Future Finance

Finextra and Oracle have gathered together some of the industry's top thought leaders to discuss, debate and analyse the key trends and issues within transaction banking, regulations and retail banking. This group will focus on upcoming regulations, new service offerings and industry debate shaping the new financial services landscape with regular blog posts, video interviews, webcasts debates and surveys.

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Revisiting Bitcoin - initial experience and questions

I first read about Bitcoin a number of years ago, and was intrigued. I scanned Satoshi Nakamoto's initial whitepaper that kicked it all off, and looked into the burgeoning scene emerging around Bitcoin mining - generating the proof-of-work required to discover a particular hash value to generate a new valid coin by expending CPU power and electric...

14 November 2013 /payments

Retired Member 

Development of Retail Banking in Asia

The Asian Retail banking business has developed rapidly in the past two decades as both economies and businesses have increased in sophistication and wealth. Japan is still the largest retail banking market in Asia, however, China will surpass Japan to be the largest in Asia in 2015. Although China’s market potential is huge, the retail banking ma...

12 November 2013

Dan Barnes Writer at Information Corporation

Bank lending puts the lie to 'economically useful'

Ockham’s Razor is one of the sharpest tools in the box of a journalist. The razor is a figurative tool, which identifies the truth as being the view that includes the fewest assumptions. The phrase “Just the facts Ma’am” sums up the implicit rejection of assumptions nicely. Applying the razor to the challenge that authorities and regulators face i...

08 November 2013

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

It's hard to pick a winner in the future of payments

PayPal has been doing a fair bit of engagement over the past 5 years with its burgeoning developer community and reaching out to start-ups, as you would expect from any mature, successful Silicon Valley company. In its most recent program it is itself nominating candidate startups to receive up to $50,000 in waived processing fees by way of suppor...

06 November 2013 /payments

Dan Barnes Writer at Information Corporation

News analysis: There is no 'B' in 'P2P'

The news that US financial services firms are beginning to use peer-to-peer or person-to-person (P2P) platforms as a method of reaching borrowers is a bit concerning. More worrying is that P2P loans are being sold on and securitised. Q: What is P2P lending? A: P2P platforms typically bring together individual lenders to invest in loans to individua...

04 November 2013 /regulation /retail

Dan Barnes Writer at Information Corporation

The risk of outsourcing credit checks

A detail sprang out at me in the recent investigation into Mizuho Bank’s accidental funding of organised criminals in Japan. The bank funded loans via an associated firm, Orico, which acted as the lender, and had in turn outsourced the background checks it ran on customers. It turned out the background checks had not picked up on the criminality o...

04 November 2013 /regulation /retail

Retired Member 

The Role of Online Banking in Asia

Over the past 3 years, online banking in Asia has been growing rapidly. A recent survey indicates that the usage of Internet banking has increased by 28% across Asia in the past five years, and the frequency of online banking usage actually surpassed branch banking in 2012, meaning that people in Asia access their account more online today than th...

04 November 2013

Retired Member 

Viva la 'bitcoin' revolucion!

The future of money is a decentralised, unregulated, completely digital currency. I feel like the only thing that anyone’s talking about now is bitcoin. Bitcoin ATMs, the Silk Road shutdown, the man who just bought a house with his long-forgotten bitcoin investment. It reminds me of the BitTorrent protocol. At its core, an innovative and efficient...

01 November 2013 /retail

Retired Member 

International banks moving into Shanghai Free Trade Zone?

Over the past few weeks, the Shanghai Free Trade Zone (FTZ) has captured business headlines here in China and abroad as discussion continues about the impact that the zone will have on reform in China. As of October 30th, 208 companies have registered in the zone in just under one month, notably 36 in the asset management sector. One of the early ...

30 October 2013

Tushar Chitra Vice President, Product Strategy and Marketing at Oracle Financial Services Software

Financial Inclusion: Obligation or Opportunity?

Why should banks care about financial inclusion? First, the statistics, I think this will set the tone for this blog post. There are close to 2.5 billion people who are excluded from the banking stream and out of this, 2.2 billion people are from the continents of Africa, Latin America and Asia (McKinsey on Society: Global Financial Inclusion). How...

29 October 2013