Fintech News Issue #83 August 31st, 2016

New data from Worldpay, which surveyed 4,000 shoppers in Europe, shows the continent is becoming more tech-savvy and a keen adopter of new payment technology.

Just as some people are starting to fear whether driverless cars will do us more harm than good, there's a growing concern that the use of artificial intelligence — letting software and machines make decisions rather than people — could lead to legal and ethical problems in financial services.

When we look at the rise of artificial intelligence, it’s easy to get carried away with dystopian visions of sentient machines that rebel against their human creators. Fictional baddies such as the Terminator’s Skynet or Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey have a lot to answer for.

Real-time transfer technologies have given rise to a new class of customers in the United States: we call them the Overbanked. The Overbanked are people with open accounts with three or more depository institutions.

Sensational headlines in the media describing Big Data as "the next big thing" somehow do not impress anymore. After all, sensational headlines sometimes are just ... sensational and not necessarily true. Behind all these boosted names and future forecasts the most important somehow lies unnoticed: numbers and the actual operational facts. And we need to turn the focus from talking to rather doing.

For almost 40 years, a key piece of banks’ social responsibility strategies has been related to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), the 1977 enactment which ensures that banks are continually addressing the needs of low to moderate income neighborhoods and other underserved areas of the communities in which they are located. The CRA requires that financial institutions are periodically evaluated for these efforts, and this record is taken into account when an institution seeks to open a new location or participate in M&A activities.

As the FinTech ecosystem grows in complexity and enrichment with technological advancements, banks and corporations rush to seize the opportunity to harvest the best solutions available. Innovation hunters have been looking for opportunities in different ways, one of which is to set an accelerator/incubator, innovation lab or some sort of a startup program. Let’s look at some of the interesting FinTech-focused programs operating around the world.

More than half of bank executives think that a lack of available IT resources is slowing down their ability to mature digitally, according to a survey from Liferay.

Dr Richard Theo, co-founder and CEO of Wealthify, outlines key things to consider when investing in the FinTech sector.

I didn’t realise until the other day that the Bank of England has a blog Bank Underground. Finally, a boring old British bank with a blog. Not a consumer bank of course – none of those blog – but a good old central bank. Central banks (CBs) have long issued paper currency. The development of Bitcoin and other private digital currencies has provided them with the technological means to issue their own digital currency. But should they?

The hype over blockchain—a new form of record keeping that relies on a shared digital ledger—is causing people to lose sight over what the technology is meant to do, according to Adam Ludwin.

With millennials comprising over a quarter of the US population, companies across industries are turning their priority and attention to creating products which can cater to this group with its lifestyle hallmarks. In addition to extensive representation, this group has influence over $600 billion of indirect spending, primarily because teens and young adults influence the purchasing habits of their parents.