Everything about blockchain

Successful Cooperation: What Banks and Fintechs Need to Consider

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.

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Classification of Blockchain-Based Applications: A Conceptualization from a User Perspective

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.

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An Analytics Marketplace for SMEs

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.

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The Business Side of the Blockchain Map

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.

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The Technical Side of the Blockchain Map

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.

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The BlockWiki – the Blockchain Explained

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.

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20 Years Agile Manifesto – An Overview of the Values & Principles

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.

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The Robo-Advisor – A Substitute for the Human Investment Advisor?

In my last post, I explained what characteristics distinguish the robo-advisory process from that of traditional client advice provided by a human advisor. Today, I explain how exactly these characteristics affect the traditional client advisory process and change it to create the robo-advisory process that I presented in the third post of this series. Finally, I answer the question of which of the two advisory processes is the better one.

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What Distinguishes a Robo-Advisor?

In my last post, I detailed the customer advisory processes for a human advisor and a robo-advisor. Today I explain what causes these differences. This step is important to be able to understand and explain the differences between the two advisory processes and then, in a next step, to be able to derive the impact of robo-advisory services and to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of robo-advisors compared to the traditional customer advisory process.

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Robo-Advisors vs. Traditional Customer Advisors

My last post before the Christmas break was about which business models and strategies a robo-advisor can align its offering with. Today, I will present the customer advisory processes of traditional, human banking advisory services and robo-advisors. In the rest of the series, I will then discuss the impact caused by robo-advisors which form of advisory is better and whether robo-advisors will be able to replace bank advisors in the near future.

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What Is a Robo-Advisor and Why Should We Care?

In the course of the change from a personalized customer experience at a bank to the desire for standardized and digitized processes, “robo-advisors” are becoming increasingly important. Today’s article looks at how robo advisory services are defined and how they came into being, whether they are serious competition for banks, and what stage of development robo-advisors are at now.

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FinTech landscape in Switzerland: Blockchain and DLT

With a share of 10% of all FinTech companies in Europe, Switzerland is one of the leading innovation centers. The focus on distributed ledger technology is striking in Switzerland, especially in Crypto Valley Zug. In the meantime, 250 crypto companies have already settled there or are planning a location. However, Switzerland cannot rest on its laurels: to remain a leading innovation center, it constantly needs new FinTechs with innovative ideas. In order to identify gaps in the existing range of Swiss blockchain FinTechs and thus the innovation potential for further services, I analyze in this article the current service offering of the Swiss blockchain FinTech scene.

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Augmented Reality in Education and the Financial Sector

The current corona virus situation has shown us that we are capable of taking big steps in digitalization in a very short time in the education sector. Digital methods have already found their way into schools and universities, but this sometimes hesitant development was reinforced to an unprecedented degree by the homeschooling required during the peak of the pandemic. Collaborative platforms have grown enormously, and new teaching and learning formats have been introduced in the form of explanatory videos and virtual lessons or group work. One technology, or rather a concept that has been largely ignored so far, but which offers great potential for improving both digital and face-to-face teaching, is augmented reality (AR), the enrichment of reality with virtual content.

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Open Banking White Paper – The Future of Collaboration in Corporate Banking

According to a survey, 90% of bankers are convinced that open banking can increase the organic growth of banks by 10%[1]. A global banking survey also found that 86% of banks plan to use open APIs in the next 12 months to enable open banking capabilities[2]. To address this development and better understand the opportunities and implications of the trend towards opening up a banks’ own IT infrastructure, the Business Engineering Institute and Commerzbank have jointly authored an open banking white paper on the future of corporate banking collaboration. In this white paper, we explored the overarching questions of what the open banking concept is all about and how it will change value creation, particularly in corporate banking.

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Open Banking Summit 2020 – Opportunities and Implementation Scenarios for Open Banking in Switzerland

Recently, the Swiss Bankers Association published an overview that outlines the status of open banking in Switzerland and formulates requirements for its further development of open banking. These requirements include the clear strategic positioning of Swiss banks and the joint development of standardized APIs for data exchange between financial institutions and third-party providers. The aim of this overview is to “support the dialogue in the financial center”, as Richard Hess writes in the initial contribution to the blog parade of the Swiss Bankers Association. The Open Banking Summit of the standardization initiative OpenBankingProject.ch pursued the same goal on September 10th, with various presentations focusing on these two requirements.

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Effects of the Coronavirus Pandemic on the Financial Industry

Since the beginning of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has caused an enormous slump in the global economy due to lockdowns all over the world. The IMF expects global GDP to decline by 5%, and for the euro zone it is likely to be as much as 10.2% [1] – and these are the figures before a possible second wave. It remains to be seen how the economy will recover. What can already be well assessed, on the other hand, are the qualitative effects of the pandemic on the macro trends relevant to the financial industry.

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The Convergence of Distributed Ledger Technology and Artificial Intelligence Exemplified by the Lending Process (Part 3)

In the first two contributions to this three-part series, we have shown that the simultaneous use of distributed ledger technology and artificial intelligence can improve today’s lending process in many ways. However, the lending process is only one of many processes that can potentially benefit from the merging of DLT and AI. In the following we have compiled the process characteristics that indicate that a process leads to the convergence of the two technologies and can therefore be optimized by them.

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The Convergence of Distributed Ledger Technology and Artificial Intelligence Exemplified by the Lending Process (Part 2)

Technological convergence means that two or more technologies merge into a single system that is more powerful than each of the technologies individually. Since AI and DLT are technologies that have some opposing characteristics (e.g., centrality vs. decentralization; transparency vs. black box), the two technologies complement each other and can compensate for crucial weaknesses of the other. Since the lending process is one of the main processes in the banking business and involves both communication and data analysis (AI) and the transmission of sensitive data (DLT), it is ideally suited for a practical examination of both the prerequisites and the effects of technological convergence.

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The Convergence of Distributed Ledger Technology and Artificial Intelligence Exemplified by the Lending Process (Part 1)

The distributed ledger technology (DLT) and artificial intelligence (AI) are two promising technologies that are at the top of their hype cycle. Scientists assume that the convergence of the blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence offers considerable opportunities, such as accelerating the pace of service, process and business model innovations. However, the information available in the current literature and research on how such an integration could be implemented in practice is still sparse. Over the next week, this series of articles will explore how specific elements of DLT and AI can be combined to achieve potential technological convergence, and what significance this convergence has for the lending process.

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