As we’ve followed the trends in server-side applications over the past few years, one of the most significant innovations that is now being promoted heavily by all the major cloud service providers is the concept of “serverless” architectures. Having spent some time over the past few years testing this new approach Crowd Valley’s newest API version, which is being rolled out to selected customers and partners at the moment, will be fully serverless by benefitting from such cloud services as AWS Lambda and Microsoft Azure Functions.

The revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) is set to change the role of banks in the financial services space. PSD2 aims to increase competition, innovation, and transparency in the EU banking sector, by opening up banking APIs to various trusted third-party services. PSD2 mandates banks and payment service providers to facilitate access to user account data and payment initiation via API, meaning that banks may no longer be the sole providers of online banking services, and instead begin acting as back-end utilities for other financial and non-financial service providers.

Crowd Valley has been invited to moderate a panel at the leading event for innovation in financial services, LendIt Europe, in London on October 9-10 on The Coming Regtech Revolution.

Paris Hilton supports an ICO the same week as the People’s Republic of China determines that Initial Coin Offerings or ICOs constitute ‘illegal fundraising.’ Back in the United States, contact with the SEC forces Protostarr to refund their ICO investors. Bitcoin is dubbed ‘the best example of a bubble’ by no other than bubble researcher Robert Shiller. And if Bitcoin isn’t sufficient, TokenMarket is tracking over 335 different types of alternative cryptocurrencies. This is either the best of times or the worst of times for cryptocurrencies. We are on a brave new path or the world is ending, depending on who you ask (cue Jamie Dimon). So should you buy a water purifier and run for the hills, or stay put?
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Big changes are happening in the financial services industry, with Fintech that has experienced a fantastic growth and with financial technology companies now on pace to see the level of investments to reach a new record in 2017. As part of this, there is a case represented by Real Estate, a trillions dollars sector that has been slow to change, which is seeing a wave of innovation with property technology, or Proptech.
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The adoption of open APIs by banks and financial institutions has been steadily growing, as has the ecosystem delivering these services. Companies providing KYC products rank among the most well established services to help financial institutions cut cost, increase scalability and help comply in a more scrupulous regulatory environment. A Thomson Reuters global survey reveals that banks are taking as long as 48 days to onboard a new customer. Also, the banks are spending in excess of $60 million per annum on KYC and client onboarding.

Fintech is growing at an astronomical rate. According to Bloomberg, more than $8 Billion has been raised in Fintech so far in 2017. Also, 5 companies have already joined the “Unicorn” status with values over $1 Billion. We have compiled a list of best Fintech reports for 2017, from some of the leading names in the industry.

"A decade ago we had the first big leap, and that was web to mobile,[…] Now the next one is mobile to conversational” said Edrizio de la Cruz, co-founder and CEO of Regalii, a startup whose application programming interfaces are used by dozens of financial services providers to build their chatbots.
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In between pauses at the WWDC, Apple announced it will be expanding their financial services strategy by going beyond Apple Pay and issuing virtual payment cards to all iOS users. There are 1bn iOS users around the world. At the same time, this same week Amazon made headlines by having lent over $1bn to third party sellers on the Amazon marketplace. Amazon has also rolled out a highly aggressive credit card offer with Chase, which offers 5 per cent cash back for its Prime customers. Neither company is a traditional financial services company. So what is going on?
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As the senators in the United States Congress maneuver a health care bill of massive significance for the insurance industry, let’s a take a closer look at the wave of disruption that has firmly placed the insurance industry and Insurtech in the spotlight of the cross industry technological wave borne out of the great recession.