Fintech

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. The Bank makes clear it’s not the opinions of the institution…

I recently opened an investment fund for blockchain start-ups in partnership with Life.SREDA, who produce a report on the state of FinTech twice a year.  The latest report, almost 300 pages of analysis, provide more insights of the first half of the year in FinTech [Money of the Future 1H’2016 and Chinese, Korean and Japanese…

Friend of the Financial Services Club and journalist with Financial News Anna Irrera has recently started producing a weekly roundup of FinTech news.  She’s kindly agreed to let me republish this summary here on The Finanser, so here goes: Lots of banks have been testing blockchain based applications for trade finance… 15 R3 Members Trial Distributed Ledger…

Someone recently equated banks and their systems and structures, to the underground in London.  It’s a lot of pipes, wires, cables and tunnels that were built in the Victorian times and are still operating today.  You have engineers on the tracks every night and day, trying to keep the systems running, whilst also trying to…

As my readers will know, I regularly interview innovators of start-ups and banks of how they see the world.  These interviews constitute a third of the ValueWeb and Digital Bank books.  In the interests of maintaining these case studies, as I find them interesting, I recently met Ben Milne, Founder and CEO of Dwolla. In case you’re…

I got into an interesting debate with two good friends in Asia over the weekend.  I was sitting at home in the UK of course, but these days we are all connected globally in real-time so if you post something on Facebook or Twitter, you can soon find yourself in a global discussion.  This one…

Friend of the Financial Services Club and journalist with Financial News Anna Irrera has recently started producing a weekly roundup of FinTech news.  She’s kindly agreed to let me republish this summary here on The Finanser, so here goes: On fintech and pensions… BBVA’s Outside Venture Fund Backs Retirement Startup (American Banker) Propel Venture Partners, the venture…

I was chatting about Unicorns yesterday.  I won’t say which one we talked about, but one specific firm was being picked on as unsustainable and incorrectly valued.  I was particularly surprised to hear that their cost of customer acquisition is estimated to be $400 per customer.  For a start-up firm that is dealing in high…

Yesterday I blogged about the flagship lead of the Bank of England to support innovation and create refreshed central bank digital structures.  They are experimenting with everything from a Britcoin to a FinTech Accelerator program, and these operations have filtered through the system into RegTech programs from Project Innovate to the Regulatory Sandbox. So now…

I like to point at the fact that the Bank of England is taking a leadership role in FinTech, but it goes wider and deeper than this.  Bear in mind, the regulator –  the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA) –  lies under the Bank’s control.  Before the Global Financial Crisis, it was independent and part of the…