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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…

Apparently, I am a miscreant.  I am the one guy who managed to break PayPal.  What?  OK, here’s the story.  The next 2,000 words tell the story but, if you’d rather miss that and cut to the chase, jump to the end. Most of my customers wire me the money.  American customers are more of…

Here are our key posts for the past week … Applying Blockchain to Clearing and Settlement I’ve talked a lot about blockchain, but not much lately about the use cases, of which four stand out in terms of real activity: Clearing and Settlement, Trade Finance, Payments and Digital Identity.  I thought I’d do a deeper dive…

I can’t finish writing my blockchain and DLT dialogue without wrapping up the missing bits.  This blog series is not meant to be an exhaustive list of every company and every use case, just the ones that stand out for me in a banking context.  There are others such as syndicated loans, compliance and more…

Digital identity is a complex area, as discussed yesterday.  First, it is focused upon shared ledgers and blockchain, not just blockchain; second, it needs to have some permission basis; third, we need to have a structure agreed for who is providing permissions; and fourth, it is a structural challenge for industry and government, rather than…

In my final deep dive into blockchain use cases, I come to digital identity.  Now this is a thorny area for three reasons. First, we need to understand what we mean by identity before we can talk about how blockchains could help. Second, we need to understand the difference between blockchain and shared ledgers which,…

There are a number of base blockchain platforms that are important in the payments sphere, with the three leading players being Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple.  These are the base development platforms, rather than a payments service per se, and choosing which to use is intriguing as they all offer something different.  Bearing in mind that…

I’ve blogged for over a week about blockchain based developments in Clearing & Settlement and Trade Finance, and will continue for another week talking about the developments in Payments and Digital Identity.  However, at this point, I should clarify that I use the term blockchain as an overall term to describe what is happening.  I…

In Trade Finance there’s a lot of activity.  As mentioned yesterday, you have HSBC and Bank of America working with HyperLedger; R3 trialling with 15 banks based upon Corda; Ripple working with Standard Chartered and DBS; and JPMorgan have been developing a trade finance trial with Digital Asset. These are platofrms and industry developmetns, but…