Pathways to the Regulation of Crypto-Assets: A Global Approach

whitePaper | July 15, 2022

The rise of Banking as a Service (BaaS) and real-time payments (RTP) are pushing the era of digitalization to new heights, where interconnected ecosystems and the instant exchange of data are the norm. Until now, banks and other players have largely implemented piecemeal solutions on top of existing legacy core systems. This has led to extremely expensive and complex back-end systems—with lots of time and money spent trying to create interoperable services at the application level. With the move to fully interconnected ecosystems, stakeholders will have to re-think their core systems at the most fundamental level. Achieving this will be difficult, but the rewards are great. Infrastructure-level connectivity can enable banks and other players to benefit through the monetization of customer data that will provide new insights for services that can only be developed based on a fundamentally networked infrastructure.

whitePaper | July 19, 2022

Paul Allen, an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist, had a vision to create better money. He found it confounding that he with his billions would pay less to transfer money than the poorest amongst us. Paul wanted to make money more equitable by making it more efficient and independent of any one financial institution. His team at Vulcan, along with several experts in financial technology, distributed systems, software, and financial regulations, came up with a design they called Xand, playing off Alexander Hamilton’s name, and spun out a new company, Transparent Financial Systems (Transparent) to develop it.

whitePaper | August 24, 2022

India's smartphone boom proved conducive for the rise of digital payments. The government-sanctioned push toward a unified payment interface led to over two billion digital transactions in April 2021, just shy of Rs 5 lakh crore. Correspondingly, this also eased access to short-term, low interest credit - reflected in a 220 % jump in offerings such as buy-now-pay-later (BNPL). BNPL products can potentially help plug the Rs. 25 trillion credit gap in the micro, small and medium (MSME) segment, considered high-risk by legacy lenders.

whitePaper | July 3, 2022

Founded in 1896, Barclays is among the world's oldest banks and enjoys the patronage of some of Europe's most profitable corporations. In 2021, Barclays claimed over 48 million customers, amassed over its 120+ year history. On the other hand, Revolut is a UK neobank that has acquired over 15 million account holders in less than a decade since its founding. These numbers are illustrative of a larger shift in the global banking system, with agile, digitally empowered financial service providers making inroads into mainstream banking territory. Currently, traditional banks, with their large product and service portfolios and legions of loyal customers, still hold the lion's share of the European banking market.

whitePaper | November 15, 2022

Carrying cards in digital form, rather than tucked away in a purse or wallet, is now commonplace. When issued with a new card, the first thing that many of us will do is upload it to our digital wallet. The physical version goes straight into a drawer. In fact we can now skip the plastic completely, and order direct an instantly useable digital card. Digitising plastic cards is fast going out of fashion.

whitePaper | October 1, 2022

Africa has enjoyed an earlymover’s position in the application of fintech in effecting financial inclusion and economic transformation. The success of the continent’s mobile money revolution caught the world’s attention over a decade ago, bringing into sharp focus the potential inherent in the combination of finance and technology – with innovation and empathy.