Coin News

In a nod to the growing popularity of Bitcoin, Microsoft Excel – the most popular and widely used spreadsheet program in the world, will provide native support for the cryptocurrency’s format within the program. The Microsoft Office software suite, a collection of various programs which altogether makes for the most popular and widely used office […]

The post MS Excel 2016 Will Have Native Support for Bitcoin Currency Format appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

In February, Bitcoin Magazine reported that The Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Project, a collaborative effort started in December to...

The post Blockstream, Bloq, Gem, ItBit, Thomson Reuters and Others Join the Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Project appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Branch International is bringing digital financial services to mobile users in an intriguing location.

The San Francisco-based company also known as Branch.co, has raised $9.2 million in a Series A round of funding to bring its services to Sub-Saharan Africa, reports TechCrunch.

Branch's free Android app is a "branchless bank for teh next generation," according to founder and CEO Matt Flannery. The app asks users to let it access and analyze data stored on their phones, such as their monthly phone bill price or who they call most frequently.

Using this data, Branch learns and anticipates who would most likely be a solid borrower and can then offer a credit line of anywhere from $2.50 to $500 in approximately 10 seconds. The app does not ask users for a credit history as they would need to get a credit card through a traditional bank.

Flannery told TechCrunch the app is growing in popularity with sole proprietors and entrepreneurs, particularly farmers, merchants, and drivers.

The rising popularity of Branch's app makes it clear that we’ve entered the most profound era of change for financial services companies since the 1970s brought us index mutual funds, discount brokers and ATMs.

No firm is immune from the coming disruption and every company must have a strategy to harness the powerful advantages of the new fintech revolution.

The battle already underway will create surprising winners and stunned losers among some of the most powerful names in the financial world: The most contentious conflicts (and partnerships) will be between startups that are completely reengineering decades-old practices, traditional power players who are furiously trying to adapt with their own innovations, and total disruption of established technology & processes:

• Traditional Retail Banks vs. Online-Only Banks: Traditional retail banks provide a valuable service, but online-only banks can offer many of the same services with higher rates and lower fees

• Traditional Lenders vs. Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces: P2P lending marketplaces are growing much faster than traditional lenders—only time will tell if the banks strategy of creating their own small loan networks will be successful

• Traditional Asset Managers vs. Robo-Advisors: Robo-advisors like Betterment offer lower fees, lower minimums and solid returns to investors, but the much larger traditional asset managers are creating their own robo-products while providing the kind of handholding that high net worth clients are willing to pay handsomely for.

As you can see, this very fluid environment is creating winners and losers before your eyes…and it’s also creating the potential for new cost savings or growth opportunities for both you and your company.

After months of researching and reporting this important trend, Evan Bakker, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has put together an essential report on the fintech ecosystem that explains the new landscape, identifies the ripest areas for disruption, and highlights the some of the most exciting new companies. These new players have the potential to become the next Visa, Paypal or Charles Schwab because they have the potential to transform important areas of the financial services industry like:

• Retail banking

• Lending and Financing

• Payments and Transfers
• 
Wealth and Asset Management

• Markets and Exchanges

• Insurance

• Blockchain Transactions


If you work in any of these sectors, it’s important for you to understand how the fintech revolution will change your business and possibly even your career. And if you’re employed in any part of the digital economy, you’ll want to know how you can exploit these new technologies to make your employer more efficient, flexible and profitable.

Among the big picture insights you'll get from The Fintech Ecosystem Report: Measuring the effects of technology on the entire financial services industry:

• Why financial technology is so disruptive to financial services—it will soon change the nature of almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management.
• The basic conflict will be between old firms and new—startups are re-imagining financial services processes from top to bottom, while incumbent financial services firms are trying to keep up with new products of their own.
• Both sides face serious obstacles—traditional banks and financial services firms are investing heavily in innovation, but leveraging their investments is difficult with so much invested in legacy systems and profit centers.
• Meanwhile, startups are struggling to navigate a rapidly-changing regulatory landscape and must scale up quickly with limited resources.
• The blockchain is a wild card that could completely overhaul financial services. Both major banks and startups around the world are exploring the technology behind the blockchain, which stores and records Bitcoin transactions. This technology could lower the cost of many financial activities to near-zero and could wipe away many traditional banking activities completely.

This exclusive report also:

• Explains the main growth drivers of the exploding fintech ecosystem.
• Frames the challenges and opportunities faced by incumbents and startups.
• Breaks down global and regional fintech investments, including which regions are the most significant and which are poised for the highest growth.
• Reveals which two financial services are garnering the most investment, and are therefore likely to be transformed first and fastest by fintech
• Explains why blockchain technology is critically important to banks and startups, and assesses which players stand to gain the most from it.
• Explores the financial sectors facing disruption and breaks them down in terms of investments, vulnerabilities and growth opportunities.
• And much more.

The Fintech Ecosystem Report: Measuring the effects of technology on the entire financial services industry is how you get the full story on the fintech revolution.

To get your copy of this invaluable guide to the fintech revolution, choose one of these options:

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the fast-moving world of financial technology.

Join the conversation about this story »

The Financial Stability Board has discussed and reviewed distributed ledger or blockchain technology in a wider meeting covering its priorities in 2016, during a discussion in Tokyo over the past two days. The Financial Stability Board (FSB), a common platform that sees the coming together of senior policy makers from central banks, ministries of finance […]

The post Blockchain Under Financial Stability Board’s Scanner appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Coincheck, CHBTC, Korbit and Quoine are among a new group of exchanges that have added support for Ethereum's digital currency ether.

Bitcoin price hovers above $410 as the market comes face to face with its options. Buy today and risk betting on the reward-halving rally too soon, or sell now to buy into the post-Classic(TM) relief rally later. This analysis is provided by xbt.social with a 3-hour delay. Read the full analysis here. Not a member? […]

The post Bitcoin Price Down Amid Fundamental Concerns appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

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Shopping online can be a pain when you need to constantly re-enter all of your information, but Bank of America just made the process a bit easier for some of its customers.

The second-largest U.S. bank has announced that it would automatically enroll some cardholders in Visa Checkout, Visa's one-click buy button that lets users easily complete transactions online.

Typically a user must enter all their information to log in and then he or she can use the one-click functionality. Now, a portion of Bank of America customers can skip that step altogether.

This partnership shows that customer acquisition is a strategic priority for Visa. The completion rate for Visa Checkout is already rather high, as users completed 86% of their purchases in the fourth quarter of 2015. So Visa is likely now trying to expand the Checkout user base.

Visa announced in February that it would integrate a Google API that facilitates address auto-completion. Banks that automatically register consumers should further ease this process.

These factors combined could substantially increase the number of Visa Checkout users, which would help the service be more competitive with other one-click options available online.

If Visa makes it easier for customers to shop on mobile, then that should give the company consumer-facing visibility as more people shop on smartphones. BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, forecasts that mobile commerce will account for 45% of all U.S. e-commerce retail sales in 2020. Therefore, it will be important for Visa and peer companies to ease the mobile shopping process for customers.

The way in which we pay for goods is changing rapidly, and companies such as Visa are doing all they can to keep up. Addressing consumers' needs and desires is crucial for companies that want to stay viable in the evolving payments process.

Evan Bakker and John Heggestuen, analysts at BI Intelligence, have compiled a detailed report on the payments ecosystem that drills into the industry to explain how a broad range of transactions are processed, including prepaid and store cards, as well as revealing which types of companies are in the best and worst position to capitalize on the latest industry trends.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• 2016 will be a watershed year for the payments industry. Payments companies are improving security, expanding their mobile offerings, and building commerce capabilities that will give consumers a more compelling reason to make purchases using digital devices.
• Payments is an extremely complex industry. To understand the next big digital opportunity lies, it's critical to understand how the traditional credit- and debit-processing chain works and what roles acquirers, processors, issuing banks, card networks, independent sales organizations, gateways, and software and hardware providers play.
• Alternative technologies could disrupt the processing ecosystem. Devices ranging from refrigerators to smartwatches now feature payment capabilities, which will spur changes in consumer payment behaviors. Likewise, blockchain technology, the protocol that underlies Bitcoin, could one day change how consumer card payments are verified.

In full, the report:

• Uncovers the key themes and trends affecting the payments industry in 2016 and beyond.
• Gives a detailed description of the stakeholders involved in a payment transaction, along with hardware and software providers.
• Offers diagrams and infographics explaining how card transactions are processed and which players are involved in each step.
• Provides charts on our latest forecasts, key company growth, survey results, and more.
• Analyzes the alternative technologies, including blockchain, which could further disrupt the ecosystem.

To get your copy of this invaluable guide, choose one of these options:

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the payments ecosystem.

Join the conversation about this story »

In a recent article on Vice’s technology news feed, Motherboard, author Sebastiaan Deetman explores the energy efficiency of Bitcoin. The article begins with a brief and fatalistic assertion regarding the environmental impact of mass migration to Bitcoin (or a similar energy intensive cryptocurrency). Another Vice Motherboard contributor, Christopher Malmo, is quoted as saying, “Adopting Bitcoin as […]

The post The Energy Efficiency of Bitcoin appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

For the past few years, many of the biggest players in the Bitcoin industry have talked about the need to build bridges to the traditional...

The post Coinbase Aims to Drive Bitcoin Adoption via New Killer Apps appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Interpol conducted a war game scenario last week that centered on discovering the identity of a blackmailer demanding a bitcoin ransom.

Deputy Governor of the Bank of England Ben Broadbent has spoken out on the implications of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for the...

The post Bank of England Official Discusses Implications of Central Bank Digital Currencies appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Dr Philippa Ryan discusses the relationship between perceptions of bitcoin as a technology and activity in its historically turbulent global markets.

The blockchain could be a revolution -- but only if it's capable of scaling beyond the tech enthusiast crowd to provide smart solutions to whole populations

Known for his outspoken and firm stance against bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, German Klimenko, Russian President Putin’s newly appointed counselor and advisor on the internet has now called the cryptocurrency an Internet meme that went viral. He further dismissed  the acceptance of the cryptocurrency in other parts of the world as “fiction”, claiming that the bitcoin […]

The post Russia’s Presidential Advisor Dismisses Bitcoin as “Fiction” appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

It has been a tough couple of years for Ross Ulbricht and his family. In mid-2015, Ross Ulbricht learned his fate for his involvement in Silk Road (which was futilely appealed). The Silk Road, as readers may remember, was an online black market that featured everything from guns to drugs to counterfeit documents for sale. His […]

The post A View From The Cell Of Ross Ulbricht appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

A new study by the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3) at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute authored by Christian Decker, Ittay Eyal, Andrew Miller and Emin Gün Sirer, among others, found that bitcoin’s blocksize could currently scale up to 4MB without affecting decentralization. According to the recently released position paper, On Scaling Decentralized Blockchains, 4,000 […]

The post Cornell Study Recommends 4MB Blocksize for Bitcoin appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.