Fintech News Issue #121 June 8th, 2017

A stellar line-up of 27 senior bankers and fintech experts will be onstage at the Finextra SAP Financial Services Forum in London next month to detail winning strategies for banks competing in a digitally-driven business market.

Are banks and credit unions keeping up with consumer demands when it comes to digital banking offerings? With 46% of consumers using only digital channels for their banking, expectations are outpacing experiences at most organizations.

This report argues that fintech ventures have so far failed because of a lack of investment and that banks can, and should, take the lead in the fintech revolution by investing more and differently.

If you are interested in Blockchain, you should maybe look to north-western Europe, in particular Ireland, The Netherlands, and naturally The UK with London still being the fintech capital of the world.

Stop with the fees already. P2P services continue to grow in popularity—no surprises there. But, there remains a segment of the population that’s refraining from downloading such services, and, one of the top reasons is a stalwart consumer unwillingness to pay fees, according to the recent Fiserv Consumer Expectations and Experiences survey.

Bitcoin’s price continues to rise, and it’s starting to make the cryptocurrency world a little nervous.

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.

There continues to be a great deal of attention paid to the Millennial segment by the banking industry despite the massive and unique financial opportunities available from the 'AOL generation'.

A survey has been conducted in the financial services industry that has revealed collaboration as an obstacle for many firms.

This year's FinTech 50 companies can feel very VERY pleased with themselves. They were selected from over 1500 FinTechs across Europe by some of the biggest names in the sector, which is no small achievement.

It’s not every day you get to hear from the CTO of a financial incumbent who has actually mined bitcoin. So, interest was high as David Thompson of global remittance giant Western Union took the stage at MoneyConf 2017 in Madrid, Spain. And he did not disappoint, facing the digital currency issue head on.

The total market cap for all cryptocurrencies just surpassed $100 billion. The vast majority of these gains have come in just the last few months — on April 1st the total market cap was just over $25 billion — representing a 300 percent increase in value in just over 60 days.

“There’s just doesn’t seem to be many blacksmith jobs these days.” At first glance, this would be a ridiculous thing to say. Of course there aren’t many blacksmiths around. We live in a modern society and machines do a way better job of making things from metal anyways.

Management teams often assume they can leapfrog best practices for basic data analytics by going directly to adopting artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies.

“Bad news isn’t wine. It doesn’t improve with age.” Colin Powell, American statesman, Vietnam veteran and retired four-star general