FinTech News Issue #21 June 25th, 2015

With emoji now the fastest growing language in the UK, a British technology firm has launched the world’s first emoji-only passcode, which is easier to remember and mathematically more secure than traditional passcodes. - See more at: http://www.intelligentenvironments.com/info-centre/press-releases/now-you-can-log-into-your-bank-using-emoji-1#sthash.z7vcG92M.dpuf

Incubator dedicated to early stage companies in the payments industry, supported by leading payment firms MasterCard and The Bancorp.

Safello, a bitcoin spending platform based in Stockholm, Sweden, has signed a proof of concept (PoC) with Barclays to explore how the financial services sector can harness block chain technologies. The agreement marks one of the highlights of the Barclays Accelerator Demo Day in London. It also marks first PoC that a U.K. high street bank has announced with a bitcoin company. Safello has already enrolled more than 20,000 users in Europe.

FinFair 2015, the first conference to feature the leadership, products and technologies driving the crowd-centric retail alternatives market, is pleased to officially announce one of the most groundbreaking FinTech and alternative finance programs to penetrate Wall Street.

Bigger is not always better but in the case of financial technology, the London market is leaving Sydney for dead.

London still rules the roost with companies like Transferwise and Currency Cloud raising vast funding rounds recently.

The entrepreneurial ambitions of engineering graduates in Kerala will now get a cutting edge with the Startup Village rolling out its 'FINTECH Studio' scheme, which provides devices and tools for transforming their innovative ideas into reality.

Slideshow

Payments platform Currency Cloud has secured $18 million in Series C funding. Sapphire Ventures led the round with participation from Rakuten, Anthemis, Atlas Ventures, Notion Capital and XAnge Private Equity. In addition to the funding, Andreas Weiskam of Sapphire Ventures has been added to Currency Cloud’s board of directors.

Banks’ “archaic technology systems” are unable to cope with the demands of modern online banking according to the Financial Times. The claim was made over the weekend in an Finantial Times article discussing the latest fintech glitch suffered by Royal Bank of Scotland last Tuesday in which payments of 600,000 customers “went missing.”

Bankers and Silicon Valley types are fond of framing their rivalry over the future of financial services as a winner-takes-all game. But that construct may be too simplistic, according to a growing number of people on the front lines of digital innovation.

I bet very few people have heard of Ant Financial Services Group. I guarantee everyone in the financial services industry should know about Ant. Ant has recently been valued at a piddly $45 billion. How can a company few know, that is not a household name, be valued at such a astronomical level? Easy answer in one word: Alibaba - read this.