Author: xiaoge

As FinTech sector expands rapidly, european FinTech firms believe that banks are lobbying against EU legislation that could see the power balance shift. If the lobby went successful, FinTech companies would face greater regulation, but the belief is that this would provide greater confidence to users in the reliability of the services.

In the mean time, banks are aim to tighter restrictions on FinTech companies and their access to customer data due to the controversial issues about cybercriminals will obtain customer’s confidential information. As a result of this, FinTech firms blame banks will delay response times to access requests.

Not only banks, former Group CEO of Barclays, Antony Jenkins also expressed his view that “within the next ten years the financial technology sector would substantially disrupt traditional banking systems and the banking sector as a whole.”

Due to concerns and worries, government regulators will have to maintain a strong focus on the regulatory perimeter, including a more disciplined management of operational and cyber risks. However, this action will further delay the process of implementing FinTech in the sector, which is already considered as sluggish by numerous industry specialists.

 

Source: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/fintech-firms-big-banks-are-lobbying-to-block-change/

After its self-removal from the European Union, United Kingdom became one of the first countries that found lack of enough people to fill FinTech positions. According to a report from Business Insider earlier this year, there are 28.3 percent of Digital Project Manager positions open and remain unfilled after two months in the U.K.. Speculation has been high as to how the U.K. will do once it removes itself from the EU. Plus, big banks have already threatened to move jobs from U.K. to overseas, which could potentially cripple the British economy with jobs remaining unfilled for longer.

Reports also showed that FinTech funding in the U.K. has fallen by 33 percent in 2016, comparing to $1.2 billion in 2015. This showed an even larger uncertainty in the FinTech sector for U.K., along with its geo political and macro-economic factors. The reports concluded, “Despite being the global FinTech hub more clearly needs to be done to fill FinTech positions in the U.K. job market and improve its standing long after it removes itself from the European Union. Only time will tell how successful this is.”

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/hardest-fintech-jobs-to-fill-in-uk-according-to-indeedcom-2017-3?r=UK&IR=T

The Kingdom of Bahrain is in talks with Singapore’s central bank as the monarchy looks toward nation-wide blockchain adoption.

According to Khalid Al Rumaihi, CEO of the Bahrain EDB, the ability for blockchain to be adopted at a country level “is a huge opportunity for Bahrain to move into the spotlight as a pioneer in this space”.

Tasked with developing the blueprint for economic growth and development, Al Rumaihi sees the entirety of the financial services sector in the midst of “disruption of fintech”, underlining the need for Bahrain to proactively adapt and leap ahead with technologies like blockchain.

Dubai is also moving towards to adopt blockchain widely. The government is willing move to record all of its documents on a blockchain by the year 2020, as a part of its “Dubai Blockchain Strategy”.

Technology companies should grasp the opportunity to work on various other blockchain-based applications, such as in healthcare, cross-border remittance, conflict-free diamond trading and e-voting, to further promote use of blockchain into daily life.

 

Source: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/kingdom-bahrain-aims-country-level-blockchain-adoption/

Japanese largest financial services company and one of the three Japanese “megabanks”, Mizuho Financial Group, announced their blockchain application development earlier this week, after completing the first trial of its customized digital currency and cross-border document sharing technology supported by IBM and consulted by Cognizant.

In the announcement, Mizuhuo concluded that the trial was successful, and their “tamper-proof” blockchain solution is proved to be effective for sharing information among several subsidiaries within the Mizuho group, as well as same-day cross-border settlements of securities transactions and digital currency transfers, with significant “cost savings and enhanced usability”. Through the blockchain technology, Mizuho confidently expressed their next goal of “storing and managing large volumes of data over a distributed ledger”.

Mizuhuo’s announcement is one of the first several trial feedbacks of companies adopting blockchain technology. And, the result turns out to be expectedly satisfying. With the development in the blockchain solutions, different institutions could seek the opportunity of collaborating with technology provider for customizing their unique and conforming blockchain solutions, to better serve within their institutions and differentiate among their competitors.

Source: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/japan-megabank-mizuho-completes-digital-currency-document-sharing-trial-over-a-blockchain/

Austria’s largest regional energy company, Wien Energie, announced to join the industry partners and counterparts to participate in a “blockchain energy trading” pilot. The company will use Interbit platform, a multi-chain remittance distributed-ledger technology based platform provided by Canadian blockchain firm BTL. The new technology could improve both cost and time efficiency in the process of energy trading, by enabling faster and significantly cheaper transfers of funds and assets. With the use of blockchain technology, Wien Energie is expecting a significant cut in energy trading costs. The company’s executive, Peter Gönitzer, also expected that the new technology “could bring rise to entirely new business models”.

Though, the viability of commercial use and strategies of blockchain-based energy trading need further trail and experimental discuss, Wien Energie is confident with the future of blockchain-based energy trading, as one of its peer, Electron (UK),  already demonstrated “significantly faster energy transfers (20x) with notably lowered costs by simulating data from 53 million metering points from 60 energy providers” using its self-developed blockchain platform. Blockchain technology in energy industry will not only bring more opportunities for energy trading, also take us to a far-reaching new age for non-financial related industries. Energy companies should see and take advantage of this opportunity as quickly as possible, hence, to create entry barriers for other competitors in the industry.

Source: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/austrias-biggest-utility-company-to-test-blockchain-energy-trading/

Christopher Giancarlo, the commissioner and acting chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), called on the regulators and agencies to speed up their process in supporting distributed ledger technology and fintech innovation. Giancarlo has seen the digital financial markets as “one of the biggest threats to economic stability and functioning world markets”.

He also listed five key elements that needs special consideration for making market reform work in the U.S., including “providing customer choice in trade execution, fixing swaps data reporting, achieving cross-border harmonization, encouraging fintech innovation, and cultivating a forward thinking regulatory culture”. Giancarlo recommended U.S. financial regulators to study cases in which other countries had successfully regulated the digital markets, with “first, do no harm” as his top-most instruction.

Though Giancarlo only expressed his personal idea, not represented any of his fellow commissioners, CFTC staff or U.S. government agencies, he did make an important point on how should U.S. government catch up to the biggest trend happened in financial markets during the 21st century. Unlike other technology and economics developed countries, U.S. is lagging its jurisdictions in promoting fintech, which is unexpected, over-conservative and inconsistent with other domestic and international regulations it had made.

Source: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/cftc-chairman-calls-agency-support-blockchain-fintech-innovation/

R3 is an innovative distributed database technology company based in New York. It was founded in 2014 by David Rutter, and now provides financial system service to more than 75 of the world biggest financial institutions, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi Bank, HSBC, Morgan Stanley and etc. Its main duty is to design and deliver advanced distributed ledger technologies to the global financial markets.

Key features of R3’s strategy provided are so called “3 pillars”:

“Pillar 1: Financial Grade Ledger—the base layer reference architecture to underpin a global financial-grade ledger

Pillar 2: Lab and Research Center (“LRC”)—Deploy secure, multi-institution collaborative lab to test and benchmark blockchain technologies

Pillar 3: Product Development—Run use cases to identify and design ‘up the stack’ commercial applications”

The reason R3 is taking the lead in this renovation of financial system technology is that it aligns similar interests from different users, and pushes distributed ledger and blockchain technologies to solve real-world problems with payments, settlements, regulatory burdens, etc. But one thing R3 should really keep up with in this fierce rival of financial system technology upgrade: put their platform into production ASAP to build entry barriers for other competitors.

Source: http://www.r3cev.com/

Ripple, a silicon-valley based fintech company, specifically a distributed ledger start-up, has been elected to fill 1 out of the 16 seats in the Federal Reserve’s Faster Payments Task Force, a US regulator’s flagship of payments modernization, in June 2015.

The company is mainly utilizing distributed financial technology, built around an open and neutral protocol, to enable banks using different ledgers send real-time global payments across networks. The technology is secured by cryptography, where transactions flow end-to-end immutably with information backed-up redundantly. Moreover, it is designed to fit within a bank’s existing infrastructure, so that banks are the biggest potential customer and beneficiary for the company.

The key features of Ripple Networks include “direct bank-to-bank settlement with no central operator, capacity to process the world’s cross-border payments volume, complete transaction privacy for each financial institution, PII data stays behind each bank’s firewall, integration with existing systems and standards, ability to connect traditional and emerging financial networks”. The company already gained customers that are from 9 countries and 1/3 out of world top 50 banks for all these high-performance services, with one of its most important features–lower processing costs, as a huge plus .

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Source: https://ripple.com/

The White House FinTech Summit has finally published a whitepaper, A Framework for FinTech, on this Friday, January 13th, 2017, aiming to develop a policy framework for regulating the FinTech ecosystem and to encourage public-private collaboration in the FinTech industry.

This is the first time the U.S. government, engaged with stakeholders across the country, published its regulation principles in the industry. The Framework including 10 principles that encourage stakeholders to:

“1. think broadly about the financial ecosystem;

2. start with the consumer in mind;

3. promote safe financial inclusion and financial health;

4. recognize and overcome potential technological bias;

5. maximize transparency;

6. strive for interoperability and harmonize technical standards;

7. build in cybersecurity, data security, and privacy protections from the start;

8. increase efficiency and effectiveness in financial infrastructure;

9. protect financial stability; and

10. continue and strengthen cross-sector engagement.”

The publish of this Framework shows that, first, the U.S. government rates highly on the rapid growing FinTech industry, and second, the government begins to make great effort in regulating the industry. The Framework also illustrates the right approaches to ensure the promising growth of FinTech in the near future as forecasted p by scholars and regulators.

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2017/01/13/framework-fintech