Kiffmeister’s Fintech Daily Digest 12/23/2019

~ kiffmeister
  • According to the People’s Bank of China’s Mu Changchun, the top-level design, standard formulation, functional research and development, joint debugging and testing has been completed, and its CBDC is ready for pilot testing.
  • “The world’s growing appetite for physical assets such as paper dollars and gold, coupled with the continued interest in cryptocurrencies and other traditional currency alternatives, merely confirms that faith in artificially levitated markets is approaching a tipping point. Meanwhile the world’s “top 0.001%ers” continue to quietly cash out, literally, and put their Benjamins in secret vaults in the middle of somewhere, even as central banks do everything in their power to reduce the amount of physical currency in circulation and replace it with easily trackable digital alternatives.”
  • A Fed website dedicated to the central bank’s payment processing services put up a notice at 9:57 am. New York time on Thursday stating, “the FedACH Services application began experiencing disruption on December 18 at 3:30 p.m.
  • 2019 was an excellent year for fintechs in terms of exposure and raising awareness among the majority of the population about what fintechs are and what potential they hold for the regular citizens. In 2019 we saw a major spike in the number of fintech, in the funding of these fintechs and the collaborations between these startups and the larger, more traditional institutions.
    tags: Fintech
  • So, what happened in open banking 2019? In Australia, open banking is finally launched; Payments NZ in New Zealand launches open banking APIs and ther NZ banks follow; Mexico continues to be the hot spot for LATAM; Brazil launches open banking model; Additional API offerings launched in Malaysia to further enrich the open banking market there; US banks begin conversations on open banking and to develop open banking ‘like’ APIs; the Central Bank of Nigeria places open banking on its Payments Vision Statement (PSV) 2030 to become the next EMEA country to implement open banking; and Bahrian makes claim to implementing open banking.
  • As of the end of 2019, Congress has introduced 21 bills addressing cryptocurrency and blockchain policy that could be considered in 2020 by the second year of the 116th Congress. Indeed, U.S. legislators have been busy examining the landscape of how this new technology has been and could be impacting businesses, consumers, and society at large.
  • Kraken were hoping to use Wyoming’s somewhat indulgent “blockchain” laws — largely written by the crypto industry — to get a local banking charter. They hoped to use this as a back door into New York state — without getting the New York BitLicense they’d normally need.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Published by kiffmeister

The Kiffmeister is a former Senior Financial Sector Expert at the International Monetary Fund.