Barcodes of Finance 4
7. Will blockchain technology affect the drive toward barcodes? It most definitely should—and in a positive way. The maintenance of a distributed database of identifiers, both for participants and products traded throughout the global financial supply chain is the easiest global blockchain infrastructure application to be developed. A global database of all the world’s participant and product identifiers, maybe a half billion records, is limited in scale, both as to data recorded in its distributed ledger and in its limits of processing speed—seconds required, at the most. Both parameters of speed and scale are well within the boundaries of current […]
Consolidated Audit Trail
The eighth anniversary of the 2010 flash crash on May 6, 2010, is approaching, Beau Alexander reminded the audience at the webinar organized by the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP). Alexander is a Senior Sales Executive at FIS Global Trading, a publicly traded provider of financial services technology. The 2010 flash crash “was the second-largest intra-day swing in the stock market,” he said. That day the market lost two trillion dollars and then rebounded. “When you see volumes drop by 15 percent, there’s an activity that needs to be flushed out.” “Someone sitting in their parents’ basement had caused […]
Optimum Price a Moving Target
How was risk-taking originally priced, and has this changed over time? Centuries ago, mercantile economies used to pool risk for the trading ships that were sent out. Over time, this “big chunk risk” has given way to increasingly more precise ways of determining risk, and is now down to individual financial transactions. “Pricing is the centre of gravity of this operation,” said Robin Bloor, Chief Analyst at The Bloor Group. “For every product theoretically there is an optimum price.” Beginning with this historical comparison, he was the first of three speakers at a webinar on August 24, 2016, sponsored by […]
Mega-Platforms, Mega Risk
There’s a world of difference between innovation and disruption. “Think of innovation as doing more, in the same old way,” said Haydn Shaughnessy, innovation specialist and author of Platform Disruption Wave: How the Platform Economy is Changing the World. He presented a GARP webinar on “The Rise of Mega-Platforms and the Risks to Banking” on May 25, 2016. In the first part of his talk, he described mega-platforms. He referred to the thesis of The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton Christensen. This book argues that successful companies get so caught up in meeting […]