Fintech

Airbitz, a San Diego-based bitcoin wallet and data security company, has announced a partnership with Bity, a Swiss bitcoin exchange that allows users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies with Euros and Swiss Francs. Bity will be a plug-in application inside the Airbitz Wallet allowing Airbitz users to buy and sell bitcoin with Euros and Swiss Francs. Airbitz has only had buy/sell bitcoin capabilities for its users with US bank accounts but this plug-in allows those with European bank accounts to buy through the Airbitz Wallet easily, cheaply, and securely.

BlackRock, the world’s largest fund company, will rely on robots to do its stockpicking. The $5.1 trillion asset manager announced on Tuesday that they will be restructuring the business to offer cheaper quantitative stock funds driven by computer models.

The change impacts about $30 billion in assets under management, including $30 million in annual fee-related dollars, says Jefferies analyst Daniel Fannon. Fannon says that while the scale of the reorganization is surprising, the change makes sense in the context of the firm’s struggle to draw active stock assets. This means that traditional stock-pickers will be replaced, with reports indicating that 40 jobs are on the line in the shake-up, with Blackrock earmarking $25 million in severance and bonuses to those affected.

JPMorgan, Microsoft, Intel, Accenture PLC and a large consortium of major players in tech and banking, including Credit Suisse, UBS, Bank of New York Mellon and Thomson Reuters, have joined hands to establish the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a new group dedicated to developing Ethereum into an enterprise-grade Blockchain platform.

The alliance connects Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, academics and technology suppliers with Ethereum subject matter experts to learn from and build upon Ethereum and to define standards for enterprise-grade implementations.

Global transaction banks are actively using SWIFT’s new global payments innovation (gpi) service, which opened for live payments in January 2017, says the financial messaging services provider.

ABN AMRO, Bank of China, BBVA, Citi, Danske Bank, DBS Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, ING Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, Nordea Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and UniCredit are live with SWIFT gpi, exchanging gpi payments across 60 country corridors. Numerous additional banks will follow in the coming months.

“SWIFT gpi is now live and is already enhancing the cross-border payments experience for corporate treasurers,” says Christian Sarafidis, Chief Marketing Officer at SWIFT.

FinTech leader NetGuardians and the School of Engineering and Management Vaud (HEIG-VD) have teamed to create a “made in Switzerland” research team focused on AI and machine learning; the project aims to use AI to take fraud detection “to the next level”. The project is being supported by the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI).

Bringing together leading-edge industry and academic strengths, the collaboration will further develop NetGuardians’ current real-time fraud detection technologies that use machine learning for superior analytics across all channels and banking systems. NetGuardians will work with the Institute for Information and Communication Technologies (IICT), an interdisciplinary applied research institute for real-world IT challenges, based at the technology-focused university HEIG-VD.

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Bitcoin startup Xapo has revealed that it has gained an early ‘conditional approval’ from Switzerland’s financial regulator (FINMA) to operate in the country.

The Switzerland-based company said in a new blog post that it has been given “conditional approval” from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) to do business in the European country.

CEO Wences Casares wrote in a blog: "We are happy to announce that, after almost two years of substantial effort and investment, Xapo has received conditional approval from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) to operate in Switzerland".

Speaking at the G20 conference, where leaders from the international organization are meeting in Germany to discuss issues around the digitization of finance Weidmann said: "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."