Customers of Valartis Bank in Liechtenstein are being held to ransom by hackers, according to German tabloid Bild. The blackmailers are demanding 10% of their account balances in Bitcoin or the customers face their personal details being sent to the media and financial watchdogs. An unusual threat but the hackers might feel the bank’s customers, […]
The UK’s Royal Mint will issue Royal Mint Gold (RMG) in mid-2017, a blockchain based digital record of ownership for gold stored at its bullion vault storage facility. CME Group, a derivatives marketplace, will develop, implement and operate the product’s digital trading platform which will see gold traded on an exchange using blockchain. The Royal […]
Germany’s central bank Deutsche Bundesbank and Deutsche Börse have unveiled a functional prototype for the blockchain technology-based settlement of securities. It is, however, “purely a conceptual study” and “is far from being market-ready”.
Treasury and capital markets (TCM) vendor Calypso has implemented its collateral management system at Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMco). It has also joined forces with the R3 blockchain consortium to build TCM applications on R3’s Corda distributed ledger technology platform.
We’ve summed up the latest funding efforts and results in the fintech space – so you don’t have to! Featuring Billon Group, Stripe, figo and Finimize.
EY Switzerland says it will become the first consulting firm to accept Bitcoin for its services. The company says from January 2017 it will be possible to pay invoices from EY Switzerland in Bitcoin. Employees will receive a digital wallet; and a Bitcoin ATM will be put into operation in its main building in Zurich […]
US Bancorp, Macquarie and JP Morgan are understood to be in the “leave” camp as they have opted out of the upcoming fundraising effort of the R3 blockchain consortium.
Catch up on Banking Technology’s top five fintech stories of the week – all in one place!
Let’s put the fun in funding by keeping it mercifully brief. Money seekers are PayKey, Euklid and Flender.
Morgan Stanley and National Australia Bank (NAB) are understood not to be renewing their membership with the R3 blockchain consortium.
Santander has decided to leave the R3 blockchain consortium, which it joined last December. Meanwhile, R3 has slashed its fundraising target to $150 million from the original $200 million.
Goldman Sachs has dropped out of the R3 blockchain consortium, according to the Wall Street Journal. The bank was one of nine original members of R3, but let its membership lapse. A spokeswoman for Goldman Sachs told the Wall Street Journal that it will continue to work with blockchain. No other details were forthcoming. As […]
Catch up on Banking Technology’s top five fintech stories of the week – all in one place! FNZ to build new BPO centre EXCLUSIVE. For Société Générale’s private banking business Mizuho Bank gears up for new core banking system go-live Keen to modernise after large-scale system failures in 2011. Big three explore blockchain for consumer […]
Stellar Development Foundation is offering sponsorships for fintech start-ups, and those who educate developers or represent an NGO. Sponsorship is available in the forms of “lumens” – Stellar’s unit of digital currency, similar to a Bitcoin. The firm says its goal is to support new products and ideas, and for those enabling that goal via […]
It’s blockchain infographics time!
IBM has unveiled a blockchain-powered Know Your Customer (KYC) project with Singapore start-up KYCK! to help financial services providers onboard customers quicker and cheaper. Using the open source Hyperledger Project Fabric, IBM says immutability, traceability and privacy of the information is provided on a permissioned distributed ledger which is “critical” in a highly regulated environment. […]
SETL, Deloitte and Metro Bank say they have completed “a series of firsts”. SETL provided a contactless smartcard for digitised payments (based on blockchain), Deloitte applied its Smart Identity blockchain ID system, and Metro Bank hosted a connected client account.
OCBC says it is the first bank in Southeast Asia to use blockchain for local and cross-border interbank fund transfers. A successful pilot payment transaction was carried out between the bank and its subsidiaries, OCBC Malaysia and Bank of Singapore, using a payment blockchain solution designed by OCBC and local payments firm BCS Information Systems […]
V-Key, a Singapore-based digital security firm, and Ant Financial have teamed up for mobile payments. Under the partnership, V-Key will provide its virtual software solution, V-OS, for Ant Financial to help secure transactions on AliExpress, one of Alibaba Group’s retail ecommerce platforms. (Ant Financial is an affiliate company of Alibaba Group). V-Key will also provide […]
South Korea’s Shinhan Bank is launching a Bitcoin remittance service between Korea and China, with Hong Kong as an intermediary. The service will be available in December.
Here is a boringly good guide to cryptocurrencies, courtesy of MBNA. It is not boring at all really!
Catch up on Banking Technology’s top five fintech stories of the week – all in one place!
The R3 consortium and ten of its member banks have developed a proof-of-concept (PoC) for a know your customer (KYC) registry “that addresses the challenges associated with satisfying KYC requirements and allows identities to be managed by their owners”.
SEB has teamed up with blockchain specialist Ripple to enable SEB customers to make real-time transfers between SEB accounts in Stockholm and New York. This is “the first step” of a larger blockchain-based payments project.
Kasikornbank (Kbank), one of the largest banks in Thailand, is exploring blockchain with IBM, “to save costs and speed up transactions”, the two companies say. The services will be launched in H1 2017, to certify the letters of guarantee (LCs).
The latest edition of our flagship magazine – Banking Technology – is out now, packed with news, analysis and insights, case studies, research and expert commentary.
There has been a tremendous amount of excitement and discussion about the potential of blockchain technology to transform the financial services industry and beyond. But the only thing that is clear at the moment is that there is still a lot of work to be done to implement wide scale use cases, clear up any regulatory uncertainly or barriers and educate institutions and employees about the technology and its potential.
Amidst tightening regulations, the latest hack of the Bitfinex Bitcoin exchange has highlighted ongoing difficulties for the sector. Bourn Collier, associate, and Oliver Yaros, senior associate at Mayer Brown International LLP, explore. A few years ago media reports in Britain drew attention to the unfortunate plight of James Howells, a Welsh IT worker who had […]
Catch up on Banking Technology’s top five fintech stories of the week – all in one place! Weatherbys Bank live with new core banking system EXCLUSIVE. Oracle FSS’s Flexcube flexes its muscles. Mobile payments and European millennials Vocalink reveals millennials’ habits and perceptions. Japan rises to blockchain challenge with new consortium Launches with 42 member […]
If you reduce it, they will come. Swiss ministry officials want to entice fintech firms and boost competition with new, lighter regulations. The nation’s finance ministry says the plan is to remove barriers to market entry and offer more legal certainty for the fintech space. Ministry officials say draft legislation could be sent to Switzerland’s […]
The payments industry went just a bit blockchain bonkers at this year’s Sibos. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) was a hot topic throughout the week. This was quite astounding given there are very few examples of working blockchain or DLT use cases; most of the initiatives under way are proofs of concept.
The name may not be catchy but “The Japan Bank Consortium to Centrally Provide Domestic and Cross-border Payments” has officially launched with 42 member banks. As Banking Technology reported in August, SBI Ripple Asia, a joint venture between distributed ledger tech provider Ripple and SBI Holdings, announced that a Japanese consortium of 15 banks in […]
London-based Nimbrix has unveiled its new blockchain platform and the creation of an industry consortium with KPMG and Microsoft. The Nimbrix buy-side platform will use cloud, open API, Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) and blockchain. It will be powered by Microsoft Azure, and Nimbrix says trades can be “executed instantaneously between counterparties, thus reducing the risk of […]
MasterCard has unveiled its own blockchain as it reacts to arch-rival Visa’s partnership with Chain and seeks to use the technology in payments and trade finance. Its version is currently at the testing stage and offers the usual things in this corner of the fintech world. These include smart contracts – scriptable transactions that automate […]
Tullett Prebon Information (TPI), a provider of real-time price information from the global OTC financial and commodity markets, has signed a deal with Brave New Coin (BNC) to distribute its digital currency data. TPI says this is the “first time such a comprehensive view of the entire digital currency landscape has been made available to […]
London-based blockchain firm SETL and Cobalt DL, a private peer-to-peer network, have teamed up to use SETL’s OpenCSD within the Cobalt FX post trade platform. The service is set to launch in 2017, with 15 institutional FX participants “already committed” to the service. Earlier this year, SETL unveiled the OpenCSD platform, its first commercial offering, […]
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), Wells Fargo and trading firm Brighann Cotton have completed the “first” global trade transaction between two banks using blockchain, smart contracts and the Internet of Things (IoT). The transaction involved a shipment of cotton from Texas to Qingdao, China, using a distributed ledger – Skuchain’s Brackets system – for all […]
European Association for Biometrics (EAB) has recently conducted a one-day seminar in London on what’s hot in the world of European banking biometrics. The seminar was supported by Banking Technology and hosted by Citi. It gathered a good haul of UK banks, including Lloyds, Santander, Virgin Money, Tesco Bank, Metro Bank and RBS and TSB.
US-based blockchain specialist Chain Inc has released its Chain Core Developer Edition, a free and open source version of its distributed ledger platform. Users have the option to run their prototypes on a test network, or “testnet”, operated by Chain, Microsoft, and the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), a collaboration of Cornell University, Cornell […]
R3 has made its blockchain platform’s code publicly available as it seeks to make it an industry standard. The Corda platform has been developed by R3’s consortium, which comprises more than 60 financial institutions around the world (the latest addition is Synchrony Financial – the first credit card company to join the consortium). “We want […]
