Either the distributed ledger is the greatest revolution in financial services for a generation, or it will make little difference to anything, according to the strongly divided opinions expressed by speakers at the Mondo Visione Exchange Forum in London last week.
Major global IT vendors – including hardware, systems software, ecommerce, big data, cloud, network, telco and systems integrator companies – have little wisdom, advice or vision to offer their customers and prospects when it comes to blockchain technology, according to a survey just conducted by enterprise IT specialist consulting firm Lighthouse Partners.
The fintech revolution is now firmly established, and disruptive technologies are blooming all across the sector. From securities to payments, everyone in the sector is watching to see how the next innovation will affect their business.
The distributed ledger is one of the hottest topics in financial services. Born out of the crypto-currency bitcoin, the blockchain concept has gone mainstream and the first area to feel the impact is likely to be payments.
SETL, the institutional payment and settlement infrastructure based on blockchain technology, claims to have which has broken the 1 billion transactions-per-day capacity barrier for blockchain movements in a test network.
Blockchain has the potential to further disrupt banking in the way that we know it today, transform traditional interbank and even peer-to-peer payments, open up opportunities to replace existing mechanisms for the exchange of financial information, and how customer records are stored and processed.
Nine major global investment banks have formed a partnership to explore the potential of distributed ledger technology in financial markets. The project, led by financial technology company R3, aims to create early standards for the emerging technology that will make it easier and more efficient as it grows.
Nasdaq is to use the blockchain technology behind controversial alternative currency Bitcoin, as part of a push to improve the exchange’s equity management abilities. The move is the first time a major global exchange has put the blockchain concept to use.
At the Recent Payments International conference in London, Patrick Griffin, EVP Business Development at RippleLabs talked to Banking Technology editor David Bannister about the technology and puts paid to some misconceptions about the Ripple protocol.
Yantra Financial Technologies, an electronic payment systems developer, has integrated its latest system for risk scoring of payments with the Ripple real-time settlement protocol. The integration means that institutions using the Ripple protocol can analyse transactions in seconds, including what other payments the customer recently made and potential concerns regarding a specific transaction. Risk levels can be assigned to certain transactions based on pre-determined criteria.
Bitcoin is the poster child of the cryptocurrency world, but it’s not alone. Michael Mainelli and Bob McDowell take a look at the real-world implications of the rise of AltCoins
