Three-year-old Batman’s cancer fight inspires crowdfunding donations from across country
As three-year-old Eamon Obst puts on his favourite superhero cloak to fight cancer, a village of online supporters is rallying behind him by donating money. In one week, $23,000 has been raised through a crowdfunding appeal on the GoFundMe website. For Adelaide parents Justin and Kathy Obst, the donations will ease the financial pressure to return to work as they juggle Eamon’s hospital treatment with caring for his 12-week-old baby sister Isla. Family friend and campaign organiser Michael Arnold, of Loxton in South Australia, said the response had been overwhelming. “It was unreal. I think people put themselves in Justin and Kathy’s situation,” he said. “A lot of our friends […]
Graham Tuckwell says active managers are threatened by ETFs
Graham Tuckwell, the Australian Rich Lister behind the world’s first gold exchange traded fund (ETF), has slammed the active funds management industry as his firm gears up for a fresh push into the Australian market. Mr Tuckwell spoke to The Australian Financial Review as he prepares to take full control of a suite of exchange traded funds launched as a joint venture with ANZ. The philanthropist and entrepreneur delivered a broadside to the hordes of stock pickers who underperformed their respective benchmarks and were handsomely paid for their services. “There are a huge amount of active managers being paid 1 per cent to 1.5 per cent for matching or even […]
KPMG sees robots taking over tax compliance
When 800 executives were surveyed for a World Economic Forum report published in September 2015, three-quarters said company audits would be performed by artificial intelligence by 2021. A similar proportion reckoned the world would have witnessed the first tax collected via blockchain within that timeframe, while 45 per cent said robots would be occupying places at the board room table. Clearly, the tax profession is ripe for digital disruption. In a new briefing paper, KPMG envisages a world where much tax compliance work is done by machines, leaving humans to pick up the more complex tasks. While computers will do the heavy lifting on the number crunching front, tasks requiring […]
Venture capital 3.0: the initial coin offering explained
The venture capital community thrives on disruption. So what happens when the tables are turned and the medicine bottle has their name on it? There’s a new kid riding onto the financing block – riding roughshod across an unregulated landscape. Welcome to the world of the initial coin offering (ICO). An ICO is a hybrid: part crowdfunding, part software token, part speculation. In simple terms, an ICO is often described, somewhat inaccurately, as an IPO for cryptocurrencies. How it works – A tech start-up team creates an ICO using a blockchain-enabled software platform, usually open sourced. – The platform is powered by cryptography-based software tokens – called cryptocurrencies. – The […]
Frenzy pushes bitcoin to all-time highs
Bitcoin’s price has soared to all-time highs over the past few days, rising above $US1300 late on Friday, then $US1400 yesterday, and even $US1500 on one major exchange, amid a surge of speculative investment across the cryptocurrency sector. Bitcoin has been struggling with a seemingly intractable internecine debate over network scaling, while similar projects have been drawing talent and investment dollars. But the price in 2017 has been generally rising, and rising sharply, amid several factors. Not all of the factors, ultimately, may turn out to be positive. At $US1400, bitcoin would be up 44 per cent for the year to date, according to the Bitcoin Price Index published by […]
Blockchain to create winners and losers
Ordering a pizza is a fairly mundane transaction for many Australians. But when Laszlo Hanyecz convinced a Florida man to deliver two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins in 2010, he made history for the first real-world bitcoin transaction. Today, cryptocurrencies can be used to purchase everything from clothing, technology and homewares to travel, artwork and fine dining. What is most interesting about bitcoin though, is the blockchain technology on which it is based — a revolutionary platform which is spawning applications across a broad array of industry sectors and functions. Just a few examples include smart contracts, neighbourhood microgrids for buying and selling energy, the protection of intellectual property, anti-money laundering […]
China giant Tencent funds Melbourne fintech start-up
Melbourne-based fintech start-up Airwallex has landed a $US13 million Series A funding round, becoming one of the first Australian companies to raise money from China’s biggest internet company, Tencent. Airwallex, which is building a new foreign exchange payment network, raised funding from the world’s fourth-biggest internet company, along with Sequoia Capital China and Mastercard. “We’ve built a digital banking layer and a digital compliance layer across traditional banking infrastructure,” co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang told The Australian. “You can think of us as a payment network; we’re offering a faster, cheaper way of making payments happen.” Airwallex lets businesses issue and pay invoices in their preferred currency at the mid-market […]
Australia to be a cashless society by 2022
Cash is predicted to make up only 2% of all payments within the next five years. If you still pay for your morning coffee with a crisp $5 note, you’re a rare breed and clearly missed the “cash is no longer king” memo. New research shows that the number of cash payments received by Australian merchants has plummeted by 46% between 2010 and 2016 alone and currently makes up less than 10% of all payments. According to the research by market analyst East & Partners, if this trend continues, cash payments across Australian businesses are predicted to fall below 5% by 2019 and below 2% by 2022, creating a virtually […]
