This week our experts brought you the following insights based on their experience as investors, entrepreneurs & executives.
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Your Editor is Bernard Lunn. He is also the CEO of Daily Fintech and author of The Blockchain Economy and occasional opinion columnist.
Monday Ilias Hatzis our Greece-based crypto entrepreneur (Founder & CEO at Kryptonio a “keyless” non-custodial bitcoin and cryptocurrency wallet, that lets users manage bitcoin and crypto, without private keys or passwords and Weekly Columnist at Daily Fintech) @iliashatzis wrote Year of the Crypto Bank
The Chinese New Year is coming up in couple of weeks and 2021 is a Year of the Ox. That’s a bull, but a “regulated” bull. And 2021 will be bullish on the convergence of crypto and traditional financial services.
Keeping up the positive crypto momentum from 2020, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in letter on January 4, 2021 announced it’s latest crypto-friendly move: “Our letter removes any legal uncertainty about the authority of banks to connect to blockchains as validator nodes and thereby transact stablecoin payments on behalf of customers who are increasingly demanding the speed, efficiency, interoperability, and low cost associated with these products,” Acting Comptroller of the Currency Brian Brooks said in a statement.
Editor note: Ilias describes how both traditional and neobanks are launching a cryptocurrency offerings and crypto banks are becoming licenses/regulated = all good news for customers
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Tuesday Bernard Lunn, CEO of Daily Fintech and author of The Blockchain Economy wrote: Prepaid Revolution part 4: what happens when payment is disconnected from bank rails credit
Some payments require credit – prepaid accounts and cards are not fit for purpose. For poor people, it might be for low value purchases when their cash has run dry. This is the world of payday lending, high APR % cards and pawnshops. For people with more cash it might be high value purchases such as furniture. These are the customers that banks want to service via credit cards.
To see what the world looks like when payment is disconnected from the bank credit card rails, look at Klarna, which we have been tracking since 2014.
Klarna is clearly doing well, scaling globally and backed by top tier investors.
Editor note: This is the final of a 4-part analysis of how prepaid accounts are disrupting banking.
Wednesday Alan Scott Managing Director EMEA at 24 Exchange @Alan_SmartMoney wrote Stablecoin News for the week ending Wednesday 27 January 2021.
This weekly snapshot is the news that matters in the Stablecoin market.
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Thursday
Rintu Patnaik, an Insurtech expert based in India, wrote: Digital Experiences Are Being Built On No-Code Platform Blocks
Insurers globally are on a quest to deliver exceptional digital customer experiences. But, when it comes to modernizing product development, they report lackadaisical progress. Burdened by constraints of archaic technology architectures, carriers often resist adopting new technologies because of the vagaries of legacy applications. Furthermore, associated costs and duration to develop in-house solutions can be humongous and unenticing.
One technology panacea to this malaise, No-Code product development, is on the rise. No-Code development enables laymen to create insurance products and customer experiences through drag-and-drop interfaces. Employing visual models to substitute coding complexity, users create products and experiences rapidly and at much lower costs without skilled technical staff.
Editor note: Rintu digs below the theory of no code / low code application building to look at a number of real world examples in Insurance.
Christian Dreyer @x3er, the Swiss based CFA who focusses on how XBRL changes our world wrote: XBRL News for Week Ending 28 January 2021.
Editor note: This weekly snapshot is the news that matters in the XBRL market.
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Friday Howard Tolman, a well-known banker, technologist and entrepreneur in London, wrote: Alt Lending for week ended 29 January 2021.
Editor note: This weekly snapshot is the news that matters in the Alt Lending market.
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