Fintech News Issue #106 Thursday, February 23rd 2017 09:49AM

In this episode of Breaking Banks Brett King, Marc Hochstein of American Banker, and Peter Renton, founder of LendIt Academy, talk about the upcoming Digital Identity Crisis Webinar, the LendIt Conference at the Javits Center in NYC, and the proposed Fintech Charter, and what that can mean for changes in banking in the U.S.

There’s been a lot of talk about fintech lately. We talk about the billions of dollars being invested in fintech; the wave of unicorns and start-ups in this space; the challenge they bring to banks and incumbents; the way in which they are reaching new spaces and places; but what is fintech?

Similar to many financial and non-financial industries, retail banking is directly affected by new innovations and developments such as AI, machine learning, contextual design or the cloud. The way these will impact the current market players and the opportunities they open to newcomers is something still to be seen.

Open Banking initiatives are bringing technology at the forefront of finance by encouraging (sometimes even mandating) secure underlying account data sharing by banks.

Representatives of leading IT companies, authors of startups and everyone who is interested in Blockchain technologies will come together. They will discuss Blockchain solutions in governance (Govtech) as well as developments of various business spheres: banking, trading, notary services, healthcare, logistics, retail.

Banking customers are demanding more and more access to innovative fintech services and applications that are making their financial lives easier. Big banks are responding by embracing the trend of open data, allowing fintech companies to access user information to provide a more seamless customer experience.

Banking APIs constitute the core of innovative approach to building financial products. Enabling access to data for all relevant participants of the market creates an opportunity for each of them to build a superior offering as well as for consumers to make better choices of financial products.

In 2011, Brett King was promoting his book, “Breaking Banks,” and creating a start-up that he hoped would do to the banks what Amazon did to the retail industry and Facebook did to media. “We had grand ideas of being the Facebook of banking, and being a new form of bank account,” Mr. King said recently.

Money is surprisingly social. Venmo was one of the first U.S. startups to capitalize on that realization, designing its mobile app around an emoji-ridden social feed. Now messaging apps are seeing the light and welcoming financial services companies onto their platforms.

I’ve seen a lot of great discussion lately on sites like Medium and LinkedIn about applying conversational interfaces to various industries and workflows. I hope this article advances that discussion, especially in the field of retail banking.

The European Banking Authority is to relax proposed rules on a requirement for strong customer authentication for all payments under EUR10.

The worldwide growth in technology has lead to the creation of hundreds of [....] puzzle pieces, all of which connect different elements of our lives – shopping, health, money. But the link doesn’t need to be just that we use this technology. Pieces that may seem far apart and disjointed can be linked, joined and synchronised.

Although banks may appear slow to react and less agile than emerging fintech companies, banks remain their corporate clients’ main point of reference for technology innovation and inclusion.

Here's why banks and credit unions should believe in artificial intelligence and invest in the power of advanced data analytics.

Mobile commerce continues to increase, with more than three-quarters of consumers making a purchase using their mobile device, and more than 60% using their mobile phone for banking. These numbers are both up from two years ago.