When it comes to introducing cashless transactions to new markets across the world, #Visa is usually the pioneer. Not so in #China, however, according to Visa’s Chief Financial Officer Vasant Prabhu: Normally we go #into countries, and we are the ones who are out there, doing the missionary work inRead More
Bank Innovation
Zwei von drei Banken lagern bereits ihre IT-Infrastruktur oder zumindest Teile davon aus. Damit bewegen sich die Schweizer Finanzdienstleister im Trend. Doch beim Thema Cloud Computing zögern sie. Noch verhindern Sicherheitsüberlegungen, dass sie ihre IT-Infrastrukturen einem virtuellen Rechenzentrum anvertrauen.
Das Marktforschungsunternehmen IDC konstatiert: Erst 25 Prozent der europäischen Finanzinstitute nutzen private, öffentliche oder hybride Cloud-Angebote. Über alle Branchen hinweg ist dieser Anteil deutlich grösser; je nach Quelle liegt er zwischen 77 und 90 Prozent.
Das Tempo, mit dem Digital Banking und Fintech die Branche überrollen, überfordert jedoch häufig die hauseigene IT. Zu schnell wandeln sich die Businessanforderungen, als dass die Infrastruktur die nötigen skalierbaren Kapazitäten innert nützlicher Zeit dynamisch bereitstellen kann.
Doch was macht die Finanzindustrie so besonders, dass die Cloud einen so schweren Stand hat? Zwei wesentliche Faktoren stehen der flexiblen Ressourcenallokation über geographisch verteilte IT-Infrastrukturen im Wege.
Aus dem FINMA-Rundschreiben 2008/7 zum Outsourcing für Banken wird abgeleitet, dass Bankkundendaten in der Schweiz zu halten seien. Bei Auslagerung ins Ausland ist mit «angemessenen technischen und organisatorischen Massnahmen» der Schutz des Bankgeheimnisses und der kundenidentifizierbaren Daten «nach Schweizer Recht» sicherzustellen, heisst es.
Die preislich und von ihrer Flexibilität her attraktiven Angebote aus der Public-Cloud, auf denen man sich per #Self #Service Speicher- oder Rechenkapazität «zusammenklickt», kommen somit nicht in Frage. Denn die Server stehen verteilt in der ganzen Welt.
Gerade diese geographisch weiträumig verteilten Ressourcen sind der Grund, dass Cloud Services so boomen. Denn damit ist jene hochflexible Skalierbarkeit von Kapazitäten möglich, mit denen Unternehmen ihre Infrastruktur minutenschnell erweitern können. Doch die Anonymität des Ressourcenpools ist die Schwachstelle der Public Cloud, wenn es um businesskritische Anwendungen und Daten geht.
Dafür müssen Sicherheitsstandards und Leistungsparameter in einer Form definiert werden, wie es üblicherweise über Service Level Agreements in einer Private Cloud geschieht. Messgrössen wie Uptime, Performance, Verfügbarkeit, Antwortzeiten und Supportleistungen müssen verhandel- und durchsetzbar sein.
Reine Public-Cloud-Lösungen sind daher im Finanzsektor momentan nicht denkbar. Mit den herkömmlichen Private-Cloud-Plattformen ist jedoch das Niveau an Flexibilität, Variabilität der Kostenstrukturen und Agilität nicht zu erreichen.
Der einzige Weg zu einer Finance-Cloud führt daher über das hybride Modell, in dem über eine Managed Private Cloud einer geschlossenen Community schrittweise der Zugang zu Ressourcen aus der Public Cloud eröffnet wird. Das Modell besteht in einer Kombination der Vorteile von Private- und Public-Cloud-Eigenschaften.
In einer Private-Cloud-Umgebung wird eine Community-Cloud aufgebaut, in der die spezifischen Sicherheits-, Datenschutz- und Service-Level-Anforderungen der Finanzinstitute adressiert sind.
Ein exklusiver Kreis von Finanzdienstleistern „shared“ sozusagen die Infrastruktur und wird dafür mit einem „Quality Onboarding“ belohnt: Self Service für die Banken ja, aber erst wenn ihre Bedürfnisse so weit abgeklärt und umgesetzt sind, dass sie Compliance-konform umgesetzt werden können.
Auf diese hochsichere und gemanagte Cloud-Plattform wird schliesslich eine Public Cloud aufgesetzt, über die Ressourcen frei bezogen werden können. Dieser Public-Cloud-Anteil wird zunächst noch sehr überschaubar sein.
Doch je mehr Erfahrung die Kunden mit verschiedenen Cloud-Modellen sammeln, umso besser können schlussendlich Kosten- und Flexibilitätsvorteile gegenüber Sicherheits- und Compliance-Vorgaben austariert werden.
The post Bank-IT im Self Service appeared first on Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – FintechNewsCH.
The #Golem anthropomorphic figure The Golem deal beckons us to revisit the ICO market. Our recent coverage can be found in IPO or ICO or IEO (briefing on Colored Coins) and Transparency missing from the suppliers of Capital to Fintechs. Golem’s ICO is over. It raised 820,000 ETH (roughly $ 8.6 million) in a coupleRead More
Bank Innovation
As millions of people begin to participate in #Global #Entrepreneurship Week celebrations in 165 countries, a new report shows the United States remains the country with the most favorable conditions for entrepreneurs to start and scale new businesses but with a slowly narrowing gap as other countries increase their support.
The 2017 Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) provides key information for policymakers and government leaders worldwide to strengthen their digital ecosystems and promote high-growth, high-impact entrepreneurship. The authors estimate that improving conditions to help entrepreneurs create new companies could add $ 22 trillion to the global economy.
“China and India are strengthening their entrepreneurial ecosystems and creating billion dollar startups while Malaysia, Iceland and the Baltic states are emerging as digital entrepreneurship leaders,” said Zoltan Acs, co-author of the report and university professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. “While institutional variables still need to be strengthened in emerging economies—where individuals are running ahead of policymakers—in developed countries individuals need to be shaken up. In other words, not enough people in developed countries—including the United States—are starting productive high-growth businesses.”
The top of the rankings were dominated by countries in the innovation-driven stage of development. The United States topped the rankings again this year, with a GEI score of 83.4 – a slight drop from its score of 86.2 the previous year. It was followed by (in order): Switzerland (78.0), Canada (75.6), Sweden (75.5), Denmark (74.1), Iceland (73.5), Australia (72.5), the United Kingdom (71.3), Ireland (71.0) and Netherlands (67.8).
India (25.8) enjoyed the largest jump in the rankings, moving up 29 spots from last year to land in 69th. Tunisia (40.5) had the second largest jump, from 62nd to 42nd. China (36.3) moved up 12 spots to 48th.
The GEI measures a country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem by combining individual data such as opportunity recognition, startup skills and risk acceptance, with institutional measures, including urbanization, education and economic freedom. These measurements help distinguish self-employment and replicative entrepreneurship from the innovative, productive and rapidly growing entrepreneurial ventures that drive real economic growth.
This year, it included four new components of the digital entrepreneurship ecosystem: Digital Citizenship, Digital Governance, Digital Marketplace and Digital Business.
The report was released by Global Entrepreneurship Network and the GEDI Institute so that findings from the #Index can drive policy discussions at events around the world during Global Entrepreneurship Week.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg of the digital disruption revolution unfolding,” said Jonathan Ortmans, president of the Global Entrepreneurship Network. “The promise of jobs, economic growth and the optimism and hope that entrepreneurs bring to government efforts to create opportunity and prosperity for their citizens, has generated an extraordinary increase in attention from all levels of government in empowering their entrepreneurial ecosystems.”
Other interesting observations from the report include:
– The big surprise is the rise of Switzerland to 2nd place, primarily driven by the aspiration index with very strong scores in high-growth firms, product innovation and process innovation.
&8211; Three of the five Nordic countries, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden, are in the top ten.
&8211; Taiwan, the highest Asian country, is in 16th place, and Singapore is 24th, which virtually ties it with Japan.
The post The 2017 Global Entrepreneurship Index appeared first on Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – FintechNewsCH.
Payments is a great business to be in — in China, that is. The Chinese e-commerce giant #JD.com announced it is considering the sale of its internet finance #unit, JD Finance, “in order to facilitate its development in certain licensed financial service businesses in China, and to take advantage of theRead More
Bank Innovation
More than 150 people from the #fintech ecosystem in Denmark made it to Christianshavn today to participate in the grand opening of #Copenhagen Fintech #Lab – Scandinavia’s first co-working space dedicated to fintech entrepreneurs.
The Minister for Business and Growth Troels Lund Poulsen and the Mayor of Employment and Integration Anna Mee Allerslev both gave very passionate speeches about the importance of growing the fintech ecosystem in Denmark and Copenhagen.
The director of Global Ecosystem Development (at Startupbootcamp) Elizabeth Lumley gave a very personal speech on the real impact of fintech and how it will help us make society more inclusive.
Copenhagen Fintech is a joint initiative by the Financial Services Union Denmark, the City of Copenhagen, the Danish Bankers Association and many more visionary partners and sponsors.
Our ambition is to create a one-of-a-kind place, where we bring together well-established fintech startups and new ones, so they can learn from each other. We want to create a platform for co-creation, new partnerships and co-development that will fuel creative innovation, exploiting synergies cross companies and speeds up time-to-market.
At the same time we also launched our new profile video of the lab including interviews with the many startups.
As you can see from the video, we have an awesome location at the heart of Copenhagen and if your fintech startup is looking for a home we should talk. So do not hesitate to contact us: [email protected] or +45 22 96 18 22.
You can also take a look at our website.
The insurance sector has entered a phase of profound transformation. Numerous #Insurtech startups—around 1,000 according to Venture Scanner map—have popped up to challenge the traditional model by generating more than 16 billion dollars in the last year from insurance companies.
I believe that we will see a completely changed insurance sector in the medium term. But I consider it a joke for an industry conference to show a picture of a newborn and sell it as the last intermediary or the last client to have purchased an insurance policy. I’m convinced that insurance companies will still be relevant in the future, or will become even more relevant than they are now, but these companies will have to be insurtechs, or players who use #technology as the main enablers for reaching their own strategic objectives.
The reach of this #digital transformation goes way beyond the elimination of “the middle man” and interpretations from a distribution point of view. The direct digital channel dominates very few markets and deals only with compulsory insurance. Whereas in the vast majority of markets, a multichannel oriented customer continues—with variations from country to country—to choose at least at some point of the customer journey to interact with an intermediary. The amplitude of the digital transformation happening in the insurance industry is widespread and encompasses all of the phases of the insurance value chain, from underwriting to claims.
Any insurance will be InsurTech
Every insurance sector player—whether it’s a reinsurer, a carrier or an intermediary—ought to pose this question: How should the insurance value chain be reshaped by using the new technologies at hand? There are numerous relevant technologies that come to mind, including: the cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and advanced analytics, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, autonomous agents, drones, #blockchain, virtual reality, self-driving cars.
In order to take full advantage of these technologies, there has to be a structured approach that begins with identifying use cases that can have an actual contribution to reaching strategic business goals, then takes these use cases and applies them in such a way to maximize the effects inside the insurance value chain of each player. Finally, it should look at the software/hardware selection or the “make vs. buy” choices. The essential idea is that there is no such thing as “one size fits all.” Each player needs to create customized use cases based on their individual strategy and characteristics.
To date there are several types of approaches to mapping insurtech initiatives. I have developed my own classification framework based on six macro areas (Awareness, Choice, Purchase, Usage, IoT and peer-to-peer (P2P)). Insurance IoT, also known as connected insurance, represents one of the most relevant and mature insurtech trends.
Connected Insurance represents a new paradigm for the insurance business, an approach that fits with the mainstream Gen C, where “C” means connectivity. This novel insurance approach is based on the use of sensors that collect and send data related to the status of an insured risk and on data usage along the insurance value chain. During the first edition of the Connected Insurance Observatory since January 2016, participants had the opportunity to learn what the results in the auto sector are and about some of the first uses of this approach in the other business lines.
Connected insurance: the insurance policy for the Gen C
Auto telematics represents the most mature insurtech use case, as it has already passed the test and experimentation phase within the innovation unit. It is currently being used an instrument for daily work within motor insurance business units. In this domain, Italy is an international best practice example: Here you can find at the end of 2015 half of the 10 million connected cars in the world have a telematics insurance policy. According to the SSI’s survey for the Connected Insurance Observatory, more than 70% of Italians show a positive attitude toward motor telematics insurance solutions. According to the Istituto per la Vigilanza sulle Assicurazioni (IVASS), about 26 different insurance companies present in Italy are selling the product, with a 16% penetration rate out of all privately owned insured automobiles in the second quarter of 2016. Based on information presented by the Connected Insurance Observatory — a think-tank I created in partnership with Ania that brings together more than 30 European insurer and re-insurer groups — the Italian market will surpass 6 million telematics policies by the end of the year.
Based on this data, we can identified three main benefits connected insurance provides to the insurance sector:
The insurance companies that are part of the Observatory are adopting this new connected insurance paradigm for other insurance personal lines. The sum of insurance approaches based on IoT represents an extraordinary opportunity for getting the insurance sector to connect with its clients and their risks. The insurers can gradually assume a new and proactive role when dealing with their clients—from liquidation to prevention.
It’s possible to envision an adoption track of this innovation by the other business lines that are very similar to that of auto telematics, which would include:
After having passed through all the previous steps in a period spanning almost 15 years, the Italian auto telematics market is currently entering this growth phase. The telematics experience teaches us three key lessons regarding the insurance sector:
[linkedinbadge URL=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/matteocarbone” connections=”off” mode=”icon” liname=”#Matteo Carbone“] is Principal at Bain & Company
SETL, Deloitte and Metro Bank completed a series of firsts this week in London. SETL provided a contactless smartcard enabled #blockchain allowing digitised #payments, Deloitte exercised its blockchain ID system known as Smart Identity and Metro Bank hosted a connected client account. In an initial test, over 100 users were issued with contactless smartcards and used them to make purchases from merchants equipped with contactless terminals. Consumers and merchant balances were updated live-time with all balances held at Metro Bank.
The successful implementation of a blockchain smartcard retail payment system offers the possibility of significantly reducing current high costs for processing retail transactions. In addition it opens the door to competition in merchant servicing to challenger #banks, which are all but excluded from this activity by the incumbent clearing banks. The service which is provided by SETL Payments Ltd, subject to appropriate regulatory approval, could launch as early as 2017.
Smart Identity blockchain
In on-boarding participants, Deloitte demonstrated its Smart Identity blockchain solution communicating with SETL’s payment blockchain. Customers taking part created their identity records on the Deloitte blockchain and had their key details certified by Deloitte. These certified details were then asserted to the SETL Blockchain to set up user credentials. This is believed to be the first commercial inter-blockchain application demonstrating how portable, cryptographically secured identity might be applied in a real-world #consumer environment.
From Pixabay
SETL’s capacity to process billions of transactions a day with burst speeds in the tens of thousands per second means that it could easily keep up with the volumes processed by the large card networks who process around 2000 to 3000 transactions per second on average with burst rates of around 14,000 transactions per second. Instant settlement for the retailer and the possibility of charges being only a fraction of the credit and debit card schemes could prove to be powerful incentives for its adoption.
Furthermore, the use of point to point encryption significantly reduces the possibility of kind of wholesale data leakage that has impacted the legacy consumer payment infrastructure over the last decades.
David Myers, Partner at Deloitte added: “To use the Deloitte Identity solution in this way is particularly relevant as it underlines the importance, in the new distributed ledger world of identity management. We are pleased that SETL together with Metro Bank have been able to demonstrate both speed, capacity and identity in the challenging retail payments arena.”
Craig Donaldson
Craig Donaldson, CEO at Metro Bank commented: “We’re always looking for new ways to improve our customers’ banking experience, and payments is an often overlooked but critical part of a customer’s journey. Retail payments have for too long been dominated by a few players to the detriment of customers. Given all the potential that blockchain has to offer, we hope that the success of today’s test will play a key role in moving us a step closer to providing a more efficient and flexible service for customers.”
Peter Randall
Peter Randall, CEO of SETL noted: “We are extremely pleased to be working with Deloitte and Metro Bank on this ground-breaking project. The team are leaders in the field of transaction implementation and retail banking service and our common focus on high speed, capacity and resiliency makes us natural partners. This is not a proof-of-concept or a prototype; it will be a revenue generating implementation of distributed ledger #technology.”
The post SETL, Deloitte and Metro Bank Put Sterling Onto The Blockchain For Consumer Payments appeared first on Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – FintechNewsCH.
#Financial #Services accounts for 10% of GDP and 5% of employment in #Switzerland and the country is a global leader in Wealth Management. So, what happens here really matters and what is happening is earth-shattering (and we normally avoid hyperbolic language on Daily #Fintech). I mean #radical in the positiveRead More
Bank Innovation
Zusammen mit #einem Schweizer #Fintech-Startup bietet die Postfinance nun ebenfalls Online-Hypotheken an. Dabei muss die Post-Tochter sich eines Kniffs behelfen, um ein altes Handicap zu überwinden.
Einmal mehr spannt Postfinance mit einer Fintech-Firma zusammen: Sie lanciert mit der Zürcher Jungfirma Hypoguide eine Lösung für Online-Hypotheken. Mit dieser können Kunden von Postfinance Hypotheken komplett online beantragen und abschliessen, wie Hypoguide am Dienstag mitteilte.
#Postfinance launched a solution for online mortgages with Hypoguide
Das lässt aufmerken: Die Post-Tochter Postfinance verfügt zwar über eine Banklizenz, darf aber bis auf weiteres nicht selber Kredite vergeben. Ist ihr nun der Einstieg ins Hypo-Geschäft quasi über die Fintech-Hintertür gelungen?
Valiant nimmt die Hypotheken aufs Buch
Mathias Joss
Laut Hypoquide-Geschäftsführer Mathias Joss ist dies nicht der Fall. Auch wenn die Hypotheken den Postfinance-Brand tragen, muss die Berner Regionalbank Valiant die Kredite aufs Buch nehmen, erklärte er auf Anfrage von finews.ch. Mit dieser arbeitet die Postbank schon Jahren bei der Hypotheken-Vergabe zusammen. Hypoguide ihrerseits hat bereits Online-Hypotheken etwa in Kooperation mit der Credit Suisse, Swiss Life, der «Hypi» Lenzburg und der Alternativen Bank Schweiz entwickelt.
Der neueste Vorstoss der Postbank dürfte in der Branche trotzdem zu reden geben. Wie auch finews.ch berichtete, ging Postfinance letzten Juli einer Partnerschaft mit dem deutschen Schwarmfinanzierer Lendico ein – mit dem Ziel, Firmenkredite zu vergeben.
Wird es der Konkurrenz zu bunt?
Damit tummelt sich Postfinance nun ziemlich nonchalant in einem Feld, aus dem sie eigentlich die anderen Schweizer Banken dringend heraushalten wollten. Gut möglich, dass die Fintech-Kniffe der Postbanker noch eine harsche Antwort aus der Branche provozieren.
The post Postfinance: Online-Hypotheken mit einem Kniff appeared first on Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – FintechNewsCH.
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