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FinTech Weekly Magazine

  • Why Machine Learning needs to be self-service to beat payment fraud

    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.

  • Retail Trading Ripe for Fintech Disruption

    Start-ups in the capital market space are a small part of the Fintech world, but are finding multiple opportunities to disrupt retail trading.

  • Emerging Tech in Mobile Banking

    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.

  • Why Robo-advisors are becoming popular

    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.

  • Is This the Best Way to Do Digital Transformation in Banking?

    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.

  • Prepare your business for the digital payments landscape of the future

    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.

  • Great Techspectations: why innovation is king, no matter who sits on the throne

    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?

  • Regtech can help national regulators win the race for talent

    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.

  • Recent Developments in Digital Currency Regulation

    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.

  • Unfair Competition In FinTech: A Familiar 
Problem For An Emerging Industry

    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.

  • Not Every ICO Is a Goldmine

    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.

  • Cryptocurrency Regulation: A Cross-Country Analysis

    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.

  • 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.

  • You say you want a revolution

    “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.

  • Is it still playtime in the sandbox?

    To support the UK fintech, the FCA launched a sandbox to bring together innovators and regulators in a less regulated environment.

  • Why are fund administrators getting fired at alarming rates?

    Private fund managers are showing an increasing penchant for firing their fund administrators. A new report by Preqin called “Preqin Special Report: Private Capital Service Providers” shows that 36% of fund managers changed their fund administrators in 2016.

  • Digital Banking - Old Wine in New Bottle?

    There was a time when digital banking was perceived as synonymous with online banking and mobile banking. Financial services industry, along with other sectors, is experiencing an explosion of digitization thanks to smartphones, tablets and access to affordable high-speed internet. The number of smart phone users is expected to equal the number of bank accounts in near future as all mobile users link their bank accounts to their smart phone and get onboard with mobile-based digital wallets and savings platform.

  • Can Blockchain be the Key to Overcoming the AML Challenge in Crypto-Currency?

    Roy Keidar of law firm Yigal Arnon & Co examines how blockchain could provide the answer to the anti-money laundering issues that crypto-currencies face.

  • The troublesome future of brokers: Interview with an InsurTech marketer

    The insurance industry is facing tremendous change and so are the tasks of those working in this field. We talked to Sebastian Heithoff, Marketing Manager at German InsurTech startup versicherungsberatercheck.de – a platform that looks to increase the quality of insurance brokerage and consumer decision making in the digital age.

  • London’s Fintech Scene Post-Brexit

    A year has passed since the UK voted for Brexit. Speculation has been rife on the potential impact that the Brexit vote, and the trigger of Article 50, could have on the London fintech landscape. Thus far London has maintained its pre-eminent position. In fact we are seeing growth of the tech hub in Croydon and further afield in the UK with growth in Bristol, Manchester and Edinburgh.

  • Why Banks Can’t Help But Help Fintechs

    Imagine if one of the large high street banks did actually truly innovate. Imagine if banks were somehow capable of taking the innovative lead from fintech. Imagine if your own bank outdid all fintech companies in speed, service, convenience and cost for all financial services you use, for your current account, payments, foreign exchange, savings and investing, and any other services.

    Would you stay with your cutting-edge bank or prefer to use four or five individual fintech companies? Most people would choose the convenient option of staying with their bank, right?

  • Microservices: Redesigning the Lego

    In the not so distant past, enterprise computing relied on monolithic applications to provide access to business functions within an organization. These applications strove to meet all operational requirements through rich and ever-growing feature sets—think ERP systems.

  • How to get Private Equity “out of the dark ages”

    Alternative investments are on a tear, and no asset class has seen more growth than private equity. According to a recent study by eVestment, Assets under Administration (AUA) grew 44% from 2015 to 2016. This influx of capital has caused major ripple effects across the entire private equity landscape, with fund managers competing intensely to attract investor capital.

  • CFOs will drive transformation to align EUC models and enterprise systems

    CFOs are under increasing pressure to demonstrate with certainty that they have full knowledge of data sources used for reported statements, to rule out errors and misreporting. However, due to ubiquitous, uncontrolled and unmonitored use of spreadsheets and end user computing applications, many CFOs are struggling to offer such cast-iron guarantees. Meanwhile the role of the CFO is widely recognized to facilitate and support business strategy so that the organization can achieve its goals and objectives – be it of profitability, capital, growth or anything else. Shareholders and investors cherish these metrics too. Consequently, CFOs are routinely driving transformation projects via acquisitions, on-shoring, off-shoring, financial restructuring and such, to control and improve the business performance of their organizations.

  • "Banks, don’t behave like the boiling frog. You won’t get out alive."

    A lack of understanding and of the will to change is often described through the story of the boiling frog. The frog is said to be unable to sense the increasing water temperature and will not search for a way out of his misery – leading to his inevitable death.