I’m boarding a flight yesterday and murfing (mobile surfing). Flicking between Facebook apps, twitter, bank account, BBC news and more. Suddenly I spot a new ICO – Initial Coin Offering – for a new bank. From Wikipedia: “An initial coin offering (ICO) is a means of crowdfunding the release of a new cryptocurrency. Generally, tokens for the new cryptocurrency are…
I’m being asked this a lot as the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have increased ten-fold in the past few weeks. Good for those who have some. Bemusing for those who don’t. There are a range of factors driving the rise in cryptocurrency prices, particularly the craze for Initial Coin Offering (ICOs). An ICO…
I’ve regularly got into confrontations with digital currency people, especially those who are believers in bitcoin, by saying things they don’t like to hear. First it was my comment that you can’t have money without government. They believe the currency is beyond control because it exists on a global network. My contention is that money…
I try to generally avoid making political commentary on the blog as it’s not appropriate. This is a blog about technology and finance, not the economy and politics. Every now and again the two come together such as with Brexit and Donald Trump. Equally sometimes they cannot be avoided as the politics impacts the financial…
I blogged a year ago about TechFin, the incumbents’ view of applying technology to existing banking services, versus FinTech which seeks to transform the financial system. That has become one of the top search terms to find my blog, as it turns out, mainly because my blog entries are the first to be returned when searching…
I’ve just been alerted by friend Gijs Boudewijn to the release of a fascinating white paper by BIS, the Bank for International Settlements (the guys who do Basel stuff and are big cohonez in banking circles). Their Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures released Distributed ledger technology in payment, clearing and settlement: an analytical framework…
As referenced in my R3 fake news last week, there are various camps out there fighting for the cryptocurrency crown. The lead runners are bitcoin and Ethereum, and both have serious backing. However, it’s still early days. I keep stressing that we need to remember we are experimenting here, and the end game is still…
It made me laugh today. I was chairing a panel where Romana Kumar, Head of Global Transaction Banking for the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), was discussing their trial of Ripple. The background to this was announced in a press release on 1st February 2017: Ripple’s Distributed Financial Technology fits within NBAD’s existing infrastructure…
