Tokenization has become a key trend with digital currencies and cryptostrategies in financial services. Tokens seem to be raising hundreds of millions in real time left and right. For an existing financial services firm, should you look at a token strategy and if so, how should you look at it? 

With the advent of PSD2 in Europe, financial services companies have embarked on their Open Banking initiatives, which are set for full swing in 2018. Banks have been writing and exposing APIs for third parties to pull data and perform actions on the banks platforms through these APIs in order to provide more customer facing service innovation. For many banks this is the final step for complying with the PSD2 regulation, but the reality is that it’s only the very first step in the total transformation to an open financial services ecosystem. 

Creating the Europe-wide framework for alternative finance is the ambitious objective of the European Commission (EC) with a new legislative proposal, part of the Capital Market Union action plan approved in 2015, that is now at the assessment stage and open for comments and feedback from the interested parties, until November 27, 2017.

A great disruption is underway in financial services, yet it’s still open who will come out on top in each distinct category of offerings. Will it be the institutions modernizing their fundamental approach to financial services or will it be digital native, technology firms that enter the sector to give clients the service they want? 

Crowd Valley is invited to speak at the Future of AI in Finance, part of the Hong Kong Fintech Week 2017, the leading financial technology event in Asia, that will take place on October 26 and 27, with over 3,000 senior financial executives and business leaders from more than 30 countries. Crowd Valley’s Chairman Jouko Ahvenainen will represent the company at the event.

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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