Fintech News Issue #181 August 30th, 2018

Today's insights show takes a closer look at what it means to have a digital identity and who really controls who you are online?

Widespread artificial intelligence, biohacking, new platforms and immersive experiences dominate this year’s Gartner Hype Cycle.

Becoming a truly digital financial institution is daunting. The challenges loom large — especially the dreaded "silos" and the difficulty of changing long-standing culture. But a clear understanding of the challenges and of what will be required to meet them lays the groundwork for incremental progress. Here is a series of actions banks and credit unions must take to break out of a status quo that soon will no longer be viable.

Artificial intelligence has been a focus of discussions at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, over the past few years, so the organization decided to partner with Deloitte Consulting on a study that sought to "cut through the sensationalism surrounding AI" and offer helpful insights for business leaders and policymakers.

The challenge is distinguishing between a good ICO/crypto/blockchain project, and a bad one.

The banking industry is experiencing disruption at an increasing pace. Over the past few years, traditional financial institutions and non-traditional fintech firms have begun to understand that collaboration may be the best path to long-term growth. At the same time, big tech firms are offering financial services, creating techfin solutions.

Not for the first time, the federal government and states are at odds over the future regulation of FinTech.

Digital disruption, fintech infiltration, big tech competition, or even new technologies such as artificial intelligence seem daunting. Yet the most serious threat to banks and credit unions lies closer to home but remains more difficult to address — because it is ingrained in almost every traditional financial institution.

A few weeks ago I had one of those holidays that should have been simple but ended up requiring military levels of planning to get from one place to the next. Part of the reason for this is the fallacy of interconnectedness when it comes to travel, as anyone who doesn’t live in a capital city already knows and anyone, like me, trying to travel between two popular destinations finds out.

With blockchain platforms being tested for various business processes, prospective enterprise users that are unwilling to accept a volatile cryptocurrency will often complain that a key piece is missing from the platform: a stable, digital medium of exchange.

Rachel Stevenson, Senior Compliance Associate (Advisory) at fscom, discusses the ESMA’s temporary product intervention decisions in the aftermath of MiFID II implementation.

You need not be a technology guru to recognize that an outage or loss of service of any type or any length of time is simply not acceptable for today’s financial organization. Advance notices of planned system downtime, even during the wee hours of the morning, are less and less tolerated, especially given today’s global economy. What is the middle of the night in one geography are prime business hours in another.

According to the KPMG Pulse of Fintech report, the amount of funding for fintech companies has come to about $122 billion during the past three years. There have also been a spate of M&A transactions.

Challenger bank Starling has recently launched what it calls a “ground-breaking” new bank card design intended to bring the brand into line with the way people use debit cards today.

When Adrian Patten, co-founder of FX blockchain project Cobalt, pitches to banks these days, he chooses his words carefully.

I just caught a clip from the BBC about Decentraland, a virtual world where you can buy plots of land and next year become part of a virtual world. This world will be owned by its community, has no central authority, is completely decentralised and will flourish in the net. So far it’s users to buy 90,000 plots of land at a value of $28 million. Today, some plots of land are selling for almost $1 million each. Incredible. Here’s the clip:

It took five researchers to come up with the following: “The persistence of the large number of local bank branches across the country may be due to the fact that both depositors and small businesses continue to value local bank branches.” Brilliant.