Fintech News Issue #168 May 17th, 2018

There's much talk of "unbundling" in the industry these days. Bankers are fretting about startups nibbling away at their most profitable customers.

The banking industry is changing at a pace never before seen. Digital transformation has become an imperative for financial institutions of all sizes. The transformation goes beyond technology, however, requiring people and organizations to embrace change, take risks and disrupt themselves. Who is up for this challenge?

Open Banking represents a once in a generation opportunity to transform the quality of information provided to consumers and enable them to take more control of their personal finances. But will it succeed?

Customer Experience for Financial Services (CXFS) is where America's most innovative financial services customer experience professionals meet and learn. An event specifically created for the financial services sector that pays special attention to balancing cx and compliance and connecting cx to business outcomes.

Two hotly anticipated legislations of 2018, PSD2 and GDPR, are products of a new digital dawn. The former was met with wholehearted embrace from a host of third party fintech startups and the wider banking community who envisioned a more customer-centric and competitive Open Banking sector; ripe ground for healthy innovation.

As banks and credit unions increasingly consider partnering with fintech firms, the main motivation is usually around enhancing the consumer experience. This is achieved through greater use of consumer insights and deployment of advanced technologies.

It's our fault the Facebooks and Googles run everything

Amazon's cloud computing arm is looking to make it easier for customers to use blockchain with a new partnership announced Tuesday.

The concept of loyalty is shifting, driven in part by the relentless, data-driven approaches of the Tech Titans. For banking, this means moving from a transactional, rewards-based concept of loyalty to something far deeper, and more personal – and, for the first time, pleasurable. This will require financial institutions to embrace data sharing via APIs, data augmentation and an entirely new way of valuing and acting upon what that data reveals.

The effect of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which comes into effect in the EU on 25 May 2018, will further add to already increasing regulatory and compliance requirements imposed on companies coming at a high cost.

The International Business Machines Corporation is issuing its first token using a public blockchain

For those new to the blog, I am the lead developer of Sia, a blockchain based cloud storage platform. About a year ago, myself and some members of the Sia team started Obelisk, a cryptocurrency ASIC manufacturing company. Our first ASICs are going to ship in about 8 weeks, and our journey with Obelisk has given us a lot of insight into the world of cryptocurrency mining.

As InsurTech startup companies continue to enter the marketplace, one innovative concept that has gained considerable momentum in the international insurance market is peer-to-peer insurance. Often powered by InsurTech, peer-to-peer insurance companies take a different approach to risk pooling.

Insurance 2.0 will bring new business models, opportunities for niche positioning, as well as enhanced profiling and predictive decisioning, powered by ubiquitous device connectivity and real-time, actionable analytics.

GDPR has been covered in great length in the run up to the enforcement date, with checklists, guides and whitepapers telling us what we need to do to stay compliant. This is all great, if your data is held in and structured in one central place.

With digital transformations for business operations increasingly seen as essential to the future prosperity of companies across multiple sectors, eight in every ten firms are prioritising their digital transformation, with 61% stating that they are “getting organised”. However, nearly a quarter still feel that their digital maturity is “frustratingly fragmented” and that they are beginning to lag behind other organisations.

Get insights from early adopters of cognitive and AI. What do 250 of the most aggressive adopters of artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive technologies have to say about their efforts to date? From the impact on jobs to their specific goals and exactly which cognitive technologies they’re using, this report shares their views with the broader business world.