Crypto

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 tweeted this the other day, and it got a lot of likes, so I thought I’d make it today’s blog title.  We seem to have lost a lot of buzz on blockchain this year, even thought it’s still buzzing away as much as ever before.  I recently was talking about how blockchain is great…

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…

I mentioned in my FinTech Wave that blockchain has entered the trough of disillusionment.  It’s certainly a lot quieter space this year than last.  In fact, when I say blockchain today, a lot of folks turn the other way.  What’s going on? A lot of it is to do with the hype cycle, and the…

For ten years, my friends cover at Z/Yen have been producing the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), on behalf of the City of London.  It’s a research program where people can answer the survey questionnaire and, from those participating, the different cities of the world vying to be financial hubs are ranked.  Around 2,500 people respond…

A bank has to make a regulatory change every 12 minutes.  That’s some task.  A bigger question must also be: how can a regulatory check that a bank is compliant with their regulatory changes, if their regulations change every 12 minutes are run to 1,000’s of pages? The answer is they can’t, but they don’t…

I outlined yesterday the fact that 98% of money laundering goes unchecked, allowing $1.6 trillion a year to be used for terrorist funding, drug dealers, sex traffickers and possibly worse.   This was prompted by a conversation about AML (Anti-Money Laundering) with the CEO and Co-Founder of I met Coinfirm, Pawel Kuskowski. So what’s the solution, is how…