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Anyone with iOS 10 will soon be able to use blockchain payments app Circle to send and receive payments directly within Apple’s iMessage app. Circle for iMessage represents a major step in the evolution of social message payments in the West, similar to what has already happened in China. Circle for iMessage is available from the App […]

The post iOS Update Brings Global Blockchain Payments via Circle appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Ripple has secured $55 million in Series B financing from new investors that include SCB Digital Ventures (the venture arm of Siam Commercial Bank), Standard Chartered, Accenture Ventures and SBI Holdings. The company will use the funds to support growth and pursue strategic partnerships. Other investors include Santander Innoventures, the venture arms of Seagate Technology […]

The post Ripple Gains $55 Million In Series B Financing From More Banks appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Ripple has secured $55 million in Series B financing from new investors that include SCB Digital Ventures (the venture arm of Siam Commercial Bank), Standard Chartered, Accenture Ventures and SBI Holdings. The company will use the funds to support growth and pursue strategic partnerships. Other investors include Santander Innoventures, the venture arms of Seagate Technology […]

The post Ripple Gains $55 Million In Series B Financing From More Banks appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

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The 2016 edition of McKinsey's annual report on Capital Markets and Investment Banking found that extensive job cuts have not resulted in decreases in operational costs in the industry, and that banks should also look to increase digitization to achieve savings.

Although 10,000 front-office jobs have been cut at major investment banks since 2011, cost-to-income ratios actually increased over that period. This is because, when banks cut jobs, there are some costs related to those roles that remain. In addition, these banks are removing people that generate revenue, and that leaves a smaller base from which to cover fixed costs.

McKinsey suggests two main digitization strategies for banks — one is an "all-in" approach for banks that are already technologically advanced, which involves implementing digitization throughout the value chain; the other is a more-targeted approach for less advanced firms that involves prioritizing the digitization of specific areas. Banks adopting the former approach are dubbed "high-speed," while those using the latter strategy are "low-speed." McKinsey says there are a number of ways in which both bank types can begin digitizing:

• Electronic onboarding of clients. This can achieve significant front-office cost savings. Enabling consumers to open accounts remotely and automatically frees remaining staff to spend more time on tasks that cannot yet be automated, making them more productive, and helping them to generate more revenue per employee. McKinsey also recommends the automation of back-office functions, which could lead to savings for the same reasons. 
• Big data analytics. This includes leveraging machine learning and robotics to create operational improvements in areas such as data management, reconciliation, and settlement. Successful data analysis can also help banks monetize their vast arrays of proprietary data by using it to roll out highly targeted, customized products. Investing in these areas could lead to 50% savings in some processes, according to McKinsey.
• Use of public cloud infrastructure. Banks have historically been reluctant to use public cloud because of security concerns, but McKinsey says that as familiarity with the technology grows, usage is too. Leveraging public cloud infrastructure enables the outsourcing of areas of infrastructure like processing capacity, which reduces the need for in-house hardware that can be old, and expensive to maintain or acquire for scaling needs. The report says one firm used cloud services to reduce the time needed to complete a complicated calculation related to derivatives from 8 hours to 15 minutes. 

McKinsey highlights that one way banks can achieve digitization is by partnering with fintechs, many of which aim to improve legacy players' business models, rather than compete with them. This is a trend we continue to see in the retail banking market, and expect to see grow in the investment banking market in the years ahead.

Trends such as this make 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, senior 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.

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The descendant of Satoshi's original bitcoin wallet is still available today, and continuing to see upgrades.

Goldman Sachs has submitted a patent application focusing on how blockchain could cut out the middle man with transaction costs, claiming that the technology could change the current process. The patent, “Systems and Methods for Updating a Distributed Ledger-Based on Partial Validations of Transactions”, which was published on September 8 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), was […]

The post Goldman Sachs Files Blockchain Patent for Foreign Exchange Trading appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Even though blockchain is seen to have a number of useful features for banks to utilize they are finding that putting these features into practice may prove difficult. The banking world may not trust the idea behind bitcoin, but they have realized that bitcoin’s underlying technology, the blockchain, has many valuable features that they could […]

The post Putting Blockchain into Practice Is Proving Difficult for Banks appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Roughly two weeks ago, ViaBTC, a relatively new bitcoin mining pool that launched earlier this summer, garnered some attention on social...

The post An Interview With ViaBTC, the New Bitcoin Mining Pool on the Blockchain appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

Technology giant IBM has signed a contract with the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Japan’s largest bank, to develop and implement a blockchain based on smart contracts among business entities. The Hyperledger Project, an open-source blockchain platform led by the Linux Foundation will see its deployment in a new partnership between IBM and the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi […]

The post IBM Shakes on Blockchain with Japan’s Biggest Bank appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

The post Bitcoin Gets (a Little) Closer to the Moon appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Genesis Mining made both financial and bitcoin history recently by sending a 3D model of a bitcoin with a paper wallet 34 kilometers into space, then sending 1 BTC to the wallet from Planet Earth, completing the first-ever peer-to-peer financial transaction in space.  A youtube video recorded the 34-kilometer space journey, along with the transaction being […]

The post Bitcoin Gets (a Little) Closer to the Moon appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Technology giant IBM has signed a contract with the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Japan’s largest bank, to develop and implement a blockchain based on smart contracts among business entities. The Hyperledger Project, an open-source blockchain platform led by the Linux Foundation will see its first deployment in a new partnership between IBM and the Bank of […]

The post IBM Shakes on Blockchain with Japan’s Largest Bank appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

BlockCypher, a company that positions itself as a blockchain “web services” provider for the corporate realm has claimed that it can now facilitate near-instant cross-border payments. As bitcoin and blockchain-based innovation continues to disrupt the payments industry with quicker settlements at a lower cost, one Fintech firm with a focus in the B2B space claims […]

The post Blockchain Services Firm Claims Instant Cross-Border Payments appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Press Release: It is hard to image living in a world without internet, especially at the time when all businesses including the financial markets are dependent on it. September 15, 2016, Romania, Bucharest – It is no secret that the currency exchange and trading industry is now heavily dependent on the internet, thanks to electronic […]

The post Unichange.me Explains How Using P2P Exchange Providers Increases ROI for Cryptocurrency Traders appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Press Release: EverdreamSoft is launching the web version of its Bitcoin blockchain based Spells of Genesis mobile game. The game will be released during the soft-launch event later today. September 15, 2016, Geneva, Switzerland – Spells of Genesis, the first ever Bitcoin blockchain based mobile game with its own cryptocurrency is finally ready for today’s […]

The post Spells of Genesis, a Cryptocurrency Powered Mobile Game Launches Today appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

Bitcoin Press Release: The DECENT blockchain based decentralized content distribution platform’s ICO with CCEDK kicks off on a high note raising more than $2,517,000 in 2 days. September 13, 2016, Blokhus, Denmark – The Switzerland-based DECENT decentralized content distribution platform has announced the launch of its ICO in association with CCEDK, a Danish cryptocurrency startup […]

The post DECENT Blockchain Platform ICO Raises Over 4138 BTC in Two Days appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.

BlockCypher, a firm that positions itself as a “blockchain web services” provider for the corporate realm has claimed that it can now facilitate near-instant cross-border payments. As bitcoin and blockchain-based innovation continues to disrupt the payments industry with quicker settlements at a lower cost, one Fintech firm with a focus in the B2B space claims […]

The post Blockchain Services Firm Claims Instant Cross-Border Payments appeared first on CCN: Financial Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency News.