Blockchain and Bitcoin technologies look set to change and shake up the course of the digital payments industry. Bitcoin to date is the most successful cryptocurrency and blockchain is what makes it possible, so it is not surprising these two technologies are dominating the eCommerce and payments news space.
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According to a recent report from the World Economic Forum, fintechs should start to fear the muscling-in of the tech heavyweights. As Alexa is the personal assistant of choice for several FIs and Amazon powers web content for others, are the tech giants dwarfing the diminutive disruptors?
A race for regulatory talent is about to begin. Regardless of the outcome of the Brexit negotiations, it’s almost certain many UK banks will relocate their headquarters or employees, and European financial capitals will swell in size.
As the digital currency space has evolved and matured over the past several years, U.S. regulatory agencies have, for the most part, sat back and observed – none purporting to exercise jurisdiction over the digital currency space in any meaningful way. This hesitation has stemmed from the novelty that virtual currencies pose to regulators, including the varied nature of the underlying technology and structure and an inability to squarely place them into a singular asset class. Virtual currencies, depending on their underlying framework and liquidity, possess certain features of currencies, securities, commodities, and property.
FinTech is one of the fastest growing industries in the United States and, as with any emerging industry, has and will face growing pains. A specific consequence of such rapid and uncharted growth will be the increase of unfair competition lawsuits, including by those who seek to obstruct changes to the existing competitive structure and otherwise protect their positions. This article identifies and defines the FinTech industry and unfair competition law, examines the impacts that the law of unfair competition will have on this emerging industry, and provides guidance to minimize risk and exposure to unfair competition claims.
Investing in ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) or functional new currencies can be extremely profitable from an investor’s perspective. For companies, it is a crowdfunding alternative that helps them raise funds for new projects. An ICO is an easy and efficient method for startups to generate capital for their new projects.
Today, financial institutions face two major challenges. First, the large volume of highly sensitive information they process, such as credit card data, Social Security numbers and personal identifiers, is highly attractive bait for attackers. Second, financial organizations in the U.S. are supervised by many agencies, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and have to follow stringent regulatory requirements to avoid litigation and financial penalties. Meeting these challenges is taxing, especially when customer demands for service availability keep increasing and IT budgets and staff are both limited.
Sixty-three percent of countries have favorable or mostly favorable regulation of cryptocurrencies out of 60 states studied as of July, 21st 2017. This is a very good sign for the industry. Still there is a lot of room for growth and diligent work with regulatory bodies to make cryptocurrencies widely acceptable.
“We are at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another,” according to Professor Klaus Schwabb, founder of the World Economic Forum. In fact he is right, and the revolution is already under way, not least in my industry – private equity.
To support the UK fintech, the FCA launched a sandbox to bring together innovators and regulators in a less regulated environment.
Private fund managers are showing an increasing penchant for firing their fund administrators. A new report by Preqin called “Preqin Special Report: Private Capital Service Providers” shows that 36% of fund managers changed their fund administrators in 2016.
There was a time when digital banking was perceived as synonymous with online banking and mobile banking. Financial services industry, along with other sectors, is experiencing an explosion of digitization thanks to smartphones, tablets and access to affordable high-speed internet. The number of smart phone users is expected to equal the number of bank accounts in near future as all mobile users link their bank accounts to their smart phone and get onboard with mobile-based digital wallets and savings platform.
Roy Keidar of law firm Yigal Arnon & Co examines how blockchain could provide the answer to the anti-money laundering issues that crypto-currencies face.
The insurance industry is facing tremendous change and so are the tasks of those working in this field. We talked to Sebastian Heithoff, Marketing Manager at German InsurTech startup versicherungsberatercheck.de – a platform that looks to increase the quality of insurance brokerage and consumer decision making in the digital age.
A year has passed since the UK voted for Brexit. Speculation has been rife on the potential impact that the Brexit vote, and the trigger of Article 50, could have on the London fintech landscape. Thus far London has maintained its pre-eminent position. In fact we are seeing growth of the tech hub in Croydon and further afield in the UK with growth in Bristol, Manchester and Edinburgh.
Imagine if one of the large high street banks did actually truly innovate. Imagine if banks were somehow capable of taking the innovative lead from fintech. Imagine if your own bank outdid all fintech companies in speed, service, convenience and cost for all financial services you use, for your current account, payments, foreign exchange, savings and investing, and any other services.
Would you stay with your cutting-edge bank or prefer to use four or five individual fintech companies? Most people would choose the convenient option of staying with their bank, right?
In the not so distant past, enterprise computing relied on monolithic applications to provide access to business functions within an organization. These applications strove to meet all operational requirements through rich and ever-growing feature sets—think ERP systems.
Alternative investments are on a tear, and no asset class has seen more growth than private equity. According to a recent study by eVestment, Assets under Administration (AUA) grew 44% from 2015 to 2016. This influx of capital has caused major ripple effects across the entire private equity landscape, with fund managers competing intensely to attract investor capital.
CFOs are under increasing pressure to demonstrate with certainty that they have full knowledge of data sources used for reported statements, to rule out errors and misreporting. However, due to ubiquitous, uncontrolled and unmonitored use of spreadsheets and end user computing applications, many CFOs are struggling to offer such cast-iron guarantees. Meanwhile the role of the CFO is widely recognized to facilitate and support business strategy so that the organization can achieve its goals and objectives – be it of profitability, capital, growth or anything else. Shareholders and investors cherish these metrics too. Consequently, CFOs are routinely driving transformation projects via acquisitions, on-shoring, off-shoring, financial restructuring and such, to control and improve the business performance of their organizations.
A lack of understanding and of the will to change is often described through the story of the boiling frog. The frog is said to be unable to sense the increasing water temperature and will not search for a way out of his misery – leading to his inevitable death.
A common analogy to the finance sector is the newspaper industry, and rightly so. Finance is quickly shaping up to be remarkably similar. The incumbent banks are the heavyweight newspapers – the Washington Post and Financial Times of the world. FinTechs are to banks what the growing mass of alternative news sources – blogs; e-zines; new digital-only newspapers; social media, most prominently, Twitter; and the increasing relevance of corporate content marketing – is to the incumbent newspapers.
It is not hyperbole to say that the second Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (a.k.a. “MiFID II”) will have a profound impact on the operations of financial institutions that distribute and trade financial instruments in the EU. In fact, this legislation, which seeks to protect investors by significantly raising the standard for transparency on investment houses, will likely confound even well-intentioned trading organizations doing their best to comply with the directive, much like we are seeing with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The FinTech revolution has become a worldwide movement in just a few years, with no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Global FinTech investments in 2015 were over double that of total investments made in 2014, indicating a surge in interest among different countries to become the FinTech capital of the world.
Why should my bank start making data-driven decisions? It’s a common question many bank executives are asking as they see the competition leveraging customer data to improve service, better segment, mitigate risk, enhance marketing messages, and drive new business opportunities.