Technology: FlashFX

Blockchain is not just for Bitcoin - it is a digital ledger of transactions

Blockchain sounds like a solution to a 19th-century railway problem, but lately, it’s on the lips of every executive who wants to solve the problem of 21st-century digital transactions. Blockchain technology is a way of recording and storing digital transactions. It’s a distributed ledger that allows transactions from

Blockchain

Embracing Blockchain for Payments

Payments are one area where banks should completely embrace blockchain to compete with fintech challengers and to expand their market share. The existing payments infrastructure used by banks faces multiple challenges relating to security, speed and cost. No wonder, Santander Group executive chairman, Ana Botín believes that her bank’s

Australia

The quiet engine powering Australia’s innovation boom

Not that long ago, building a global company was reserved for large incumbents and heavily capitalised start-ups. But that’s changing. Instead of needing millions in the bank or being based in the heart of Silicon Valley, the internet — and the tools it enables — are empowering a new generation of

Ripple

Ripple Continues to Bring Internet of Value to Life

When faced with the issues of today’s antiquated cross-border payment system, we often focus on the difficulties of scalability with banks struggling to handle the volume of transactions, causing it to take three to five days to complete. In a time where you can send a text message to

Digital Currency

The future of banking: four scenarios

The fact that the financial services industry, and especially banking, is going through the greatest disruption since the arrival of computers in the 60s is now universally accepted. The advent of digital technology and, more importantly, its adoption by customers is changing the fundamentals of the business. This isn’t

Currency Conversion

Fastest, most affordable currency transfers from Australia to Europe

Australian startup FlashFX was designed from the ground up to outperform traditional financial institutions by providing fast, secure and very affordable foreign exchange conversion services as an alternative to the existing opaque, siloed and inefficient banking networks. And it does so without the hidden fees typically imposed by the banks.

Ripple

Ripple Selected to Participate in the Bank of England FinTech Accelerator’s Exploration

The Bank of England’s FinTech Accelerator announced that it is conducting a PoC with Ripple to demonstrate cross-border payments and settlement using two different Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) systems. The goal of this PoC is to showcase the synchronised movement of two different currencies across two different RTGS

Currency Conversion

"...So easy to use compared to the banks"

"Used FlashFX transfer yesterday. Money is in the Irish bank account this morning. It's so quick compared to the banks. Saved $136 compared to my bank. Awesome stuff. Love the GUI too, so easy to use compared to the banks." John C Sydney If you are looking for

Australia

Top 5 FinTech and Banking Trends for 2017

* FinTech competition will drive banking transformation. * Continued shift from in-branch to digital channels. * Customer service will be the most important differentiator for banks. Banks should especially be worried about the fact that 33% of millennials don’t believe they’ll need a bank in the next 5 years, and almost

Ripple

Ripple Supports Efforts to Drive Thoughtful Regulation

Innovation in banking often results from the convergence of three key domains: financial services, technology, and regulations. The regulatory framework is a crucial aspect of innovation. When crafted in a balanced, proactive way, regulations can directly drive positive innovation and market competition. This is why Ripple has been an active

Technology

Building a Better Banking Customer Experience

Analysts at leading firms agree that customer experience is the new battleground to differentiate and compete. After all, a “delightful” and frictionless customer experience yields increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, advocacy and customer lifetime value. One of the biggest CX trends in financial organisations around the world is digital transformation, which

FinTech

What is FinTech?

According to Morningstar "FinTech companies are businesses that leverage new technology to create new and better financial services for both consumers and businesses. It includes companies of all kinds that may operate in personal financial management, insurance, payment, asset management, etc..." These start-up companies compete directly with traditional

Blockchain

Lessons From Bank of Canada's First Blockchain Project

Carolyn Wilkins, the senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, where she oversees the central bank's strategic planning and economic and financial research, looks back on key takeaways from nearly six months of distributed ledger learnings. She writes "It's not surprising that central banks have developed a keen

Blockchain

“It’s Time for Blockchain Use Cases to Be Proven and Come to Market”

While 2016 was the year of firms and governments experimenting with blockchain technology, 2017 should be the year we see use cases being proven and actually coming to market, according to Abdul Naushad, chairman and founder of PayCommerce. "So much venture capital money has been pumped into the market

FinTech

A Framework for FinTech: The Whitehouse

At the White House FinTech Summit in June 2016, Cabinet Secretaries and senior officials from across the Administration engaged with stakeholders about the potential for fintech to further myriad policy goals, including small business access to capital, financial inclusion and health, domestic growth, and international development. At the same event,

Australia

We already love mobile banking, so how can it get better?

Australians love to moan about banks, but it turns out we're actually fairly content with the current approach to mobile banking. The chart below shows the percentage of customers who are either very satisfied or fairly satisfied with mobile banking apps for the 10 biggest banks, according to Roy Morgan.

Exchange Rates

Business chiefs more cautious in 2017: Ai Group

Fresh from a year that delivered major political shocks and proved tougher than expected, Australian business leaders are taking a cautious approach to 2017. Fewer chief executives expect to see business conditions improve than a year ago, though there are more forecasting a stable environment, according to the latest CEO

Innovation

The world is edging closer to becoming cashless

Vendor and customer payment services company Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski writes in Wired that In 2010, 40 per cent of Swedish retail transactions were made using cash; by 2014 it was down to 20 percent and it's still falling. E-commerce, in contrast, is growing. The huge impact of innovative finance-tech

FinTech

The Traditional Payments Player Role In The FinTech World

As the payments ecosystem continues to evolve, FinTechs are leading the charge in transforming everything from operational efficiencies to business models, and especially the customer experience. But how do the industry’s incumbents fit into the new world of payments? Joby Orlowsky, VP of business growth and development for Discover

FinTech

Building a fintech ecosystem: Why customer experience should come first

If banks weren’t already feeling the pressure from financial technology (fintech) startups, they should be now: Fintech companies are officially mainstream. A report conducted by the tech company LinkedIn, the advisory firm Capgemini and the non-profit Efma found that half of banking customers around the world now use at

Currency

How the world's currencies got their names

From the pound to the peso, the ruble to the lira - you may think the names of currencies have nothing in common. A recent blog post from the Oxford Dictionaries website showed that many of the names the world uses for its money have similar origins. Read more in

Currency Conversion

Fed Distributed Ledger Tech Report Singles Out Interledger

In the latest report from the Federal Reserve Board on “distributed ledger technology in payments, clearing, and settlement,” the future use of distributed financial technology looks more certain than ever. The exhaustive document details potential and known use cases, the path to adoption for new solutions and legal issues and

FinTech

The world's best Fintech conferences and expos to attend in 2017

The massive growth of the financial technology industry rolled along in 2016 due to a host of new financial industry trends and numerous fintech investments. With all that growth, it's crucial for anyone in the financial industry to stay educated in order to get ahead of the pack. Fortunately, there

FinTech

The Future of Banking: Growth of innovative banking fintech services

Banking is a rapidly changing industry, and the biggest paradigm shift that has occurred is the move to digital-only banks. Millennials, in particular, are moving more frequently toward digital banking. And as a result, they're walking into their banks' traditional brick-and-mortar branches less often than ever before. This shift to

Digital Currency

FlashFX Uses Ripple and XRP

Ripple announces the launch of a brand new foreign exchange payments solution by FlashFX to improve cross-border payments in Australia. Built on Ripple and using its digital currency XRP for liquidity, FlashFX delivers transparency, near real-time settlement and transactional control to users, while cutting the cost of international payments. FlashFX