Fintech Daily Digest

Bittrex has announced that it is moving headquarters from Malta to Liechtenstein. Interestingly, Malta's financial regulator has recently said that it will "actively monitor" licensed cryptocurrency businesses in the country to prevent money laundering.

In many countries, the gender gap is lower with mobile money than with traditional financial services and mobile money is helping with closing the gender gap[25]. Globally, 65% of women have an account compared with 72% of men. This means that women are 10% less likely than men to have a financial account. This number reaches 24% in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. However, in many, the gender gap in mobile money account ownership is lower than the gender gap in bank account ownership.

As more transactions flow through digital startups instead of traditional banks, fintech firms represent increasingly important partnerships for the card networks. These startups could also prove vital for the card networks' continued grip on payments, as physical cards become less important and transactions become more digital. Four-year-old Revolut offers foreign exchange and stock and crypto brokerage as well as peer-to-peer payments. It says it has 8 million customers, and more than 1 million of them use its services every day.

Sumitomo Mitsui Banking is set to begin utilizing R3's Marco Polo trade finance blockchain on a commercial basis by the end of the year. A cross-border proof-of-concept test was successfully completed involving Mitsui & Co, a Japanese general trading company, Indorama Ventures, a Thai company in the intermediate petrochemicals business, and Bangkok Bank.

TransferWise obtained a license as a Money Services Provider in Abu Dhabi. The license will allow users in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to transfer funds in the local dirham currency into accounts around the world through TransferWise's platform.

A federal judge dealt a blow to the Office of the Comptroller of Currency's special purpose fintech charter on Monday, ruling that the agency lacked legal power to grant a bank charter to a nonbank entity that wasn't eligible for federal deposit insurance.

MTN, Nigeria's largest telecoms operator, with more than 60 million customers, has launched its MoMo Agent mobile money service. And, on the back of a $1.2 billion funding boost last year, Airtel Nigeria, Nigeria's third largest operator, is expected to follow suit. 9Mobile and Globacom, the country's two other major operators, have also reportedly been issued licenses to become payment service banks.

Malaysia's virtual banking framework will be ready for public consultation by end of 2019 and the final framework along with applications will be open by the first half of 2020.

Despite a growing trend toward cashless payments, a J.D. Power Pulse survey shows consumers still want flexibility, as 78% of consumers still believe restaurants and retailers should be required to accept cash.

China's central Hunan province's financial regulator banned all P2P lenders. None of the 24 local P2P lending platform operators investigated by authorities complied with regulations.

With the new platform, Vanguard aims to lower transaction costs for the trillions of dollars worth of currencies it trades annually by boosting peer-to-peer trading for investors, connecting them directly via blockchain technology.

Ex-Fed Chair nominee Stephen Moore is part of a group that will launch a USD-pegged stablecoin called Frax. It will be fractionally-backed and use algorithms to loan out its reserves and collect interest to maintain the peg.

"Industry sources have told the FT that the decisive factor was a letter that Democratic Senators Sherrod Brown and Brian Schatz sent to Mastercard, Visa and Stripe. It warned that proceeding with the project would expose even their non-Libra businesses to heavier regulatory scrutiny."

This filing is reportedly only the latest part of Bitfinex' ongoing initiative to recover $880 million that were held at Crypto Capital when the payment processor was seized by authorities in Poland in April of last year as part of a money-laundering investigation.

Calibra's David Marcus told a banking seminar hosted by the Group of 30 in Washington that instead of having a synthetic unit...Libra could be a series of stablecoins: a dollar stablecoin, a euro stablecoin, a sterling pound stablecoin, etc.

"The IMF should take over Libra with a view to reinventing the international monetary system in a manner reflecting John Maynard Keynes' rejected proposal at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference for an International Clearing Union."

While suptech is still in its infancy, it is gaining traction, with a significant number of suptech use cases found in the areas of misconduct analysis, reporting and data management. But most of these use cases are still experimental in nature. This helps to explain why only a limited number of external parties have so far been involved in the development of suptech tools. This underscores the need for further international coordination and collaboration to help open up the field of suptech.

Bitcoin trading volume among the top ten biggest bitcoin and crypto exchanges has fallen to under $200 million a day, according to bitcoin and crypto data company Messari, down 20-fold from a peak of $4 billion per day just a few months ago.

Binance U.S. holds its customer's USD deposits in "pooled custodial accounts" maintained in a manner that provides access to pass-through FDIC insurance coverage up to the depositor coverage limit, which is currently $250,000.

Telegram will have to wait to make its case to the U.S. SEC that its Gram token is not a security. According to the latest court filing, the hearing on the case has been postponed until Feb. 18-19, 2020, pushed forward from an Oct. 24. slot.