My colleagues and I are often left bemused when we hear claims, from fraud experts from across the world, that machine learning is set to change a business function or disrupt a market. Surely, to be really disruptive you have to put the tools in the hands of the customer so they can model and implement the findings immediately. Adding additional 3rd party manual intervention flies in the face of adopting machine learning.
Start-ups in the capital market space are a small part of the Fintech world, but are finding multiple opportunities to disrupt retail trading.
Customers’ expectations for mobile apps are changing rapidly across the board. And the banking industry just can’t keep up. The 2 billion people using mobile banking apps by 2020 will expect an immediate and seamless user experience.
Robo-advisory, along with artificial intelligence and big data, is a top trending buzz-word. It is the Uber of the professional investment advisory world, eliminating the intermediate role and thus reducing fees for the end-user.
Match borrowers with lenders directly and there is no need for intermediaries anymore. So when digital disruptors squeezed their way into financial services industry, one could think banks were doomed.
Blockchain and Bitcoin technologies look set to change and shake up the course of the digital payments industry. Bitcoin to date is the most successful cryptocurrency and blockchain is what makes it possible, so it is not surprising these two technologies are dominating the eCommerce and payments news space.
According to a recent report from the World Economic Forum, fintechs should start to fear the muscling-in of the tech heavyweights. As Alexa is the personal assistant of choice for several FIs and Amazon powers web content for others, are the tech giants dwarfing the diminutive disruptors?
A race for regulatory talent is about to begin. Regardless of the outcome of the Brexit negotiations, it’s almost certain many UK banks will relocate their headquarters or employees, and European financial capitals will swell in size.
As the digital currency space has evolved and matured over the past several years, U.S. regulatory agencies have, for the most part, sat back and observed – none purporting to exercise jurisdiction over the digital currency space in any meaningful way. This hesitation has stemmed from the novelty that virtual currencies pose to regulators, including the varied nature of the underlying technology and structure and an inability to squarely place them into a singular asset class. Virtual currencies, depending on their underlying framework and liquidity, possess certain features of currencies, securities, commodities, and property.
Investing in ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) or functional new currencies can be extremely profitable from an investor’s perspective. For companies, it is a crowdfunding alternative that helps them raise funds for new projects. An ICO is an easy and efficient method for startups to generate capital for their new projects.
FinTech is one of the fastest growing industries in the United States and, as with any emerging industry, has and will face growing pains. A specific consequence of such rapid and uncharted growth will be the increase of unfair competition lawsuits, including by those who seek to obstruct changes to the existing competitive structure and otherwise protect their positions. This article identifies and defines the FinTech industry and unfair competition law, examines the impacts that the law of unfair competition will have on this emerging industry, and provides guidance to minimize risk and exposure to unfair competition claims.
Today, financial institutions face two major challenges. First, the large volume of highly sensitive information they process, such as credit card data, Social Security numbers and personal identifiers, is highly attractive bait for attackers. Second, financial organizations in the U.S. are supervised by many agencies, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and have to follow stringent regulatory requirements to avoid litigation and financial penalties. Meeting these challenges is taxing, especially when customer demands for service availability keep increasing and IT budgets and staff are both limited.
Sixty-three percent of countries have favorable or mostly favorable regulation of cryptocurrencies out of 60 states studied as of July, 21st 2017. This is a very good sign for the industry. Still there is a lot of room for growth and diligent work with regulatory bodies to make cryptocurrencies widely acceptable.
“We are at the beginning of a revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another,” according to Professor Klaus Schwabb, founder of the World Economic Forum. In fact he is right, and the revolution is already under way, not least in my industry – private equity.
To support the UK fintech, the FCA launched a sandbox to bring together innovators and regulators in a less regulated environment.