Private Equity Moris Beracha Wuani

By Dennis Wafula  Advancements in blockchain technology are proving beneficial in the financial industry. The most recent progress is the introduction of the Finledger blockchain platform, which allows processing of promissory note loans. According to a news release dated May 21, this new application for this type of legal binding loan agreement will be very beneficial to the entire financial industry. The test stage involved four banks, DekaBank, dwpbank, DZ Bank, and Heleba, who used finledger technology to complete note transactions. Reportedly, the platform can reduce the processes involved when issuing such notes by more than 50%. Marion Spielmann, Head of Banking & Depositary at DekaBank, said:   “The opportunities offered by using a blockchain take the product promissory note loan to a whole new level. Together with the other institutes, we have now successfully implemented a digitization project that allows our customers and us to han...

By Thomas Simms JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is expanding the use of its blockchain technology to help reduce the number of global payments rejected by errors, the Financial Times reported on April 21. The United States financial giant is adding new features to its Interbank Information Network (IIN,) which is now used by more than 220 banks around the world. The technology was initially designed to help institutions share payments data in real time — cutting delays in processing times. John Hunter, JPM’s head of global clearing, said it has built a new feature that can instantly verify whether a payment is heading to a valid bank account. At present, transactions can be rejected days after they were sent because of typos in sort codes, account numbers and addresses. He told the FT: “Banks straight through processing rates are in the mid-80s to mid-90s. It’s that gap — the 5 to 20 percent of payments — that have to be assessed by operations where we’...

Bitcoin miners consumed as much as energy in 2018 as Hungary, according to Alex de Vries. The researcher at the Netherlands’ PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) branch studied bitcoin’s global energy consumption all across the year. He found that existing hydropower projects were not sufficient in sustaining the cryptocurrency mining operations, adding that the bitcoin network demanded as much as 62.3 TWh power. The power of such scale could single-handedly serve a Hungary or a Switzerland. More than Banks The revelation followed years of debates about whether or not bitcoin is anti-environment. Skeptics criticize the decentralized financial network for contributing to global warming because each node in the system requires electricity to sustain itself. That is how machines process mathematical problems – by injecting vast computing power – that eventually mine and confirm bitcoin transactions on the network. As a result, the entire mining operation generate...

William M. Peaster A cryptocurrency custody service entering its beta launch this month will use cloud infrastructure provided by international tech powerhouse IBM. It’s the latest notch in the powerful firm’s cryptoverse belt, as the company has already undertaken a slew of blockchain pilot projects over the last few years. That new custody solution, the Digital Asset Custody Services (DACS), is being launched by investment company Shuttle Holdings. It’s currently unclear the extent to which IBM was directly involved in the creation of DACS. However, it is known the custody platform will rely on the IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services suite, which leverages enterprise-grade Linux servers from the tech titan’s IBM LinuxONE offering. IBM had highlighted the capabilities of that suite by allowing Shuttle Holdings to present on DACS at the former’s Think 2019 conference in February. The target market for the service will be institutional investors, as the platform is d...