Fintech News Issue #73 June 22nd, 2016

We interviewed Kevin Bottoms, Global Vice President of TELUS International, about the importance of customer service and experience in financial services and beyond. Customer don't only need to be acquired, they need to be retained – by building trust.

If Britain votes to leave the European Union on Thursday the consequences for the country's thriving fintech sector will be "catastrophic", prompting an exodus of companies and costing the economy some $5 billion over the course of the next five years, claims a report from consultancy William Garrity Associates.

I just discovered a really interesting legal view of the implications of the Brexit vote on the UK Financial Services sector. It was in a magazine by Mayer Brown, a law firm, written by legal eagles Alexandria Carr, Mark Compton, David R. Sahr and Guy Wilkes and, as the vote takes place tomorrow as to whether Britain will Brexit or Bremain, I thought I would post a summary of this note here. Here are the conclusions:

As disruptive technologies continue to fuel innovation, banks are not likely to remain unaffected by the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). While IoT has been around for longer than the surrounding hype, it’s time to acknowledge that IoT is real and exhibits tremendous growth.

Brand loyalty isn’t what it used to be in financial services. Gone are the days where bank managers were considered trusted advisors and confidants to customers. They’ve been replaced by mobile apps and digital services designed to boost customer convenience.

Most people, if they thought about it, would admit the way digital identity is managed in the U.S. is suboptimal. Those truly in the know find much stronger words.

I’ve written about Bitcoin and blockchain for half a decade, and now banks are all talking about it too. There is a belief that the blockchain technology that came from the Bitcoin structure could revolutionise banking. But there’s a problem, not with blockchain protocol, but with the hype and confusion that surrounds it. How will banks make any progress if no one understands it?

Working on Wall Street has always been a hazardous profession, especially for those in the front line of the business, the traders. Market risks, volatility, and uncertainties, are the stressors for traders and those allocating capital and managing risk. This is the nature of the business, the markets, whether currencies, stocks, bonds etc.

At the start of the year, I wrote a piece that outlined six trends that I suggested would set the agenda for payments innovation and commerce reinvention in 2016. The foundation for those six trends was the ability for innovators to leverage the near ubiquity of mobile devices and the ability to connect those devices – and many others – to the internet.

One of the proposals to deal with Bitcoin’s capacity problem is called Lightning. It is being seriously considered by Blockchain.com, which is currently alpha testing its own version. Predictably, Blockchain’s version is called Thunder. It doesn’t appear to differ materially from Lightning.

Advances in technology are allowing for a more convenient and effective delivery of financial services, but the fintech industry is yet to board the Web 3.0 train in a full-fledged manner. Today, Artificial Intelligence is going beyond matching and testing data to process the data and create algorithms to enhance trading decisions and rules. Emerging fintech companies have started using machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence that provides computers with the ability to learn without being openly programmed.