In the era of Industry 4.0, the world has become progressively interconnected and digital. The trend is increasingly moving toward a decentralized information technology infrastructure, often using blockchain technology. In this blog post, you will learn about the three types of (de)centralization and the advantages of decentralization.
Continue reading »
Both technical and associated organizational decentralization are taking on an ever-increasing role due to the disruptive technologies DLT and blockchain, and continue to advance as new use cases and application areas are established. A new and increasingly growing trend are decentralized aut
Continue reading »
One of the biggest challenges in this context is the handling of bank-specific and personal data and its processing by artificial intelligence (AI). The basis of data-driven services is a high-quality and up-to-date database. But not all companies have a large enough database to train an algorithm, and the sharing and basic use of some data is strictly limited – sometimes even within the company. To counteract these problems, the concept of synthetic data has become established.
Continue reading »
The topic of digital assets has finally reached the mainstream. The potential for services that make it easier for customers to acquire digital assets is great, but so far only a few financial institutions offer such services. According to the banks, there are many reasons for the lack of a comprehensive offering, e.g. concerns about the value of digital assets, high scepticism regarding money laundering or a lack of know-how in the operational handling of the new asset class. This blog post addresses the last point and aims to show that there are various operational implementation options for a basic digital asset offering for regulated banks.
Continue reading »
Since 2017, the Core Banking Radar has regularly analyzed the most common as well as emerging core banking systems in Switzerland using a comprehensive assessment model[1]. The latest publication highlights the Estonian neo-system Tuum and shows success factors for its use. The Core Banking Radar is a joint project of Swisscom and the Business Engineering Institute St. Gallen.
Continue reading »
To preserve our world for future generations, we must take action now to stop global warming. The interesting question is how to achieve this. If you consider that CO2 emissions are largely caused directly or indirectly by us consumers, you could assume that we would have to do away with the customer. “Traditional sustainability makes the customer the enemy.” This is where the concept of the Circular Economy comes in, with its concept of decoupling growth and resource consumption. In contrast to linear value creation with its “take-make-use-dispose” concept, the Circular Economy relies on a regenerative system, a circular economy in which the concept of “waste” no longer exists.
Continue reading »
Cloud solutions are faster, more flexible and less expensive than on-premise solutions. However, the best-known cloud infrastructures – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and IBM’s Red Hat – all have one thing in common: they are headquartered in the USA and are therefore subject to the (decidedly lax) US data protection “law”. This makes using the services difficult from a data protection perspective, especially for financial institutions. The European Gaia-X project could be a real alternative.
Continue reading »
When attempting to assess the potential of tokens for their business, decision makers face the challenge that while there are tons of technical literature on token design, there are no simple decision support tools to help identify suitable use cases for their own business.
Therefore, we conducted a study to derive archetypes that can be observed in a variety of existing token-based solutions. These archetypes provide companies with an initial starting point for addressing the benefits and potential applications of token-based solutions.
The credibility of data in the supply chain is often questioned. Using distributed ledger technology in this context is proving to be a promising use case in various industries.
Continue reading »
For a long time, fintechs were seen as a direct threat and competitor to traditional banks due to their high innovative capacity and the disruption potential attributed to them. In recent years, however, it has become apparent that both fintechs and banks are more interested in cooperation than in competition. However, there are factors that can cause a cooperation between a bank and a fintech to fail. How to prevent this is the topic of this article.
Continue reading »
The second Open Banking Summit in Switzerland took place at the end of August – a good opportunity to take another look at what is currently happening in the Swiss open banking scene.
Continue reading »
61 % of Germans would obtain financial services from an online retailer. In contrast, 65% of German banks do not see their customer interface threatened. The situation is similar when it comes to the question of whether banks see themselves threatened by disruption from digital competitors, with 68% answering in the negative. In view of these contradictory figures, the question arises as to whether German banks are in the process of missing out on one of the most disruptive trends in banking: Embedded Finance.
Continue reading »
The concept of business ecosystems has become established in the context of corporate operations in recent years. Business ecosystems seem to provide a particularly advantageous foundation in times of uncertainty and diverse customer needs. Often, companies that orchestrate value creation among the different actors are considered to play a prominent role when it comes to enabling business ecosystems. The question, however, is what factors are necessary for an orchestrator to be able to build a business ecosystem business model. In the following, I provide insight into the results my master’s thesis, which identifies such factors from an orchestrator’s perspective.
Continue reading »
Claims such as “robo advisors will replace bankers” or “banks will have disappeared” could be read frequently over the last decade in connection with accelerated digitization. However, we don’t notice much of this in Europe. Is the fintech movement really a revolution or rather an evolution?
Continue reading »
How do you decide whether you want to participate in an ecosystem? And if so, in which position? This article offers a first clue.
Continue reading »
This article shows, by way of example in the area of housing, how various services can be meaningfully combined in an ecosystem in order to comprehensively address a customer need.
Continue reading »
Insurtechs are constantly making news in the financial world. Whether they are seen as the big competitor to insurers, exploiting the limping digitalization of the big players, or helping conventional insurers to arrive in the 21st century, startups are bringing a breath of fresh air to the industry through new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) or natural language processing (NLP). Due to the abundance of new services and business models, it is appealing from both an entrepreneurial and scientific perspective to gain an overview of the structure and innovative capacity of the market.
Continue reading »
Despite many known advantages, it is still difficult, especially for practitioners, to identify concrete application areas for blockchain-based applications. This article takes this as its starting point and presents a sector-independent typology of application fields, which not only serves to analyze existing blockchain applications, but also provides users with an orientation as to which general possible uses there are for the blockchain and how complex an initial implementation of the respective applications can turn out to be.
Continue reading »
Sustainability is on everyone’s lips and now impacts all regions and sectors of the global economy. Increasingly, financial industry stakeholders, including customers, investors, suppliers and regulators, expect financial services providers to play an active role in financing the transition from a linear economy to a circular economy. ESG criteria are a tool for companies to become more sustainable and to comply with the regulatory efforts of policymakers and regulators.
Continue reading »
For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), AI offers enormous potential for scaling and increasing efficiency, but for these companies in particular there is no alternative to using GAFA services because they themselves lack, for example, machine learning knowledge or the necessary data to train algorithms. An analytics marketplace could solve these challenges.
Continue reading »
Two weeks ago, we introduced the BlockWiki here on the blog, a website where we compile and explain the most important blockchain and DLT terms. The blockchain map, a graphical summary of blockchain terms, can also be purchased there. The overview differentiates between the technical and the business view of the Blockchain. After the left side with the technical view was described in detail in the blog post “The Technical Side of the Blockchain Map”, in this article we focus on the business view of the blockchain universe and explain the terms depicted there within their context.
Continue reading » In our last blog post, “The BlockWiki – The Blockchain Explained,” we introduced the BlockWiki, a compilation of blockchain terms and research on blockchain and distributed ledger technology. One component of the BlockWiki is the Blockchain Map, which graphically depicts the technical background, various uses and functions of the technology. It is divided into two sections: technical view and business view. In this blog post, the focus will be on explaining the elements of the technical side.
Continue reading »
The blockchain is gaining more and more attention and importance worldwide and across industries. Although there is a broad field of application behind this technology on both the technical and economic side, the terms surrounding blockchain in research are not entirely consistent and often unclear. The BlockWiki is a website where relevant terms regarding the blockchain are explained and related to each other and can therefore be used as a reference tool by anyone interested in the blockchain.
Continue reading »
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto, I would like to take another look at the central concepts of the document. Because even after this long time, the values and principles contained represent the basic tenets of the agile working method and can be found in many different agile methods, such as Scrum, Kanban or SAFe.
Continue reading »
In my lecture, “The Tokenization of Everything,” I explore the topic of tokenization starting from the concept all the way to the status quo of the token economy. The lecture was created as part of the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center’s Industry Insights series.
Continue reading »