Crypto fever seems to have broken. That was a big takeaway last week from the Paris Fintech Forum, one of the biggest annual gatherings of its kind in Europe.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, about 3,000 entrepreneurs, investors, bankers and regulators descended on the neo-classical Palais Brongniart, once home to the stock exchange.
Last year, with bitcoin and its imitators soaring, attendees jammed discussions on blockchain technology.
“I nearly lost my whole team to cryptocurrencies,” said Will Andrich, the chief executive officer of Switzerland’s Thaler.One, which says it creates real-estate-backed digital securities.
No such problem this year.
With the top 10 crypto assets down 80 percent in the past 12 months and skepticism mounting, many fintech professionals said that the technology might not be ready for prime time, especially in a heavily regulated industry.
Instead, the conference was about getting back to banking basics. Sessions on building branchless lenders were standing-room only, investors buzzed about how this year could be a banner dealmaking year and the most controversial moment came at a panel on old-fashioned lending.
With Europe’s new payments law now requiring banks to share customer account data with fintech firms, the prevailing vibe was that there is plenty of action without messing around with crypto.
Perhaps nothing drove that point home more than the face-off between Swift chief executive officer Gottfried Leibbrandt and Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of San Francisco’s Ripple Labs Inc.
Swift is a 46-year-old cooperative that directs trillions of US dollars in cross-border payments between thousands of banks.
Garlinghouse has repeatedly vowed to leapfrog Swift’s 1970s-conceived system with a faster, cheaper blockchain-like one.
“I look at the dynamic between Ripple and Swift, and I liken it to Amazon and Wal-Mart,” Garlinghouse said on Wednesday to a packed auditorium.
Leibbrandt countered, saying that for two years, Swift’s latest payment standard revitalized its system, letting customers track a payment like a FedEx package and cutting transfer times to hours.
Unlike Ripple, which has struggled to sign up major banks, Leibbrandt said the world’s top 60 lenders are utilizing its technology, which is already embraced by regulators.
“Banks are not ready for a model where you convert into a crypto and then convert back again,” Leibbrandt said. “It’s not clear to us that blockchain is better than what we have today.”
Last week, the hot fintech jargon was “banking as a service.” A more apt moniker might be “bank in a box”: These ventures create digital versions of products ranging from debit cards to money transfer to account-management tools, which customers can rebrand as their own.
Antony Jenkins, the former CEO of Barclays PLC, runs an outfit called 10x, which has made inroads in this space.
“We’re commoditizing everything that a bank does,” said Brad van Leeuwen, head of partnerships at London-based Railsbank Ltd.
Railsbank, whose slogan is “banking in five lines of code,” is taking advantage of the spread of inexpensive open source software and cloud computing.
Things were less rosy in the online lending space. The underwhelming initial public offering and share slump by Funding Circle Holdings PLC, the No. 1 peer-to-peer loans outfit in the UK, cast a pall.
Then there is Brexit.
Christian Faes, the CEO and cofounder of mortgage lender LendInvest Ltd, said his firm is originating between £20 million and £30 million (US$26 million and US$39 million) per month in loans to residential landlords after moving into the market in 2017, with funding from Citigroup Inc.
He would like to expand into mainstream mortgages, too, but it is harder to attract backers now, he said.
“The market for institutional money has been shut down until Brexit is sorted out,” Faes said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last