英凡研究院微信公众号：“英凡智库”正式开通！

英凡研究院是致力于互联网金融研究、服务于互联网金融行业的独立智库平台。英文名称为Internet Finance Institute，意在锁定互联网金融及创新金融领域，兼收并蓄，众筹智慧，推动互联网金融行业发展是英凡研究院的核心目标。

公众号将定期推送英凡活动、业内知名专家观点、精选的国内外最新Fintech资讯等。

投稿、转载、合作等事宜可联系[email protected]

欢迎点击二维码关注！

【英凡研究院】Fintech海外资讯拾贝-总第15期

（2018年1月第4期）

       导读

1. 从周六 (2018/1/13)起，英国的部分大银行开始执行open banking，即消费者和小企业可以要求其贷款人将数据公开给第三方。这一改变将加速第三方借贷平台上(银行不一定参与)贷款申请，因为平台上的贷款人可以利用这些数据更快地判断贷款项目的风险和优劣。

2. 随着2017年底一家纽约冰茶公司更名为Long Blockchain后(且表示将会逐渐转型做相关方面的投资)股价飙升至3倍，区块链在2018年还将持续升温。业内人表示新的一年将更着重在架构、支付和交易上的运用和相关软件推出，例如高盛分析师认为区块链技术可以让股票交易变得更快且透明。

3. IBM在2017年共申请得到9043个美国专利，保持了其25年的专利排行第一名；作为销量最高的手机制造商三星紧随其后，拥有5837项专利。今年，Facebook第一次进入了排行前50。

4. 于2012年申请破产保护的柯达近日发布ICO名为KodakCoin的数字货币以及帮助摄影师售卖其作品的区块链平台。自宣告破产后的三你里，柯达的销量锐减了三分之一，这一新平台和ICO的发布虽然使股价升高了一倍，却很难对其公司销售及利润产生如此大的影响。

资讯原文：

Banking Rules Set to Open Door in Search for Funding

Jan 10, 2018

By James Hurley

The Times

Why is it that aholidaymaker can go online and get insurance for a trip in minutes, but a smallbusiness owner must wait days or even weeks when seeking a simple credit facilityfor their company?

The outmoded servicesavailable to small companies have helped to inspire Funding Options, a platformthat matches credit-hungry small businesses with lenders, including non-bankfinance providers.

Conrad Ford, founder andchief executive of Funding Options, says that on a good day his service canhave money in a customer's account within about an hour of them landing on hiswebsite. Better still, he thinks that new rules coming into force this weekcould reduce the wait to as little as 15 minutes.

"We've made hugestrides in tackling [slow service for small businesses]," he said."It's no longer weeks and days. But if you look at why an hour gets wastedin the first place, a business owner has to take photos of their bank statementsand somebody in a fintech [financial technology start-up] has tospend their time reading them."

From Saturday, some ofBritain's biggest banks will begin to offer "open banking", wherebyconsumers and businesses will be able to force their lender to share theirbanking data with third parties. The rules could result in better and quickerlending decisions and potentially to launch new services that tap into thedata, such as cashflow forecasting and automated accounting and tax services.

"At the core, it ismoving from a world where your bank controls the data they have on you to onewhere it's your data," Mr Ford said. "Small business lending is oneof a number of user cases."

For would-be lenders,detailed transaction data will provide a much more reliable picture of whethera small business borrower is good for the loan than Companies House filings,which typically are outdated and lacking in detail, or credit ratings, whichrely largely on those filings. For Funding Options, it means that lenders willbenefit from better and quicker qualification of potential borrowers, while MrConrad will feel "more confident in routing small companies to the rightlenders.

"The data caneliminate that hour [wait] and mean that getting a business loan will be comparableto the five minutes it takes to shop for your travel insurance forMajorca."

In theory, open bankingshould level the playing field between financial technology businesses andbanks. "The popular view is we have these big lumbering banks doing dumbthings and new alternative finance providers doing amazing things with data.It's a characterisation of the market that doesn't ring true. Actually, banksare more data-driven in their lending decisions that alternative financeproviders."

That, however, is onlybecause they are the guardians of the data. Once rivals can access "thistreasure trove, you can guarantee they'll do cool stuff with it".

One business hoping to dojust that is Iwoca, which provides loans of up to £150,000 to small businessesthat want to smooth their cashflow, make investments or buy stock.

According to ChristophRieche, Iwoca's co-founder and chief executive: "Open banking will finallyput an end to the monopoly that banks have on customer's data."

Outside what he calls the"London fintech bubble", Mr Rieche suspects that most smallbusinesses "don't know and don't care" about the arrival of openbanking. "However, they will care about the products that open bankingallows them to access — for example, finance on competitive terms fromproviders other than their bank, with a dramatically simpler and fasterprocess."

Mr Ford said: "Smallbusinesses are not going to wake up and think, 'I wonder what I can do withopen banking today?' What will happen is a business like mine will say, 'We'vefound you a lender and we're going to need your bank statements. We can do itthe hard way, which will take days, or the fast-track route.' "

For Mr Rieche, the initialsuccess of open banking will depend to a large extent on the willingness ofbanks to play ball: "A critical part of the puzzle is whether banks makeit simple and seamless for small businesses to share their data. If the processis cumbersome, open banking will fail, even if there's awareness andtrust."

Billion-dollar opportunity

Though it will take time tobe realised, the potential of open banking is vast, according to DamianKimmelman (James Hurley writes). "Without a doubt, billion-dollarbusinesses could be built off the back of this," the cofounder of Duedil, a company that providesinformation on private companies, said.

Nine of Britain's biggestbanks are required to comply with the new rules. Open banking is due to comeinto force on Saturday, but five of these banks have been given additional timeto comply.

Christoph Rieche, boss ofIwoca, a lender that aims to make quick decisions on flexible loans forcompanies such as Brew Lab, an Edinburgh-based coffee business that used Iwocato fill a gap between securing a bank loan, said that more innovative players,including banks, would adopt the technology, "but our expectation is thata many [banks] will take a 'wait and see' attitude. They'll not realize theextent of the disruption until it's too late."

Forget Boxploitation—Look for Real Blockchain Action in These Areas Soon

Jan 13, 2018

By Bill Peters

Investor’s Business Daily

"Blockchain,blockchain, blockchain. Blockchain? Blockchain, blokchain, blokchin bokchn,bkcn, bk-bk, ch." — That was conversation, basically, in parts of theworld in 2017, when an iced-tea company rebranded as a blockchain company,grandparents talked up Bitcoin, and CryptoKitties pollinated the digitallandscape.

Since the new yearbegan, Eastman Kodak (KODK), Moviepass parent Helios andMatheson (HMNY) and Chanticleer Holdings (BURG), which operates Hooters and burgerrestaurants,have joined or may join Long Blockchain (LBCC) and RiotBlockchain (RIOT)on the bandwagon. Autonomous Research thinks we'll see at least 100 "blockchain pretenders" this year.

While the current frenzymight obscure blockchain's actual potential, most people agree that therecord-keeping technology behind Bitcoin that allows anyone involved in atransaction to see it and agree on it before clearing it is sound enough tooutlast today's crypto-hellride. But if 2017 was a year of talk aboutblockchain, 2018 might be a year of more action, with a possible focus ontrading, payments and architecture.

"I think in 2018you're going to see a lot of these new projects that have been promotingthemselves and raising money (in 2017), many of them are going to see theirfirst real releases of software, official releases of their platform, happeningin 2018," said Matthew Spoke, CEO of blockchain startup Nuco Networks.

Analysts have long saidblockchain has the ability to make trading in stocks and other securitiesquicker, cheaper and more transparent, and 2018 will offer more of a look into whetherinvestors actually want to trade on a distributed-ledger platform.

Online retailer Overstock(OSTK), which is rapidly morphing into a blockchain company, has opened up ablockchain-based trading system it majority-owns, tZero, to more investors.

TZero, along with SiebertFinancial (SIEB)and Overstock, have said they intended to partner to "offer deeplydiscounted online trading" in the first quarter of 2018 — charging $2.99per trade and, eventually, $1.99 for members of a new, "elite"segment of its Club O rewards program. The company also hopes to make it abigger alternative trading system for tokens and initial coin offerings.

And the tZero platform cansettle trades on the same day, potentially offering brokers a way to shortenthe time between when an investor's order is executed and when money andsecurities are actually exchanged. While investors will still be able to maketrades in milliseconds, brokers could lower their risk of seeing a tradingcounterparty defaulting. Today, the SEC requires that trades must be settledwithin two days.

For now, the platform islargely being used as an outlet for short-selling. In particular, Overstock CEOPatrick Byrne hopes the platform's blockchain technology will address what hehas long considered abusive short-selling practices by prime brokerages —particularly surrounding rules for locating shares that short-sellers borrow tomake trades. Byrne, a vocal Bitcoin and blockchain evangelist, said in Novemberthat he intended to use tZero to go after a huge chunk of GoldmanSachs' (GS) revenue.

"Arguably," D.A.Davidson analyst Tom Forte said, "they're disrupting or working to disruptthree things — one being short-selling, two being settlement, three beingissuance, if you think about what they're doing with their initial coinoffering."

In November, Byrne said theplatform had $80 billion to $120 billion worth of lendable securities.

Meanwhile, Nuco is workingwith the TMX Group, the parent of the Toronto Stock Exchange,to build a blockchain platform for the NGX natural gas exchange, which is ownedby TMX, said Nuco's Spoke.

IBM Led on Patents in 2017, Facebook Broke intoTop 50 for the First Time

Jan 9, 2018

By Ingrid Lunden

TechCrunch

Patents may sometimes get abad rap for how they are abused (and misused) by some companies for commercial gain,but they also remain a marker of how a tech company is progressing with itsR&D and pushing ahead on innovation. For one measure of that advance,today, IFI Claims, the patent analytics firm, published its 2017 list ofcompanies with the most U.S. patents assigned for the year.

At the top of the list, IBMhas once again come in at number-one, a position it’s held for the past 25years. It was assigned 9,043 U.S. patents in 2017, one thousand more than itpicked up in 2016, and around 3,300 more than its next-closest assignee,Samsung Electronics.

Rounding out the top 10list, were Canon, Intel Corp, LG Electronics Inc, Qualcomm Inc, Google,Microsoft, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and Samsung Display.

IFI Claims notes thatSamsung — the world’s biggest mobile phone maker in terms of volumes, and atech behemoth beyond that — comes within 150 patents of IBM when you put all oftheir different entities together (in all it has three in the top 1000, whichyou can see here).

Of course, it’s not thecase that patents directly correlate with a company’s fortunes, since tech thatis at the cutting edge of innovation that’s winning patents may be far fromever seeing a commercial application.

And in fact, one of theworld’s richest companies and most profitable tech company, Apple, didn’t makeit into the top 10. Apple stayed level with last year at number 11, winning2,229 patents. Amazon — another tech juggernaut that has some of the biggestmainstream brand recognition today for its leadership in areas like e-commerce,logistics, cloud services and most recently voice-based AI innovations — jumpedup one spot and is now at number 13, with 1,963 patents assigned.

The top 20 follows, withmore analysis below that:

In terms of technologies,the IFI Claims’ report also underscores that it is also not always the casethat the themes getting the most buzz — or VC funding, or sales — in the widerworld are the same as the top technologies that are winning patents, or seeingthe most growth.

According to the analysts,the top tech in 2017 was e-cigarettes in terms of patent growth, up 45 percent.It was followed by 3-D printing (GE had the most patents); and then a pair oftechnologies tied to artificial intelligence, machine learning and autonomousvehicles. IBM filed the most patents in each of these. Other fast-growing areasincluded aerial drones and food tech.

When it comes to the mostpopular categories, of patents filed, the general area of “electrical digitaldata processing” saw the most patents, with 48,935 assigned in all. Thiscategory covers both hardware and software and relates to different ways thatdata can be transferred. IBM also led in this category.

The full top-five list,when you think about it, provides a decent enough sketch of the tech landscapeand what are the general areas of interest in terms of products today, too.

The other four techcategories that saw the most patents filed include “transmission of digital information,such as telegraphic communication”; semiconductors; wireless communications andpictorial communications (such as TV but also video and photo apps would beincluded).

KodakLast-Gasp Hope: KodakCoin

Jan 10, 2018

By Tom Buerkle

The New York Times

What do you get when youcross the feverish world of cryptocurrencies and a faded industrial giantdesperate for a new lease on life? The answer, provided Tuesday by EastmanKodak,is KodakCoin.

Kodak filed for bankruptcyprotection in 2012 after fumbling the shift to digital images. Now, the companyis betting its future on digital currencies with an initial coin offeringintended to help photographers sell their work. The announcement more thandoubled Kodak's stock, but it's unlikely to do anything like the sameto the company's sales or profit.

Kodak, based in Rochester, N.Y.,emerged from bankruptcy in 2013, relieved of much of its debts and patents. Itrefocused around digital printing, packaging and a legacy film business that'sa shadow of the glory days when Paul Simon had a hit song rhapsodizing aboutKodachrome. None of those has caught on. Sales fell by a third in the firstthree years after bankruptcy. They dropped another 8 percent in the first threequarters of 2017, to $1.1 billion, and the bottom line dipped into the red. Thecompany's market capitalization, nearly $30 billion at its peak in the late1990s, fell to just $135 million early this week.

The announcement of theplanned blockchain platform and initial coin offering changed the stock'strajectory. Kodak is just the latest to see the potential halo effectof cryptocurrencies after Bitcoin soared some 14-fold in 2017. In December,shares of the tiny Long Island Iced Tea tripled after it renamed itself LongBlockchain.

Start-ups raised more than$3 billion with initial coin offerings last year, led by Filecoin, a blockchaindata-storage network that raked in $257 million. Yet the field is growingcrowded. ICO Alert lists roughly 80 offerings in the market anda similar number planned in the next two months.

            Jeffrey J. Clarke, Kodak's chief executive,will take whatever he can get. The company has been looking for assets to sellto pay down some of its $845 million in debt, according to Eikon data. Ablockchain platform could give photographers a better way to license theirimages and receive payment. But it's hard to see how that will reverse Kodak's decades-long decline.