Blockchain

Stellar, which started as a splinter group from Ripple, has formed a for-profit company called Lightyear.io to help financial institutions integrate its software.

The roughly $2 million investment comes as banks keep joining (and in some cases, leaving) various distributed ledger projects as they try to pick the winners in a young field.

Sovrin, a new blockchain for the creation and management of digital identities, may help credit unions save money and fight fraud while returning power to individuals.

Blockchain technology requires major change in people and processes and smaller banks need to prepare, according to Joe Dewey, an attorney at Holland & Knight and author of a new book about distributed ledger technology.

The bank has quit the R3 consortium, whose tech decisions were at odds with its own.

With an ever-increasing number of unsecured devices connected to one another, the potential for cyberattackers to overwhelm any organization is a clear and present danger.

The global messaging network Swift and its fintech challenger, Ripple, have been vying for bankers’ hearts and minds for more than a year. Whoever prevails, their latest moves could bring needed change to how international banking is done.

There has been a lot of activity lately around modernizing cross-border transfers through the use of blockchain and and cloud-hosted technology, but despite the potential savings in cost and time, none of these methods has caused a meaningful decline in the use of cash.

Using a program built by Ripple, BBVA has transferred about 50 euro-denominated payments to Mexico from Spain in seconds. Such transactions normally take up to four days to clear, the bank said.

Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA, Spain’s No. 2 lender, has executed its first cross-border payments through a system based on the software that supports bitcoin.