Crypto

I regularly attend conferences where several themes crop up around disruption – that word we hate – disintermediation, and the end of banking as we know it.  The problem is I’ve heard it for 30 years and it hasn’t happened … yet.  Will it?  Let’s have a look. The first theme is that banks are…

I know many of my twitter followers have seen this news already, but here’s the official announcement of the partnership we are creating with Life.SREDA in Singapore. SINGAPORE-BASED LIFE.SREDA LAUNCHES $100 MILLION BLOCKCHAIN INVESTMENT FUND LONDON, APRIL 18 2016 Life.SREDA, a venture capital fund based in Singapore, has partnered with financial expert and fintech specialist…

Like a few other guys, I fly around the world almost non-stop. When people ask me where I live, I say British Airways lounge, and George Clooney’s Up in the Air looks like a novice to me.   Yet, even with all of that experience, you now and again encounter an anomaly.  China for example.  What…

After sharing my favourite white papers about blockchain and fintech a month ago, I got a bit of a deluge of offers of more papers, so here’s this month’s update.  If you don’t like to read about them though, you can always listen to this excellent podcast interview with Chris Skinner, author of ValueWeb, by the…

Flying back from Oslo after the SWIFT Nordics Conference, I was reflecting on the blockchain discussion we had.  I chaired the discussion which was titled: “Blockchain: from hype to real world applications” and was joined by Vytautas Karalevicius from Spectro Finance, Lasse Meholm of Nordea and Colin Kwan from Magnr.  It is clear that there…

We had a great debate at the Financial Services Club last night between digital money sage Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion, and all things bitcoin master Jon Matonis. The debate was about whether blockchain is faster and cheaper, and it was clear from the start that this was going to be difficult as the question…

A friend of mine at JPM received an internal email the other day.  It was broadcast to all staff and, as it’s all about blockchain, thought I would share with y’all.  It goes like this … Innovative blockchain technology may provide links to improve client experience (Feb. 09, 2016) J.P. Morgan is pursuing a three-pronged approach…

There’s been a large number of white papers produced recently about Fintech and Blockchain, so I decided to collate the most notable ones here.  All links are to file downloads and if I’ve missed any, please let me know. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (9 pages, October 2008) The origins of the whole thing in…

There are a few friends in my network whose opinions I respect and Professor Michael Mainelli, Chairman of Z/Yen Group is one of those.  He has kindly given me a really insightful paper into blockchain technologies and terminologies.  For the uninitiated, it will enlighten and for the initiated, it will offer something new.  Enjoy … Terminology…

There’s lots of discussions about financial markets and their different structures.  Retail and commercial banking are likened to farms, whilst investment banking is a jungle.  Retail and commercial banking have dull products likened to chickens.  Look after them and they produce regular and predictable results.  Investment banking is just full of testosterone fueled animals that…