The blockchain or distributed ledger technology is fascinating because it questions how businesses have been conducted for decades (even centuries): Do we really need trusted intermediaries? What is trust? What is a contract? What is identity? Etc. But regarding its application to Financial Services, what fascinates me the most is the hiatus between the concept […]
People who are not familiar with the Distributed Ledger technology ask me how it is different from a good old database? And what is the difference between a private distributed ledger (DL) that banks are seemingly experimenting, and a public DL such as the Bitcoin Blockchain? The key to understanding: the network characteristics. In a […]
Between 2009 and 2014, Bitcoin caught the public’s attention as the first viable and widely used cryptocurrency. In 2014 the world started to take an interest in the Blockchain (with capital “B”), the underlying distributed ledger used to securely record the Bitcoin transactions. Recently we reached a hype peak, hearing about blockchains (with an “s”) […]
You can find as many articles announcing the rise of Fintech and end of banks as the ones predicting that banks will remain and take over Fintech. It is not even clear for the people involved, as Fintech executives are more confident about banks’ future than banks themselves, as shown by this Economist survey: To […]
I did a quick inventory of the values as stated by the major US and European banks*, and did the same exercise for some of the largest Fintech** It is not a systematic scholarly study, but it gives you a good flavor of their respective business principles. Banks “Clients” is what comes first. No surprise […]
The “Uber of banking” buzz word has been employed too many times. Please don’t use it anymore, no simple financial app will emerge tomorrow to instantly replace banks. Let’s consider Uber and Airbnb, two of the most successful unicorns. They didn’t invent a new business. Nothing new in offering car rides or rooms for accommodation, […]
