Fintech Daily Digest

To let businesses quickly deploy digital payment services, a consortium of major companies is rolling out a new financial innovation platform called b.yond. Global Processing Services, Pannovate, Cornercard, MeaWallet, Modulr, AllPay and W2 Global are founding partners of the consortium in collaboration with Visa.

The essence of the USC project is to create blockchain-based cryptocurrencies to make it easier for international banks to settle various transactions between each other. USCs are 100% fiat-backed currencies held in respective central banks with convertibility into fiat currency at par guaranteed at all times.

Yahoo Japan's trading platform Taotao is open offering BTC and ETH trading while also providing users with margin trading available in litecoin (LTC), ripple (XRP) and bitcoin cash (BCH).

The £259m Lendinvest securitisation is backed by buy-to-let loans. It's worth briefly going into its model, because it illustrates the basic point of fintech: it's not so much about new things, as the absence of old things, plus securitisation.

Lufthansa says that their points do not have a cash value, the argument is undermined by the ability of customers to transfer points from other programs that do sell their points for cash. If you're issuing cash-like liabilities you have to be regulated as a bank or e-money issuer/ transmitter.

Based on Facebook's statement and several anonymous comments made by people tied to the project, Caitlin Long predicts that Facebook will pay interest to holders of its stablecoin, and this will eventually lead to populist calls to repeal corporate subsidies to banks at the heart of the US banking system.

The IMF thinks BigTech could significantly disrupt the financial sector, accelerating inclusion and modernizing financial markets, but raising privacy issues, plus competition and market concentration concerns, both of which could lead to financial system vulnerabilities.

Ever since the 116th Congress convened in early January, we have been tracking FinTech-related legislation introduced in the House and Senate.

Debit cards tied to cryptocurrency wallets provide an opportunity to spend your digital coins almost anywhere fiat money is accepted. It's a working solution, at least until wider adoption comes around.

Britain's peer-to-peer lenders are hoping this week's intervention by the Financial Conduct Authority will help to restore the sector's damaged reputation by weeding out potentially dozens of weaker competitors.

UK retail investors will face limits on how much money they can put into P2P platforms under new Financial Conduct Authority rules that experts predicted would trigger the closure of more lenders.

More names are being linked to Facebook's secretive cryptocurrency project, MIT's Christian Catalini as the project's chief economist.

Since Bitcoin's largest price decline and the launch of the Bitcoin futures market coincided in December 2017, there have been heated discussions about whether the launch of the futures market crashed the Bitcoin market. This paper empirically shows that this is not so.

There needs to be a more seamless transition between fiat and digital assets, so that customers do not risk losses as they switch back and forth. One solution would be for central banks to issue a crypto fiat, which would support product manufacturing. It would also enable real-time peer-to-peer payments and potentially cross-border interbank clearing and settlement.

On May 15, 2019, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) implemented a system upgrade designed to support a number of scaling solutions. Shortly after the fork, there appeared to be a power struggle between miners looking to recuperate lost BCH, which became spendable after the upgrade. This has led to new debates over the centralization, security, and immutability of the BCH network.

Ernst & Young has released a zero-knowledge proof private transaction protocol for the Ethereum blockchain, called Nightfall.

The Riksbank has started the work of developing solutions for a possible future e-krona and is now procuring a supplier for support in this work. The procurement process will run over the summer and autumn of 2019, after which development work will start together with the procured supplier. In 2020, a technical platform for e-krona payments, as well as a small number of different forms of means of payment for the e-krona, will be developed and tested.

Facebook's Laura McCracken confirmed that the planned stablecoin will not be tied to any single fiat currency, but will instead be linked to a basket of currencies in order to prevent volatility.

The National Bank of Ukraine has released a report on issuing its own central bank digital currency, based on a pilot scheme for the 'e-hryvnia' which was completed in February.

US SEC Chair Clayton said that the SEC needs to feel comfortable with crypto custody and ensure no market manipulation can take place before approving a crypto exchange-traded fund.