Finance Monthly had the privilege to talk to tech veteran Carlo Gualandri about his FinTech start-up Soldo.

How does Soldo work and how easy is it to implement?

With a Soldo business account, organisations can allocate multiple intelligent pre-paid plastic and virtual Soldo Mastercards to employees and departments. Soldo provides real-time control on exactly who within an organisation can spend money, how much they can spend and where, when and how they can spend it. Companies can allocate spending budgets and impose very specific spending rules, whilst processing payments in real time. Soldo’s instant controls are remote and virtually effortless. Soldo's rich and detailed transaction data allows for uniquely detailed analysis, putting an end to the tedium and cost of traditional expense reports. Setting up an account with Soldo is quick and easy. There are no credit checks and accounts are up and running within one business day of registration. Once money is loaded onto an account, funds can be easily transferred to users for free and they can start spending immediately.

What are the three main benefits of investing in a multi-user business spending account?

Delegate: Soldo provides a mean for businesses to manage delegation of spending. It enables them to empower employees and departments to spend on behalf of the business itself - putting an end to cash advances and last-minute bank runs.

Control: With Soldo, businesses can easily stay in control of their money by setting bespoke limits, budgets and rules on user spending to retain ultimate authority.

Track: With Soldo, employees can effortlessly add transaction data, including pictures of receipts, notes and tags. All transaction data is available to view in real time and with a couple of clicks, expense reports can be generated, putting an end to traditional tedious expense reports.

As a young company, what would you say have been the major challenges so far and how have you overcome them?

Soldo is constantly evolving to meet and exceed customer needs. As such, it can prove challenging to implement internal processes in an environment which is dynamic and constantly changing. Soldo benefit from being composed of an experienced team, many of whom have worked together previously, which facilitates processes implementation and communication of ever-changing needs. Another major challenge has been the international outlook of Soldo right from the beginning, with offices in 3 different countries. However, we strongly believe that it is important to have a global outlook from the start to better understand and serve our customers. Here at Soldo, we utilise technology to communicate daily between our various offices and have 2 annual companywide conferences where we come together to discuss our progress and vision for the future.

How did the company come about in the first place, and what has pushed you to develop it this far?

Soldo was founded in 2015 by entrepreneurs and banking experts, united by the search for a simple and effective way to manage money within organisations. With over 20 years of experience in payment services and developing transactional systems, the team has harnessed the latest financial technology to provide the smartest corporate payments and expenses solution. We didn’t just stick a label on an ‘easy’ solution but invested heavily in the creation of a world-class technological, regulatory and operational platform and in finding the best team.

Soldo’s rock-solid innovation and talented team has attracted $20 million, in both Seed and Series A funding. Led by Accel Partners, our Series A round was completed in June 2017.

What are your thoughts on the digital age and the optimisation of all systems, including cashflow and accounts, in 2018?

Long-overdue regulatory evolution in the financial services industry has coincided with vastly accelerated technology amidst a market in which customers are more demanding than ever. Used to seeing innovative technology change almost every aspect of their daily lives, customers are increasingly impatient with old-fashioned, expensive or inefficient solutions. This technological evolution has played out particularly powerfully in cloud and mobile, and the stage is set for a perfect storm that will create significant market opportunities for new players and services. Within financial services, banking has always been a relatively closed market, shielded from the need to innovate by the lack of open market access. In this context, competition has been minimal and B2B services have lagged behind, even those for consumers. Soldo has seized this opportunity, bringing B2B financial services up to speed and leveraging this perfect storm to the utmost. Soldo’s innovative services make it easy for companies to manage and send payments and gain clear insight into spend. Soldo optimises the entire accounts administration process, which has been woefully under-leveraging technological innovation, and is still dominated by time-consuming manual work.

Website:  www.soldo.com

Email: businesssupport@soldo.com.

Barely a day passes by now on the internet when I am not offered to subscribe to the ICO (initial coin offering) of a new currency. If the statistics are to be believed, there are 11,000 of these new currencies, of which 1,200 or so are capable of being traded on the various cryptocurrency exchanges which have popped up around the world in recent times. But why are there so many of these new currencies popping up and how do they differ from one another? Richard Tall at DWF explains.

Cryptocurrencies - the 'next-gen' currency  

The first cryptocurrency was Bitcoin, and this has been with us since 2009. Bitcoin has in reality only been in the public consciousness for the last three or four years and most cryptocurrencies have been created within that time period. As it is now mainstream, Bitcoin can be used as a means of payment either through transfer over the internet, or by use of bank cards which are linked to accounts denominated in Bitcoin. In the modern environment, where so few of us use cash, it has the same sort of functionality as a fiat currency, albeit that the numbers of traders and businesses which are prepared to accept it remain in the significant minority.

Like Bitcoin, most new cryptocurrencies have their genesis in smart contracts. A smart contract is a computer protocol which enables a contract to execute automatically. The basis of a smart contract is that if X happens then Y will flow from that. Most of us would recognise that as a conditional contract, but a smart contract enables this obligation to happen in the decentralized world for those who sign up and agree to its protocol.

The rise of the token

The vast majority of new cryptocurrencies do not create their units in the same way as Bitcoin, though. A Bitcoin is created by solving an algorithm, the reward being generated through proof-of-work. Generally, most new cryptocurrencies being made now are offered as a token which is created by the originator and then traded through the blockchain. This is known as a proof-of-stake. An ICO in these circumstances will simply offer tokens for subscription by investors, usually to raise money for the next stage of development of their project, and in many ways an ICO shares many characteristics with an IPO of a development stage company. Many of us will remember the dot com era, where numerous companies sought funds to take themselves to the next stage of development, with the investors being asked at IPO to invest in the idea rather than a revenue, or indeed profit, generating business.

Coins and tokens - the regulator's perspective

The similarities between ICOs and IPOs have not escaped the attention of regulators. An offer of shares or bonds is clearly within the bailiwick of regulators and so both are subject to a host of legislation. However, the general mantra with an ICO and a cryptocurrency is that they are "unregulated." Bearing in mind money laundering and anti-financial crime legislation, "unregulated" is entirely inapt as a tag. Equally, little thought has been given by ICO originators as to the true nature of what is being offered. The SEC (the US Securities and Exchange Commission) has recently ruled that ether (the tokens behind Ethereum) are securities, on the basis that they are an investment contract (investment of money in a common enterprise with an expectation of profit). Accordingly, the SEC's view is that ether offers should have been conducted in accordance with securities laws. Many other regulators are issuing similar warnings, and making the point that simply because a new technology is being used it does not mean that the resulting token is outside long-established principles of consumer regulation. As a broad rule of thumb:

• If a token offers voting or similar rights it will be treated as a security, as it shares its characteristics with shares;
• If it offers redemption it will be an instrument creating or acknowledging indebtedness, or colloquially a bond;
• If it derives its value from fluctuations in value of another asset it is likely to be some form of derivative.

Whether an ICO is of any merit depends ultimately on the utility of the token offered and what it is capable of doing. Clearly the aim of most ICOs is for the value of the token to increase over time, and any investor needs to look closely at whether that will ever come to pass. Equally, those originating ICOs need to exercise extreme caution in relation to the terms of the tokens offered and the jurisdictions into which they are offered. This is a red-hot topic for regulators who definitely do not share the view that this arena is "unregulated".

Bangalore-based software company Ezetap has developed a platform that makes it easy to pay anywhere with any device you like. It has created software allowing a merchant with a smartphone to accept any type of payment and see that money moved seamlessly into their own bank account.

When adopting new payment methodologies, banks must strike a challenging balance between ease of use and access and the need to put in place stringent levels of security. With technology evolving at ever-increasing rates, it’s increasingly difficult to keep on top of that challenge. Below Finance Monthly hears from Russell Bennett, chief technology officer at Fraedom, on this challenging balance.

Banks first need to put in place an expert team with the time, resource and capability to stay ahead of the technological curve. This includes reviewing, and, where relevant, leveraging the security used on other systems and devices that support access into banking systems. Such a team will, for example, need to look at the latest apps and smartphone devices, where fingerprint authentication is now the norm and rapidly giving way to the latest facial recognition functionality.

Indeed, it is likely that future authentication techniques used on state-of-the-art mobile devices will drive ease-of-use further, again without compromising security, while individual apps are increasingly able to make seamless use of that main device functionality.

This opens up great potential for banks to start working closely with software companies to develop their own capabilities that leverage these types of security checks. If they focus on a partnership-driven approach, banks will be better able to make active use of biometric and multifactor authentication controls, effectively provided by the leading consumer technology companies that are investing billions in latest, greatest smartphones.

Opportunities for Corporate Cards

This struggle to find a balance between security and convenience is however, not just about how the banks interact directly with their retail customers. We are witnessing it increasingly impacting the wider banking ecosystem, including across the commercial banking sector. The ability for business users to strike a better balance between convenience and security in the way they use bank-provided corporate cards is a case in point.

We have already seen that consumer payment methods using biometric authentication are becoming increasingly mainstream – and that provides an opportunity for banks. Extending this functionality into the corporate card arena has the potential to make the commercial payments process more seamless and secure. Mobile wallets, sometime known as e-wallets, that defer to the individual’s personal attributes to make secure payments on these cards, whether authenticated by phone or by selfie, offer one route forward. There are still challenges ahead before the above becomes a commercial reality though.

First, these wallets currently relate largely to in-person, point of sale payments. For larger, corporate card use cases such as settling invoices in the thousands, the most common medium remains online or over the phone.

Second, there are issues around tethering the card both to the employee’s phone and the employee. The 2016 Gartner Personal Technologies Study, which polled 9,592 respondents in the US, the UK and Australia revealed that most smartphones used in the workplace were personally owned devices. Only 23 percent of employees surveyed were given corporate-issued smartphones.

Yet the benefits of e-wallet-based cards in terms of convenience and speed and ease of use, and the potential that they give the businesses offering them to establish competitive edge are such that they have great future potential.

One approach is to build a bridge to the fully e-wallet based card: a hybrid solution that serves to meet a current market need and effectively paves the way for these kinds of cards to become ubiquitous. There are grounds for optimism here with innovations continuing to emerge bringing us closer to the elusive convenience/security balance. MasterCard has been trialling a convenient yet secure alternative to the biometric phone option. From 2018, it expects to be able to issue standard-sized credit cards with the thumbprint scanner embedded in the card itself. The card, being thus separated from the user’s personal equipment, can remain in the business domain. There is also the opportunity to scan several fingerprints to the same card so businesses don’t need to issue multiple cards.

Of course, part of value of bringing cards into the wallet environment is ultimately the ability to replace plastic with virtual cards. The e-wallet is both a natural step away from physical plastic and another example of the delicate balancing act between consumerisation of technology and security impacting banking and the commercial payments sector today. There are clearly challenges ahead both for banks and their commercial customers in striking the right balance but with technology continuing to advance, e-wallets being a case in point, and the financial sector showing a growing focus on these areas, we are getting ever closer to equilibrium.

Traditional banks are lagging behind when it comes to technology and we are increasingly seeing non-financial services companies, like Facebook and Orange moving in into the territory of traditional banks. Below Daniel Kjellén, Co-Founder and CEO of Swedish fintech unicorn Tink, looks at how Facebook is currently adding P2P payments to their services.

You would have to have your head in the sand not to notice that huge change is afoot across the banking and personal finance sectors. Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it was making its first foray into finance in the UK, with the launch of a new service which will allow users to transfer cash with just a message.

Facebook is not the only tech giant moving in on the territory of traditional banks, with Apple also set to launch its own virtual cash payments system and telecoms behemoth Orange recently announcing the launch of its online banking platform. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Fintech firms like Mint, Moneybox and Tink are taking this concept beyond payments, creating a sophisticated consumer led money management ecosystem.

So why is this happening? The launch of Facebook’s P2P payments service is evidence of the wave of technological and legislative driven disruption sweeping toward the retail banking market that change the shape of the sector beyond recognition. Consumers in 2017 are platform agnostic and don’t care whether they manage their money through their bank or their phone company or social media account.

Across the world, we are witnessing a move to the model of ‘open banking’ which will blow open the retail banking sector and create competition in the form of tech firms, who are already making a play for the territory traditionally held by banks. This hasn’t happened in a vacuum, it is just one symptom of the enormous transformation the industry is undergoing.

The fintech invasion

The current wave of tech companies offering in-app personal finance capabilities is just the beginning. The success of fintechs such as Monzo and Transferwise has demonstrated beyond doubt that today’s consumers are looking beyond their bank to manage their finances.

Until recently, banks have enjoyed a monopoly over their customers’ data and have operated in a market which by design, discourages competition and transparency. The result has been a mismatch between people and products, with consumers having to settle for high cost, low quality financial services. It’s not surprising that nimble tech companies are moving in on the space previously occupied by the banks. So long as their investments in fintech yield results, these ambitious and visionary companies will continue to pioneer new solutions that transform our relationship with money.

Banks who don’t innovate and create customer led products, will risk losing their customers who, through tech solutions will automatically be filtered towards a smorgoesboard of banking products which suit their needs. Third party platforms will become the main interface for money management, regardless of who the consumer actually banks with.

A nudge in the right direction

Facebook’s mobile payments feature will be supported by M Suggestions, a virtual assistant which monitors Messenger chats and nudges consumers to use the payments feature whenever the subject of sending money comes up in conversation, aiming for a seamless integration between social interaction and finance. The smart technology which underpins Facebook’s virtual assistant is a glimpse of the future of personal money management.

Today’s apps are nudging consumers in their day-to-day choices, encouraging them to save a little every month, offering tailored advice based on their economic habits, pointing them towards better deals and products, helping them to prepare for life’s big financial commitments - all with the aim of improving users’ financial happiness.

Money on autopilot

Facebook’s payments service aims to remove friction from the transaction - friction in this case being the need to leave Messenger. We are witnessing increasing numbers of tech companies offering these in app capabilities, the ultimate aim of which is to allow users to do everything in one place.

PSD2, which comes into force in January, will open the floodgates for third parties to build financial services apps which aggregate, enabling consumers to do everything in-app from paying their bills to comparing how much they are paying for access to financial products like credit and mortgages.

Technology is ushering in a new era where money management is frictionless and simple. Many people today have a difficult or distant relationship with their finances. There is often a mismatch between people’s needs and the product they are offered by their bank. This means money management can often feel like a chore rather than a choice.

In-app personal finance services such as those offered by Facebook, Tink and Apple, will offer consumers the ability to effortlessly manage their personal finances while going about their daily business. People’s relationship with their money will become a lifestyle choice, with financial decisions being akin to the choices they make about their health or their hobbies. Eventually, money will be on autopilot.

A bank by any other name

Today it is rare to find an individual who is loyal to their bank. With the ties between consumers and their bank becoming increasingly weak, smartphones will become the interface between people and their money. The entity sitting behind this engagement will become little more than an afterthought.

Tech companies who have built a strong consumer facing brand - underpinned by best in class technology - are waking up to the opportunity and are planting their roots in the fertile ground left wide open by the traditional banks. As the line between banks, fintech, social media and telecoms becomes blurred, the banking market as we know it will soon be unrecognisable. The banks who will survive and thrive are those who embrace the disruption and invest in the power to innovate through technology.

To learn all about Plutus - a mobile application for making contactless Bitcoin payments, this month Finance Monthly reached out to the company’s CEO - Danial Daychopan.

What is Plutus?

Plutus consists of two interconnected applications:

Plutus Tap & Pay is an Android and iOS app for paying with Bitcoin & Ethereum at any contactless-enabled debit card terminal already in use today. Additionally, every deposit you make rewards you in Pluton, a loyalty rebate token which can then be used to make further purchases without fees.

The PlutusDEX is a one-way peer-to-peer exchange (smart contract) that provides liquidity for the Tap & Pay app. The way this works is that PlutusDEX traders can escrow fiat currency such as GBP or EUR to purchase Bitcoin and Ethereum from the users of Tap & Pay mentioned above. 

Our favorite aspect, however, is that the Bitcoin and Ethereum can be bought by other users with zero fees through the PlutusDEX. Our person-to-person system it much easier to add new currencies (both fiat and digital) depending on demand, and a 0% fee trading experience encourages exchanges and blockchain enterprises to use our API as well. 

Tell us a bit about yourself. How did the idea about Plutus come about? What were some of the challenges that you faced when setting up the company?

My journey in FinTech began in 2013 when I first started one of the first licensed Bitcoin exchanges, followed by a cryptocurrency merchant payments platform called LazyPay.

Earlier that year, I had seen an invoice get filled within seconds across different timezones, all without the need for a centralised party. After this, I was immediately attracted to Bitcoin and fascinated by the features it had to offer.

At the time, there was already a growing niche of Bitcoin supporters and early adopters who wanted to spend the coins they had earned. However, merchant adoption proved far more challenging than anticipated, stalling due to the logistical and volatility issues. Even the largest Bitcoin companies couldn’t move it forward. Unswayed by rising hype, merchants decided that cash and debit cards worked just fine for them. It was and still is an uphill battle.

We were undeterred and still wanted to be able to spend our digital currencies wherever we wanted. And if possible, without having to get merchants involved altogether. After much deliberation, we finally found a way to do it.

In 2015, Plutus first set out to circumvent the issue of merchant adoption by connecting the blockchain to the Visa and MasterCard networks. This gateway makes digital currencies valid for payment at over 40 million debit-enabled points-of-sale worldwide.

This means that even though you are using digital currencies, the store owner or merchant will receive a bank transfer as usual and will not see any difference when compared to a regular debit card transaction.

What have been the company’s major achievements thus far?

Plutus has come a long way since our inception. When we began, we first wanted to gauge community demand. We knew that we needed the app we were making, but we didn’t know whether other people knew it too. From this idea forth, we decided to crowdfund the project. In a surprising result, we raised over 1 million USD from over 1000 users, and have grown to thousands of subscribers since.

We’ve also built an incredible team of tremendous people, from management to development, and entered into partnerships with leading service providers. Now we are right in the middle of the BETA programme, testing and tweaking our platform with the help of our community, drawing ever nearer to the first production-ready release of Plutus.

What kind of device is required to use Plutus? Do merchants need anything to accept Plutus payments or Plutons? 

Pretty much all (relatively) new smartphone have built-in NFC. In fact, finding a smartphone without it

Is actually quite difficult nowadays.

To support Plutus, all merchants need is the regular contactless payment terminal that they most likely already have. This makes Plutus payments valid at over 40 million compatible points of sale in the world by default.

What can you tell us about your in-app cryptocurrency called Pluton?

Our platform Plutus Tap & Pay has an in app token called “Pluton”, which act as loyalty reward points on the platform. However, it is important to note that this is not intended to be a competitor of Bitcoin or Ether.

Rather, Plutons (or PLU for short) are actually a cashback program similar to frequent flier miles. This means that they can be used to make purchases on our platform just like BTC and ETH, with the added advantage of faster deposits and absolutely zero fees. Every time you make a purchase with BTC or ETH, you get 1-3% of your purchase back in Plutons.

Could you tell us more about where you see blockchain technology in the future?

We believe there is huge potential in blockchain technology to positively disrupt our standard methods of payments, trading, and other aspects of our lives. The industry is rapidly growing with a never-ending drive towards more automation, more decentralisation, and less friction. Over the coming years, we believe the use case will reach mainstream products where consumers could have a better user experience without the need to understand or be aware that the blockchain was utilised.

However, that said, private blockchains do not rely on a peer-to-peer network but if an organisation intends to utilise the technology for improved governance, automation and transparency internally then it can work if done right – for now, we remain skeptical.

Do you look at others in the FinTech industry as competitors or do you take a different view?

I have a different view - they help push the industry forward and help us to learn from their mistakes. In many ways, we are doing something completely different.

When you charge your Plutus account with digital currencies, you are actually transferring them directly to a trader on the DEX who has created an order to purchase them in return. This means that our customers can sell and buy digital currencies directly to and from other customers. As a result, Plutus never stores any digital currencies on the platform.

And with recent security concerns on the rise, the benefits of not holding funds are becoming increasingly clear as the blockchain space develops.

What have been the biggest hurdles faced by the company?

Red tape and creating a winning team - both in development and in management. In the blockchain space everyone is competing for talent, while regulators are still very skeptical. This creates a challenging environment.

What is your vision for the future of Plutus? Where do you see the company in 2-3 years?

The aim is to enable users to pay using crypto currency directly with smartphones at any merchants of their choice. And lower the barrier of entry for anyone wanting to buy Pluton, Bitcoin and Ether. This is why we created Plutus Tap and Pay and the PlutusDEX. We also wanted to create decentralise loyalty reward system called Pluton that awards customers for every deposit, which they can then spend anywhere. In the future, we believe the platform will be one of the largest platforms that enables payments via the debit card network in the peer-to-peer market.

We also aim to enable users to make a direct deposit in their Plutus account, using direct bank transfer instead of crypto, who will also receive a reward in Pluton, introducing new users to the blockchain ecosystem.

Initially, we will be releasing physical debit cards, NFC stickers. Our main product will be an iOS and Android app for making contactless purchases, trading and managing your wallets. We plan to add online payments and other nifty features as well.

What are you currently working on?

We are currently working on Plutus Tap & Pay, and the PlutusDEX. Both parts are interconnected and fulfill important roles in our ecosystem. Currently, our live payment systems are already undergoing internal testing. Once the stress-tests have been completed, the PlutusDEX will be released, followed by shipment of the official Plutus Debit Cards.

We are also looking to grow Plutus with new members in key roles - we are currently hiring.

If you could share one piece of advice with young FinTech entrepreneurs, what would it be?

Don't be scared to fail and be prepared to live “the ramen life”.
Website: https://plutus.it

If helping test the platform and coordinating how the future of Plutus Tap & Pay and PlutusDEX will look, why not join the BETA waiting list? http://beta.plutus.it

 For more information about Plutus’ long-term ideas, please take a look at “Slingshot from Orbit: The Future Vision of Plutus.it”: https://medium.com/@PlutusIT/slingshot-from-orbit-the-future-vision-of-plutus-it-cf7b69f827ef#.wajh88j3e

Case Study: An Interview with Plutus.it’s CCO - Filip Martinka

Recently, Plutus has been making rounds in London and Berlin, presenting their technology for instant, peer-to-peer, decentralized payment platform. The company’s CCO - Filip Martinka tells us about how the project is coming along.

Why use Bitcoin over Ethereum? 

We believe that there are useful aspects to both. The main reason we are using Bitcoin is for its already widespread usage, and Ethereum - for its ability to automate business logic. We want be able to adapt based on demand. Fortunately there are many other projects on the horizon that aim to be natively compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine, so porting the platform may be possible as well.

Why should more merchants accept Bitcoin as payment? What about Ethereum? 

We believe that at such an early stage of Bitcoin’s development, convincing merchants is quite challenging. This is why our app is mainly intended for Bitcoin and Ethereum users who are tired of waiting for merchants to accept digital currencies and want to wield the ability to pay regardless of whether the merchant is involved.

Are you planning to integrate with other Decentralized Exchanges?

Initially, our platform will launch with an open API, meaning that 3^rd party applications can interface with some features of our system. At the present moment, our development team is focused on finalizing our product. However, once we have a production-ready release, we will look into available options to expand our cooperation with other exchanges, developers and SaaS providers.

What is the reason, in your opinion, that merchant adoption of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies has been so slow?

It appears that mass adoption is a slow process, and not necessarily a straight line.

Accepting digital currencies still takes a lot of effort, involves friction and regulation, and is often cost intensive. The main problem is that it is not possible for merchants to accurately predict how many Bitcoin purchases they will get in the early stages of adoption. Many get discouraged when they get none, or remove Bitcoin as a payment option for a combination of reasons including training expenses, fees, or technical difficulties.

What can Status do for Plutus?

We appreciate integration into any 3rd party apps, exchanges, or services. All we want is for our users to have optimum interoperability with platforms, and liquidity for our traders. If you have other suggestions please let us know.

How does Plutus benefit from the use of Ethereum?

Our one-way trading gateway integrates an Ethereum smart contract, which makes our platform more transparent and decentralized. Over time, we want to optimize costs, reduce friction, and make the platform more autonomous.

What is the goal you’re hoping to achieve with Plutus?

We want Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other digital currencies to become regular payment options in daily life.

Which other DApps do you think Plutus can benefit the most from?

Exchanges can plug into our platform as well. It will be interesting to see the result.

What do you see as the biggest hurdle(s) in gaining a critical mass for Plutus?

We have to wait for society to get more familiar with digital currencies - until it becomes a topic one can talk about without getting weird looks from strangers. In the beginning, people who earn their income online will be the first to fully adapt to digital currencies. But we believe that this will take less time than most people think.

How do you see Plutus helping people's lives?

Our main goal has always been to provide a convenient payment method, and an easy and affordable way to buy digital currencies.

Is there a level of technical knowledge required by the end-user in order to use Plutus?

Ideally, there will not be more than few clicks required to use any feature. Our team is always thinking of new ways to make Plutus easier to use and navigate.

What is the most exciting feature of Plutus in your opinion?

How it all comes together. The Tap & Pay users deposit Bitcoin and Ethereum, while traders purchase them on the PlutusDEX, and the merchants receive their usual payment from the traders. This makes it possible to add currencies based on demand, and connect other platforms.

What do you think is the most important factor that differentiates Plutus from the non-blockchain(/Ethereum) applications in your field?

The fact that Plutus does not hold any digital currencies, and simply acts as a gateway to connect users with each other and match their trades. This makes the platform more secure and adaptable. And in some ways, the peer-to-peer nature of our exchange makes it more like “localbitcoins” for example, rather than a regular centralized exchange.

What can people in the Ethereum community do to help Plutus?

The main thing would obviously be to use our app, or to purchase digital currencies through our gateway. If you are a developer or entrepreneur, note that our decentralized exchange will have an open API and 0% trading fees for buying any digital currencies, making it ideal for integration in 3^rd party software.

Here John Milliken, Chief Operating Officer at Infomedia, delves into the statistics and facts of online, mobile and digital payments, how they differ between regions, and why.

According to a report by UNCTAD - the United Nations body on international trade and development - online, mobile and digital currency payment systems are set to overtake credit and debit cards as the most popular ways to pay in e-commerce worldwide by 2019. The research suggests that the share of credit and debit cards in global payments will drop to 46% by 2019 from the 51% forecasted three years ago.

Last year, China’s mobile revenue hit $5.5 trillion, a figure that is 50 times more than the size of America’s $112 billion market, according to consulting firm iResearch. Similarly, in the last year alone, Japan’s e-commerce market was valued at $89 billion, with half of that coming from mobile.

By comparison, in the UK and US, many brands, from retailers to publishers, continue to struggle to deliver a mobile experience that enables a convenient and simple payment method and encourages consumers to spend. As a result, despite the fact that mobile devices have consistently driven the highest levels of engagement compared to any other platform, it continues to experience the lowest conversion rates.

So, what is it the East is doing differently to the West that has caused mobile revenue to sky rocket?

The Asian Mobile Market

The Asian technology industry - particularly mobile - has pulled ahead of what we’ve seen in the West. China and Japan, like many other developing markets, have not followed the pattern of the West in going from physical shops to PC to laptop to smartphone. Instead many consumers are going straight to smartphones without previously owning a fixed internet connection.

According to Zenith’s Mobile Advertising Forecasts for 2017, mobile accounts for 73% of time spent using the internet globally, however in the UK this figure is just 57%. By comparison, in China, internet users reached 668 million in June 2015, and 549 million of those users (almost 90%) access the internet primarily via their mobile devices. In other words, the number of internet users in China is more than twice the population of the US and almost the population of Europe, and most of those individuals are walking around with a smartphone.

With these figures in mind, it’s clear that mobile is prevalent in China - it’s a way of life, not just a medium of communication. On mobile, consumers talk, text, shop, order food, hail taxis, book travel, pay for products and services, deposit money into their bank or transfer money, amongst other things. Most Chinese companies have recognised this, and build their advertising and marketing, customer communication, shopping, purchasing, and even their payment programmes around mobile. In fact, about half of all e-commerce in China happens on mobile, compared to just over a fifth in the US and around a third in the UK.

As a result, rather than focusing on card payments, merchants and mobile operators in China and Japan have worked together to develop truly frictionless mobile payment processes. In China in particular, much of this is driven by mobile payment services via social messaging service WeChat and AliPay, its paypal equivalent. In fact, Alipay recently signed with Starbucks to enable e-payment at all 2,800 Starbucks locations, while at a KFC, diners can pay via Alipay using facial recognition technology. In Japan however, DCB is the most popular payment method accounting for more than 50% of all ‘online’ transactions - a number that has risen consistently over the past five years as more consumers move away from card payments.

It is clear there is an opportunity for brands to deliver the same conversion rates on mobile seen in Japan and China if they are able to adapt to behavioural change. And although the Chinese market appears to be different to the West, it has actually just reached the predicted next stage for all markets quicker. By acknowledging that consumers want the quickest and easiest payment processes, we can also deliver an experience that is frictionless and encourages customers to convert from browsing to spending on mobile. In summary, it is only when brands begin to deliver and offer a mobile first experience that they too, will be able to maximise on the mobile opportunity.

Ray Dalio, the founder of the largest hedge fund in the world, told Henry Blodget that investors should have 5% to 10% of their portfolio in gold. During that same interview, Dalio called bitcoin a "speculative bubble" and said "bitcoin is not an effective medium exchange by and large" and "it's not easy to buy things with the bitcoin."

Dalio isn't the only one asking these questions about bitcoin. If bitcoin really is a currency, then it is important that you can buy things with it. But this may not be a fair argument. We all seem to accept gold as a storehold of wealth and as an alternative currency even though you really can't make purchases with gold.

So in an effort to fairly compare gold and bitcoin in this vein, we went out into the world to see how easy it was to spend both in everyday transactions. It turns out it isn't easy to spend either. The only person we could find who accepted gold in New York City was Donald Trump in 2011.

Bitcoin is slightly easier to spend. We couldn't use our bitcoin at Subway, which is on a few lists of retailers that accept bitcoin. Le Village, a restaurant in New York's East Village that many have reported accepts bitcoin, was closed down when we tried to eat there. But we did have some luck spending bitcoin.

We found that it was easy to use bitcoin on Overstock.com. Also, my daughter's preschool accepts bitcoin for tuition payments. But if you really want to use bitcoin in everyday transactions, you can get a debit card that allows you to spend bitcoin easily. But maybe we are simply using the wrong words when we talk about bitcoin.

As Adam Ludwin, the founder and CEO of Chain, says in his open letter to Jamie Dimon, "since this isn't about cryptocurrencies vs. fiat currencies let's stop using the word currency." He goes on to say that he prefers to think of them as "crypto assets."

According to ONS’ most recent crime report, “Bank and credit account fraud” was the most common type of fraud experienced (2.5 million incidents or 75% of total fraud) in the UK, followed by “consumer and retail fraud” 6– such as fraud related to online shopping or fraudulent computer service calls (0.7 million incidents or 22% of total fraud). More than half (1.9 million incidents or 57%) were cyber-related.

Below Sundeep Tengur, Banking Fraud Solutions Manager, SAS UK & Ireland, comments on the progress that FS organisations are making on tackling fraud.

“It’s encouraging to see that the financial services industry is starting to give fraud the attention it deserves.

“With increasing instances of the misuse of alternative currencies like Bitcoin and difficulty in securing the electronic payments industry, the financial sector is rising to the occasion. But there is still plenty of work to be done as fraudsters continue to adapt their tactics.

“Whether it is against low-level bank account and card fraud or more serious attacks on organisations, financial services can’t afford to leave their doors open to fraud. They must continue to tighten defences and improve their capabilities to detect and resolve instances of fraudulent activity.

“To stay secure and instate confidence, organisations must derive actionable intelligence from the information available. Spotting the tell-tale signs of improper payments and transactions means they can get one step ahead and stop any financial or personal assets being compromised.

“Advanced analytics will be at the core of these efforts, crucial for helping firms mine their ever-increasing datasets for these invaluable insights. At the same time, artificial intelligence and machine learning will prove to be just as beneficial as more and more financial institutions are automating the process of fraud detection, improving the speed and efficiency of their response.

“The fraud factor is never going to go away. Yet those businesses that are proactively interrogating data will have a better chance of preventing fraud’s most devastating effects.”

A recent study from Forex Bonuses finds the countries among the 20 largest economies who are adapting quickest to using cashless systems like phones and contactless cards – revealing that Canada narrowly edges out Sweden for the top position.

The economies adopting the most cashless technology have been revealed in new research from global trading site Forex Bonuses.

Investigating twenty of the world’s most significant markets, the study looks into contactless card saturation, number of debit and credit cards issued per capita, usage of cashless methods, growth of these cashless payments, and the proportion of people who are aware of which mobile payment services are available. From these six metrics an overall ranking was calculated.

Cashless Economies

The top position has gone to Canada, who, while only having contactless functionality in 26% of their cards (compared to 41% in the UK and 56% in China) and the lowest number of debit cards per capita included in the research (0.7), were found to have over two credit cards per person, a figure only exceeded by their neighbours in the US, who had just under three.

Likewise, the majority of their payments were made using cashless means at 57% of transactions, outmatched only by 2% in both Sweden and France. The UK reached 52% on this scale, while China, despite the majority of cards being contactless, used cashless methods in only 10% of transactions. China were also the most educated on mobile payment services, with 77% of survey respondents claiming they were aware of the options available to them in this regard. In comparison, only 47% in the UK claimed the same.

(Source: Forex Bonuses)

Figures released by UK Finance find the number of debit and credit card transactions grew by 12% in the UK in the year to the end of June, the highest annual rate since 2008. The value of spending also rose, accelerating to 7.2%.

Lenders are currently facing the pending challenge of upping their game after The Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) highlighted the need to address lending concerns.

Ian Bradbury, Chief Technology Officer, Financial Services Business at Fujitsu UK and Ireland, told Finance Monthly:

“With the use of contactless payment cards soaring by over 140% in the past year alone, the news that UK credit and debit card spending is growing at its fastest rate in nine years comes as no surprise. We expect contactless payments to become an increasingly important feature in the British payments landscape. Making up around a third of all plastic card transactions – up from around 10% just a couple of years ago – the convenience and ease of contactless payment means that such transactions are continuing to gain traction with the public. Not only this, the high-growth adoption of contactless payments underlines the fact that consumers and retailers choose to adopt solutions that are secure, quick and easy to use, as well as ubiquitous.

Contactless payments are not only easier to use than Chip and Pin, they are in many ways more practical than small change and small notes. The significant parallel growth in debit card transactions also suggests that this is not growth just fuelled by debt and easy credit – much of this increase will be a result of contactless payments being made purely due to ease. What’s more, contactless payments have the added value of fuelling other payment solutions such as Apple and Google pay and other wearable technology – which can’t be done as easily with Chip and Pin.

Finally, the success of contactless payments demonstrates that consumers are quick to adopt new payments solutions that focus heavily on improving the consumer experience. However, because consumer experience can cover many aspects including convenience, security, speed and ubiquity, it’s vital that providers put in place ways to improve the experience over current solutions. If future payment solutions do not address all of these areas – which are fast-becoming a customer expectation – then they are unlikely to be successful.”

Craig James, CEO of Neopay, tells Finance Monthly PSD2 will prove to be the most beneficial piece of legislation for fintech companies in years, and could completely change the face of the UK banking sector.

While technology has grown increasingly important in the financial sector, the “traditional” industry has been slow to adapt as consumers grow more frustrated by the lack of progress.

Innovative start-ups, looking to fill the gap left by the traditional establishment’s hesitation to change, have been growing in prominence as some banks, regulators and the government try to encourage new ways for businesses to engage with customers in a market suffering a long-standing loss of reputation.

Coming into force in January next year, the EU Payment Service Directive (PSD2) is the latest change facing one of the country’s oldest institutions, and could prove the catalyst for a technology revolution in the sector driven by innovation in personal banking.

Putting consumers at the heart of the fintech revolution

The most substantial change in PSD2 is enabling customers to allow third party businesses – like technology companies – to have access to all their bank data.

For fintech companies focussed on bringing new products to the market, this presents a new opportunity to create these offerings, without the infrastructure costs facing traditional banks.

Personalisation has been a buzzword in banking for some time, and there is no shortage of products from savings accounts to credit cards that are promoted as tailored to a customer’s needs.

However, while banks can provide a card with an interest rate suitable to the customer, the current offerings are incapable of working across multiple accounts, and cannot adapt to real time changes to a consumer’s individual circumstances.

PSD2 opens the possibility for fintech businesses to create “one stop shop” apps for bank services, allowing a customer to access and manage every aspect of their financial footprint from a single point.

These technology based products will put the consumer back at the heart of banking as businesses will be forced to adapt their products, or face getting left behind by smaller technology businesses which can suddenly offer better services.

It will also open entirely new ways for consumers to manage all aspects of their financial needs.

Better budgeting

There is already a plethora of products which can help customers with their finances, but they are severely limited in essentially being a replacement for paper based tracking. The onus is still on the customer to stay on top of the information.

However, by getting access to a person’s account information and financial history, a fintech company could create a genuinely personalised budgeting tool which could remove the management aspect from the customer.

By being able to monitor balances and outgoings in real time, these apps could be programmed to learn when particular bills are due and, if one account is lacking funds to pay, the app could notify a customer and then automatically transfer money from another account – or combination of accounts.

Considering that most people have more than one active bank account, this type of capability could prove invaluable for customers, helping them avoid unnecessarily falling into debt because they failed to move money around in time.

Real time debt solutions

For those customers who have already fallen into debt, new technology based bank apps could be created to offer real time solutions to help consumers pay down the money they owe, and get out of difficulties.

One of the major frustrations with current banking services, according to our research, is that balance updates are not always immediate and in some situations a user is not being shown an accurate account of their financial situation – which makes it hard to make decisions.

New banking apps could greatly benefit these customers by assessing their income and spending habits – while updating account balances in real time – and instantly suggest ways that customer could reduce their out-goings.

There is also the potential for banks to adopt these kinds of apps, which could be used to find or suggest savings plans.

The biggest benefit of this wave of products over existing services, is that they could monitor activity across multiple accounts in real time. The real-time aspect of these tools could help customers by instantly alerting them to unusual activity or if an account is in danger of becoming overdrawn.

While the “traditional” banking sector is at risk of being left behind by the speed of technological change there remains great potential for banks and fintech companies to introduce a wave of new products and tools for consumers that can help them manage their personal finances better.

PSD2 could kickstart the biggest chance the banking sector has experienced and, in the long run, will prove extremely beneficial for those institutions most able to implement technology at the heart of the customer offering.