Fintech News Issue #179 August 16th, 2018

I’ve been proven wrong once again. For eight years running, I’ve predicted that fintech investment is going to plateau. Based on the start of 2018, it hasn’t yet.

I haven’t written about blockchain for a while. I guess it’s because I got bored of it. I’m not bored of the promise of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Just bored of how much hype there has been and of so many companies claiming to have the latest blockchain breakthrough.

Here’s what we should do. We should set out on a long journey. Ready? Awesome. Let’s not discuss where we are going, why we are going there and what our expectations are.

Brett King and Jason Henrichs talk with their international guests about trends in FinTech and how these advances will spread across regions.

The role of innovation and transformation tops the list of industry buzzwords today. The fear of disruption and obsolescence is driving a host of strategies and tactics that are intended to "reinvent" something that is new and competitive.

When PayPal emerged in the late 90s, it changed the game for small businesses in the United States. Individual contractors, Mom and Pop stores, and side hustlers would no longer have to fear being unable to accept credit cards for online transactions or wait weeks for a paper check to arrive.

A new report has shown that investment rates in the global FinTech scene have hit record levels in the first half of 2018, as financial institutions look to tackle complex problems with the leveraging of innovative new technologies. Britain represents a leading global presence in the market, surpassing the value of investment in US FinTech by almost $2 billion.

As banks and credit unions around the world retool their branch experience for the digital age, many are pouring more tech into their brick-and-mortar environments. But such digital investments might do little more than simply delay their eventual obsolescence.

In June, the Insight Vault published a post titled Guess Who Holds The Most Blockchain Patents? To save you the trouble of a click, the answer is Bank of America. The advice to mid-size banks and credit unions was not to go out and pursue their own blockchain-related patent applications but to understand what the BofA patents means to their IT strategies and plans.

Digital lending is the use of online technology to originate and renew loans in order to deliver faster and more efficient decisions.

The future of banking will put a premium on data analysis and cognitive technologies – areas in which the tech titans are making ever-deeper inroads. Can banks and credit unions see the bigger picture, or will they continue to "add a few bots" on top of traditional technology?

Each collaboration uniquely satisfies the specific needs of its participants and is built on models...

Tokenised utilities leverage blockchain networks and decentralised applications so as to offer services built using the capabilities of these networks. In order to interact with such services, users must use cryptographic tokens that represent certain rights of access to the network.

The U.S. Treasury and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) both hit the headlines with fintech-related announcements.