IMF Chief: Banks Shouldn't Fear Bitcoin or the Blockchain
Christine Lagarde, chief of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and finance minister under former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, said this week that banks don't have much to fear from bitcoin or the blockchain. The Financial Times reported today that, while speaking at a conference in New York City, Lagarde said attendees worried that the banking industry could be altered or rendered obsolete by the blockchain should "pause for a second". "Many of you have heard about not only bitcoins but blockchains and that unbelievable technology that underlies the bitcoins of this world at the....
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If you were a large bank or another type of large financial interest, and you had finances say, in Greece, wouldn't you potentially be looking for a good way to get them out quickly? Why wouldn't you consider Bitcoin? With Bitcoin, you could buy a large portion of them, and then transfer the money for a fraction of the cost, and then cash it back out into a fiat currency wherever you've sent it. For a bank, this would save a lot of time and money usually wasted on bank fees. For anyone else, it would represent a cheaper way of getting funds out of a dangerous environment. Is there any....
India’s second biggest private bank by assets, ICICI, is showing plenty of interest in the development of blockchain applications, according to the banking institution’s managing director and chief executive, Chanda Kochhar. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Kochhar states that the bank is prepared for a technological revolution bought on by innovations like the blockchain. While the narrative is increasingly seeing Fintech as the banking industry’s biggest threat and disruptor, the chief executive confirms that her bank is ‘constantly looking’ at blockchain technology.....
According to law experts in South Africa, most banks are scared of blockchain for its power to disrupt their sector. A Senior Associate at Norton Rose Fulbright in Johannesburg, Nerushka Bowan, said the adoption of blockchain among banks has the potential to disrupt the global banking industry. Using the blockchain technology and its digital distributed ledger to confirm batches of transactions just as it does for bitcoin, it can take over functions such as verifying payments. She added that though banks are a trusted intermediary for the exchange of funds, they will be cut out once the....
Two more Indian private banks have started conducting pilot transactions using blockchain technology, days after the country’s leading private sector bank, ICICI, completed its successful blockchain pilot. Axis Bank Ltd., and Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd., are two of the latest banks to join the growing number of global financial institutions jumping onto the blockchain bandwagon. According to Indian publication Livemint, the two banks are experimenting with blockchain-based solutions in different sectors of businesses and industry. Chief among them are applications for cross-border remittance....
Financial innovation is the topic of the hour, so it is hardly surprising that banks are being increasingly judged on their capability - and willingness - to implement change. Mariano Belinky, managing director at Santander InnoVentures, the megabank's venture capital fund, is familiar with this desire to innovate from within. But what about innovations, like bitcoin, that take place beyond bank walls? Speaking on a panel at Finextra's FutureMoney conference, Belinky described how his industry could be "transformed" by distributed ledgers like the blockchain. The bigger picture. Speaking....