Fintechs Eye The Mortgage Market

From Fintech Business.

Speaking at a media roundtable in Sydney this week, SocietyOne co-founder Greg Symons said there is a class of mortgages that could suit “exactly what we do”.

“We will look at that in time, probably through a partnership of some kind,” Mr Symons said.

“The fact is it’s very cheap debt and very low capital that goes into it. The problem is the margins of play are very tight, whereas there is a second tier of mortgage lending with a lower LVR, a different form of mortgage lending that actually would fit well,” he explained.

“It is more like a syndicated loan style opportunity, which essentially is just low-volume peer-to-peer. The thing is, you’ve got to change your thinking. You’ve got to move away from this pooled investment style to something that is more individual based.”

Mr Symons said he built SocietyOne and the technology underpinning it to ensure that the company doesn’t exclude itself from certain asset classes that are a natural fit.

However, SocietyOne’s newly appointed chief investment officer John Cummins, who was also present at Wednesday’s discussion, said there is little “juice” in mortgages, echoing Mr Symons comment about tight margins.

The group has over 280 funders including Australian banks, credit unions, high net worth individuals and SMSFs.

Mr Cummins said mortgages are a difficult market to get high net worth investors into.

“The structures are really set up for institutional. To go in and nakedly invest in mortgages… I know it has been done overseas. It’s just a bit more challenging here because you have established an investment structure now that looks like an amortising structure with a whole lot of variable rate mortgages in it,” he said.

US-based online lender SoFi, which is planning an Australian mortgage market play, has successfully managed to move from a peer-to-peer lending offering student loans to a balance-sheet lender offering home loans.

The company has made clear its ambitions to grow beyond lending to provide a fuller, more holistic banking-like offering to customers including deposits, credit cards and payment solutions. It is currently preparing to launch its first mortgage securitisation deal.

SoFi this week announced the acquisition of Delaware-based mobile banking group Zenbanx, which has been pioneering ‘conversational banking’.

Blockchain and others will transform financial advice

From Australian Fintech.

The potential for distributed ledger and associated technologies has fundamental, long-term ramifications for financial planning businesses. Planners need to be across these innovations now so that when commercial solutions that use these technologies hit the market, their businesses are ready to embrace them.

Distributed ledger technology is a way of recording information that makes it easy to verify. Blockchain, which is the system that records how the virtual currency Bitcoin is stored, is one application of this technology.

Shortened Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) transaction settlement times will likely be the first real change to the market from Blockchain. Last year, the ASX invested $14.9 million to acquire 5 per cent of US-based distributed ledger technology business Digital Asset Holdings to start working on Blockchain solutions for its business. Subsequently, the ASX shortened settlement times for trades made through the exchange from three days to two.

This will improve market liquidity, reduce the cost of trading and minimise paperwork. An ASX spokesperson has confirmed an update on its Blockchain development will be included in its half-year results announcement in February.

“We’ll provide an update on our development then. In the meantime, we’re engaging extensively with stakeholders,” he said.

Tim Lea, chief executive of innovative technology company Veredictum.io says Blockchain will also streamline the conveyancing process.

“It can take up to 15 weeks to complete a property settlement now. There are use cases for Blockchain being developed that will enable automatic registration of a property’s title to an immutable ledger, which means a substantial reduction in legal work.

“There are use cases internationally being tested that put all property registrations on the Blockchain. The state of Georgia in the former Soviet Union is doing a pilot to put all property online in the form of an immutable database that cannot be altered.”

Lea says any information that needs to be formally confirmed and identified naturally fits into the Blockchain remit.

“Anything that requires provenance, a look at the history of the asset, can very clearly be defined within a Blockchain-based structure.”

Robo advice on steroids

Blockchain is far from the only emerging technology that will affect financial advice. Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) is another game-changer for the sector.

Lea calls it, “the world’s largest crowd-funding campaign that nobody’s every heard of. They raised US$168 million in 30 days on the basis of a 28-page white paper in June last year.”

The idea was to challenge the notion of a traditional company with a board and management structure and replace it with computer code.

Faster credit decisions with real-time technology

From Fintech Business.
Credit providers will need to embrace newer technologies and real-time data processing in order to meet changing client needs, writes Experian’s Suzanne Steele.

Over the last decade, the digital transformation of the banking sector has accelerated dramatically, and the pace of change is showing no sign of slowing.

Recent research data shows more than 1.2 billion people are banking on their mobile devices today, a number set to increase to over two billion by 2021.

Competition from agile new arrivals to the market, combined with a need to enhance the customer experience, are compelling credit providers to improve their range of services and reduce the time it takes to make credit decisions.

Gone are the days when a discussion with the local bank manager was the only option.

Dissatisfaction with traditional systems that fail to meet the instantaneous needs of the modern-day customer already has some Australians looking to fintech start-ups and alternative lending sources.

Millennials report convenience anywhere, any time as the primary driver for choosing non-traditional finance providers, according to recent Telstra research.

This highlights that many of today’s consumers live in a world of digital banking and expect to be able to have their banking needs met at any time, in any place and on any device.

There are signs consumer pressure is shifting the massive cogs of Australia’s financial services industry, slowly but surely adjusting to the demands of today’s hyper competitive 24/7 global economy.

The National Payments Platform (NPP) rollout in late 2017 will provide Australian businesses and consumers with a faster, more flexible and data-rich way to transfer funds within seconds.

In the NPP world, an Australian credit shopper can receive funds from friends, family or peers almost instantly.

Australian credit providers will have the same ability to almost instantly fulfil a customer’s credit wishes, but they will also need the right tools in place to assess customer risk with the same level of immediacy.

In order for credit providers to meet the evolving demands, real-time automated decision-making must become the new norm across the credit industry, enabled by access to a variety of internal and external databases.

What are the databases and insights credit providers need at their fingertips to make well-informed decisions?

In order to accurately, quickly and confidently make a ‘yes’ decision anytime, anywhere, a credit provider needs to first answer these five fundamental questions:

  1. Is the applicant who he or she purports to be? (ID data)
  2. Will the applicant likely be fraudulent? (fraud data)
  3. Is the applicant too risky? (credit data)
  4. Can the applicant afford to repay the loan? (servicing capacity data)
  5. If the applicant has a property, is it worth what they say it’s worth? (asset value data)

Historically most credit providers have answered each of these questions separately, using disparate and unconnected systems. For example, the bank will access an existing customer’s profile on their CRM database, but will also look at external data provided by a credit bureau or a shared fraud database.

The result is a lengthy process that delays credit decisions and results in a poor customer experience. In an increasingly saturated market, consumers’ ability to access credit seamlessly will likely be a key differentiator.

A one-stop shop

Emerging technologies promise a faster and more customer-friendly alternative to these clunky systems of old, offering access to a wide range of separate databases on demand and as part of a singular process.

As banks up the ante in their adoption of cloud-based services, a more flexible, collaborative technology ecosystem is emerging.

These technologies enrich a bank’s own customer data with third-party credit data, identity information, fraud insights and property data, and make it all available online and in real time.

With integrated workflow and decisioning processes, banks can fast track applications from existing customers and prompt a request for more data from new customers.

This enables credit providers to deliver a credit decision within seconds, reducing the number of customers who drop-off midway through the application process due to the lengthy questions and delays.

However, it also ensures credit offers are more accurate, based on a holistic approach to a customer’s financial situation. For the bank, this reduces risk, streamlines operations, and enables it to offer efficient and competitive products and services.

A digitised approach also addresses an ongoing concern for credit providers.

In 2009, to meet ASIC’s responsible lending guidelines, the onus was put on lenders to request evidence such as pay slips or financial statements, to support credit applications.

This process significantly delays the processing of applications. However, by applying the same principles in data integration, banks can now automatically access bank statements to fast track their evaluation of the ability of a consumer to service a loan.

Developing an effective data hub with real-time decisioning software future-proofs a bank, enabling an agile response to both future regulatory changes and transformations to the market.

Such a capability results in a more positive experience for customers and delivers much improved efficiencies and business performance for credit providers.

Suzanne Steele is the managing director of Experian for Australia and New Zealand.

More lessons on fintech to come for Scott Morrison

From The Conversation.

This week, Treasurer Scott Morrison will be in Germany, as part of the run up to this year’s G-20 Summit, talking to other finance ministers about “Digitising finance, financial inclusion and financial literacy”. The Treasurer is due to give a keynote speech on “Developments and challenges of fintech with a focus on Australia”.

Just before Christmas, ASIC released a document with the new rules on how new fintech businesses can test certain services without holding an Australian financial services or credit licence. The waivers provide a “sandbox” for new fintech start-ups to play in without incurring the wrath of the regulator.

However, the restrictions for playing in the sandbox are actually quite onerous. First, and probably the biggest hurdle, is that would-be Warren Buffets must be a member of “one or more ASIC – approved external dispute resolution (EDR) schemes”, such asthe Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS). The budding billionaires must also organise some professional indemnity insurance cover, of at least A$1 million. Not too many small firms will have the sort of money lying around to do both of those.

The things that the startups are allowed to do are fairly restrictive, with limits on the products that they may offer and the money they can manage with a “total customer exposure of no more than A$5 million”.

When in Europe the Treasurer will also visit London, where among other visits, he is due to meet with Internet royalty – none other than Sir Tim Berners Lee. He’s the inventor of the World Wide Web (www) and head of a new UK government initiative, called the Open Data Institute(ODI).

Among many areas that Berners-Lee and the ODI are looking at is Finance and particularly something called the Open Banking Standard. This standard has the lofty goal of:

Unlocking the potential of open banking to improve competition, efficiency and stimulate innovation.

ODI describes the rationale for the standard:

The European Union is rapidly advancing legislation that will, upon implementation in the next two years, require UK banks (subject to consent from individuals and businesses) to open access to their customer data and payments capabilities.

It means the banks will be required to make (some of their) data available, or “open”, to all. But it won’t be everything, the example ODI gives is “financial product information”, basically the pamphlets that are available in bank branches today. But it’s a start.

Other data is considered “closed” or “shared” such as personal bank details or a company’s transaction data. Access to such sensitive data would, according to ODI, be subject to the consent of the individual or business to whom the data belongs and specific governance related to that. Access to the data would be through standardised application programming interfaces (APIs) and, subject to privacy constraints, data could be made available to banks and fintech developers.

The ODI approach promotes fintech development by allowing start-ups to develop new services and products that can access bank data directly rather than having to suck data out of banks and massage it locally. The data remains with the banks and customers, but the logic moves to the fintech developer.

The banks, in the UK or Australia, are not going to be happy. For example, a fintech could write a program to extract a customer’s data from their bank or credit card accounts and run a program to see how much better the customer would be if they moved their accounts to another bank, using real data rather than marketing promises. Customers, for example, could also set up alerts on their account balances not at the simple overdraft level but also using real rules taking into account upcoming expenses, such as holidays.

On the subject of bank accounts, the Treasurer should take note of how the UK banking system is actually implementing bank account number portability rather than still talking about it as in Canberra.

But while fintech is a fascinating subject, I suspect other topics in global finance might just take up some of the visit, such as the reversal of the global trade agenda and Brexit both of which could be considered financial exclusion rather than inclusion.

Author: Pat McConnell, Honorary Fellow, Macquarie University Applied Finance Centre, Macquarie University

The Bank of England On Fintech

Mark Carney,  Governor of the Bank of England, spoke on ‘The Promise of Fintech.” Specifically, he looked across the banking value chain, and highlighted how digital transformation may be applied across it, as well as the risks which may emerge is so doing and how regulators need to respond.

To its advocates, this wave of innovation promises a FinTech revolution that will democratise financial services.

  • Consumers will get more choice, better-targeted services and keener pricing.
  • Small and medium sized businesses will get access to new credit.
  • Banks will become more productive, with lower transaction costs, greater capital efficiency and stronger operational resilience.
  • The financial system itself will become more resilient with greater diversity, redundancy and depth.
  • And most fundamentally, financial services will be more inclusive; with people better connected, more informed and increasingly empowered.

With hundreds of millions now entering the digital financial system every year, could higher economic growth and a quantum leap in social equity be on the horizon? Or will the range of new financial technologies primarily make existing institutions and markets more efficient and effective? No small prize but hardly a transformation.

FinTech’s true promise springs from its potential to unbundle banking into its core functions of: settling payments, performing maturity transformation, sharing risk and allocating capital. This possibility is being driven by new entrants – payment service providers, aggregators and robo advisors, peer-to-peer lenders, and innovative trading platforms. And it is being influenced by incumbents who are adopting new technologies in an effort to reinforce the economies of scale and scope of their business models.

In this process, systemic risks will evolve. Changes to customer loyalties could influence the stability of bank funding. New underwriting models could impact credit quality and even macroeconomic dynamics. New investing and risk management paradigms could affect market functioning. A host of applications and new infrastructure could reduce costs, probably improve capital efficiency and possibly create new critical economic functions.

The challenge for policymakers is to ensure that FinTech develops in a way that maximises the opportunities and minimises the risks for society. After all, the history of financial innovation is littered with examples that led to early booms, growing unintended consequences, and eventual busts.

Conduct regulators are in the lead in addressing regulatory issues posed by payment services innovations. This is both because, at least in advanced economies, FinTech payment service providers have not chosen to undertake banking activities and individual providers have not yet reached the scale that might be considered systemic.

Looking ahead, it is possible that virtual currencies and FinTech-based providers, particularly where they gain direct membership to central bank payment systems, could begin to displace traditional bank-based payment services and systems. Such diversification could be positive for stability; after all the existing tiered and highly concentrated system has created single point of failure risks. At the same time, regulators would need to monitor such changes for any new concentrations.

In this regard, with a view to such future proofing, the Digital Economy Bill in the UK proposes to extend the definition of a payment system beyond those that are inter-bank, to include any that become systemically important. If these are so designated by HMT, they would be supervised by the Bank. This would be akin to the recent recognition by HMT of Visa Europe and Link.

Changes to payments and customer relationships may have more fundamental implications for financial stability.

Specifically, while FinTech may make conventional banking more contestable, improving efficiency and customer choice, the opening up of the customer interface and payment services business, could, in time, signal the end of universal banking as we know it. If today’s universal banks lose the loyalty I saw on the Canadian prairie and instead have less stable funding and weaker, more arms-length client relationships, the volatility of their deposits and liquidity risk could increase. In addition, with weaker customer ties, cross-selling (my old preserve as a teller) could be less prevalent, hitting profitability. The system as a whole wouldn’t necessarily be riskier, but prudential standards and resolution regimes for banks may need to be adjusted.

The diversity in funding brought by market-based finance, as an alternative to retail banking, means that peer-to-peer lending has potential to provide some consumers and small businesses with affordable credit, when retail banks cannot. At the same time, this implies that borrowers in some segments may be placing increased reliance on this source of funding. How stable this funding will prove through-the-cycle is not yet clear, as the sector’s underwriting standards, and lenders’ tolerance to losses, have not been tested by a downturn.

Due to its small scale and business models, the P2P lending sector does not, for now, appear to pose material systemic risks. That said, as a general rule, it always pays to monitor closely fast-growing sources of credit for slippages in underwriting standards and the promotion of excessive borrowing. Moreover, it is not clear the extent to which P2P lending can grow without business models evolving in ways that introduce conventional risks, including maturity transformation, leverage and liquidity mismatch, or through the use of originate and distribute models such as those seen in securitisation in the 2000s. Were these changes to occur, regulators would be expected to address such emerging vulnerabilities.

In wholesale banking and markets, robo-advice and risk management algorithms may lead to excess volatility or increase pro-cyclicality as a result of herding, particularly if the underlying algorithms are overly sensitive to price movements or highly correlated. Similarly, although algorithmic traders have become a more important source of market liquidity in many important financial markets, they tend to be more active during periods of low volatility giving an illusion of plentiful liquidity that may subsequently be withdrawn during periods of market disruption when it is needed most.

FinTech innovations, such as distributed ledgers, are being trialled for use within, or as a substitute to, existing wholesale payment, clearing and settlement infrastructure, will need to meet the highest standards of resilience, reliability, privacy and scalability.

For all financial firms, the advent of FinTech materially changes operational and cyber risks. Regulators need to be alert to new single point of failure risks such as if banks come to rely on common hosts of online banking or providers of cloud computing services.

In recent years, the cyber threat to the system has grown as financial institutions have become more reliant on interconnected IT systems. As the FinTech future envisages the sharing of data across a wider set of parties, coupled with greater speed and automaticity in executing transactions, the challenges around protecting data and the integrity of the system are likely to increase. One sign of this is a growing preoccupation in the insurance industry with how best to underwrite such risks.

Recognising the vital importance of learning from international experience, in late 2016 the G20 called upon the FSB to stock-take existing cyber security regulation, as a basis for developing best practices in the medium-term.

While only private sector ingenuity will make these gains possible, authorities have essential, supporting roles in reinforcing them and managing the associated risks to financial stability. To help realise FinTech’s promise, we should refresh our supervisory approaches in a few ways.

First, regulatory sandboxes can allow businesses to test innovative products, services, business models and delivery mechanisms in a live environment and with proportionate regulatory requirements. This supports innovation and learning by developers and regulators. The FCA was an early mover launching Project Innovate in 2014.21 The G20 might consider the extent to which such approaches should be adopted more widely.

Second, existing authorisation processes can also be adapted to ensure they do not unnecessarily block new business models and approaches. This is why in the UK, the PRA and FCA now work closely with all firms seeking new authorisation as banks.

Third, the Bank of England is expanding access to central bank money to non-bank payments service providers (“PSPs”). Allowing access to the Bank’s Real Time Gross Settlement System allows PSPs to compete directly with banks, and so supports innovation, competition and financial stability.

Fourth, a number of authorities, including the Bank of England with its FinTech accelerator, are developing Proofs of Concepts with new enabling technologies from machine learning to distributed ledgers. And, to explore what could be genuinely new under the sun, we are researching the policy and technical issues posed by Central Bank Digital Currencies. On some levels this is appealing; people would have direct access to the ultimate risk-free asset. In the extreme, however, it could fundamentally reshape banking including by sharply increasing liquidity risk for traditional banks

This last point underscores that, in order for FinTech’s potential to be realised, authorities must manage its impact on financial stability. On the positive side, FinTech could reduce systemic risks by delivering a more diverse and resilient system where incumbents and new entrants compete along the value chain. At the same time, some innovations could generate systemic risks through increased interconnectedness and complexity, greater herding and liquidity risks, more intense operational risk and opportunities for regulatory arbitrage.

As those risks emerge, authorities can be expected to pursue a more intense focus on the regulatory perimeter, more dynamic settings of prudential requirements, a broader commitment to resolution regimes, and a more disciplined management of operational and cyber risks. And we will be alert to potential impacts on the existing core of the system, including through business model analysis and market impact assessments.
By enabling technologies and managing risks, we can help create a new financial system for a new age… under the same sun.

 

 

Digital Finance and Fintch – Benefits and Risks

Dr Jens Weidmann President of the Deutsche Bundesbank spoke on “Digital finance – Reaping the benefits without neglecting the risks“, drawing  important links to financial literacy, financial stability and fintech.

More than 20 years have passed since Bill Gates famously said that “Banking is necessary, banks are not”.

While banks still exist – and I am sure they will continue to do so -, recent developments have shown that non-banks are just as capable of providing bank services. And that is not least due to the huge strides made in the field of information and communications technology (ICT), which has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for designing and distributing financial services.

And this has even transformed traditional banking business. Online banking, for example, has become the main point of access for many bank customers.

Digital finance, and the fintech industry in particular, have experienced very rapid growth in recent years on the back of both supply-side and demand-side forces.

On the supply side, technological progress plays an important role, but so, too, do efforts to drive down the costs of financial services. These forces are being propelled by the increasing availability of ICT infrastructure, the provision of unique access points to financial services, and the growing number of digital natives.

And on the demand side, “always on” customers are increasingly expecting to be able to bank with a minimum of fuss, whenever and wherever they like.

Digital finance opens up a host of opportunities, but we should not neglect the risks it entails. But how can we capitalise on these opportunities without losing sight of the potential risks? That is a key question of this conference – one that will be addressed by a panel discussion and also by Bank of England governor Mark Carney in his keynote speech this afternoon.

From an economic point of view, digital finance can deliver a wealth of benefits. First of all, digital financial services can bring about significant efficiency gains. Digitalisation can also stoke competition within the financial system and raise the contestability of financial markets. Some commentators even argue that digitalisation has the potential to revolutionise financial services and infrastructure.

The key buzzword here is “disruptive”. And many believe the most disruptive potential is to be found in blockchain or distributed ledger technology, which promises to allow payment transactions and securities settlement to bypass banks and central counterparties altogether.

Originally developed for the bitcoin virtual currency, this distributed ledger technology, it would appear, has turned out to be a multi-purpose tool. And even central banks – which aren’t typically known for being early adopters of new technologies – are currently doing experimental research on the potential use of blockchain.

The Bundesbank, for example, has recently launched a joint project with Deutsche Börse to develop a blockchain-based prototype of a securities settlement system.

But even apart from radically transforming the payments and securities settlement infrastructure, digitalisation enables newcomers to mount a challenge against incumbent market players.

Data-driven technologies can boost the transparency of the financial system and thus reduce information asymmetries. Big data analysis, for example, can improve the estimation of default risks even in the absence of a longstanding bank-customer relationship.

An increasing number of suppliers of financial services is particularly good news for households and enterprises lacking access to traditional sources of finance. In the end, this might drive up the number of projects that receive financing.

Online crowdfunding or peer-to-peer lending platforms might enable investment projects which would otherwise be too risky or too small for traditional banks, to go ahead.

In general, digital finance facilitates access to financial services. And this benefit is not confined to tech-savvy consumers in advanced economies. Indeed, digital technologies can be key drivers of financial inclusion in less developed countries, too.

In Kenya, for example, the share of people with a financial account rose from 42 % in 2011 to 75 % in 2014. Over the same period, the respective global figure rose from 51 % to 61 %.

In tandem with the mounting ubiquity of cell phones, mobile money accounts have gained popularity, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. In some countries, there are even more adults with a mobile money account than a conventional bank account.

Financial inclusion is thought to be conducive to promoting economic growth and lowering inequality. Financially included people are in a better position to start and develop businesses, to invest in their children’s education, to manage risks, and to absorb financial shocks.

On the other hand, there is a trade-off between financial inclusion and financial stability. Expanding access to financial services – especially to credit – at too fast a pace and with too little control exposes economies to stability risks, and households to the risk of over-indebtedness. The Indian microfinance crisis in 2010 showed us what can happen if too many households have access to credit despite being subprime borrowers.

And that is why financial literacy is so crucial. People with access to finance need a basic understanding of financial concepts like compound interest and risk diversification.

Surveys, however, provide some worrying results. According to an International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy Competencies, which was commissioned by the G20 and published by the OECD, overall levels of financial literacy, as indicated by knowledge, attitudes and behaviour, are relatively low.

And another study, the S&P Global Financial Literacy Survey, which was supported by the World Bank, reveals that two out of three adults are not financially literate, albeit with major variations across countries. While more than half of adults are financially literate in most of the advanced economies, that goes for fewer than one-fifth of people in some developing or transformation countries.

There are, of course, other aspects of digital finance which have a bearing on financial stability.

Herding behaviour, for example, could be amplified by automated advisory services in portfolio management. Robo advisors might exacerbate financial volatility and pro-cyclicality if the assets under management reach a significant level, which is not yet the case.

Traditional banks in many countries are currently suffering from dwindling profitability due, most notably, to the low-interest-rate environment. Disintermediation, however, could intensify the problems of narrow profit margins. This might be the flipside of the mounting competition unleashed by the more widespread use of digitised financing.

And decentralisation might make it more difficult to tell who is exposed to whom, and to detect where financial risks ultimately lie.

Another point worth noting is that fintech business models have not yet run through an entire credit cycle. Experience with digital finance in economic downturns is very limited.

That being said, it is quite obvious that regulating fintechs and the entire digital financial industry smartly without hindering financial innovation is warranted. That’s why the objectives of the German G20 presidency include taking stock of the different regulatory approaches. Our aim is to develop a set of common criteria for the regulatory treatment of fintechs.

Fintechs should not base their business models on regulatory loopholes. Using lax regulation to attract business is a mistake that was already made before the latest financial crisis. Whatever we do, we need to avoid a regulatory race to the bottom. Rather, we should go for a level playing field.

To quote the words of the former ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet who said in 2010: “(…) “the crisis has exposed the risk of regulatory arbitrage, shedding a more negative light on the competition among different systems and rules.””

Getting a clearer picture of fintechs’ business activities is essential if we are to better understand whether and in what way they might pose a threat to financial stability. It is therefore an important endeavour of the Financial Stability Board to further investigate and promote data availability. Without reliable data, any assessment of risks is unfeasible.

Another threat – and certainly not just to financial stability – comes from cyber risks.

The more market infrastructures rely on digital technologies, the more vulnerable our interconnected global financial system becomes to criminal attacks, be it from computer hackers, cyber saboteurs or even terrorists.

Cyber criminals have repeatedly targeted financial institutions around the world, including central banks. There are plenty of financial institutions I could name whose defences have been successfully breached. The damage unleashed by successful attacks goes beyond the financial loss incurred. Cyber-attacks can potentially undermine peoples’ trust in the financial system.

So to avoid jeopardising the positive impact of digital finance, it will be crucial to address these risks and for banks to manage their IT and cyber risks with as much diligence as they do their traditional banking risks.

Cybersecurity risks will be a major item in a talk this afternoon with Thomas de Maizière, German Federal Minister of the Interior. And a research dialogue tomorrow will also address the topic of cyber security.

US fintech eyes Australian mortgage space

From Australian Broker.

US financial technology company SoFi has hinted at its plans to launch an Australian branch that offers mortgages and changes the banking world.

The firm, which is based in San Francisco, has recently put out a LinkedIn job advertisement for a manager of mortgage operations in Sydney. It is also looking to hire a marketing manager and an operations manager.

This would be the fintech’s first office outside of the US where it has funded more than US$7 billion in student loan refinancing, personal loans and mortgages, reported the Australian Financial Review.

The job ad says the new hire would preferably have non-bank lending experience and would “be responsible for building out an in-house mortgage customer service and underwriting operation to serve SoFi’s new mortgage business line”.

This will include developing the operations, processing and underwriting functions as well as supervising mortgage originations at or ahead of target.

SoFi recently raised US$1 billion of funding and has grown its staff from 150 to more than 600 over the past year. It offers a range of its own mortgage products which can be applied for directly via smartphone, reported The Economist in an article last year.

Borrowers – or ‘members’ as the fintech refers to them – are also showered with a range of other services. This includes being invited to parties to network, using SoFi’s offices for investor meetings and even tapping into the firm’s network to find employment.

When contacted by Australian Broker, a SoFi spokesperson declined to comment about the company’s future plans for Australia and its expansion into the local mortgage market.

The Time For Mobile-Centric Banking

Mckinsey says that Consumer adoption of digital banking channels is growing steadily across Asia–Pacific, making digital increasingly important for driving new sales and reducing costs. The branch-centric model is gradually but unmistakably giving way to the mobile-centric one.

Deferring the development and refinement of a digital offering leaves a bank exposed to the risk of weakened relationships and lower profitability. Now is a critical moment to draw retail-banking customers toward Internet and mobile-banking channels, regardless of the general level of network connectivity in a given market.

Our annual study, the Asia–Pacific Digital and Multichannel Banking Benchmark 2016, was led by Finalta, a McKinsey Solution, and examined digital consumer-banking data collected between July 2015 and July 2016 from 41 banks. This article focuses on our findings from Australia and New Zealand, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan, examining consumer digital engagement, user adoption, and traffic and sales via Internet secure sites, public sites, and mobile applications.1 We detail three counterintuitive findings, and make suggestions for how banks should move forward.

Three counterintuitive findings

Consumer use of digital banking is growing steadily across all five markets (Exhibit 1). In the more developed markets of Australia and New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore, growth in recent years has been concentrated in the mobile channel. Indeed, among some banks use of the secure-site channel has begun to shrink, as some customers enthusiastically shift most of their interactions to mobile banking. In emerging markets, growth is strong in both secure-site and mobile channels.

Consumer adoption of digital banking is growing steadily across all markets.

Three counterintuitive findings point to the need for banks to act aggressively to improve their use of digital channels to strengthen customer relationships.

First, banks can excel in their digital offering despite limitations in the digital maturity of the markets they serve. One measure of digital maturity is the Networked Readiness Index (NRI), published annually by the World Economic Forum. This scorecard rates how well economies are using information and communication technology. It examines 139 countries using 53 indicators, including the robustness of mobile networks, international Internet bandwidth, household and business use of digital technology, and the adequacy of legal frameworks to support and regulate digital commerce. Comparison of digital-banking adoption with the level of networked readiness reveals that a country’s level of digital maturity does not necessarily promote or inhibit the growth of a bank’s digital channels.

Singapore, for example, has the most highly developed infrastructure for digital commerce in the world. However, when it comes to digital banking, Singaporean banks trail their peers from the less-networked markets of Australia and New Zealand, where banks have been able to draw consumers to digital channels despite gaps or weaknesses in digital connectivity.

Some banks have also been successful in pushing mobile banking regardless of network limitations (Exhibit 2). While Australia and New Zealand have moderately high levels of third-generation (3G) and smartphone penetration (trailing both Hong Kong and Singapore), the banks surveyed have achieved much stronger consumer adoption of mobile channels than their peers in other markets.

Mobile banking can also grow despite a market’s limited mobile-network infrastructure.

The second key finding is that having a relatively small base of active users does not necessarily mean low traffic (Exhibit 3). Among all participating banks in our survey, banks in Malaysia report among the smallest share of customers using the secure-site channel; however, these customers tend to log on many times a month, and the typical secure-site customer interacts with the bank more than twice as often as the secure-site banking customers of participating banks in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Low channel adoption does not necessarily mean inactive users.

Third, the survey data reveal wide variations in performance across key metrics by country. In Australia and New Zealand, for example, there is wide variation in digital-channel traffic, with customers logging on with 32 percent more frequency at participating banks in the upper quartile than those in the lower quartile. In Hong Kong, digital adoption among upper quartile peers exceeds that of the lower quartile peers by ten percentage points. Participants in Singapore observe a sixteen-percentage-point gap between the upper and lower quartile peers in the proportion of sales through digital channels.2 The wide gap between best and worst in class in multiple markets points to a significant opportunity for banks to beat the competition with compelling digital offers.

What banks should do

Banks in emerging markets have an opportunity to leapfrog to digital banking. Despite gaps in technology and smartphone penetration, a number of banks have tapped into consumer segments eager to adopt digital channels. Banks in emerging markets should prepare for rapid consumer adoption of digital channels. The digital evolution in emerging markets will differ considerably from the trajectory of banks in more developed markets.

Banks in highly developed markets have room to grow their active user base and digital sales. Indeed, the cost and revenue position of banks that do not act to improve their digital offering may weaken relative to peers that shift more business to digital channels. Banks in all markets should plan for this transition, especially through the integration of diverse technology platforms, the consolidation of customer data across multiple channels, and the continuous analysis of customer behavior to identify real-time needs. It is important to build services rapidly and to go live with minimally viable prototypes in order to attract early adopters—these digital enthusiasts eagerly experiment with new features and provide valuable feedback to help developers.

The significant variation of performance among countries shows great potential for banks to boost digital engagement with a dual emphasis on enrollment and cross-selling. Banks should carefully consider four best practices that often bring immediate gains by streamlining the customer’s digital experience:

  1. Deliver credentials instantaneously upon in-app enrollment. The global best practice shows that banks that issue credentials instantaneously through in-app enrollment see their mobile activity rise on average 1.5 times faster. Of the banks that provided data on functionality, more than 50 percent do not have in-app enrollment. This presents a significant value-creation opportunity.
  2. Simplify authentication processes to make them both secure and user friendly. Approximately three in five banks surveyed lack the ability to authenticate a user’s mobile device. In our experience, banks that store device information and allow users to log on simply by entering a personal identification number or fingerprint see three times more digital interaction than banks that require users to enter data via alphanumeric digits each time they log on.
  3. Implement ‘click to call’ routing to improve response times. Instead of using a voice-response system, where customers must listen to a long list of options before selecting the relevant service choice, an increasing number of mobile apps are adopting click-to-call options for each segment, enabling customers to bypass the voice-response menus. Of the banks that provided data on capability, only 30 percent in our Asia–Pacific survey offer authenticated click-to-call options. The improvement in customer service is significant, with global banks able to improve the speed of answering customer calls by up to 40 percent.
  4. Make digital sales processes intuitive and simple. Take credit cards as an example: best-practice global banks achieve average conversion rates (the ratio of page visits to applications) some 1.6 times those of Asia–Pacific banks. They do this by presenting products and features for which a customer has been prequalified through an intuitive, easy-to-read dashboard display or via tailored messages. Application forms are prefilled automatically with customer data. With intuitive and simple applications, banks in the Asia–Pacific region could increase the rate of completed applications by 22 percent, to come up to par with global best-practice banks.

Across the five markets we focused on, the branch-centric model is gradually but unmistakably giving way to the mobile-centric one. Looking at how digital-channel adoption and usage is evolving, along with the diversity of scenarios, banks have ample room to win in their target markets with a carefully tailored digital offering. Digital-savvy consumers warm quickly to well-designed and easy-to-use digital-banking channels, often shifting to the new channel in a matter of days. Banks need to act quickly to improve their customers’ digital experience or risk being left behind.

Is Blockchain the Next Great Hope — or Hype?

From Knowledge@Wharton.

Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin may have captured the public’s fancy – and also engendered a healthy dose of skepticism — but it is their underlying technology that is proving to be of practical benefit to organizations: the blockchain. Many industries are exploring its benefits and testing its limitations, with financial services leading the way as firms eye potential windfalls in the blockchain’s ability to improve efficiency in such things as the trading and settlement of securities. The real estate industry also sees potential in the blockchain to make homes — even portions of homes — and other illiquid assets trade and transfer more easily. The blockchain is seen as disrupting global supply chains as well, by boosting transaction speed across borders and improving transparency.

These uses are merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg for a nascent technology whose development stage has been compared to the early years of the internet. “We’re very early in the game,” said Brad Bailey, research director of capital markets at Celent, at a recent Blockchain Opportunity Summit in New York. He likened the blockchain’s current status to the web of the early 1990s, heralding a coming wave of new ideas and uses. “This will impact the world.”

The blockchain technology came about initially as a way to verify bitcoin transactions online and to enable two parties to transact business without having to know or trust each other. It was designed without a central authority in mind, such as a bank or government, to oversee transactions. Essentially, the blockchain is a shared virtual public ledger where encrypted transactions are confirmed by outside parties. In the bitcoin world, these outside parties are called “miners” — computers that solve complex mathematical problems to confirm transactions and earn fees. Confirmed transactions are placed in a “block” and added to the chain. Since the ledger is shared by everyone on the network, it is thought to be nearly impossible to remove or change the data – a premise that turned out to be false in some cases.

Today, the concept of the blockchain has expanded beyond its use by cryptocurrencies. Instead, the benefits of the shared ledger and its seemingly immutable record of transactions accessible to multiple parties are being explored by a variety of industries. Experts said there won’t be a “mother blockchain,” but multiple ledgers with different purposes. Varying versions of blockchains have popped up, too: While the original bitcoin blockchain was open to anyone, some companies’ blockchains are private and “permissioned” — they restrict access to approved parties. The latter approach is preferred by companies fearful of being hit with government fines and lawsuits if they get hacked, said summit participant Sarab Sokhey, chief technology leader of new product innovations at Verizon Wireless. They’ll stay private until the technology matures and industry standards are set.

While the blockchain’s business applications are clear, it has social implications as well. For instance, it can create identities for individuals apart from those sanctioned by governments and not limited by geographic boundaries. The blockchain also allows less-technologically advanced nations to participate in global transactions more easily. “Blockchains are exciting, undoubtedly,” said Saikat Chaudhuri, executive director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management, which was an official partner for the summit. “It’s much more than about transaction efficiency or flexibility. It’s really beyond that. It could provide an identity to those who don’t have it, or promote financial inclusion. Therein lies the power of this whole thing.”

‘Nervous’ Financial Institutions

According to a survey by the IBM Institute for Business Value and the Economist Intelligence Unit, one in seven companies it calls “trailblazers” expect to have blockchains in production and at commercial scale in 2017. Respondents were interested in taking advantage of the blockchain’s multiple benefits, which include cost reduction, immutability of records, transparency of transactions and the potential to create new business models. For example, the blockchain would eliminate the need for keeping multiple records at banks and other parties doing currency trades. The survey tracked responses of 200 global financial markets institutions.

The survey also said “trailblazers” were focusing their efforts on the following business areas: clearing and settlements, wholesale payments, equity and debt issuance and reference data. The report added that in recent years, financial institutions have “swarmed to blockchain pilots and proofs of concept” — opening innovation labs, holding hackathons, partnering with financial technology startups, joining consortia and collaborating with regulators.

To be sure, banks have a vested interest in participating. “Banks provide essentially escrow services for the transfer of value, and here comes a technology that threatens to eliminate that service,” said Chris Ballinger, global chief officer of strategic innovation at Toyota Financial Services. “So they are nervous about that, because it’s a huge revenue stream” that could be taken away. How? “With the blockchain, you can run a network that transfers value among untrusted nodes, and therefore you can eliminate the middle man and you can eliminate all the costs associated with the middle man,” he said. “You’re essentially turning assets into something like cash that you can hand to somebody and they will accept. That makes the transfer of assets extremely efficient.”

Another unique benefit of the blockchain is that it separates someone’s identity from the transaction they’re making. In general, a blockchain uses a digital signature – not real names and other personal information – that is activated by a private key or secret code held by the one doing the transaction. Compare that to current credit card or bank transactions, which tie one’s personal information such as a name and address to purchases and other financial activities. This separation improves the security of one’s data. “Today, the payments information and identity are [bound] together. The combined is a tempting honey pot for hackers,” Ballinger said. “By separating the financial information from the identity, there’s no honey pot, no central place to hack, no incentive to go after.”

In December 2015, Nasdaq executed its first trade on a blockchain, through its Linq ledger. The exchange said the blockchain promises to expedite trade clearing and settlement – all the steps needed to transfer the asset from seller to buyer including recording the transaction — from three days to as little as 10 minutes. That’s because the trades remove many manual processes and bypass third parties. As such, “settlement risk exposure can be reduced by over 99%, dramatically lowering capital costs and systemic risk,” according to Nasdaq. Other stock exchanges tinkering with the blockchain include ones in Australia, Myanmar, Germany, Japan, Korea, London and Toronto.

Overstock.com is on the cusp of issuing its first security using the blockchain. “We are in the process of proving out the first public trading of a blockchain security,” said Ralph Daiuto, Jr., general counsel of tØ, a subsidiary of the e-commerce retailer. While the company has kept its clearing firm, it is using digital wallets for the actual transfer of assets in settlement of the trade. “The goal is to shorten the settlement cycle and [avoid] all the ills that can go wrong with that cycle.” He added that the company can cut its equity trading costs by 70% using the blockchain.

Overstock got regulatory approval for its blockchain trade by taking “incremental steps in proving out the technology in use cases and demonstrating we have real-world application for this blockchain technology,” Daiuto said. “It literally has been a monthly, if not a weekly, education process with our core regulators.” It has taken nearly two years of laying the groundwork for Overstock to get to this point.

Real Estate and Smart Contracts

An area of particular promise for the blockchain is the real estate market. “The blockchain solves pretty much every problem in real estate that we have” in terms of fraud, middleman fees and friction, opaque due diligence, slow price discovery, complex transaction process and other ills, said Ragnar Lifthrasir, president of the International Blockchain Real Estate Association. “In many ways, our technology is still in the 17th century – notaries still use seals.” The blockchain promises to simplify and speed up the process while adding transparency to the records.

For example, in selling a house, people still sign paper deeds over to the new owner. It has to be entered into the public record, which means someone physically has to go to the local government office. “It’s a paper-based system that is ripe for fraud,” Lifthrasir said. The blockchain solution is fairly straightforward, using digital deeds. “When I want to transfer the property, I simply transfer it from my wallet to the buyer’s wallet.”

As for putting the property ownership on the public record, he said the list is already on the blockchain so recording it won’t be hard. Lifthrasir added that validation of ownership would be strengthened. “It’s very difficult to deny who owns the property when it’s on a public network.” His startup, Velox, is working with Cook County in Chicago to use the blockchain for transferring and recording property titles. It is also working on a way to show liens on titles on the blockchain.

Within a blockchain, so-called “smart” contracts could be revolutionary. “They programmatically represent a contract,” said Mark Smith, CEO of Symbiont and co-chair of the Smart Contract Council. For example, a smart contract on an auto loan could be linked in real time to payments made by the car buyer. If he misses payments, the contract gets wind of the violation and starts the repossession process. In Delaware, Smith’s company is working with the state to create “smart” records of its public archives to do such things as being able to sunset themselves.

EY’s Australian operations piloted a real estate blockchain ecosystem that is now being used in the market to trade full, and even fractional, ownership of properties. Real estate and financial institutions approved by EY all liked the idea of using a blockchain, but when it came to actual implementation, “fear and uncertainty crept in,” said James Roberts, partner and Australian blockchain leader. EY had to essentially guarantee verification of participants and transactions to build trust. “We decided we would solve the identity problem [of people and institutions]. We would build trust into the system and prove recordkeeping is true and accurate and can be used to transact financial instruments like property or debt.”

EY’s blockchain ecosystem goes through several stages. First, individuals using the blockchain have to be validated using identity checks and even biometrics. They create records on the blockchain using randomly generated unique keys that let EY do further checking against various databases from the government and elsewhere. Next, the transaction is traded on a blockchain exchange. The assets being traded are verified. The entire ecosystem is private and permissioned. Also, EY stores individuals’ unique keys offline for security. Moreover, EY built back-system administrative functions – despite the premise of the blockchain as not having a central authority – to make participants more comfortable in using the system. But to be a viable ecosystem, it needs to scale. “We need millions and millions of people in our system, and that’s going to take a lot of effort,” Roberts said.

Challenges and Risks

Security is still the biggest challenge confronting the blockchain. “The truth is, once you give someone access to a network, many times, more often than not, they can end up very easily getting blanket access to that network,” said Joe Ventura, CEO of AlphaPoint. “This is a huge security problem.” However, if one ends up building many protections to prevent hacks, then it bogs down the blockchain and defeats its purpose in the first place. “Basically, you have to jump through so many hoops simply to pass the message from some party to another party.”

And while blockchain records theoretically can’t be changed, there are ways around that. Smith cited a recent controversial decision by the Ethereum Foundation – the organization behind the open-source cryptocurrency Ethereum – after a hacker exploited a software flaw and took funds. The foundation decided to roll back the clock to give people their money back and created two versions of the ledger. “Imagine if you’re a business and they roll back a day,” Ventura said. “That’s completely unacceptable.” Moreover, by creating two versions, some people were able to exploit it. “People were able to double their money,” Smith said.

As for compliance, at least regulators could have a node on the blockchain itself in which companies define their access to data, said Sandeep Kumar, managing director of Synechron. As such, regulators wouldn’t have to wait days for a bank to hand over documents for compliance. “They can see it as it is happening.”

In the end, each company has to figure out whether a blockchain is suitable. “Is it a blockchain use case or is it a database use case?” said Tyler Mulvihill, director of Consensys. “If you are a company that has a lot of information internally and you don’t transact like a lot of vendors, and not a lot of people need to use your information or do business with you, a database can be fine for a lot of things. It’s when you have a lot of parties that need trust, need access to certain information and need to be audited – that’s where I see the biggest use cases.”

Centrelink data-matching problems show the need for a government blockchain

From The Conversation.

Governments across the globe are experimenting with the blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, as a way to reduce costs and provide more accountability to the public. In Europe alone, the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Estonia are experimenting with blockchains to fight corruption and deliver public services.

Australia, too, is looking at what a blockchain might achieve. The recent problems with Centrelink’s automated data-matching system show precisely where a government blockchain would fit in.

Rather than siloing our data in government agencies, we could create a single source of information. This would speed up our interactions with government, while reducing errors and fraud.

What is a blockchain?

The blockchain is a kind of public database, one stored simultaneously on a bunch of different computers. When a new transaction occurs it is verified (otherwise known as “mining” or “consensus”), encrypted and added to the database.

The most famous example of the blockchain is Bitcoin, a crypto-currency built upon the blockchain. However, the blockchain is suitable for many other applications, not just financial transactions. For example, the blockchain could be used to authenticate that a diamond has not come from an illict source, or for buying and selling property.

A government blockchain

For the government’s purposes, the killer feature of the blockchain is that it is a way to record transactions so that they are transparent and cannot be altered or tampered with. When used to track fish through a supply chain, for instance, it allows customers and restaurants to follow where the fish has been and have confidence in the data.

When applied to a government context, these capabilities could be useful for collecting tax, delivering benefits, or regulating business. From the public’s point of view, this could enable us to track government spending, eliminate fraudulent transactions, reduce errors in data processing and speed up service delivery to almost real time. It could be useful almost anywhere records are kept.

All the while the public could be more confident about the accuracy and integrity of the data being held.

In practice

The Australian government makes benefit payments and provides support services through Medicare, Centrelink and Child Support services. It also collects information through numerous other agencies, such as the Australian Tax Office. A government blockchain could record the transactions about a citizen and link together information about health, welfare and child support.

The information would be entered only once into the blockchain by any one of these agencies. There would be no need for the data to be re-entered or matched again. Thus errors that occur in data processing as information is passed on down the line will be eliminated, avoiding some of the issues with the current Centrelink system.

Further, once data is entered it cannot be altered or changed in any way without proper authentication. Any authorised officer within the government could then access the information in the blockchain, avoiding a paper-pushing exercise between government departments. All of your data would be in one place.

We could go even further, as the blockchain would also allow other services to be processed through an app, as the UK is trialling with welfare payments.

The overall cost savings, reduction in bureaucracy and increased responsiveness to helping people in need could be immense. All we need is the government to invest in its own blockchain.

The challenge is making it legitimate

The essence of a blockchain is to reduce the reliance on centralised systems (such as the government), replacing it with a system with inherent accountability, transparency and trust. The original blockchain concept achieved this by being open, like the internet (also known as unpermissioned), relying on independent, anonymous “miners” to validate transactions. This guarantees the integrity of the data as no-one knows who the miners are to bribe or bully them into underhanded actions.

However, some might view a government-run, “permissioned” blockchain with suspicion. The trust of the public would need to be gained. A government blockchain would not be open, and we would have to rely on the government to approve all of the transactions. This negates some of the benefit offered by a blockchain. The legitimacy and trust would have to come from the government itself.

Thus a government-run blockchain would not be without its challenges. But if an Australian government blockchain is developed and allowed to succeed, then the potential benefits could be enormous. Society as we know it will be disrupted!

Author: Christine Helliar, Professor School of Commerce, University of South Australia