Blockchain

National banks just got the OCC's go-ahead this summer to hold and transfer digital assets like bitcoin for customers, but the Paris-based bank has already vetted the technology needed to do the job.

Bank of America is applying a familiar arsenal — including APIs and its popular virtual assistant, Erica — to online business banking, cross-border payments and cash management in an effort to modernize those services.

The control of crypto exchanges will resemble that of regular financial companies in Europe and the U.S., says Extante's Anatoliy Knyazev.

Employees in the financial industry and public sector are considerably more worried about the risks posed by digital currency than those in the cryptocurrency field, a new survey finds.

The conversation around advancing the distribution and use of digital currency gets a boost every time the banking system stubs its toe. And there have been many recent examples of financial system problems to point to.

The company, which left New York in 2015 to avoid its regulations on virtual currencies, has found a more welcoming state.

Blockchain's cross-border power eliminates the intermediary and solves the problem of rendering the traditional processing system redundant, and processes the payment on a chain with no middleman intervention, says ForumPay's Joshua Tate.

In a sharp escalation of the battle over the future of the dual banking system, the acting chief of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency suggested that states should defer to federal authority in supervising global money transmitters.

The OCC’s efforts to bring the technology into the financial mainstream could help people in underserved communities execute payments more securely.

Caitlin Long, a former Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse managing director, is starting a special-purpose depository institution that will provide payment and custody services to institutional investors and corporate treasurers.

The OCC’s efforts to bring the technology into the financial mainstream could help people in underserved communities execute payments more securely.

The bank will outsource future development of Quorum to the software firm.

The former SoFi chief’s latest startup, Figure, has created what it says is a transparent marketplace for buying and selling assets. Some banks have embraced the technology, but other blockchain projects have stalled because lenders don't want rivals to see their data.

A CBDC has the potential to be a real game changer for the payment industry if one condition is met: central bank digital currency has to be built as an open and shared infrastructure for the private sector to easily build on top of it, says ConsenSys' Matthieu Saint Olive.

By slicing clutter out of international payments, Ripple managed to turn rivals into partners once before. It hopes a hunger for sharable authentication can make that happen again.

Major payment companies have long looked on at cryptocurrencies as too risky to touch, but too tempting to ignore. Mastercard's latest move indicates that the card brands are ready to make a firm pitch for crypto spending.

It was an attention-grabbing decision when Facebook hired PayPal's president, David Marcus, in 2014. At the time, Facebook didn't have much of a dedicated payments business to speak of; when people thought of spending money on Facebook, they typically thought of in-app purchases in Farmville.

Paystand's Zero Card leverages its proprietary blockchain-based bank-to-bank payments network in combination with a virtual Mastercard.

Cross-border payments do not and should not exist in a vacuum, says Veem's Marwan Forzley.

The best intentioned efforts to bridge racial or gender gaps, or to create a more inclusive market for a financial project, will likely fail unless there’s careful attention paid to a lack of diversity at the onset.