Crowd Valley was invited to be part of the Middle East's largest technology conference, GITEX, in Dubai from 16-20 October 2016. Crowd Valley's CTO Paul Higgins attended alongside executives from Blockchain, PayPal, the US Department of Homeland Security and many other banks and funds looking to bring the latest innovations in fintech, cybersecurity and digital infrastructure to their financial services operations.
Insurance has remained fundamentally unchanged for centuries. It has been described as one of the least trusted industry sectors with the lowest level of user satisfaction. Accordingly, to Daniel Schreiber, Lemonade CEO, the cause of this consumer unfriendliness is in the traditional structure of insurance: every dollar insurance company pays for their customers is directly taken away from their profits, which makes insurance company’s interest directly contrary to its customer’s interest.
The Emirates may have been less responsive than others to take action on the disruption happening with financial technology, but in the last year, along with the growing enthusiasm showed by the local environment of finance pioneers and investors, we have seen a good number of new initiatives that should catalyze the local digital finance market to scale.
Thomson Reuter’s Practical Law division published an article that provides a comprehensive review of the 60 crowdfunding offerings that were filed within the first two months of Regulation Crowdfunding becoming effective on May 16, 2016. This publication contains highlights and a more detailed analysis of a nascent, but promising sector.
Financial technology adoption has been incredibly fast in the most advanced economies, but it’s a totally different story for what concerns emerging countries, where the penetration of digital finance services is still very low. The good news for those economies, and for those looking to do business there, is that the potential growth is now extraordinary, thanks to the level of smartphone penetration.
Having the opportunity to interact with digital finance professionals and innovators from around the world gives Crowd Valley a strong insight into market trends. These trends give a fantastic overview into market demand that is shaped by investors, borrowers, financial institutions and regulators alike.
Germany recently received quite bad news that could affect its economy and financial system. In order to settle the claims in the diesel emissions scandal, Volkswagen agreed to pay about $15 billion to the US authorities and Deutsche Bank, the country’s largest bank, received a $14 billion charge (pending final settlement), again from the US authorities, for mis-selling residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) in the 2008 financial crisis. However, we will see its not all bad news for Germany. In the second quarter of 2016, the investments received by VC-backed German financial technology companies, have been 80% higher than those for UK ventures, and its fintech ecosystem is now growing at a good pace.
“In the U.S., 33 percent of millennials (ages 15-34) believe that within next five years they will not even need a bank”. - McKinsey & Company. Global Payments 2015: A Healthy Industry Confronts Disruption.
It is difficult to conceive a reality where banks stand redundant and, while the probability of such a happening is highly unlikely, a large number of individuals globally are adopting a new set of expectations for the infrastructure that supports their pecuniary activities on a p2p, p2b level, e-commerce, or for cross border transactions. Fintech has not been on the radar in Spain long, it was long not known by most of the people and with just 50 financial technology companies, and with few successes. But things have improved quite rapidly and accordingly to Fintech Radar Spain 2016, prepared by Finnovista, the sector can now count 208 startups, with a 400% increase in just three years, and few players that are making waves.
In a post published on our blog last year, we described Islamic Finance as 'one of the next frontiers of crowdfunding', saying that we could certainly expect to see more and more ‘digital investing conducted under Islamic Finance principles’.
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