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.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day