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FinTech Weekly Magazine

  • FinTech Sector at Risk From Attack on Patentable Subject Matter

    Innovation in the United States could be at risk due to a recent patent ruling having a detrimental effect on patent enforcement efforts and obtaining patents on business methods including financial technologies. Certain rulings disfavor patent owners and could hurt many sectors, such as FinTech. In particular, The Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision—has led to the invalidation of a multitude of software and business method patents in the FinTech sector (“pro-infringer measures”).

  • A Cloud-Based Controlled Open Web Container for the Fintech Market

    As the demand for faster and more sophisticated financial trading tools increase it is envisaged that future trading platforms will need to adapt in terms of functionality and flexibility.

  • Is Big Data a big foe?

    Sensational headlines in the media describing Big Data as "the next big thing" somehow do not impress anymore. After all, sensational headlines sometimes are just ... sensational and not necessarily true. Behind all these boosted names and future forecasts the most important somehow lies unnoticed: numbers and the actual operational facts. And we need to turn the focus from talking to rather doing.

  • Aligning CRA Efforts Within the Changing Climate of Corporate Social Responsibility

    For almost 40 years, a key piece of banks’ social responsibility strategies has been related to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), the 1977 enactment which ensures that banks are continually addressing the needs of low to moderate income neighborhoods and other underserved areas of the communities in which they are located. The CRA requires that financial institutions are periodically evaluated for these efforts, and this record is taken into account when an institution seeks to open a new location or participate in M&A activities.

  • Real-time transfer technologies have given rise to a new class of customers in the United States: we call them the Overbanked. The Overbanked are people with open accounts with three or more depository institutions.

  • A Brave New World of Microservices

    We have the web at our fingertips. We connect more and more parts of our lives to the internet. We are moving whole business segments from brick and mortar to the online space. That's not really big news - it is called progress and we observe it with more or less interest day in, day out. With the digitalization also comes a shift in the nature of the services offered to us. Consumers will change, the service landscape will change and banks will need to adapt - which means they will drastically change, too.

  • Africa - FinTech's Natural Fit and Next Frontier

    We’ve heard the sensationalism before – That the unbridled array of opportunities in Africa are either being “squandered”, “exploited” or just now seeping to the surface for globalization to capitalize on the ‘Rising Continent’ in timely fashion.

  • Composite Lending: Why a Hybrid of Balance Sheet and Marketplace Lending  Makes The Most Sense

    A few years ago, marketplace lending platforms quickly gained steam and emerged as Wall Street darlings, promising to bring greater access, speed and efficiencies to all parties involved in the borrowing process – borrowers (small businesses and consumers), the marketplace lenders themselves,  and secondary investors. In recent weeks, however, a series of high profile incidents and disappointing earnings statements have called into question the transparency, stability and viability of the marketplace lending business model. Apparently, the headlines read, it is not time to ring the death knell for traditional banks just yet.

  • Big Banks can be Challengers too

    Paul Bowman from Market Gravity shares his insights on how traditional long-term strategies are dead and banking organisations are finding new ways to innovate quickly.

  • Blockchain Technology - The Next Disruptive Computing Innovation

    Yamini Kona has around 15 years of experience in Financial Services. She comes with a strong research and business analysis background and has authored various case studies and thought papers in the past.

  • What the Gig Economy Means for the Emerging Fintech Industry

    When thinking about the implications of the gig economy, all industries must take notice of its disruptive nature in order to remain smart and streamlined, adapting to consumer needs. And, they can achieve this mainly by making their workforces more flexible. But particularly how can it affect the traditional finance industry and the new disruptive trend in fintech? The traditional financial industry is one of the anchors of the world economy, but it is undergoing a reinvention thanks to fintech. When you combine two major disruptive shifts -- fintech and the gig economy -- the results are powerful and game-changing.

  • FinTech Customer Experience is Changing Financial Services to Become Trusted Again

    We interviewed Kevin Bottoms, Global Vice President of TELUS International, about the importance of customer service and experience in financial services and beyond. Customer don't only need to be acquired, they need to be retained – by building trust.

  • Ways for Risk Management Departments to Provide a Winning Customer Experience

    It is generally calculated that businesses must spend between four and ten times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one [1]. With that in mind, we would like to share several strategies risk departments can employ to help deliver a strong customer experience, an important component of customer loyalty.

  • Cookies – "Pay the Street Musicians Digitally"

    We were interested in the P2P payment startup Cookies for quite a while now. When we met co-founder Lamine Cheloufi at the Pioneers Festival 2016 in Vienna, it was about time for an interview.

  • There will be rebundling after unbundling – Interview with NUMBER26

    At the Pioneers Festival 2016 in Vienna, we met Maximilian Tayenthal of the rapidly growing mobile banking startup NUMBER26 and talked to him about the evolution in finance and what it means for their business.

  • Interview with Raj Singh & Jürgen Hütter from Avant

    We interviewed Raj Singh and Jürgen Hütter from online lender Avant about the reasons alternative lenders gain ground, why the US offers better prerequisites for the business and what the bank of the future will look like.

  • Interview with Creamfinance

    In London, we had the pleasure to meet with Co-founder and CEO Matiss Ansviesulis and PR-Specialist Viktorija Gorcakovaite from Creamfinance.

  • Interview with Thomas Joykutty from Deloitte Digital

    Thomas Joykutty, working at the London office of Deloitte Digital, was part of the “Grid” team at Fintech Connect Live. We talked to him about their project, the terms fintech and insuretech and tried to take a look into the crystal ball.

  • Interview with GeoPhy's Teun van den Dries

    Teun von den Dries talked to us about his company GeoPhy and the role of fintechs in the finance sector.

  • Interview with Jamie Rakover from App Dome

    Tel Aviv based startups App Dome offers what they described to us as “Security as a Service”.

  • Interview with Scalable Capital – “Death by a thousand small punches”

    We met a part of the Scalable Capital team in London: Adam French (Founder and UK Managing Director), Dr. Manuela Rabener, (Global CMO) and Marianne Slamich (PR specialist).

  • Interview with Michael Mellinghoff from TechFluence

    We talked to Michael Mellinghoff, Managing Director at TechFluence. Being a longtime banking professional with several years of experience with FinTech startups, we asked him about some of the key questions in the industry at the moment.

  • The Future of the Digital Bank

    New technologies have shown to be a driving force behind new business cases. Most of the time, however, banks are not really pioneers regarding these kind of changes. New providers keep pushing into traditional business areas and use innovative technologies to generate additional value for the customers. Particularly the past year needs to be viewed as a wake-up-call for the banking sector to push its efforts in the digital sector. How can banks react to challenges posed by new competitors like Apple Pay? Taking a look at other industries reveals a lot of opportunities apart from the risks. To use these opportunities, banks need to adjust their strategies smart and consistently.