Xinja launches equity crowdfunding with partner Equitise
Crowdfunding is about to become reality with Xinja today unveiling plans that allow everyday Australians to directly join the digital banking revolution through the Equitise crowdfunding platform. Xinja’s full retail crowdfunding round follows the passage of national legislation last month that gave the green light to this form of capital raising. Investors will be able to invest as little as $1,000 in Xinja, with at least $500,000 likely to be injected via crowdfunding into the neobank’s current $10 million-$15 million round. Eric Wilson, the Chief Executive of Xinja, said he is very excited that Australian consumers now have the chance to be ground-floor investors in the digital […]
Fintech to link banks, brokers and regulators
Australian fintech MoneyCatcha has partnered with global bank HSBC in a trial of its two blockchain platforms with the aim to improve loan turnaround times and reduce compliance spending for the banks. MoneyCatcha has developed loan processing platform Homechain and regulatory risk review tool Regchain which are both powered through the same internal blockchain engine. The fintech has partnered with HSBC Bank to trial the use of its Regchain software which helps regulators capture and review information from lenders through regular reports detailed at a level that each lender is comfortable with, CEO and founder of MoneyCatcha, Ruth Hatherley told Australian Broker. “We are completely agnostic in terms of how […]
Fintech startup, Trade Ledger, launches world-first tech to help banks fight off global tech giants
Career technologists, Martin McCann and Dr. Matthias Born, are launching a world-first lending tech for banks and traditional lenders that will help to equip them against competition from tech giants such as Facebook, Tencent, and eBay wanting to enter financial services. Trade Ledger is the world’s first business lending platform that transforms digital data from business supply chains in real time, allowing banks to assess and regularly update credit and default risk of businesses they lend to. Currently this is only done on a one-off or infrequent basis on a very small sample of invoices, and not on any other trade documents. The platform will finally give banks more advanced network and data […]
Blockchain gains traction in fintech as payment networks emerge
J.P. Morgan has created what is arguably one of the largest blockchain payments networks to date. The financial services company announced that the Royal Bank of Canada and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. are the first two banks to join the blockchain network, “representing significant cross-border payment volumes.” J.P. Morgan created the Interbank Information Network (IIN), which it said will significantly reduce the number of participants needed to respond to compliance and other data-related inquiries that delay payments. “IIN will enhance the client experience, decreasing the amount of time – from weeks to hours – and costs associated with resolving payment delays,” said Emma Loftus, Head of Global […]
Partnerships driving the local fintech sector
Financial technology startups are growing in Australia, from less than 100 in 2014 to approximately 579 companies today. Many financial businesses see this as a direct threat, but if our country is to have any hope of building a world-class financial services technology industry, the future lies not in competition, but in collaboration. We are already seeing the local attitude change, with a recent PwC report finding that over 82% of financial institutions expect to increase fintech partnerships in the next three to five years. By partnering and collaborating with smaller fintech startups, established companies can accelerate industry growth and push the capabilities of both parties forward. Australia has a […]
Ethereum Founder: Central Banks far from Digital Currency
Vitalik Buterin, the 23-year-old creator of the world’s second biggest digital currency, Ethereum, isn’t worried about coming competition from the central banks of the world. Speaking in Toronto on Tuesday, Buterin downplayed the possibility of countries creating digital versions of their currencies that could rival or displace bitcoin or Ethereum. He said the advent of a national currency based on a blockchain, which is the distributed ledger technology that underpins bitcoin and Ethereum, will take years to launch. “If there is [such a launch] it will be a server and a bunch of marketing buzzwords to make it look like a blockchain,” Buterin said, suggesting central banks lack the ability […]
IBM develops blockchain system for banks
The company expects to process up to 60% of all cross-border payments in the South Pacific by early 2018. International technology company IBM has joined forces with blockchain startup Stellar and payments company KlickEx Group to enable high-speed cross-border payments for banks and other financial institutions. The aim of the payments process is to speed up clearances and settlements on a single network in real time. Blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, is a revolutionary distributed-ledger technology that offers a secure and immediate way of transferring a range of data – more specifically, in this case, currency transactions. IBM’s solution is already active, processing live transactions across 12 different currency corridors […]
Are fintech companies changing the industry for the better?
FinTech is most commonly known as the abbreviation for the term “financial technology” and the name given to an emerging and rapidly growing financial services sector. Financial technology is often used to describe any technological innovations within the financial industry, ranging from banking and investments, all the way through to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. With new technologies come new businesses, and so financial technology companies were born. The question is, however, whether these businesses and the technologies on offer through them are changing the industry for the better, or are they simply a disruption to an already functioning economy? How are fintech companies changing the financial industry? One of the […]
