Fintech News Issue #81 August 16th, 2016

Top Stories

    As European banks can’t stop talking about open APIs, further discussion over the matter throws light on opportunities open APIs have in store for the banking industry, businesses and customers. Open APIs are at the core of open banking, which comes with enabled access to data for all relevant participants of the market.

    A confluence of factors puts China at the financial technology (“fintech”) forefront: economic advancement, investor behavior, mobile technology, big data, financial industry liberalization, and regulatory acquiescence.

FinTech Articles

    Community currencies are a window into a possible future. The model is practical, not theoretical. It has shown its usefulness in many places. And it has now reached a point where it deserves to be much more widely known.

    International financial institutions and other organizations come to realize the importance of research and blockchain application pilots and projects in discovering the right use case and consequent benefits.

    With advances in machine learning and IoT, tech companies, consumers, and retailers are all abuzz about the benefits of big data. Copious amounts of information, that were previously unreachable, are changing the way everyone does business.

    Two in three European bankers are adopting a risk-averse wait-and-see approach in response to the uncertainty an open application programming interfaces (API) could bring. Here's why the PSD2 mandate could be the best thing for banking since the recessionary shake-up of 2008

    Insurers must look past the gloss and hype from other areas of finance adopting blockchain technology, and consider the real benefits and drawbacks of implementing these systems, says Thomas McCourtie.

    Through partnerships, licensing deals and incubators, why fintech and banks are getting along surprisingly well these days

    On August 11, 2016, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released a 300-page report entitled The future of financial infrastructure: An ambitious look at how blockchain can reshape financial services, exploring how the financial sector “could overcome current-state pain points through distributed ledger technology (DLT).”

    Here's What the Bitcoin Naysayers Get Wrong

    — by Arthur Levitt Jr. & Peter Smith

    Naysayers love to nay. And the bitcoin skeptics — of which there are many — are at it again. In late June, Citi Research released a report that asked, "Could the Bitcoin Blockchain Disrupt Payments?"