Category: Uncategorized

IoT Cloud Drive

As interconnected consumer devices become increasingly common, it’s only a matter of time before commerce follows. While entertainment typically moves the market, monetization is often quick to follow. This has held true in every internet-based movement so far, and there’s no reason to suggest that the trend is going to end now.

When mobile Internet was in its infancy, companies like Google, Facebook and Apple were the driving forces behind a push to speed up connection speeds and connect more devices worldwide. Revenue is a powerful motivator for change, and without it, the status quo would remain indefinite. The  IoT (Internet of Things) is no different. As profit motive increases, adoption and roll-out will as well. In a future dominated by mobile technologies, interconnected devices, and the need for on-the-go payment solutions, the IoT could be the movement that nudges everything in the right direction.

Alternative Currencies can become viable

For all alternative currencies such as BitCoin, the one thing that remains a key roadblock to consumer adoption is accessibility of technology. Altcoins have real value in the consumer marketplace if the barriers to entry are lowered by ensuring safety, ease of use, and retailer adoption. The problem currently is strictly technological, but as wallet makers begin the slow process of integration, digital wallets could be the key to unlocking the potential held by alternative currencies.

Digital wallets for altcoins isn’t a new idea. In fact, several of them already exist. Bitcoin Wallet, Mycelium, and Hive are just a few of these technologies that allow consumers to store altcoins on a mobile device. The problem is, outside of a payment network that allow customers to use them, they are essentially worthless. While the technology exists, it’s a hard sell to get consumers to move to a single technology in order to store alternative currencies that they aren’t using in the first place. This is why digital wallets made by trusted companies such as Google, Apple and others could spur real innovation as well as viability in the altcoin space.

Linking alternative currencies to well-known wallet makers not only lends trust to alternative currencies, but gives retailers the option to process all of these different methods (credit, debit, loyalty cards, alternative currency, and others) through one piece of point of sale technology. This is how we can bring altcoins to the mainstream.

Reference:  http://Reference: https://sites.google.com/a/utexas.edu/digitalwallets/secur

Robinhood Markets Inc. is a U.S. based company founded in 2013. The founders announce their mission to democratize access to the financial market. To fulfil its mission, the company is swiftly stealing commission charges from online brokerages from the rich, and giving access to the stock market to the poor. The Robinhood smartphone app allows individuals to invest in publicly traded companies listed on U.S. exchanges without paying a commission . 

To sign up for the app, users must fill out an application. Once accepted, users are sent a brief video that explains the app, how to make trades and how they can get away with $0 trades.

How the company makes money:

Originally, Robinhood planned to make money off of order flow– a common tactic used by discount brokerages in the 1990s to generate revenue. Robinhood backpedaled on the idea because it executes orders through a clearing partner and, as a result, receives little to no payment for order flow. The company is willing to return to its original plan in the future if it receives order flows directly or begins to generate a lot of revenue from them.

For now, the app stays afloat for mainly two reasons. First, the business itself is extremely lean: no physical locations, a small staff, no massive public relations campaigns. Robinhood also generates interest off of unused cash deposits from user accounts according to the Federal Funds rate.

Second, venture capitalist such as Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Leverage, have invested more than $16 million in the app.

Some main features of the Robinhood product in addition to no commissions are account protection, secure and encrypted, fast execution by low-latency trading systems, real-time market data and smart notification.

How technology helps your investment: to describe the impacts of technology in stock market it is better to compare Robinhood with traditional players in the market. In fact, technology and competition has brought the cost of trading stocks for individual investors down to zero with the introduction of Robinhood. In addition, Robinhood does not have a minimum initial deposit requirement, whereas E*TRADE as one of its main competitors requires that its customers deposit at least $500 to get started.

In general, FinTech helps people to invest in the stock market who could not imagine entering this market due to lack of enough money or understanding the market. So it can be said that they are achieving their goal to democratize the market.

Source of table: Robinhood Market website

References:

http://blog.robinhood.com/news/2015/8/12/robinhood-at-a-play-store-near-youhttp://www.investopedia.com/articles/active-trading/020515/how-robinhood-makes-money.asphttps://www.quora.com/Should-someone-begin-investing-by-using-the-Robinhood-apphttps://www.robinhood.comhttps://techcrunch.com/2015/05/07/free-stock-trades/https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/analyst/timeline#/timeline/index

 

Funding: unknown amount;

Investor: Converge Venture Partners; 2016; Palo Alto
Enigma provides solution for protecting usage data. It allows sharing data with others for processing without actually giving it away. It ensures that data is guaranteed to be encrypted at all times, even when complex analytics functions are needed. Enigma combines Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) with Blockchain Technology to enable this highly encrypted cloud platform that is built from a network of computers that can store private data and process it, without being able to see the data they are operating on. Core functions of privacy and security are layered on top of distributed cloud technology, as a result it is a dynamic combination that transforms how data is stored and retrieved; providing industries like finance, health, and civil services the platform for having a secure and trustworthy data. This can be further used for mobile application development in this domain.

Reference: http://www.enigma.com/

Grab is a Singapore based ride-hailing platform that holds a large presence in Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia.  Grab is planning a $700 million investment in Fintech companies in Indonesia, which is already their largest market.  With only 75 of the 250 million people in Indonesia having banking Fintech is a great avenue to provide access to a part of the population that hasn’t had the ability to use Grab’s services.

Grab co-founder and CEO Anthony Tan states it well, “We see this huge, unbanked population becoming bankable. If we can… give access to those who don’t have access to credit, it’s a massive opportunity.”

Fintech transactions are expected to grow at an annual rate of 20% in Indonesia. In addition to the rise in Fintech startups in the country, there is a significant rate of smartphone use.  This investment makes it evident of how important Fintech is, especially in emerging and developing markets.  It is easier for people to buy a cheap smartphone than get bank credit.  I see this investment having a high rate of return for Grab.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/uber-competitor-grab-700-million-fintech-indonesia/

What the Article Says:

Dealnet Capital Corp., a consumer finance company, recently launched its new financial technology platform to increase security and certain automation services. The fintech platform is initially set to automate credit and application processing on mobile and web enabled devices, tying in the new functions with the existing platform. In addition, the improvements intent to streamline the funding process for dealers, while providing a closed secure network. Dealnet intends to put out additional modules to create a smoother lending experience and allow for an efficient engagement between dealers, consumers, and the technology.

My Thoughts:

I think that Dealnet is going about these tech improvements in the right manner. While offering more resources and a smoother experience for their users, the focus on security standards is increasingly more important. There are already so many risks when it comes to lending, and ensuring that the tech platform is functioning at its best is crucial. I am curious to see how other businesses and competitors respond to their improvements, and how they decide to go about their next steps.

Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/dealnet-launches-financial-technology-platform-122549422.html

There is currently a lot of pressure on financial advisors to make the client experience more efficient and user friendly for their customers.  This creates opportunity for fintech companies to build programs for these advisors to implement.  In one example, Redtail Technology will launch real-time communications for the advisor to be able to reach out and respond to both staff and clients using text messaging services built within their client relationship management tools.  This technology will also make sure all communications will tie into an audible trail, with quick responses that will allow everything to happen faster.  Another company, Orion, is working on a fee benchmarking tool so advisors will be able to compare the fees they charge households with 1,000 other firms that use Orion’s systems.  This will not only allow advising companies to come up with comparable pricing, but also will show clients whether or not they are paying too much for their services.  Lastly, the Envestnet Tamarac platform is planning on releasing new features which will allow investors to view and co-manage a series of accounts, such as those of an entire household.  Fintech has been a strong growing industry, and as shown by this article, 2017 will carry on this trend.

 

 

http://www.investmentnews.com/article/20161216/FREE/161219948/tools-financial-technology-companies-plan-to-bring-advisers-in-2017

Dodd-Frank legislation, originally signed into law in 2010 by the Obama administrations, was a series of legislative compliance rules targeted to the financial service industry in response to the industry’s 2008 major crisis.  With the recent announcement by the new Trump administration, the question remains as to what effect, if any, will their actions have on the financial technology industry? 

The predictions in 2011, following the announcement of the original legislation, was that business would be forced to put more money into IT solutions to satisfy compliance, and as a side-effect, this additional funding to the back office systems, would spur new innovation with data management as a whole. For the business, the idea of a more comprehensive understanding of its data, would lead to competitive advantages. I think when we look back over the last six years, the SAP solution to the integrated systems, and the current trends, such as the Blockchain distributed ledger, we can conclude that IT has seen growth due to Dodd-Frank.

 I believe that with the advantages that businesses have realized by concentrating on solutions to data management, along with the focus on integration across its sectors, this area will continue to grow for Information Technology, despite any attempt at the proposed reforms to the current legislation.

 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/business/dealbook/trump-congress-financial-regulations.html?_r=0

NY Times Dealbook – Trump Moves to Roll Back Obama-Era Financial Regulations

 http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/blogarticle/3547273/how-blockchain-can-aid-dodd-frank-compliance/banking-and-capital-markets-trading-and-technology.html#/.WJgk0RsrK01

Institutional Investor – How Blockchain Can Aid Dodd-Frank Compliance

 http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/regulatory-compliance/dodd-franks-impact-on-it/229200184?pgno=3

Wall Street & Technology – Business Innovation Powered by Technology

In an article written by Mike Elgan, the way we use our personal devices can not only put our personal data at risk, but also the confidential data of their company.

The article provides a list of 5 new security concerns. However, I will highlight a few which can have a direct impact on a Information Systems Confidentiality.

Link to Article

1. Be wary of your selfies:

Elgan argues that with the high resolution of today’s mobile phones, the camera itself can accurately capture our fingerprints, which hackers could use to make prints and bypass biometric systems. While it may seem unlikely, it’s always a possibility.

I would also like to add to that topic of being aware of what you’re background is. If you’re at work, you would want to make sure no confidentiality information can be picked up from the background. Such as passwords written on the dry erase board.

2. Do you really know what your Mobile apps are sending to their servers.

We all download different mobile apps for their different purposes. However, we may not necessarily know what is occurring in the background. The author used the example of Meitu, an app from China which was sending back information back to their servers including the mobile carrier and IP address.

This can pose a problem for Information Systems because we link our company emails to our personal devices, we send texts to our bosses and coworkers, and we may use the companies Wi-Fi.

Essentially our mobile devices are becoming gates to unlocking the doors to our servers.

At the end of the day, while we can never fully secure our data we can still utilize this knowledge to be more wary and make better decisions as to how we use and monitor our personal devices and our company’s data.

 

 

Be it be security or demonetization, the growth of card less payments  is increasing everyday. The number of users who prefer making their payments without cards are spreading all over the world. The demonetization  act in India has also played a really important part of, people freely making their card less transaction. Long ques in the ATM’s forced customers  to consider to the option of other Fin Tech like Pay TM. It’s a Fin tech start up in India, which has been wildly spread in a very short duration of time.This start up has replaced the concept of people carrying cash. This is an instant money transfer platform which works a lot like  Paypal , but the transfer of money is much faster. The PayTM stands from PAY through mobile, Uses all kinds of ways for money transfer. One can create a PayTM wallet and save your money their, Or It also provides you to save the option of your credit or debit card and the money will be deducted from that for the corresponding transactions ,It can also use our net banking accounts.This is an app which has spread and is also used in the payments of jeweler which involves a transfer of large amount of money to to the payment of your taxi fare.

The market in US for digital wallets has been growing considerably. Many payment options like Apple pay, Citi Wallet, Android  are in use and upcoming product announcements from Samsung, Chase, Visa and MasterCard sounds promising. But if we consider the consumer side, only 2% of the payments are through mobile wallet. Even services like Paypal, Venmo are struggling to gain progress. So will consumers adapt digital wallets at a faster rate? A Mckinsey Research suggests that mobile payments will reach upto 9% spending by 2020. Among these, the early leaders would be online transactions combined with mobile payments. This could be followed by POS.

Online transactions are mostly done by card data stored in file, browser etc. Hence digital wallets should offer some sort of value to particularly capture this market segment. Also a considerable amount of effort is required from merchant side in terms of acceptance. Merchants should incentivise consumers to enable some motivation to help them make the switch. Starbucks is a good example as it helped consumers make the switch with reward programs.

Among consumers, if we look at a need based segmentation, Mobile enthusiasts would be early adopters. They could be followed by people who like to shop for deals, manage finances on their own. People who are cautious about security and budget would be late adopters. Hence trying to maximise market adoption would require specific strategies to attract different segments. Apple pay and android pay would be more attractive to mobile enthusiasts. To appeal to other segments, the product should have additional propositions other than just payments like helping to manage finances, reward programs by merchant companies, integrating bank card with digital wallet etc.

Source: http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Financial%20Services/Our%20Insights/Digital%20wallets%20in%20the%20US%20Minding%20the%20consumer%20adoption%20curve/Digital%20wallets%20in%20the%20US.ashx