Retirement fintech makes senior appointment
A financial advice start-up founded by former Challenger executive Paul Rogan has appointed a chief customer officer. Joining Retirement Essentials in the new role is Antoinette Tyrrell. She joins a growing team to lead the ‘direct to consumer’ marketing strategy including brand building, designing the member experience and being responsible for the customer growth plan. The self-described retirement fintech aims to “make advice more affordable and accessible to all Australians, not just the wealthy.” Prior to joining Retirement Essentials, Tyrrell held senior executive roles in consumer marketing and business strategy in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and telecommunications industries across Asia, Africa and South Pacific working for Coca-Cola and Vodafone. […]
Crowd-sourced equity funding to open up for DIY funds
DIY super funds and other investors will soon be able to invest in start-ups and small companies through “crowd-sourced” equity funding platforms. These are the minnow unlisted companies of which some, at least, if only they had access to capital, could go on to great things. From September 29, this year, crowd-sourced platforms will be able to apply for a licence that will enable small investors to invest up to $10,000 per company per year through the platforms. These platforms must perform some basic checks on companies and their directors, as well as on offer documents. Public unlisted companies that are limited by shares with less than $25 million in […]
Perth’s Power Ledger readies first Australia’s first Bitcoin IPO
Power Ledger, the Perth-based peer-to-peer energy trading company, is preparing to launch Australia’s first virtual currency IPO – an “initial coin offering” or ICO. The company, which is trialling community trading of solar energy over a custom private blockchain platform in Western Australia and New Zealand, aims to host a “token generation event” in early September. The amount they are seeking is uncapped and will be determined by demand for Power Ledger’s “POWRS” tokens. Chief executive Dave Martin said that, while they would be satisfied with $5 million, they could raise $10 million or $20 million if demand is strong. POWRs will be tradable on the Ethereum public blockchain platform […]
Blockchain solutions provider DigitalX seeks to slash costs via Minority Holder Sale
Through the minority holder sale, DigitalX hopes to cut the administrative costs associated with maintaining a large number of very small holdings. Australian Blockchain technology company DigitalX Ltd (ASX:DCC) is seeking to reduce costs stemming from maintaining a grand number of small shareholdings. In a filing with the ASX, the company has unveiled its plans to conduct a minority holder share sale of parcels of shares with a market value of less than $500. Let’s note that a “marketable parcel” is a parcel of shares with a market value of not less than $500. DigitalX notes that it “values all its shareholders, however it incurs significant administration costs maintaining such […]
You can use Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin to BPAY your bills
Yes, this will be old hat to some, but you can definitely do more with cryptocurrency than letting it sit in a digital wallet. And you don’t even have to use a chain of different websites to do so. Online, local services exist that let you spend Bitcoin and its progeny directly, including playing bills. The strangely-named Living Room of Satoshi is one service that allows you to pay your bills via BPAY using various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. Amounts are limited to $1000, though you can issue multiple payments for bills greater than the limit. What’s interesting (or disturbing, depending on your point of view) is that LROS […]
What directors need to know about fintech
Since all organisations rely on financial services in some way, directors will need to be cognisant of the changes fintech is bringing as it enters the mainstream. Until relatively recently fintech had been perceived as the esoteric domain of cryptocurrency enthusiasts, but two stories in Australian markets this week highlighted the increasing prominence and mainstreaming of the industry. Big four bank Westpac invested $40m in ASX-listed zipMoney, according to a stock exchange announcement on Monday (7 August). As part of the investment in the Fintech small cap, the bank committed to exploring the rollout of zipMoney’s ‘buy now, pay later’ services across its payments network. On the same day The […]
Microsoft to release open source blockchain framework
Coco Framework promises confidentiality, scalability, and governance.Microsoft has launched the open source Coco Framework for blockchain networks, promising to address key drawbacks for enterprise use of the distributed transaction ledger technology. Blockchain was originally part of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency and was designed for public use with anonymous, untrusted actors and full transaction transparency. This means every participant in the blockchain network would execute all transactions added to it, making them visible to everyone with no confidentiality and unsuitable for enterprise use. Existing blockchain protocols also employ computationally intensive consensus algorithms, leading to poor scalability, with performance as slow as 10 to 20 transactions per second. Microsoft said the Coco Framework […]
Bitcoin hits new record, bitcoin cash fades
Experts say the rally in bitcoin still has a long way to go, after the cryptocurrency reached a new all-time high of $US3525 this week. The latest price surge has been driven by the rise and fall of bitcoin cash – a secondary cryptocurrency – and an update in the underlying bitcoin software, which paves the way for an evolution of the bitcoin blockchain. The update – called SegWit – is the product of months of internal debate within the cryptocurrency community around how to handle the rapid increase in transaction demands. A byproduct of this debate was the creation of bitcoin cash, another coin, duplicated from the original, that […]
