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  • user 4:54 pm on November 7, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , technology,   

    Why FinTech Startups Will Not Win If They Play Like The Banks 

    My recent experience with  Startup Revolut has shown me that the can still sleep quietly for a while as Fintech Start-ups will in fact not be in measure to disrupt the industry if don’t also change the rules of the game…

    simulator screen shot 10 dec 2015 16.26.03What went wrong with Revolut?

    “Revolut is a Global Money App, cutting your hidden banking fees to zero. It allows you to exchange currencies at perfect interbank rates, send money through social networks and spend with a multi-currency card everywhere MasterCard® is accepted. All this is done at the touch of a button, in a beautiful mobile application. Our goal is to completely remove all hidden banking costs.” Source: https://revolut.com/about

    So what went wrong with my Revolut account… I used my multi-currency card abroad to pay for goods in Euro. I received a VAT refund in Euro that was to be re-credited to my Revolut account. But today, when I logged into my account, I noticed that the refund had been re-credited in Sterling, with someone taking a hefty spread in the process…

    So in simple words, it did not go as planned, the client promise was broken, and the hidden banking costs were suddenly very visible… I decided to query this with the Revolut customer service…

    Adopting the same approach to client service as the banks is recipe for failure

    What clients of FinTech Start-ups want is a completely different approach that puts them at the center. They want services that are not only answering their needs, but that are also:

    • simple to use
    • fast
    • convenient

    FinTech Start-ups have understood that, or at least, part of it…

    They are leveraging new to outgun the banks that are suffering from their archaic systems. The claim is that FinTech Start-ups armed with integrated systems, new algorithms and access to social networks can now analyse client sentiment real time and can offer the right service at the right time, for the right price.

    From Pixabay

    From Pixabay

     

    Banks on the other hand are struggling to make sense of big data. Because it lives on several databases and systems that are hardly integrated, because they did not think of asking clients the right to use this data twenty years ago when they signed them up, and because of plenty other valid reasons, mining through this data is a difficult, near impossible, task.

    Clients are attracted to FinTech Start-ups because of the glitter this new lawyer of technology provides. They see the novelty in the approach and they believe something has changed…

    Clients love the new simplicity – no more endless paper form to sign, all is done with a click on a fancy app interface and they even work with pictures of you, your ID card or proof of residence taken through your smartphone!

    Clients love the increased speed – they can do it here and there, through the internet and 4G mobile connection, wherever they are, no more need to visit a branch in person.

    Clients love the convenience – FinTech Start-ups provide the same services as traditional banks, often even better, and at a fraction of the price they normally pay their bank.

    From Pixabay

    From Pixabay

     

    But underneath, unfortunately, it seems nothing has changed… When the acid test comes, when something goes wrong at a FinTech Start-up… then the same old mechanisms that make you hate your bank re-surface:

    Claiming that they did not do anything wrong

    “Just to inform you that we don’t have any control over the refunds. Refunds are processed automatically after the merchant’s release.”

    Putting the fault on the other party in the chain

    “It is not our fault as we are not able to choose the currency for the merchant” or “if you were expecting to receive these refunds in Euros, and apparently you have received in GBP is because the merchant released then in this currency.”

    Invoking procedures and rules that prevent them doing it the simple way

    “However there is a procedure that needs to be followed. Especially when, as in this case, we didn’t have any control and the way to rectify it, is to raise a chargeback.”

    Referring client to another department or to third party as the solution lies outside their competence

    “I will forward this to the chargeback team.” or “You can contact the merchant and ask for clarification.”

    This behaviour will not help FinTech Start-ups win!

     

    Clients are asking for a great customer experience, they are asking for simplicity, speediness and convenience, even when, or especially when, things break. This is exactly where FinTech Start-ups need to make the difference.  Playing it the banks will not satisfy clients, it will end up putting FinTech Start-ups and banks in the same basket.

    What should have happened instead at a Fintech Start-up?

    First, the FinTech angle should have kicked in immediately:

    From Pixabay

    From Pixabay

    The data analysis should have been instantaneous, with artificial intelligence reading the support chat channel and picking up that I was growing more and more upset by the interaction with the customer service representative. This was visible in the language I was using and the speed at which I was typing (and the accompanying typos).

     

    From Pixabay

    From Pixabay

    Social Media listening should have also indicated real-time that I was starting to tweet about my problem and my frustration at the lack of understanding from the customer service representative, and that I was starting to drag influencers in the discussion.

    This would have also been supported by a rapid scan to establish my social media strength (number of followers, Klout score, retweets and likes) and the risk of PR damage that could result.

     

    Finally, the CRM system should have spitted out a customer profile showing that over the past 4 months:

    I had increased my volume of transactions significantly (so I was on my way to become a “good” client)

    that all transactions I had done were in Euros and that there were no transaction in GBP (so there was possibly something abnormal with those two transactions in GBP)

     

    Then, the Start-up angle should have also played a role:

    &; The customer service representative should have calculated the costs involved to solve the issue quickly and bring immediate satisfaction to the client:
    namely by reversing the two transactions in GBP into EUR, at an exchange rate of 1 GBP for 1.1177 EUR – which was 54.78 GBP x 1.1177 = 61.23 EUR, when I was claiming I should have received 64.50 EUR – that means a cost of 2.92 GBP.

    &8211; The customer service representative should have then assessed how much effort any other alternative solution would take:
    time spent by customer service staff to escalate the client’s request, plus time spent by the compliance team to raise a chargeback request and deal with the third party to fix the issue and to that, add the potential loss of faith in the product by the client, plus any potential damage to the brand resulting from the negative publicity on the social networks.

    &8211; Armed with those two assessments, the customer service representative would then decide quickly which solution would be the most satisfactory for the client and the less expensive for the FinTech Start-up to execute and would have executed it.

     

    So, in other words, the customer service representative should have assessed what was my issue with Revolut (i.e. refund process did not work properly), should have assessed the most practical and easiest way for Revolut to address my need (i.e. fix the refund by compensating the difference) and should have asked me how Revolut could still increase my client satisfaction (i.e. reinforce their client promise and turn me into a champion of their brand to drum up more business).

    FinTech Start-ups need to embrace a client-centric approach

    FinTech Start-ups need to go further than just layering a fancy new technology on one of the oldest jobs in the world if they want to win. They need to adopt a client-centric strategy, putting client satisfaction at the core. Because it is the alliance of technology and client-centric approach that will help them beat the banks.

    Client-centric champion Amazon would have paid back the 2.92 GBP in a split-second and would have probably issued a compensation voucher to make up for the bad customer experience. This would have reinforced my trust in their brand and would have led me to sing their praises on the social networks, bringing them additional clients attracted by this positive client experience sharing.

    FinTech Start-ups need to do the same, before Amazon starts doing FinTech…

    This article first appeared on Lionel Guerraz&8217;s Blog

    Featured Image: From Pixabay

    The post Why FinTech Startups Will Not Win If They Play Like The Banks appeared first on Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – FintechNewsCH.

    Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – FintechNewsCH

     
  • user 7:35 am on November 7, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , technology,   

    Fintech: Friend or Foe? Why are we still asking? 

    I have been travelling a good part of 2016 having just returned from Money2020 and recently the UK where Horizn was fortunate to attend an invitation-only European Digital Banking conference near London. While in London a similar question was asked, “Which side are you on?” both the startups and some of the largest and smartest minds were in attendance pondering this question.

    One of the most interesting answers I have seen to date on this question is a LinkedIn post by Sabrina Del Prete, Digital Director at Williams & Glyn /RBS. Digital transformation in banking – is it a mission impossible?

    She states, “The key word in Digital Transformation is indeed “Transformation” and not “Digital”. Doing digital is fun, creative and rewarding – it’s a journey that you take with a light heart and a sense of optimism. Transforming a business in a sector that for hundreds of years has remained virtually unchanged, programmed for risk aversion and centred around products rather than clients is hard – cynicism and resilience are essential travel companions.”

    As the CEO of Horizn, which has always been on the bank side of digital transformation, versus the “disrupting” fintech startups, I am always surprised by the focus on this question. Maybe it’s simply because there are no sides. Transformation can’t happen without collaboration. If you are on the side of transformation, you are indeed on both the banks and the fintech side. The digital age has no respect for borders and the movement of money will have no borders either. I would venture to say innovation and transformation have no borders. Just take a look at the giants, Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. Emerging fintech companies and traditional financial institutions will eventually have no borders, as both players need each other to define and advance the new financial landscape.

    Many consumers are adopting innovation faster than most banks. Banks need to innovate, arguably faster than their customers are. Banks need to be innovating internally, partnering with fintechs and be focused on getting their digital innovation to market. Or more importantly, there needs to be a cultural of adoption for both the bank employees and their customers that could help propel and embrace innovation. In a world that becomes 100% more intelligent every 18 months, is of the essence. Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce) is very clear on this: “Speed is the new currency of business”

    Digital transformation we know has the potential to change the role of today’s banks, and simultaneously help them create a better bank for the digital age. It is simply a time for action, partnerships and for collaboration. It is time for banks with their internal stakeholders and outside fintechs to partner collectively to build banks for the digital age.

    For us at Horizn we also know that, “build it and they will come” is a myth. We believe in the need for digital and cultural transformation, both for the bank employees and for the customers they serve. To dramatically accelerating market adoption of digital transformation will mean getting both employees and customers digitally fluent. The key elements of the Horizn platform are, to drive awareness, adoption and increase revenues by inciting employees and customers to learn the latest digital innovation. Fast!


    [linkedinbadge URL=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/janicediner” connections=”off” mode=”icon” liname=”Janice Diner”] is Founding Partner CEO Horizn (Horizon Studios)

     
  • user 12:18 am on November 7, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , technology   

    How can technology help enable financial inclusion? 

    Currently more than 2 billion adults worldwide &; mostly poor and disproportionately women &8212; lack access to formal services. A&;

    Continue reading on Hacking Finance &187;

    Bank Innovation

     
  • user 10:54 pm on November 6, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , technology   

    Identity is the new Black 

     

    shutterstock_395378032

    I was invited to a one day event on at the US Dept. of Treasury this past Friday. Treasury officials had invited a healthy cross section of identity management and solutions practitioners ranging from startup founders, technologists, scientists involved with standards settings, officials from various US governmental entities such as the Dept. of Justice, the IMF, the World Bank, FinCen, USAID, several bank representatives, executives from telecom, payments or social media companies, academics from various universities, current or former representatives from the governments from Estonia, the European Union, Pakistan or the United Kingdom, lawyers, institutions such as Brookings or the Pew Charitable Trust and the Treasury of course &; I am sure i am missing a few. Who would have thought Identity was such a sexy and trendy topic. All in all, and from my own count, we were shy of 90 in attendance.

    I was seated next to an official from the Dept. of Homeland Security and another gentleman with a buzzcut and no identifiable badge for the first part of the day. Needless to say I was on my best behavior, ready to flash on command my ultimate proof of identity in the US &8211; my green card. Given the convivial atmosphere I realized my identity had already been vetted and I started to relax and soak in the proceedings.

    The event was masterfully organized with a variety of panels that touched upon what legal identities were both from an US and a global perspective, the role of international standards when building identity solutions, the solutions at hand to make optimal identity solutions a reality, the issues around identity as currently experienced and the ways government and the private sector can collaborate to bring to market viable digital identity products and services in a compliant and legal way.

    I took away the following points from the day&;s proceedings:

    1) Identities are as diverse as human beings, their cultures and modes of social organization. Therefore digital identity solutions will have to be as diverse as possible given the contextual nature of what an identity means both from a structural and dynamic point of view. In other words, there is no one size fits all identity solution.

    2) Standards are crucial if we have to have the appropriate level of interoperability both within a country and between countries, assuming there will be more than one identity solution brought to market.

    3) Cooperation and coordination between the private sector, not for profit organizations, standards setting organizations, consumer advocacy groups and the government is a must. Digital identities and their related data sets &8211; legal, static, dynamic, social, digital, in real life &8211; are too sensitive for one group to take the lead without any cooperation.

    4) Digital identity solutions are by definition multi-faceted as they have to take into account how an identity is created, its baseline, how it evolves and is managed over time, how it can be kept trustworthy throughout the lifetime of the human being or entity it represents and how a framework is built to enable its assurance and verification in context.

    5) Digital identity solutions have to empower either individuals &8211; retail solutions &8211; or entities &8211; wholesale solutions &8211; and allow them to retain control in legal and compliant ways. Any identity solution that does not have the needs of its users at its center is not an adequate and appropriate identity solution. One of the logical paths towards identity solutions that empower individuals/entities leads to self sovereign identities constructs. (My personal views here.)

    6) Fraud, theft and all kinds of illegal activities are being combatted vigorously by several US entities. the battle is far from being won, but we are well protected by US govt entities that fight the good cause.

    7) Our current means of assuring one&8217;s identity, authenticating one&8217;s identity belong more to a universe of misfit toys than to a rational and organized approach. Much can be done to make our identities safer. Much is available too. Why is the private sector, as well as us as consumers, so complacent is a mystery though.

    8) Advanced technology solutions are being developed or have been developed &8211; biometrics, various technology stacks, cryptography amongst others. Few are live and operational as of today. Only a matter of time I guess. Yet, I could not shake the fact the advanced technology solutions are neither a silver bullet nor should be an excuse for us to wait to see solid identity solutions come to market in the US.

    9) Indeed, it was clear that various identity solutions have already been deployed to great effect in countries as diverse as Pakistan, India, Estonia, the United Kingdom, seemingly without the use of advanced technology solutions. Except for the United Kingdom, most of these countries have national identifying schemes such as a national identity number, or national identity card. The cultural and genetic aversion for such a scheme within the US may explain why this country is behind when it comes to digital identities. The fact that the United Kingdom is also working very effectively towards government enabled digital identities shows there is no excuse for the US to remain a laggard.

    10) Natural identity solutions providers are financial institutions, or startups.

    11) Two strong themes emerged towards the end of the day. First, there is a natural tug of war between the yearning for protecting privacy and the craving for transparency and disclosure to combat illegal activities. This natural tug of war is exacerbated by the sensitive nature of identities in commerce. Indeed, the private sector stands to monetize data &8211; our data &8211; in myriad of ways in the digital age, which renders the issue of privacy, ownership and legality even more important. Second, especially in a country like the United States, the private sector both dislikes overt government interference and abhors uncertainty. As such to the question of how government could help which was asked by one high ranking Treasury official, most in the room, a cappella and in perfect musical harmony declared it important the government help the market create a framework to foster identity solutions. I interpret this pleas as the quest for the right governmental nudges and an active avoidance of rigid mandates.

    12) Finally, although we did discuss a variety of subjects ranging from privacy concerns, legal and compliance issues, enforcement, technology solutions, identity vs data, the plurality of identities, one subject was notably absent from the proceedings: Identity rights. By identity rights I do not mean the right to an identity. I mean rights akin to property rights. In as much as property rights have been one of the foundational blocks of economic prosperity during the industrial age, I believe Identity rights will be a key engine for growth in the digital age. One needs to know his identity and the data associated with it are secured and that one owns them outright. In this sense data privacy is not enough. I have blogged about this in a previous post already. I suspect the issue of identity rights will be settled in different ways depending on context, via the courts in an organic way in the US, via legislative fiat in Europe. Be that as it may identity rights will emerge as currently our identity and data are neither tangible property nor are they intangible property and more than not are regulated by the various Terms of Service we seldom read but often agree to when signing up to use the various digital applications we spend more and more of our time with online.

    13) One parting thought: I view this one day event in a very positive light, as a proof that the thorny problem of digital identities is being taken seriously at the highest levels of government in the US. a very positive sign indeed. The private sector, along with standards bodies, now needs to come up with proposals and submit them to various US govt bodies. I eagerly await the next chapters and hope I will be invited to follow on events at the Treasury or which other entity takes up the challenge.

    FiniCulture

     
  • user 3:36 am on November 6, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , technology, ,   

    World FinTech Report 2017: Half of Banking Customers Globally Now Using FinTech Firms 

    of across the globe are the products or services of at least one firm1, according to the first FinTech (WFTR) from Capgemini and LinkedIn, in collaboration with Efma.

    The inaugural report quantifies and tracks customer response to the rise of FinTechs, includes the views of financial services industry executives at both FinTech and traditional financial institutions2, and summarizes how innovation is key in the emerging industry landscape.

    In particular, the WFTR found that FinTechs are gaining momentum and mindshare amongst younger, tech-savvy, and affluent customers. Emerging markets led the adoption where over 75% of customers in China and India report using services provided by FinTech firms, followed by the UAE and Hong Kong.

    FinTechs have made the greatest inroads in investment management, where 17.4% of customers rely on them solely and another 27.4% use them in addition to their traditional providers. With so many FinTechs specializing in niche services, the WFTR also found that many FinTech customers (46.2%) are using services from more than three FinTech providers.

    FinTechs continue to gain momentum, but overall customer experience and trust remain low

    While FinTech providers continue to have a disruptive market presence, overall customer trust levels in these providers remain low. Only 23.6% of customers say they trust their FinTech provider compared to 36.6% for traditional firms. Customers noted traditional financial institutions still hold some advantage over FinTech providers when it comes to fraud protection, quality of service, and transparency.

     

    WFTR 2017_Infographic

    “Rising customer expectations for more personalized and advanced digital experiences, advancements in , greater access to venture capital, and lower barriers to entry have created fertile ground for growing FinTechs,” said Penry Price, Vice President, Marketing Solutions, LinkedIn. “FinTechs are largely gaining momentum by meeting needs traditional players have yet to address, but many FinTechs lack the transparency required to earn the trust of their consumer audiences to capitalize on these opportunities.”

     

    The drive for collaborating with FinTechs is seen as key to delivering innovation

    Traditional financial institutions continue to face challenges, with less than half (44%) of executives confident in their FinTech strategy. This is not surprising given only about one-third (34.7%) affirmed they have a well-structured or proactive innovation strategy in place that is embedded culturally. The risk-averse nature of traditional firms also makes it difficult for them to create cultures that prioritize innovation, and 40.3% of executives said that theirs is not conducive to innovation.

    WFTR 2017_Infographic

    “Financial services senior executives are seeing FinTechs in a whole new light as they see greater opportunities to collaborate, but are also making significant headways in building more agile, in-house FinTech capabilities.” said Thierry Delaporte, Head of Capgemini’s Global Financial Services Business Unit and Member of the Group Executive Board. “But with the exception of a handful of industry leaders, most firms are struggling to achieve positive results from their innovation initiatives with only 10 percent of executives stating they have been very effective at achieving desired innovation results.”

    The WFTR found that traditional firms are increasingly pursuing a wide range of strategies in response to FinTechs. A majority of financial institutions (60%) now view FinTechs as potential partners, but nearly the same percentage (59.2%) are also actively developing their own in-house capabilities. Beyond partnership and in-house development, executives are exploring a full range of models, whether it be Investment in FinTech (38%), partnering with educational institutions (34.3%) or setting up accelerators (29.6%), while a much smaller percentage (18.6%) are acquiring FinTechs.

     

    Traditional firms actively investing in emerging technologies to improve both operations and customer experience

    Traditional firms are in large, part responding to this shift by giving highest priority to investment in technologies which facilitate more streamlined and effective operations, thereby providing better day-to-day customer experiences.

    Nearly 90% of executives report they are most focused on implementing big data and analytics, followed by the Internet of Things (IoT) (55.8%), (54.7%), robotic process automation (52.3%), and open API technologies (50%). Blockchain technology, which forms the backbone of the popular virtual currency , is increasingly penetrating the financial services industry. It has numerous applications including enhanced transfers of digital assets, identity management, and better management of reward and loyalty solutions.

    “Both FinTech and traditional firms still have work to do on delivering a better customer experience,” said Vincent Bastid, Secretary General, Efma. “The arrival of FinTechs has accelerated the improvement of overall customer experience in the industry but it is still not at the level that customers perceive that it should be. It is only a matter of time before BigTech3 companies and players in e-commerce and telecommunications join in to stake their claim to benefit from this industry disruption.”

    To help traditional firms overcome their innate resistance to innovation and address current and potential future disruption, the WFTR has defined a four-step framework which will be essential in the face of a growing number of prospective threats to the financial services business.

    According to the report, traditional FS firms can unlock innovation by: discovering new technologies, devising ideas and insights into business models, deploying aligned executives to support innovation, and sustaining innovation by improving efficiency and implementing best practices. As the “platformification”4 of the industry continues to gain momentum, it will be more and more imperative that financial institutions take aggressive action to innovate to ensure they are prepared.

    WFTR 2017_Infographic_final - Copy

    The post World FinTech Report 2017: Half of Banking Customers Globally Now Using FinTech Firms appeared first on Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – FintechNewsCH.

    Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – FintechNewsCH

     
  • user 9:26 am on November 5, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , technology, usecase   

    30 things you can do with a blockchain 

    According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle 2016, is hovering somewhere near the peak of inflated expectations, and probably just about to fall off a cliff into the trough of disillusionment at any moment. All over the place, overblown ideas and proofs of concept oversold by those who really don’t understand how the technology works are colliding head-on with scalability challenges, industry-specific regulatory obstacles, dinosaur technology departments and corporate perceptions of events such as the Ethereum hard forks.

    As I said in a previous post, when overzealous innovation teams are claiming that blockchains can do anything you want them to, including making your morning cup of tea, it’s more important than ever to examine the problem your use case is solving and ask yourself whether it involves trust, consensus, immutability or an intersection of the three. If not, then you probably don’t need blockchain in the mix.

    However, it’s also important to remember that it’s borderline-crazy blue-sky kind of stuff that gets people thinking.

    When people outside the blockchain/ ecosystem start referencing discussions like this on /r/, you know that the possibilities are starting to sink in, even if reality hasn’t quite caught up yet.

    If we revisit this Medium in 2018, many of the 30 examples I’ve given here will be consigned to the dustbin of history. Some of them may already be dead on arrival.

    But the important thing was that someone, somewhere, saw the possibility of transformative power and seized the opportunity to try to make something new work. Seeing the glimmers of a nascent technology evolve is exciting.

    These use cases may not be fully realised towering edifices of technological excellence. But some of them may turn out to be the building blocks of our future world. And when we are plunged down into Gartner’s trough of disillusionment, it’s important to remember that.

    So, if you’ve ever wondered what you can do with a blockchain, here are 30 ideas:

    1. Transfer money
    Bitcoin has been described as “blockchain’s first use case”, and with good reason. For more than 40 years, since David Chaum’s DigiCash, economists have been seeking the holy grail of a digital currency that can eliminate the problem of double-spending and circumvent the issue of needing to trust an unknown third party. When Satoshi’s famous White Paper was published in October 2008, few people realised its impact at the time. Eight years on, the Bitcoin blockchain has still not been hacked — and you really need to try using it for yourself to realise how simple and how amazing the protocol is. The convergence of mobile payments, particularly in the African market, with cryptocurrency, is a niche to watch… companies such as BitPesa are leading the charge here. Read more about using Bitcoin here.

    2. Make micropayments
    Closely related to 1, the ability to use blockchains to transfer minuscule amounts of money is a potential game-changer. Whether you’re talking about in-app payments of a fraction of a cent, microgrid transactions or household appliances moving towards a pay-per-use rather than an ownership model, being able to make tiny payments using cryptocurrency without incurring bank fees that exceed the original payment is a huge opportunity.

    3. Lend people money
    Peer-to-peer lending is one of the fastest-growing areas in personal finance, with users attracted by the opportunity to make a return on their savings in a low-interest environment while enabling other users to borrow at a sensible rate — and all without giving the bank their cut. In contrast to fiat competitors such as Zopa and Funding Circle, BTCJam allows users to do all of the above, but with Bitcoin.

    4. Pay your parking fines
    Last year, New York City councilman Mark Levine suggested that recalcitrant motorists in New York should be able to pay for parking tickets not only with ApplePay, but with Bitcoin.

    No news yet on whether this will actually happen, but in the context of BitLicense, it’s an interesting aside.

    5. Consume content
    The rise and rise of ad-blockers has thrown the traditional business model out of the window. All-or-nothing paywalls have proved successful for a few publishers, but research has shown that users are more prepared to reward content creators if the process is seamless and if they can pay only for what they consume. Startups such as London-based Smoogs, Berlin-based SatoshiPay and Yours provide an easy way for writers, film-makers and other content producers to be paid for what they do. The groundbreaking Brave browser is yet another example.

    6. Charge an electric car
    Small, incremental payments are good for more use cases than just content consumption. Traditional car-charging stations normally require drivers to pay in fixed increments, regardless of how much electricity is consumed by the car’s battery. Additionally, for electric rental fleets, the hire company needs to develop software to track the charge left on the battery, or to do this manually. Imagine a system where every electric vehicle has a chip that allows it to pay directly for exactly the power it consumes, and where all the driver has to do is top up the payment allowance from time to time. German energy giant RWE developed exactly this pilot scheme with Ethereum pioneers slock.it, allowing electric cars to charge while waiting at the traffic lights. Read more about it here.

    7. Certify a supply chain
    Many consumers would prefer to make ethical choices about the products they buy. Recent scandals such as the sale of horse meat as beef in the UK, and revelations about the poor conditions of garment workers in developing countries has pushed this issue into the headlines. However, proving the origin of every component in a product can be impossible, and even if this information is held by a centralised authority, it may not be trustworthy. London startup Provenance offer decentralised supply chain certification. Read the white paper here.

    8. Share electricity with the neighbours
    It should be the easiest thing in the world to do. Take one street that has a sunny side and a shady side. The lucky people on the sunny side of the street have solar panels on their roof. It’s more efficient to use electricity close to where it is generated, so instead of selling the excess power back to the grid (which most networked domestic solar installations do), imagine if the owners of the houses with excess power could sell it on the local market. Unfortunately, this would normally come at a cost, with the homeowners having to agree a price among each other and monitor the amount of electricity being used. The MicroGrid project in New York’s Brooklyn solves this requirement by allowing the households to buy and sell energy via smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. No independent calculation or monitoring required.

    9. Prove your identity
    A reliable digital identity system is the Holy Grail of our connected world. We already live so much of our lives online, but it all comes to a grinding halt as soon as we need to somehow connect our carefully honed digital identity with our presence in the physical world, verified by some kind of government-issued paperwork or proof of existence at a particular address. Meanwhile, as we struggle to maintain our credit records and prove who we are to employers, or car rental companies, private corporations are making money from selling our data: data which belongs to us as individuals, and which we should be able to monetise. Too many organisations to mention are working on digital proof-of-identity schemes, many of them blockchain-based. Deloitte’s Smart Identity System is probably the best known .

    10. Let your household appliances pay for things
    IBM’s ADEPT [Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry] research project was one of the first blockchain/IoT proposals, and certainly the highest-profile of 2015. The idea of a blockchain on which a household appliance is registered at the point of manufacture, and which has some kind of autonomous identity which it can use — for example — to purchase consumables such as washing powder, is a powerful one. As the white paper itself notes, scalability is (and remains) the major barrier: “A blockchain to cater to hundreds of billions of devices needs to be scalable…”

    The SPUR scheme under development by Quantoz is based on these principles.

    11. Prove ownership of an asset
    If someone steals your car in most countries of the world, there’s a reasonable chance it will be traced or recovered. Most governments operate some kind of registration scheme based on licence plate and/or chassis number. But what if your stolen possession is a bike? A jetski? A luxury handbag? A drone? Such high-value portable assets are easy to steal and also to remove from a particular geographic area where they may have been registered. Our startup Mamoru aims to provide a global standard for proof of ownership.

    12. Issue shares
    Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne is a long-time Bitcoin advocate, and the retailer already has its own issuance and trading platform, t0. At Money2020 this week, Overstock announced that stockholders would have the opportunity to subscribe for shares of its Blockchain Series A Preferred, which will trade exclusively on t0.

    “Through this public issuance of blockchain-based securities the history of capital markets is entering a new era, the era of blockchain-based securities,” said Byrne.

    13. Execute an equity swap
    Enterprise blockchain technology firm Axoni recently conducted a test of OTC smart contracts for equity swaps involving institutions such as Barclays, Citi and JP Morgan. “Using a blockchain you have a reliable record of who signed to the transactions and when each action was taken, so what you end up with is this distributed data store with a valid, provably gold version of the trade,” said CEO Greg Schvey

    14. Issue money from a central bank
    The idea of a cashless society is hugely appealing to governments around the world. Not only does it circumvent the need to print notes and mint coins, but it also means an end to the anonymity of cash, and provides a way to track the spending of individuals. Various central banks have flirted with the idea, but the Bank of England has gone as far as endorsing an independent study at University College London which proposed how cryptocurrencies might be issued by such an authority. Read the white paper and read my earlier Medium about why it’s different from Bitcoin.

    15. Smooth the shipping process
    Shipping across national borders generates so much paperwork that it can be measured in whole kg (or pounds, if you prefer imperial). When shipments are delayed, it can cause an impact on the whole supply chain as factories wait for components, and in some cases (for example, perishable goods), it can affect the viability of the whole shipment. Days of time and huge administration costs are tied up in producing bills of lading, so there was plenty of interest when shipping giant Maersk recently announced a blockchain-based bill of lading proof of concept.

    16. Authenticate sneakers
    San Francisco startup Chronicled hit the headlines when they partnered with high-end sneaker manufacturer Mache Customs to produce a range of smart-tag-enabled shoes in honour of Kanye West. Busting the counterfeit trade is one of their stated aims.

    17. Run a decentralised marketplace
    Open Bazaar is widely seen as a successor to Silk Road, but it is far more than that. Silk Road was a website on a server hidden by the Tor network. The FBI was able to track it down, seize the server, and arrest those involved. In contrast, Open Bazaar is a peer-to-peer network like BitTorrent. You can download the software and set up your own storefront. It’s worth mentioning that Open Bazaar does not explicitly endorse selling illegal items. From their FAQ: “Sellers on the OpenBazaar network host their own products and are therefore directly responsible for complying with local laws (and their own conscience) when listing items or services. Users engaged in illicit activity cannot hide behind a third party service.”

    18. Register music copyright
    Channelling income from music to the artist who created it is a huge global challenge. Often, the administrative costs of recovering royalties exceed the amount due. Friction caused by cumbersome payment processes mean that fans who would otherwise be prepared to pay to consume music end up illegally downloading content, just because it’s easier.

    Singer-songwriter Imogen Heap, assisted by various Ethereum people, announced the launch of Mycelia in July to address this problem. Billed as ‘fair trade for the music industry’, it aims to offer extra functionality such as allowing fans to pay for additional content, and targeted pricing, such as allowing charities to use tracks at a lower or zero cost.

    Swedish startup Zeptagram are also operating in this area.

    19. Vote
    The idea that we are still voting with pens and paper in 2016 is an anomaly. But electronic voting — whether at local or national government level, or in the context of corporations — is justifiably regarded with suspicion as the results seem open to manipulation without the relevant oversights. Because of the transparency offered by public blockchains such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, proponents of open government are vocal about the advantages of blockchain-based voting. Nasdaq has already announced plans in Estonia to allow corporate shareholders to vote and various startups are developing e-voting machines for state and national elections that work in a similar way.

    20. Register land rights
    Maintaining a national register of land ownership is an expensive and labour-intensive operation. Additionally, in countries where there is a history of government corruption, they may not always be trustworthy. Factom were widely reported to be working on a solution with Honduras to come up with a proof of concept for a blockchain-based land registry. This proved to be less concrete than originally reported and the project has stalled, but someone, somewhere will implement this one day.

    21. Execute a legal contract
    Code is not yet law! Remember this. But some legal firms are so convinced that one day this will be the case, that they are already making the first moves in this direction. London law firm Selachii have already announcedplans to launch digitised agreements based on blockchain technology.

    22. Run a prediction market
    The decentralised prediction market Augur is a brilliantly simple idea. Their platform allows you to make predictions by trading virtual shares in the outcome of events happening in the real world, such as the upcoming US election. If you buy shares in the correct outcome, you make a profit.

    23. Manage a swarm of robots
    This sounds pretty sci-fi, but is rather more based in fact than the title suggests. Increasing automation means that all kinds of industries, from farming to manufacturing, are now predicted to rely on large numbers of robotic labour. MIT Media Lab affiliate Eduardo Castelló Ferrer explains his rationale in this white paper.

    24. Manage healthcare records
    Think of any sector where there is an overriding need for untamperable data and a clear audit trail, and one of the first to come to mind is healthcare. Various startups are competing in this space, as this Bitcoin Magazine storydescribes, but one of the more interesting is the Factom/HealthNautica partnership in which they “are looking to secure medical records and audit trails. This is done by encrypting the data onto the Bitcoin blockchain with a timestamp to verify its accuracy. The records can’t be changed and, because it is hashed to the blockchain, it can’t be accessed without permission. HealthNautica hopes to improve efficiency of claims processing and certainty that the records have not been changed.”

    25. Certify students
    In a world with a mobile labour force, verifying academic qualifications (which are often needed for work visas) can be a slow and painful process. Vietnamese architect applying for a job in France? Russian developer seeking work in Germany? When universities have to be contacted individually and employer references verified over the phone or email, these processes consume time and money. Imagine a world where your certifications were written into a secure global data structure where they could not be deleted or altered. MIT wrote an interesting post about their certification architecture. Similarly, London’s B9Lab certify successful graduates of their excellent blockchain developer course with an entry into the Ethereum blockchain.

    26. Trade cryptocurrencies
    Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency! Hundreds of other cryptocurrency blockchains exist, although the majority of these are either defunct or carry virtually worthless tokens. A host of exchanges, some more reputable than others, have sprung up to cater for those which are worth trading: Bittrex, C-Cex and Poloniex are some of the popular options. Check out CoinmarketCap for an exhaustive list. And of course, I can’t resist mentioning my own altcoin portfolio tracker, CountMyCrypto. Since my friend Bruce and I launched it nearly three years ago, we’ve seen countless coins and exchanges spring up and die, and enough drama to put a soap opera to shame.

    27. Rent a car
    The car rental process is often more cumbersome than it needs to be, with insurance documents and identities that need to be verified, and vehicle mileages and damage reports that are still manually verified in many cases. This is how DocuSign described their smart contracts trial for car rental, in conjunction with Visa’s innovation team.

    28. Verify your work history
    Closely aligned with student certifications on the blockchain, the idea of a careers networking API based on a blockchain is one that’s been around for a while. At Mamoru, we’ve been working on this, since we won a BlockchainX grant from Wanxiang Blockchain Lab earlier this year.

    29. Get compensation for flight delays
    When the Ethereum DevCon2 conference happened in Shanghai earlier this month, attendees who flew to China from all over the world were notified of an interesting opportunity before the event. The Flight Delay dapp trialled a new proof of concept that allowed travellers to share the risk in the event of flight delays. Stephan Karpischek wrote a good post about the results of the experiment.

    30. Buy beer
    OK, so this is really a subset of use case 1, but you can’t be in Berlin and not mention Room 77. It’s a piece of cryptocurrency history, as the first bricks-and-mortar establishment anywhere in the world to accept Bitcoin. And, of course, it’s also a favourite haunt of Mamoru and all the other awesome Bitcoin and blockchain startups based in Germany’s capital city.


     
  • user 10:06 pm on November 4, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , origin, technology   

    A brief history of cryptocurrencies… 

    the inevitability of crypto economy?

    Once every few generations, we get to witness a milestone in human progress, a phenomenon or an icon so rare and inspiring that it defies extrapolation of the law of averages, and all known expectations of what is extra ordinary. At inflection points such as those, humanity makes progress by leaps and bounds. Standards are re-set. Recall the invention / discovery of electricity, spacecraft, electro magnetism, antibiotics, Einstein, the smart phone, Usian Bolt, Nicola Tesla.. they inspire awe, stretch our boundaries, expand the human experience, and alter the way we live – forever!

    Our generation has been extremely privileged to witness more than a few such rare occurrences. Internet, Smart Phone and now . It’s as if we have achieved more technological progress in the past few decades than we have in the past several centuries. Not to belittle the foundations our forefathers and the great adventurers built and have bequeathed to us, but it is natural with any tipping point where progress accelerates manifold after gathering critical mass.

    While we have significantly leveraged the internet and miniature computing, past the hype and mass adoption, we are still at the cusp of a revolution with respect to cryptocurrencies, so my piece today will focus on what awaits us in !

    (If you are short of patience, skip and head straight to Blockchain India Summit 6 Dec 2016 in New Delhi and hear directly from Vitalik Buterin, Founder of ethereum)

    Ladies and Gentlemen

    I am going to spill some secrets tonite, and betray the parable of swiss secrecy, as one does on a high.

    I am high on Switzerland!

    You are probably tempted to think of some revelations of the personal kind, but the swiss mastery of money and time – “philarguria“, and “chronometry“/chronology“/”horology” the two biggest obsessions of mankind – that the Swiss have made industries of – is as fascinating. Not to mention the draw of great intellects and relativity theorists like Einstein and now the modern day cryptographers, to Switzerland. I have always held that pristine beauty and tranquility are conducive to attaining superior realms of thought and thereby pinnacles of creativity.

    Which explains the lure of Himalayas for many a world changing icon like Steve Jobs, though I couldn’t tell if Satoshi was as inspired by Switzerland as Vitalik. Anyway, if I were not Indian I would make it my home. Why, I have spent my most inspired moments here. Like when I was Vitalik’s age, I had taken my first ever international flight on Swissair to Zurich, and had been awe-struck by the experience seeing the gigantic imposing wooden doors of UBS for the first time. Years later I had returned to do my first ever investment banking deal – Hirslanden – for UBS. Years later I am about to do my first ever crypto stuff in Zurich again. So Switzerland is associated with deeply profound experiences, some romantic.

    I am going to argue in this piece for the inevitability of cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are to modern economics as the theory of relativity is to physics.

    Let us first visit the basics of money:

    What is Money?

    A form of promise – a promise to buy something of value

    A substitute for direct barter – instead of exchanging my sheep for your wheat bushels, I give you money

    A trust in a central party (like a Central Bank) that the currency note you carry will be worth some real value

    A form of exchange – you give me your services or time and I pay you money

    A factor in wealth creation, like labour – capital earns interest or can create wealth for its owner – capitalist economics

    Money as an investment / appreciating asset (like art or Gold)

    Let us for the time being ignore other philosophical definitions such as

    Money as freedom to pursue life’s lofty goals

    Money as a presumed substitute for immortality (a delusion of the rich that the more money they have the safer they will be)

    Money has been serving its various functions well since the babylonian times, and yet has evolved with each successive generation. In earlier centuries, for example, artists would create art for their masters in return for their patronage and being taken care of, and not money. But slowly, transactions have come to be more short termish than a kingly patronage and have had to rely on money for settling the exchange of value. So the modern day Emir of Dubai or Oman would give his humble vassals wads of cash or write a cheque instead of promising his life long patronage.

    The origin of cryptocurrencies

    The concept of crypto money took life in 1997, when Nick Szabo invented hashcash. If anyone knows who Nick Szabo is, I am very keen to meet, if only to ascertain if he is Satoshi, and if he ever sent me a few emails. I discarded the possibility out of fear of being proved gullible by a fake Satoshi, and never took up my email “Satoshi” on the offer! As a solace, the rest of the world also knows Satoshi only by email! 😛

    was the first real form of crypto money as opposed to digital cash – for example Paypal. Ofcourse Facebook money, QQ coins, and coins in virtual games all made their remarkable debuts but these fancy coins were seen mostly as a means for the wealthy (chinese?) to splurge on the ridiculous and the inconsequential, besides robot cafes offering forbidden pleasures, you know what I mean. None of the currencies went so far as to be treated a substitute for real money. Facebook even applied for a banking license in Ireland wanting to capitalise on FB messenger being a platform for peer-to-peer cross-border payments (these constitute a significant chunk of global remittances market of US1 trillion a day as per BIS).

    Bitcoin was the first money to solve the problem of trust in a trustless environment – The Byzantine Generals Problem – How can parties transact and establish trust, in face of non-verifiability and when all parties cannot be trusted. As all masterpieces go, Satoshi had combined together several disparate concepts in creating bitcoin. Obviously he had to have deep mastery of all subjects to come up with this invention, which has been fascinating technocrats as well as the cult of wall street.

    Bitcoin has been a preferred mode of investment for some people, from every strata, including some retirees who chose to put their entire nest egg in bitcoin. One of the early bitcoin believers had told his friend – you will either lose all of it, or make a fortune like 1000X. Invest as much as you can stomach the loss! Interestingly, Satoshi himself had never spent a single bitcoin he had mined, as was discovered by an Eastern European developer who was tasked and paid to research this. And Satoshi had amassed bitcoin equivalent to millions of dollars as he had to keep the mining operation going singlehandedly, early on. Infact there were only two miners at the beginning for the better part of the first year, and the early months had just been Satoshi’s server. That he didn’t invent bitcoin for his own benefit speaks of his selfless movie in giving the world his open source gift. For anyone familiar with the mystical, this is self-evident – nature only bestows special gifts and privileges on people who would pass on their gift for the maximum benefit.

    As it turns out, Bitcoin is also a form of protection against inflation for hyper inflationary countries, like any appreciating asset. One of the early bit coiners (Wences Casares, Founder of Xapo and Board member of Paypal) as a young boy would run into an Argentinian store with his family, grabbing all they could for the money his mom had just received in salary, so that they could maximise the value of goods purchased – in the face of hyperinflation. There was no concept of saving for tomorrow, because a few minutes later, the same notes would buy significantly less food as store keepers went around the aisles all the time rewriting price tags. Real story!

    As a tribute to the genius of Satoshi, here is my attempt to decrypt his magic recipe of bitcoin.

    Bitcoin is a cult!

    Decentralisation – Satoshi’s first ingredient:

    Satoshi essentially solved the problem of centralisation. A handful of people in the world got to decide how much money would be in circulation at any point (monetary policy), how much would its relative value be vis-a-vis other currencies, are people spending too much or too little and how to mend that (fiscal policy), how much would be the time value of money (interest rate), and what do people have to give up by way of data and privacy (endless KYC and identity verifications and intrusion into private affairs) in order to spend their money (yes you read it right – I didn’t say what people have to give up in order to earn money, but to spend money!)

    If people could determine with zero error if money had indeed changed hands between parties and by how much, through alone, without having to trust each other or any third party like a central record keeper, it frees people from the tyranny of watchful big brothers. And if I may add, greedy, power-hungry, self-aggrandising actors (if not dictators) on rotation – in the form of elected governments. Oligopolies who want to make money off your money spending transactions. With bitcoin, people can choose how and when they spend without a concern for informing anyone else about it – which many would agree “informing” amounts to slavery or extortion or restriction of liberty or all of the above.

    The magic is that Satoshi achieves decentralisation through a mere technology protocol. A protocol that combines cryptography, mathematical functions, the economics of incentives in markets and game theory. There may have been bugs in code, as Satoshi himself encouraged other developers to fix and even go so far as to take ownership of the protocol but the code is essentially robust, and bitcoin code today contains supposedly only 15% of Satoshi’s original code.

    Now experts are anticipating “segwit activation” on bitcoin code to happen in 2016, which will enable “Lightning Network” to speed up transactions on the original bitcoin – whose 10 min Block interval had been a bottleneck for many, especially financial institutions. The earlier drawbacks of bitcoin – such as slow Block Verification – had been leveraged well by some firms such as Bitfury with their Lightning protocol and side chains. Bitcoin Blockchain is by far the most robust Blockchain, having been tested, bug-exposed, and reengineered by fervent believers espousing the cause of decentralisation. Bitcoin is no longer a currency or a technology, it is a cult! With Lightning embedded on top, the current Bitcoin Blockchain will give a tough fight to many fledgling and newer well-funded blockchains. Afterall, Cult figures are difficult to dethrone, no matter how nimble and powerful the imitators. Satoshi Nakamoto is a cult, and so is bitcoin!

    I am not speaking yet about the blockchain or its benefits of faster, cheaper, frictionless transactions upending intermediaries in every industry, and am restricting my arguments only to bitcoin so far. See more bitcoin drama here. Read my piece on blockchain herehttps://www.linkedin.com/pulse/besotted-blockchain-arifa-khan and the sequel here

    Cryptography – Satoshi’s second ingredient:

    Cryptography and trap-door functions involving prime numbers and factoring, were applied to device public and private keys – a combination of which would enable you to unlock a bitcoin but make it impossible for you to reverse engineer a private key from a public key – thereby ensuring safety and irreversibility of a bitcoin transaction.

    Game Theory – Satoshi’s third ingredient:

    Since the mining operation is computational and energy intensive, what if some miner or a mining group amassed enough power to subvert the process to his benefit – aka the 51% hash attacks? Satoshi figured that for a serious miner playing for long term stakes, it is important that bitcoin’s value is sustained through confidence of the market and players. Any attempt by a player to abuse the process will result in bitcoin losing value, which would not benefit the rogue miners in long run. Ofcourse many hackers got away with blackmail ransoms from founders like Stephanie Kent who were blindsided by attacks on their chains. But those outcomes for hackers were not the Game theory Maxima, and the Nash equilibrium of bitcoin in long term does point to a sustainable bitcoin economy and thereby, an appreciating bitcoin – as has been proven by bitcoin price charts.

    Macroeconomics – Satoshi’s fourth ingredient:

    Satoshi foresaw that for the hashing to go on indefinitely, miners had to be incentivised by rewards (bitcoin) for carrying out the computational processing. He also took into account demand-supply dynamics of hashing power, and accommodated in his code self-adjusting difficulty level of computations required for arriving at the winning hash so as to keep the time interval between blocks a constant ~ 10 minutes. As he had anticipated, the early community actively engaged in upgrading the code, discovering and fixing bugs as it was open source – bootstrap nodes were introduced as an example to defend against DDOS attacks, and rogue miners hijacking the wrong fork of the blockchain.

    Smart Contracts as a way of Record-Keeping— Satoshi’s futuristic fifth ingredient:

    Satoshi had apparently studied money so thoroughly that he wanted to accord bitcoin the features of money as a tool for record keeping too, besides as a token of value or means of transfer. In Babylonian times, contracts were recorded on clay tablets as to how much one owed the other and when.

    (Image of ‘A tablet from the Babylonian times’ – Prof Willi Brammertz Author of Unified Financial Analysis explaining Financial Contracts to me)

    The complex hieroglyphics are thought to be the first form of record-keeping or accounting. To store 1MB of data in Babyloninan times would have taken a warehouse of several football fields and to transfer this data would perhaps take a ship physically ferrying these clay tablets across distances. The contracts were just a record, and depended on the good nature of the contractual parties or the fearsomeness of a central authority for execution. Satoshi now conceptualised a foundation for contract which depended on neither the goodwill or generosity of the counter party nor the authority of an intermediary to execute. The contract, with its collateral of cryptomoney in escrow, would irreversibly tilt the outflow of the underlying asset from one party to another, based on the outcome of a pre-determined function. Prof Willi demonstrated to me that all financial contracts currently in existence in the world can be explained by just some 30 patterns – so very amenable to Smart Contracts.

    He visualised that this protocol would enable self-executing financial contracts to be embedded in code, and thereby obviate many other forms of centralisation such as the legal profession, notaries, securities exchanges etc. However, he was content to leave bitcoin code simplistic, in order to achieve more code robustness – to withstand any malafide attacks and bugs.

    Disclaimer: I haven’t read Satoshi’s original paper. If I do, I hope to be able to decipher unspoken magic beyond Smart Contracts. If I go recluse, it would be because Satoshi will have sworn me to secrecy. 🙂

    The history of Cryptocurrencies

    Bitcoin is the world’s favourite , as a wide variety of players around the world have embraced it as an investment vehicle. It competes with real investments like real estate, gold, precious metals, art, jewelry, fiat currencies.

    Hundreds of Remittance startups around the world have bitcoin rails supporting their FX remittance operations (buying and selling in the background which creates demand supply for bitcoin). 1000s of merchants in Africa and countries with hyper inflation or unstable currencies prefer to accept bitcoin over fiat.

    Nearly 600 cryptocurrencies have been issued so far, since Satoshi gifted us the ‘bitcoin’ in 2009, and are now again back in the limelight. Zooko & Co have just launched Zcash (@zcashco) – a variation of bitcoin with absolute anonymity (no pseudonymity). The bitcoin price currently at $710 as of 30 Oct 2016 (having appreciated wildly in the past week with the hype around launch of new crypto “Zcash”) is expected to touch $1000 in 2017. Bitcoin has ridden the crests of human imagination at a scale never before witnessed, as one of the most fascinating man-made phenomenon of 21st Century. Bitcoin has survived drama of Shakespearean proportions. One investor who had put all his retirement savings in bitcoin early had lost it in one swoop when MtGox went belly up in 2014, losing a collective $400 million of its investors wallets in compromised security.

    ZCash or ZEC works on a similar algorithm to bitcoin with the same 21 million ZECs to be issued during the lifetime etc, but 10% of which would be set aside and issued to stakeholders like founders, investors etc. Bitcoin was not entirely anonymous as its early adopters thought, as was proven by the anti-climax of Silk Road. Nor was ethereum’s DAO safer than a dozen put together, as a hacker proved – resulting in the hard fork that split ether into ETH and ETC.

    Many companies use cryptography in varying context. blockchain.info wallet only holds crypto files to encrypt and decrypt private keys and does not really hold the bitcoins in the wallet, thereby eluding regulation and also the licenses required for holding e-money. Nicolas Cary, CEO, is an oft quoted figure in bitcoin annals, a bundle of energy, and is a pleasure to listen to.

    Now Zcash would be entirely anonymous. Enough to justify its futures trading price at 1.5BTC, when it hadn’t even begun trading? When it was launched, one report pegs the traded coin value at USD7000 , an eye-popping number given the highest bitcoin ever reached was ~ USD1000.

    Cryptocurrencies – an inevitability of Modern Economics

    You can now spend your crypto with absolutely no traceability. This would give the transaction finality of cash. You spend it and forget it – the original raison d’être of money. No need to maintain bills, accounting, or record the spend on a clunky blockchain. Take privacy back from the Governments, the Amazons, the Paypals, the Visas, Facebooks, Squares and Banks who horde all this data about your faintest digital trails and your minutest personal proclivities. Interesting anyone? You bet! It finally dawned on me why all the rich guys insist on spending only in cash everywhere. I am talking of respectable and responsible PE investors & the Valley kings, not just the flamboyant types.

    Behold another variation at the opposite extreme of Zcash! A new coin wants to be the cryptocurrency with zero anonymity. You can always associate this coin with its owner’s identity. This is a play to serve the excessively cautious regulators and Central Bankers who would be loathe to give up on their KYCs and citizen accountability, much like Accenture wants to serve the Bank market who would love to get on a Blockchain lest they get taken over by Silicon Valley, but would be loathe to give up their control of data, and keep it mutable.

    Then there are the architects of circular economies like the Solar coin, Diamond coin, Gold coin. Many firms are offering tokens/ coins at their ICOs such as Decent, Apptrade (Initial Coin Offerings are equivalents of IPOs in Crypto but no investment bank determines the subscription price). Apptrade is a stock market exchange for new DApps.

    As eventful as my research goes, I met someone claiming to be the patent holder being infringed upon by – hold your breath – Apple, Samsung, and now Ethereum.. and he needed me as saviour to restore his rightful intellectual property and the billions (in dollars) to follow. Anyway, I happened to be in a conversation trois – at a swiss bar between the geek and Andreas Antonopoulos on patents & decentralisation. (I checked with another friend for a word for conversation between three – just so I wouldn’t accidentally mention the wrong menage and he goes “if you are part of the conversation, then its called “a monologue with two listeners“! hmm.. With friends like that, do I need detractors?) I caught Andreas, the author of “Internet of Money”, in a lighter moment in an impromptu conversation informelle and asked him why he thinks cryptocurrencies are inevitable. I quote him verbatim –

    "The architecture of centralisation is antithetical to the principles and interest of society. Patents and any intellectual property is passe and will be outdone by open source as it is more conducive to innovation, and will garner more support as it is philanthropic. All my life, I have been against patents. This century is about decentralisation. So cryptocurrencies are here to stay!" Andreas Antonopoulos 
    

    Why will Crypto Currencies succeed?

    • We are tired of paying fees, and customers will revolt when faced with superior customer friendly options
    • We are tired of being surveillanced, and we will fiercely guard our privacy and interest when faced with more secure options
    • Why do we have to supply onerous information when we decide to send or spend our own money? We tend to adopt the easier and more discreet options.

    In a face-off between Wences Casares and Bill Gates, Wences had managed to convince an initially skeptical Gates that bitcoin was the tool for getting a bang out of his buck spent uplifting poor nations, and putting power back in the hands of the impoverished and unbanked. Bill Gates bought into that pitch. Alas, Wences just told me he can’t make it on 6 Dec to India – a favourite of every philanthropist trying to make a dent in the universe! Soon Wences!

    Switzerland and its historic relationship with money (not a tryst)

    Then there is the history of Switzerland as a storehouse of money. Even during the world wars, the wealthy chose Swiss underground caverns for preserving their wealth, as Switzerland has forever been a neutral peace-loving country more focused on being the world capital for banking, engineering precision, ultra luxury craft, hospitality, private schools and sanatoriums. Famous for its secrecy laws, the Swiss rarely concede to authorities as formidable as even the FBI. In keeping the tradition, The SBB (my favourite Swiss Bahn Railway) will be opening up its 1000 ticket kiosks as bitcoin ATMs on 11 Nov 2016.

    Recognising Switzerland’s potential to emerge as the hub of crypto economy, Blockchain Storm hosted a roundtable discussion in Geneva on 30 Sep 2016 with authorities on distributed ledger technology such as Brian Behlendorf of Hyperledger, Bruce Pon of Bigchain, Eddy Travia of Coinsilium etc, which I moderated. We all agreed on the merits and the inevitability of crypto economy and that we now needed to work on interoperable systems and standards. So we will be gathering again in 2017.

    Switzerland could emerge as a cauldron of unimagined combination of industries and academia – asset management, banking, crypto economy, precision engineering, luxury goods.

    Many firms have made their home in crypto valley, Zug – perhaps for proximity to ethereum. Sample a bitcoin investment bank – “bitcoinsuisse”. If you wonder what CEO Niklas Nikolajsen looks like in real life, he had all the panache of a real investment banker spreading his fiat notes including a collectors’ item – A 100 SFR from centuries ago – on the table of a bar. How is that for a conversation starter? I remembered being in Copenhagen years ago on a deal, when my investment banking colleague Diamandakis had just given me a wad of cash and asked me to play at the Casino. I remember winning big at the tables that night, and feeling like Bond girl! And of course enjoying the high of a banker! We bankers are hopeless Adrenalin chasers! Years later, he was still surviving the credit crunch as a lone Director who held forth at Credit Suisse, long after many of his peers had ‘left’. Says something about human nature and the importance of making people happy as a secret of success in banking and elsewhere!

    "Future of cryptocurrencies is bright. It's what we have been waiting for. The cheaper, faster, better system always wins. First came the internet which liberated data. Now comes Blockhain which will liberate value." - Niklas Nikolajsen, CEO bitcoinsuisse as told to Miss Khan
    

    Caution : He could do this in Switzerland (display all forms of money old, new and crypto at a bar), but don’t try it elsewhere 😛

    Now there are dozens of companies leveraging the swiss reputation as trust- keepers and managers of money. So much so that whenever a famous world leader dies or takes seriously ill, legends abound of their nearest kith and kith reaching first for their personal effects supposedly storing the password to their swiss account, before they consider anything else. So the Swiss had outdone Satoshi in private keys long before cryptocurrencies would become a global fashion? And they had combined it with their other passion for fine luxury crafted jewellery? Luxury Jewellery – a perfect draw for women, in turn a perfect draw for… Any Crypto Lord listening? 😛

    Woman is the Oasis of Life!

    Consider this tagline – Cryptocash – for cold bitcoin storage in swiss mountains. (I’d head there in a jiffy!)

    The rise of Cryptarchs

    Want to mint your own Cryptocurrency?

    There are some things that cannot be cryptoed, but for everything else there is Batman. (Thank you MasterCard – your only legacy in a few years may be your clever advertising)

    Input Output (IOHK) is a firm specialising in cryptocurrencies, ICOs and circular economies, the stuff where minting your own crypto is still a legitimate way to create wealth, and also to make yourself famous – while the fable of crypto is still an intriguing mystery. If you have an idea for another wildly successful crypto – consult with Batman in the guise of Charles Hoskinson, a fine mathematician, a person exuding eloquence on esoteric subjects, and great authority on all things crypto. We are pleased to be hosting him at our Blockchain Storm – Cryptocurrencies & Modern Economics – 20 January 2017 in collaboration with Swiss Finance Institute at University of Zurich.

    All systems have been created by people no better and smarter than ourselves. We don’t have to accept them as fait accompli! –Charles Hoskinson

    Charles, you can thank me later. But, where’s my crypto? 😛

    IC3 – Initiative for Cryptocurrencies & Contracts

    Lending cryptos their respectability is IC3 – an academic consortia led by Cornell University – which I was very privileged to receive an invite to join! Well, hobnobbing with academia has it’s benefits! Which brings me to our partnership with Swiss Finance Institute at University of Zurich, the university which employed Einstein as a Physics Professor in 1909. We are pleased to be hosting a “Cryptocurrencies & Modern Economics – Blockchain Storm Switzerland” event at Uni of Zurich on 20 Jan to bring together banks, academia and crypto economy stakeholders to take the debate to the next level. I chose Zurich, the world capital & Mecca of Banking as the destination for its concentration of intellect as well as assets under management, and for crypto valley – home of many game changers in open source protocols. Zurich is now interestingly the confluence of old money and new bleeding edge inventors. Be there at University of Zurich to herald 2017, the year that cryptocurrencies emerged as mainstream.

    The legend of Vitalik Buterin

    I am also playing hostess to India’s first ever Blockchain Summit http://europeindiaconclave.com, with the rare privilege of presenting Vitalik Buterin to India, alongside many distributed ledger technology firms from co-founders of Ethereum. India is eager to make the best of blockchain and welcomes Vitalik (read more about Vitalik in my Daily Pioneer article here). Zero Field Labs will be the bridge between Indian firms and Distributed Ledger Technology expertise in the west, and will also set up an Academic Excellence Centre on Blockchain in partnership with Indian Institute of Technology, my alma mater. We will also announce Blockchain Council India to work with the rule-makers on policy issues. I hope to have the regulator on stage for views on just what will be allowed and encouraged in India – given bitcoin is borderless and , by its very design, resists patrolling by powers-that-be.

    I might consider giving a keynote on “India’s Climb to becoming an Economic Super-Power – What would I do as a Macro Economist”. I would be happy to host Senior Ministers at such a gathering, and hope the importance is not lost on rule-makers in the protocol maze.

    Bitcoin is a mystery that never ends, wrapped in sequinned layers, beguiling a whole generation of crypto suitors.

    The coming generations will remember the legend of Satoshi Nakamoto as a man who singlehandedly reduced a whole planet of rule makers to bedazzled spectators watching a real sci-fi thriller, with their hands tied. And being an object of Satoshi’s attentions (if not the object), however questionable the claim, gives me bragging rights 😛

    You see, I have a rival in bitcoin!

    About the Author

    Miss Khan, the author, dedicated a significant chapter of her life, as investment banker executing Leveraged Buy-outs for Private Equity firms, at two bastions of swiss banking – UBS and Credit Suisse, after obtaining a MBA in Finance at Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania. Miss Khan is an avid blockchain researcher and speaker at various international forums such as Payments International. She advises Govt. of India on international financing. She has now identified her favourite destination Switzerland – as also a hub for people that will go down as legendary historic figures in the evolution of money – cryptocurrencies.

    She lives in London. She paints for recharging, and photographs Switzerland. Meet her in New Delhi 6 Dec 2016 at http://europeindiaconclave.com with Vitalik , and in Zurich 20 Jan 2017 http://blockchainstormzurich.eventbrite.com with Charles Hoskinson. Follow her @misskhan

    True to the spirit of sublimely Swiss, this piece was created on panoramic trains, charming rides on country roads, tete-a-tetes at chocolate places, tram rides to a quaint strasse where Einstein once lived, all soaking in excessive beauty of Switzerland. She marks this para as being penned on a very refreshing ride from Zurich to Luzerne which had turned rather chilly by nightfall on return.

    Season’s Greetings

    Happy Diwali

    Miss Khan is CEO of Zero Field Labs, a crypto economy play.

     
  • user 3:35 am on November 3, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , technology   

    F10 Selects 10 Fintech Startups For The -Swiss Accelerator Program 

    F10F10, the Incubator and , is delighted to announce that out of the 167 Startup companies that applied to F10’s Prototype to Product (P2) 10 have been chosen to join.

    The P2 Program allows teams with a thrilling prototype to participate in the product development program where they produce a minimal viable product and subsequently incorporate their startup. These 10 startups will now become part of F10’s roster and will be accompanied and supported in their endeavor to bring their ideas to the market.

    Earlier this month, F10 announced to the world that the FinTech Incubator and Accelerator had reorganized itself in the form of an association with the aim of bringing innovation to the finance and insurance sectors of Switzerland and Europe.

    The F10 association includes the well-known members Julius Bär, Switzerland’s leading private banking group, and PwC Switzerland; who together with SIX form the foundation upon which the Fintech Incubator and Accelerator is built.

    Twice a year, F10 offers a six-month “Prototype to Product (P2)” program which assists yearly up to 20 selected, promising teams/startups to transition their prototype into a sellable product. The teams gain access to the working space at F10 in Zurich. Coaches from the F10 team, as well as external mentors, will be allocated to each team to support them and ensure that they achieve their milestones. The first batch begins in November 2016 and ends in April 2017.

    Throughout the six-month period, the teams will attend lessons and workshops grouped into five units: Vision, Team & Strategy; Business, Product & ; Marketing & Sales; Legal & Regulations and Demo Day & Graduation. Coaches and mentors will be present to ensure that the teams are on the right track.

    The program can be partially completed online/off-site with only certain dates requiring actual on-site presence. F10 will cover travel expenses with a 15’000 CHF reimbursement for each team upon achieving their determined milestones.

    By the end of the program, teams/startups will have gained in-depth experience of all aspects of the financial industry and top level contact to big financial players, they will have access to the F10 association members’ global network of and benefit from SIX services, regulators, angel investors and venture capitalists. Participation is free and F10 does not take equity in the Startups.

    The 10 Startups that have been chosen to participate in the next P2 Program are:

    air.lifeAir
    A P2P ecosystem which is completely decentralized by eliminating centralized servers to insure that no one cloud computing company has access to the users’ data and information.

     

     

    APIAXAPIAX
    Generating better access to compliance regulations by providing easily integrated public programming interfaces (APIs) that facilitate access to always up-to-date and verified compliance rules.

     

     

    bizgeesBiz Gees
    Technology customised for philanthropic P2P lending with a focus on micro loans for micro businesses in refugee camps.

     

     

     

    Enterprise BotEnterprise Bot
    Focussing on an automated customer support system for banks that is able to understand and act upon customer queries and is easily integrated into existing infrastructure.

     

     

    FuturaeFuturae
    Creating fast, simple and hands-off two-factor user authentication for online applications that require additional security by pairing mobile devices with computers in the vicinity of each other.

     

     

    LendityLendity
    Providing investors with a streamlined system to access tailored loans from multiple P2P loan platforms around the world.

     

     

     

    SONECTSONECT
    Creating virtual ATMs where users can withdraw cash from any shop that joins the program at over 50% cheaper than the current ATM withdrawal costs.

     

     

     

    TraderionTraderion
    Profiling and training of trading professionals using gamified simulators and machine-learning algorithms.

     

     

     

    VesgooVesgoo
    Designers of the ThematicCloud, a platform which will facilitate thematic investment processes by combining technology and research to produce customizable and sustainable thematic investment vehicles.

     

     

    WealthInitiativeWealthInitiative
    Creating a platform to allow wealth management institutions to recognize and exploit synergies amongst their clients, and in a further step amongst their peers.

     

     

     

    This article first appeared on F10

    The post F10 Selects 10 Fintech Startups For The -Swiss Accelerator Program appeared first on Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – FintechNewsCH.

    Fintech Schweiz Digital Finance News – FintechNewsCH

     
  • user 11:37 pm on November 1, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , jenkins, technology, transforming   

    Why I want to transform banking 

    aaeaaqaaaaaaaaiwaaaajgm1zmixztljltiwzmmtngqxmi05yjk5ltu1ntgxoddhnjljng

    I’ve long believed that can leverage technological innovation to offer customers much better, faster and cost-efficient services. Today, after much planning, I’m excited to announce that I’m launching a financial business that will aim to build that better world – 10x Future Technologies.

    After many years as a senior bank executive, this might seem like a surprising move. But every day I see the signs of the huge changes that have taken place since I first started out in banking 30 years ago. Back then, I couldn’t have imagined that today’s financial services would give us contactless payments, or let us pay bills on an app, for example.

    Yet despite making life far easier for customers, most of these innovations have not been truly disruptive because they have not much affected the hierarchy of the banking world itself. Customers still use the same banks they have for many years – it’s just that now we can view our account balance on our mobiles, make payments online and use cards abroad.

    There’s still so much more that must be done to ensure that new technologies deliver the best impact possible on the customer experience.

    Have you ever received an official bank letter about a financial matter you settled years ago, or been told incorrectly that details on your account are wrong? That’s because the pillars that underpin the existing banking infrastructure are often dated, overlapping and inefficient, and core banking IT systems are sometimes so cumbersome that it’s difficult to get them to talk to one another.

    Even if you have a mortgage and a current account with the same bank, for example, the systems that underpin those two services might not effectively communicate with each other. They reduce potential returns for investors, slow down the customer experience and encourage the complicated banking products that make it virtually impossible for customers to compare providers and get the best deal.

    I’m convinced that 10x Future Technologies can offer the solution. We’ll provide the technology to enable banks to unify those systems into a centralised interface, creating much better customer service in the process. Our technology will help banks offer more personalised credit cards, loans and accounts, among other products. It’ll also allow them to crack the information hidden in the personal data they hold about their customers, which means they could anticipate when a small business owner might need a more flexible line of credit, or offer personalised mortgages that allow you to overpay to reduce your debt, or skip a payment when you need extra cash at Christmas.

    We’ve already assembled a team of top talent working in financial technology, and are in advanced talks with a number of potential major clients. But we’re rapidly expanding and are on the lookout for more exceptional individuals to get involved. Head to the 10x website to find out more.

    the customer experience

    I’ve always been excited about the ways new technologies can change our lives. Look at how cloud-based online storage has made working on collaborative projects significantly easier, or how smartphone maps mean you can now find the nearest ATM or supermarket at the touch of a button.

    Yet it’s fair to say that this kind of data innovation has not been fully implemented in banking – and it if were to be, it could transform the customer experience. That’s why introducing new technologies has been a significant part of my career in finance. When I was CEO of , I made it the first bank to issue all cards with contactless technology, focused on the bank’s digital and app offering and launched the peer-to-peer money transfer platform Pingit, which uses an open data architecture.

    These kinds of changes aren’t just good in themselves. I see the current climate as providing three broad challenges to banks for which technology is a potential solution:

    • New companies are providing banks with greater competition. Market entrants such as online brokerages are capitalising on their sophisticated technologies to offer better prices and more efficient services than the banks can give in specific business areas. Customers now have many more options. But a leaner, digital infrastructure would allow banks to offer an improved service in the face of this competition.
    • Economic conditions are affecting banks’ bottom lines. Persistently low interest rates mean they are making less money on loans and investments. With new capital controls forcing banks to move away from riskier activities, it’s clear that they need to move away from the aggressive practices that characterised the pre-2008 period. But by unifying their often incompatible legacy systems into a modern, digital infrastructure, banks will be able to cut their costs while providing a significantly improved service.
    • New regulatory changes could expose banks to areas of competition where their businesses had previously been insulated. A recent Competition and Markets Authority report, for example, asked them to develop a single, cross-bank interface to make it easier for customers to shop around and for competitors to overcome current barriers to entry. 10x’s technology could contribute to the creation of that interface, allowing banks to satisfy new regulatory requirements without losing a competitive advantage.

    Banks need the better technology customers deserve – and it starts from the bottom.

    Those banks that take decisive action in the face of this situation will be the winners. 10x Future Technologies will offer them the means to do this.

    I’m convinced that financial services and other businesses need to return to a position where they play a critical role in enabling social and economic progress, with a clear focus on long-term sustainability rather than short-term gain. As an independent company with inherent neutrality in the market, 10x will help this process by providing the services to help companies consider the long-term impact of their actions, build a sustainable business and do right by their customers.

    As new technologies proliferate, boosted by the 10x platform, we’ll see a great deal of innovation in financial services, reinventing the way we all use and move our money. Overhauling the banks’ infrastructure would have no small impact on how we manage our finances, so we’re determined to make sure that the result works for everyone. Our long-term goal is to truly democratise banking: to deliver the ten times better service that banks need and that customers and society deserve. We at 10x Future Technologies believe that technology can create the transparency, lower costs, fairness and competition that mean everyone wins.


    [linkedinbadge URL=”https://www.linkedin.com/in/antony--642953105″ connections=”off” mode=”icon” liname=”Antony Jenkins”] is Executive Chairman at 10x Banking

     
  • user 7:37 pm on November 1, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Open Innovation, technology   

    Open Innovation, hyperledger & blockchain 

    aaeaaqaaaaaaaaeiaaaajgu0ogmxnjmwlwiwzmutngnlys05njqzltblmtdjodhlyta0ng

    In this blog post, I will outline these three terms and explain the amazing transformational opportunity that arises from their coalescence.


     is a term originally coined by Dr Henry Chesbrough in the early 2000’s best summarised by Figure 1 below.

    Figure 1 – Open Innovation

    Open Innovation gives organisations the ability to create value by combining their ideas and innovation with those from their business network members.


    To understand , it’s useful to step back to realize that Business – and Governments – never operate in isolation. They are participants in a business network. Ownership of assets pass across the network in return for payments, governed by contracts. Network participants currently keep their own ledger – recording all assets they own and updated on when asset ownership changes. Whilst well tried & tested, this process is very inefficient, often piling cost on cost.

    Figure 2 – Components of Blockchain for Business

    Blockchain provides the business network with the ability to agree that a transaction is valid; an audit trail of asset ownership over time; a shared ledger ( “record book”) that is tamper proof, and guaranteed finality of transactions. Government oversight, compliance & audit can be part of the same network.


    Hyperledger is a Linux Foundation project to render a blockchain fabric (or plumbing) for business. It’s stated goals are a “collaborative effort created to advance blockchain by identifying and addressing important features for a cross-industry open standard for distributed ledgers that can transform the way business transactions are conducted globally”.

    For me, the important attributes of are:

    1. Open Governance – direction and oversight comes from a wide cross industry base, ensuring the widest applicability of the blockchain fabric for business usage.
    2. Open Standards – hyperledger blockchain solutions will interoperate with other blockchain solutions through open, published interfaces and services.
    3. Open Source – hyperledger source code can be inspected and validated by the broadest community of interest maximising quality and fitness for purpose.

    So what happens when we bring Open Innovation, blockchain and hyperledgertogether?

    First we need to realise that the business network as the first “acid test” for a blockchain use case – no business network means “think again about blockchain usage”.

    Our customers have different approaches to building out the networks to drive full value from blockchain, and we often get to advise and guide them in the pragmatic, practical steps of network formation. This comes down to how much our customer wants to embrace Open Innovation – that is how much they want to create value by combining their ideas with those from other business network members. This can be visualised by setting the slider in Figure 3.

    Figure 3 – Open / Closed Innovation Slider

    Full Open Innovation is not right for all use cases, not organisationally easy, and won’t be possible when strong competitive forces exist in the network.  But I would argue that the most transformational value can be realised when Open Innovation, blockchain and hyperledger can be brought together.


    More blockchain Information?

    1. Blockchain for Government
    2. Proving Provenance with Blockchain
    3. Blockchain and Cyber Security
    4. Blockchain, how SMART is your contract?
    5. Blockchain privacy services

    Originally published in Insights on Business, October 2016

    [linkedinbadge URL=”https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/open-innovation-hyperledger-blockchain-john-palfreyman?trk=hp-feed-article-title-like” connections=”off” mode=”icon” liname=”John Palfreyman”] is Director – Blockchain at IBM Cloud Division

     
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