Chris Skinner
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A few years ago Jamie Dimon was renowned for saying that bitcoin developers "are going to try and eat our lunch" and that silicon valley was coming to get the banks. Three years later, it's not quite the case.
Europe’s competition commissioner has beaten up Google for rigging search results, introduced the right to be forgotten, told Facebook to stop spreading fake news and smashed Apple with multi-billion dollar fines for tax dodging.
Is it any wonder that technology firms are under the microscope when they are the least regulated industry in the world? According to Bank of America, technology is the least regulated industry sector with just 27,000 regulations, versus 215,000 for manufacturing.
I had a chat with The Financial Times the other day, and provided lots of background as to why I don’t think cryptocurrencies are the choice of criminals. The comment that was reported was the following:
Everyone got very excited a few years ago about blockchain technologies, the ledger system that was spawned by the arrival of bitcoin in 2009. It allows the recording of transactions to be automated and completely trusted, as the ledger system is tamperproof. The resulting excitement was that this could therefore replace many systems of contracts that are paper-based with smart, digital contracts.
Unless you have been asleep for the last year, you cannot have failed to catch the buzz around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum’s Ether and Ripple’s XRP. There are even some coins that were created as a joke that are getting significant investments, such as Dogecoin.
How do you regulate something that is completely decentralised and has no office? I struggle to find an answer for this. I know that when my exchange is hacked or my hard wallet is lost, I am frustrated and have no authority to report it to or bail me out. What is the answer?
I’ve blogged quite a bit about adapting to change lately, and will continue to do so as banking-as-usual (BAU) is not an option. It’s similar to standing in the middle of the road. If you stand there for long enough, you’ll get run over. This is as true in banking: if you stop changing, you die. Now banks know this – they’re not stupid – and have been changing a lot over the past decades.
In mid-December 2017, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a really interesting 32-page paper on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). The timing wasn’t great as most of the City was out getting smashed at Christmas parties, so I thought it best to put it aside until the New Year hangovers were out of the way and share it with you now.
I usually start the new year by making some predictions, but so many others have been writing about 2018 trends that I’m not going to. There are four big things for 2018 from a FinTech viewpoint that are obvious to me, however
