Fintech News Issue #66 May 4th, 2016

Today, Brett hosts Kamal Budhabbatti, called the Bill Gates of Kenya to talk about the amazing fintech scene in that part of the world. And Scout Finance Founders- Vivek Nasta and Ariez Dustoor are talking to us about their work to allow investment professionals to always be able to access their clients information and do real financial analysis from their mobile devices. And Sam Maule is doing another FinTech 5, this time with Guest Ivan Cheung of Invest HK. It is a truly global and groundbreaking episode of Breaking Banks!

Behind closed doors in a small office, off an nondescript corridor, in a rather large building on Rue Wiertz in Brussels, Belgium a hushed conversation took place last month. Shortly afterwards a piece of European Parliament legislation was quietly shelved. It carried the rather dull title of "Directive 2009/125/EC" and it was one of the most dangerous documents in Europe!

Another factor of reimagining finance for the internet age is the very nature of person-to-person connectivity and peer-to-peer networking. These two factors are very different and also different in the nature of how people are connecting.

Jeremy Pollack reveals statistics that show mobile banking uptake among the elderly, according to a US Federal Reserve study.

The most relevant, hyperconnected, entertaining, tech-savvy and inspiring FinTech event. Milan, May 5-6 2016.

Register via: http://www.fintechstage.com/milan/app/?platform=hootsuite

Join Mergermarket and leading technology experts as we discuss what 2016 holds for the most disruptive business sector in the world. Join the conversation on Twitter with #Tech2016.

Given that insurance is fundamentally about the trading of information (consumer data for a policy product), if you think about it, the most logical and near-term place for technology disruption should be found in distribution. Looking at any industry where we make big purchase decisions that involve the trade of information — buying a home, car, plane ticket — the Internet has become the key facilitator.

The fintech boom, as many are calling it, instead seems primarily focused on creating new offerings and experiences in the retail banking and consumer-facing financial sectors. As a result, investment managers across a spectrum of products, channels, and styles are being stymied by the challenges of navigating the complexity of the daily operations of their businesses.

A couple of years ago I attended a Bank Innovation afternoon, run by the lovely JP Nichols, where I encountered my first ‘persona’ exercise. The room was full of design people, FinTech folks and bankers. My group were the bankers. We were assigned to create a person. A real-life person, with wants and desires, flaws and problems — and then create a banking relationship for that ‘person’. I was amazed by the variety of different people created by each group.

In this guest post Marie-Louise Dalton, Marketing Director EMEA at Connexity, a tech-driven market research company, discusses the findings of the company’s recent research about the preferred payments methods of younger shoppers.

In this blog post, we aim to explain the inner workings of the blockchain and help people to understand how it manages to keep transactions both secure and anonymous. This post will go into the low level algorithms of blockchain and provide verified examples alongside each algorithm; this post is not for the faint of heart!

Enthusiasm for certain fintech investments is said to be cooling among venture capitalists and private-equity firms already. So the natural question is, how can enterprising online lenders and other startups survive, much less grow?

We’ve taken a look around the world of web design and ecommerce to see what improvements could be made to application forms, and how some small changes could greatly improve the user experience.

With branch visits decreasing, the importance of every interaction has never been greater. Many financial institutions have enormous potential to increase sales and service in the branch by capturing, measuring and managing their lobby sales and service interactions.