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Switzerland has taken a big step toward unified standards for financial messaging among banks.

These standards make the entire process far more efficient. To that end, the Swiss Interbank Clearing (SIC) payment system has been redone by SIX, the firm that runs the European nation's financial market infrastructure. SIX debuted the redesigned system this week.

The new system is the first in Europe created with the ISO 20022 messaging standard, which has been developed and managed by an international group of representatives. This group wants to have ISO 20022 become the worldwide standard for real-time payments among banks.

And they're certainly headed toward that goal, as the Canadian Payments Association plans to implement the standard.

As more banks around the globe begin to adopt evolving technologies and change their strategies, it becomes increasingly 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 »

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence "Payments Industry Insider" subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

Several major banks just made a big move toward meeting consumers' desires for digital bill payments.

Capital One, Wells Fargo, TD Bank, PNC, and Fifth Third Bank (along with growth capital firm Safeguard Scientifics) have all contributed to the Series E funding round for Transactis, an electronic billing and payment solutions provider. The six entities helped Transactis raise $30 million to bring its total financing to $70 million.

Transactis offers a white-label product that helps businesses implement digital processes in lieu of paper billing and invoicing.

Consumers have been clamoring for more digital payment options. Currently, approximately 25% of the 25 billion bills produced each year are electronic, according to Transactis. But that number is likely growing rapidly as users move toward mobile in droves.

Visits to biller websites on mobile phones surged 42% in the last year, which suggests that digital bill pay is growing overall, according to Fiserv. Transactis' service makes it much easier for businesses to meet this need.

Furthermore, this investment is another step forward into the fintech sector for these banks. Fintech is rapidly growing, as 32% of financial services executives recently said their firms have built a fintech partnership.

Capital One, for example, has been incorporating former tech executives to its board and staff, and the company was the first in the U.S. to debut a mobile wallet based on host card emulation (HCE) for its Android customers. Capital One also recently debuted an app that handles credit scores and financial management.

Fifth Third has also announced a plan to hire another 120 tech employees by the end of the year in order to improve the user experience on digital and mobile platforms, as well as to strengthen technology within branches.

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 »

A Louisiana man and his son have plead guilty to running an unlicensed bitcoin exchange, the US Department of Justice said today.

It has been said plenty of times in the past and it’ll be said again in the future. Taavet Hinrikus, CEO of TransferWise, a popular peer-to-peer international money transfer service has stated that bitcoin, is dead. TransferWise is a prominent player in the Fintech space. Founded in 2010, the money transfers service is among the […]

The post P2P Money Transfer Firm CEO: Bitcoin Is Dead appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Employees with bad attitudes can cripple a company's culture

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The post BitcoinAverage Newest API appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Editor's Note: This is an opinion piece by Andrew Quentson; the views and opinions expressed are those of the author. Since their inception,...

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Bitcoin price pushed to a new high at resistance today, and we have to ask: Why another high when your bitcoins are fundamentally threatened? This analysis is provided by xbt.social with a 3-hour delay. Read the full analysis here. Not a member? Join now and receive a $29 discount using the code CCN29. Bitcoin Price […]

The post Bitcoin Price Breakout? appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

In an announcement today, New York-based blockchain startup Digital Asset Holdings (DAH) revealed its acquisition of Swiss technology firm Elevence Digital Finance AG. With the acquisition, DAH has announced the Digital Asset Modelling language, an alternative to Smart Contracts that is specifically designed for financial services. Digital Asset has revealed its acquisition Zurich-based Elevence, a […]

The post Digital Asset Reveals Smart Contracts Alternative for Financial Industry appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

A top official at the Bank of England says central banks need to embrace technology and change with the times or risk disruption akin to what Uber has done in the taxi industry.

Andrew Hauser, the Bank's executive director for banking, payments, and financial resilience, told the audience at the SWIFT Business Forum event in London on Wednesday: "The change is going to happen whether we like it or not. We have to ensure we adapt as well. If we don’t do so, effectively we might not be able to do our jobs. Central banks, just like everyone else, can’t afford to be Uber’d."

Hauser was referring to the wave of tech-driven innovation that is currently sweeping through financial services, usually referred to as fintech. Startups unencumbered by legacy systems are offering cheaper and quicker services to consumers.

Uber has also been particularly effective in the US at bending regulators to its will (there's a good explanation of how here). A big criticism of transport regulators from traditional cabbies is they've failed to keep a handle on the pace of change in the industry. Hauser doesn't want that to happen in financial services, so is keen to keep a close eye on developing fintech players.

Some fear that these new business models, while delivering short-term bonuses for many consumers, could pose long-term risks by creating new systematic risks that central banks have yet to fully grasp. The World Economic Forum on Tuesday highlighted the risk of consumers being left with big losses at the hands of peer-to-peer lending, for example.

But Hauser told the conference: "It’s often the case when you meet central bankers, they instinctively say I don’t like it, therefore it must be risky and undermine stability. I think we’ve learned that that’s too simplistic.

"When you have too little innovation or too little competition you get an excessively concentrated market and concentrated markets are by definition the ones that tend to have single points of failure. Innovation properly channeled, therefore, could actually improve stability rather than undermine it."

The central bank does sleep overnight and it does sleep at the weekend, although maybe that’s going to become harder for us to do overtime.

It could be bad news for banks though. Former Barclays CEO Anthony Jenkins issued a similar warning to Hauser's earlier this year, predicting an "Uber moment" for banks that could reduce headcounts by up to 50% and profitability by up to 60%. 

As well as backing innovation in mainstream banking, Hauser says the Bank of England itself is looking at how it can do things differently and change with the times.

He said: "The central bank does sleep overnight and it does sleep at the weekend, although maybe that’s going to become harder for us to do overtime. We need at least the technological capacity to run 24/7/365, even if the issue of whether we chose to use it is slightly more finely balanced.

"We need better data and analytics for people using our systems so that they can control their flows better." Hauser said the Bank of England is also looking closely at how it could potentially use blockchain technology in central banking.

Blockchain tech, also known as distributed ledger technology, was first developed to underpin bitcoin. It allows all parties on a network on share the same set of information and make changes in real-time, rather than relying on a central register or discreet registers within organisations that must be reconciled with each other.

The blockchain was originally conceived by bitcoin's developers to do away with the need for central banks, by allowing the network to collectively sign off on transactions. But the likes of the Bank of England could in fact use the technology to help them in their jobs, by improving real-time monitoring of activity for example.

Join the conversation about this story »

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Editor’s Note: This is part 1 of CCN’s “Peace & Stability Through The Blockchain” Series.  As Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in The New York Times, an ongoing global political awakening means more politically enlightened people, who hold a better understanding of colonialism and empire, and share a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo. As he wrote:  For […]

The post Peace & Stability through the Blockchain: Global Political Awakening & Peace through Trade appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Olga Skorobogatov, deputy chairman of the Bank of Russia (Russia’s central bank) has, in a blockchain conference, spoken about the possible development and creation of a national digital currency in the Russian Federation. Speaking at the “Blockchain and Open Platforms” conference in Russia, Deputy Chairman of the Bank of Russia Olga Skorobogatov has suggested that […]

The post Russian Central Bank Official Talks National Digital Currency appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Bitcoin Press Releases: OXBTC (www.OXBTC.com) – a China-based cryptocurrency investment platform lately unveiled its upgraded and expanded farms for Bitcoin/Litecoin/Ether cloud mining, which is about to beat all major miners and become the world’s largest one. Located in 3 different regions in China (Sichuan, Ordos and Inner Mongolia), OXBTC’s mining farms cover a total area […]

The post World’s Largest Bitcoin/Ether Mining Farm Unveiled by OXBTC appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Bitcoin Press Releases: OXBTC (www.OXBTC.com) – a China-based cryptocurrency investment platform lately unveiled its upgraded and expanded farms for Bitcoin/Litecoin/Ether cloud mining, which is about to beat all major miners and become the world’s largest one. Located in 3 different regions in China (Sichuan, Ordos and Inner Mongolia), OXBTC’s mining farms cover a total area […]

The post World’s Largest Bitcoin/Ether Mining Farm Unveiled by OXBTC appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

The last 24 days mark the longest period in which bitcoin prices have been less volatile than gold prices, going back to 2010, according to The Wall Street Journal. Some see this as a sign of investor perception of bitcoin as a safe store of value. Not one for lack of volatility, bitcoin has witnessed […]

The post The Gold Standard: Bitcoin Price Stability at its Best since 2010 appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

One of the world’s largest bitcoin exchanges is reportedly close to an announcement with the Luxembourg government.