Posts Tagged: "financial services"

The SEC Defines Blockchain, But Did They Get it Right?

The SEC has landed on a definition which includes both permissioned distributed ledgers and permissionless distributed ledgers in the term “blockchain.” This is not surprising, nor is it necessarily the result of a misinformed view. There are lots of market opportunities and reasons for enterprise permissioned distributed ledgers, as there was always market appetite for permissioned systems in general. These ventures use the term “permissioned blockchain” intentionally and purposefully. After all, the transactions are batched in blocks that are linked to each other. So, there is a chain of blocks, and some kind of consensus protocol. But is that sufficient for a blockchain, really? And what ‘blockchain’ is the SEC referring to when it references “the blockchain”?

Trump nominates financial services inventor Margaret Weichert to serve as OMB’s deputy director of management

Margaret Weichert, Trump’s selection for deputy director of management at the OMB, is an inventor who has received “14 successful U.S. patents,” an indication that someone knowledgeable about patents and the U.S. patent system will have a role in shaping U.S. policy on the budget for the executive branch, including the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. As an inventor and entrepreneur, Weichert’s focus was squarely on financial networking and online transactions.

Lex Machina commercial litigation report shows that one-fifth of commercial cases include IP claims

The total number of intellectual property claims included in all commercial cases is higher than the figure of 11,643 commercial cases including at least one IP claim. “It turns out to be incredibly hard to build a Venn diagram that reflects the types of IP claims included in these commercial cases,” said Brian Howard, Lex Machina data scientist and the author of the commercial litigation report. “It turns out to be its own mini-Venn diagram within a Venn diagram, some of the cases are patent and trademark and commercial, so there’s overlap within that IP circle.” Of the different types of intellectual property claims which are included in commercial litigation, trademark claims are by far the most common, occurring in a total of 8,277 commercial cases; that’s 15 percent of all commercial cases filed since 2009. Copyright claims were brought in a total of 3,260 commercial cases filed since 2009, a total representing about 6 percent of all commercial cases. Patent claims were brought in 2,219 commercial cases, or only about 4 percent of the total.

Goldman Sachs increasing interest in blockchain, develops distributed ledger tech

The concept of the central clearing house in financial systems could be completely obviated with the use of blockchain. Blockchain is a distributed database system that decentralizes the financial ledger; instead of the ledger being held and checked by the clearing house, each member of the blockchain network receives an updated ledger every time a transaction is made on the system. It’s a peer-to-peer system which reduces financial transaction risk through massive redundancy. With every member of the blockchain system holding a copy of the ledger for every transaction that has been completed, going back to the beginning of the blockchain, it becomes easier to identify malicious activity on the financial network or prevent transactions if users don’t have enough cryptocurrency. New transactions are recorded on blocks, which are added to the blockchain. Blockchain systems like bitcoin often reward those in the blockchain system who offer their computing resources to record new blocks; this incentivized process is known as mining.

What’s the big deal: Big data in the financial services sector

Customers, myself included, are used to the customer-centric technologies experienced in other ‘digitized’ sectors like publishing or music – these have had to adapt to the digital revolution early. Customers now want that experience replicated in the FS sector. Banks, for example, are beginning to take notice, investing significant amounts of money in IT upgrades: Australia’s Commonwealth Bank invested over AUD $1.1 billion in an end-to-end IT transformation project to replace its aging core banking system and Barclays has been promoting customer-centric technologies like the mobile payments app PingIt for many years.