommerce leader, Alibaba’s money market fund to grow larger than the average US fund. Now, after a year, it’s grown so much that it would rival the 3rd largest US MM fund. The power of a big tech firm moving laterally into financial services is transformative – that’s why the biggest competition to some core banking functionality and services will come from the Apples, Googles, and Amazons (and, yeah, Alibabas).

4. Tradestreaming’s list of top resources about the marketplace lending industry

So much has happened over the past couple of months in marketplace lending. From massive changes in the supply/demand equation to the ouster of Lending Club’s CEO, it’s hard to stay on top of it all. It’s an industry that’s dealing with its own growth pains and there are some really good resources out there to help investors, borrowers, and industry professionals make sense out of it all. We’ve assembled them into one easy-to-use list. Go get ’em, Tiger.

5. Why fintech influencers don’t pay to play

Funny thing happened this week in fintech land. Here’s the brief summary of what went down:

1. Create a list of the top 100 fintech influencers
2. Share it
3. Ask the influencers to pay for inclusion
4. Tweetstorm ensues

So, here’s a word of advice — don’t publish a list of fintech influencers of any kind and then ask the people on the list to pay for their listing. It doesn’t look good, is kind of a shady practice, and will probably be shared with an audience of hundreds of thousands of industry professionals.