Fintech Daily Digest

South Korea's financial regulatory sandbox policy went into effect Monday, with the Financial Services Commission selecting 19 innovative fintech services for "priority review."

Ria Money Transfer has joined the RippleNet blockchain-based global payments network. Ria is one of the largest payment service providers in the world, With customers in over 155 countries, and $40 billion in money transfer volume per year.

Sopnendu Mohanty, chief fintech officer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore: "We don't see much in the Ripple bank digital currency, but definitely still a lot of hope that we can remove a lot of inefficiency […] when it comes to cross-border payments."

The OCC Innovation Pilot Program would be offered only to OCC-regulated banks that need regulatory guidance on offering an innovative product or service to the market. A bank can partner with a fintech firm in the pilot or the bank can join others in offering a consortium-backed idea. The program is distinctly different from the OCC's new special-purpose charter that is open to a nonbank fintechs.

JP Morgan is tapping Microsoft's Azure cloud-based services to boost its blockchain-based Quorum platform, aiming to make it easier, faster and cheaper for companies to build and deploy blockchain applications.

Facebook is looking to raise $1 billion for its rumored cryptocurrency stablecoin, the WSJ reports. Facebook was also said to be talking Visa and MasterCard about potential support, along with payment processor First Data Corp.

While it is true to say that the great ICOmedy festival has died down a fair bit in recent months, it's not quite over yet. Dressed up in all sorts of new cryptoclothes and abbreviations, the perpetually preposterous initial coin offering lives on.

The Securities and Exchange Act of 2019, in effect since April 17, aims to help Thailand introduce blockchain use in trade and security tokenization. https://www.sec.or.th/EN/Pages/News_Detail.aspx?SECID=7406&NewsNo=38&NewsYear=2019&Lang=EN

Bakkt has acquired crypto custodian, Digital Asset Custody Company, and partnered with custodial bank, BNY Mellon. These developments are part of its strategy to provide a fully regulated, end-to-end crypto asset custody and trading ecosystem for institutional investors.

The International Accounting Standards Board will on Friday publish proposals offering relief on the treatment of old Libor-type benchmarks and newer ones, such as Sofr, the US benchmark.

The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency proposed an Innovation Pilot Program, designed to provide OCC-supervised entities with regulatory input early in the testing of innovative activities.

A survey conducted by Fidelity Investments found that, already, around 22% of investors have some exposure to digital assets, while 40% say they are open to taking the plunge in the next five years. Of those that have exposure, most investments were made in the last three years.

The World Economic Forum has teamed up with over 100 global supply chain and logistics leaders to standardize blockchain apps in the industry. The project aims to co-develop interoperable blockchain applications in the logistics industry and to leverage an open-source toolkit to deploy blockchain responsibly.

A poll taken by the audience of about 300 DTCC customers and others showed that while 74% of the audience's employers were participating in blockchain projects expected to be rolled out to customers, only 23% were planning to implement a business solution involving cryptocurrency. The three largest obstacles to the audience deciding to invest in cryptocurrency were regulatory uncertainty (29%), valuation approach (29%) and fraud (21%).

The State Administration of Foreign Exchange of China has collaborated with ZhongChao Credit Card Industry Development Co., Ltd, a state-owned monopoly enterprise to built a blockchain-based cross-border financial trade service platform.

The BoC and MAS linked up their respective blockchain projects, Jasper and Ubin, which are built on R3's Corda and JPMorgan's Quorum platforms, respectively. They connected using hashed time-locked contracts that allowed direct PvP settlement without the use of an intermediary.

Now the crypto industry has its own MF Global - the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. It is being investigated for fraud after losing $850m of its customers' money.

The central message of this IMF paper is that with readily available tools a central bank can enable deep negative rates whenever needed-thus maintaining the power of monetary policy in the future to end recessions within a short time.

If institutional investors are delaying entering crypto until the industry 'settles down,' they will be in for a long wait - as in-fighting and controversy are part of crypto's DNA. And as with any Darwinian struggle, crypto's dramas are fundamental to the sector's overall health and prosperity.