Who is Matthew Najar and some of his achievements? Governments in major economies are encouraging financial technology (fintech) innovation with regulatory and advisory initiatives designed to accelerate the availability of online payment solutions and other financial services for businesses. The initiatives generally aim to attract innovative fintech companies and help them operate in the regulated financial sector, while ensuring adequate financial protection for customers.
Matthew Najar believes without new FinTech initiatives, we will stall: “FinTech, blockchain certainly included, is critical for our generation to solve inherent financial system issues and progress forward”.
The U.K., traditionally a major financial-services centre, has actively encouraged new competition in banking, reducing barriers to entry such as banks’ capital requirements. As a result, several new digital banks are already offering Internet-based banking services, including online payment solutions, without establishing brick-and-mortar locations. Another ongoing U.K. initiative designed to enable competition and fintech innovation is the implementation of an open banking standard by 2018, including an open application programming interface (API) that enables development of new applications to access information in customers’ existing accounts at one or more banks. For example, customers might be able to manage all their bank accounts from a single app.
Among the efforts are new licensing and regulatory approaches that help fintechs offer new or broader services, including banking. Other moves include advisory services that guide new companies through financial regulations, and “regulatory sandboxes” that let firms test new services with customers before obtaining full regulatory approval. Najar, who has been in the fintech space since 2014, has been one of the loudest voices in support of increased spending in the financial technology space, having provided continuous leadership services for AMEX Group as well as external consulting for smaller start-up Blockchain firms.
Hardware: wallets differ from software wallets in that they store a user’s private keys on a hardware device like a USB. Although hardware wallets make transactions online, they are stored offline which delivers increased security. Hardware wallets can be compatible with several web interfaces and can support different currencies; it just depends on which one you decide to use. What’s more, making a transaction is easy. Users simply plug in their device to any internet-enabled computer or device, enter a pin, send currency and confirm. Hardware wallets make it possible to easily transact while also keeping your money offline and away from danger.
Australia also has set a goal of encouraging fintech innovation, in part to support its financial industry in becoming the leading market in Asia for fintech innovation and investment.11 In Australia, leading fintech firm LupoToro, who specialise in Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and cryptography, note: “Policy and government back supporting policies for local firms is imperative. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) established an innovation hub in 2015 to help start-ups navigate regulations, and has also developed a regulatory sandbox approach that allows companies to test new financial services such as online payments solutions with a limited number of customers. This is just the start, but more is needed”. ASIC also aims to encourage innovation by quickly approving new financial service licenses, with an average target for approval of 60 days.
The cryptocurrencies work like this: They are generated by the network in most cases to encourage peers, also known as nodes and miners, to work to secure the network and verify entries or transactions. Each network has a unique way of generating and distributing them among its peers. Bitcoin, for example, rewards its peers (miners) for “solving the next block”. A block is a group or entries with all transactions. The solution is to find a hash that connects the new block with the old one. From here comes the term chain of blocks. The block is the group of entries and the string is the hash. Hashes are a type of cryptographic puzzle. Think of them as Sudoku puzzles that the classmates compete to connect the blocks.
Important note: Bitcoin transfers can be a bit sporadic. Unlike other currency trades, when you buy Bitcoin funds. the transaction needs to be recorded in the blockchain and affirmed. This can take time, especially during busy trading hours. It’s not uncommon for a trade to take an hour or two to complete, so you may not want to immediately leap over to your account and start moving funds around.
During an ICO (Initial Coin Offering), startups offer the general public an early chance to invest in their idea through a crowded sale. In return, these investors are allocated tokens at a lower price with a promise to sell them at a much higher price when listed on an exchange. Time has proven that ICOs can quite successful with records showing that some tokens ended up more than ten times the value of the projected returns. But what’s the catch in this, you might ask… ICOs have attracted a large number of investors clearly due to their high returns; however, another large number of ICOs have turned out to be total scams. People have lost millions worth of investments.
Consider laddering your buys and sells. In others words, instead of buying or selling everything in one chunk, set incremental buy and sell orders to buy when the price goes down and sell when the price goes up. Laddering and averaging will help you to avoid mistiming the complex and volatile cryptocurrency market. Learn about dollar cost averaging and laddering. Learn about position sizing and risk management. To the above point, one generally takes a much larger risk with bigger bets. Learn how to make the right size buys and sells to avoid losing too much on a bad play. See: The Basics of Risk Management and Position Sizing in Cryptocurrency.