Bankloch

  A very hot topic at the moment are the so-called   CBDCs , short for " Central Bank Digital Currencies ". These are the recent reply of central banks to the continuing success of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin and Ether(eum). After the unsuccessful attempts of several governments to restrict or even ban these crypto-currencies, there is more and more a consensus of " If you can’t beat them, join them ", resulting in the setup of an alternative that fits better the agenda of governments and of central banks to stay relevant and in control of monetary policy. Very simplistically said, CBDCs are a   digital version of the fiat currencies   that people use in their daily lives. They take over a number of features, characteristics and technologies of crypto-currencies (CBDCs will be crypto tokens), but instead of being decentralized (and bypass central bank and government control), they ensure some degree of   centralization , allowing the central banks to keep con...

Introduction On 18/05 Bernhard Kauer (Founder & CEO by Puzzle2Pay) wrote an interesting blog on the need for digital offline payments, i.e. "Do we need digital offline payments?" - https://bkauer.medium.com/do-we-need-digital-offline-payments-3a74ec2d8c7b  Bernhard makes here an interesting argumentation that there is no real need for offline payments.  After some reflection, I must admit I do not fully agree. Below my argumentation in reply to his blog. Would love to hear your opinion. 1. More and more places are getting online Definitely true, but internet connectivity is still an issue in certain emerging countries and even rural areas in developed countries. Even if only a few percent are without connectivity, it's still worth to offer a solution for these places. Otherwise you exclude certain populations, but also the active users can come in very uncomfortable situations, when they are so used to a certain payment method and then realize it is not available (and...

Expressions like "Data is the new oil" are already becoming a cliché on social media, but there is still a lot of truth to them. Obviously with customer centricity and hyper-personalization increasing, data gets more and more value. However just like raw oil, data in its raw form has little usage. It needs to be cleaned, filtered, structured, matched and enriched, consent needs to be captured from the data owner (via GDPR compliant opt-in requests) and the data needs to be analysed before it can give its value in the form of new (customer) insights. This is where most companies in the financial services sector are facing issues. While collecting and storing raw data is relatively easy, ensuring high quality data sets (avoiding the "Garbage In – Garbage Out" principle) and converting them into insights is a whole different story. Most financial institutions are facing a lot of data quality issues, i.e.   most  of their data is  mostly  right,  most  of the t...

One of my first blogs was an introduction to non-technical people about Docker ( https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/docker-dummies-joris-lochy ) and last year I wrote a similar blog on DevOps ( https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/devops-dummies-joris-lochy ). Recently I joined the "Merit-VC" platform (i.e.   https://www.merit-vc.com/   - a platform to train yourself in VC-funding), where I got the assignment to write a report on the trend of "Serverless". I thought it would be interesting to share my conclusions in the form of a third "for dummies" blog, introducing another innovative technical concept to non-technical people, namely the   concept of "serverless" . Before introducing serverless it is however important to have a notion about   cloud computing . Cloud computing allows to "rent" servers from cloud companies instead of having to setup and maintain your own infrastructure (data centre). The advantages are a switch from CapEx to OpEx ...

The ultimate goal of every software product is to   convert inputs (provided by end-users or automatically received from external systems)   into valuable outputs (insights) . This is typically done via   processing logic (= algorithms) , which transform a number of inputs in a set of outputs. Based on my experience these process-logic components can be divided into   5 categories : Calculation : a calculation is a clear mathematical formula, which allows to calculate a specific value. This category can be identified by the fact that all required information is available as input and that the output is precise, i.e. there is only 1 correct result and this is perfectly repeatable. Examples are the calculation of the average price of a share in the last year, the calculation of the time-weighted rate of return of an investment portfolio, the reimbursement schedule of a credit or the interest amount to be paid out on a saving account every quarter. Data lookups : a data...