The Ugly Unethical Underside of Silicon Valley

As the list of startup scandals grows, it’s time to ask whether entrepreneurs are taking “fake it till you make it” too far.

Recklessness with the financial truth is often a sign of an economic bubble about to deflate—see the dot-bombs and Enron in late 2000 and the banks amid the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis. Scandals don’t cause recessions, but they can help trigger one. As White warned her Stanford audience: “Who loses when the truth behind inflated valuations is revealed? I think we all do.”

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More banks are closing as digital banking booms

British bank branch closures are continuing apace, according to the BBC.

New research by Which?, the leading UK consumer organization, has shown that 1,045 branches have closed in the last two years — HSBC closed 27% of its branches, while Lloyds closed 14%. The smaller Co-operative Bank closed a whopping 53% of its branches.

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Blockchain: BNP Paribas completes live transaction

BNP Paribas has completed its first live cross-border B2B payments between corporate clients using blockchain technology.

The transactions, conducted on behalf of packaging outfit Amcor and trading cards group Panini, were cleared in various currencies between BNP Paribas bank accounts located in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

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Bitcoin and blockchain seem more and more like solutions looking for a problem

From QUARTZ -

"The bitcoin and blockchain world is in a bit of an investment slump.

Venture money flowing into startups working on cryptocurrencies or the technical principles underpinning them, generally known as blockchain technology, is getting harder to come by, according to data from trade publication CoinDesk. “It really seems like we’re in a slow phase with bitcoin and blockchain right now where people are mainly building infrastructure,” says Zavain Dar, a venture capitalist at Lux Capital who has taught classes on cryptocurrency at Stanford and has invested in Blockstream, one of the biggest companies in the sector."

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Mobile payments trends report shows mainstream adoption is a long way off

Industry analysts had predicted that Apple would kick smartphone wallets into gear but that might not be it.

When Apple Pay was launched, many analysts believed this would be the start of powerful mobile payments trends. They felt that Apple was the key to the mainstream adoption of mobile wallets. That said, that wallet app has now been available for about two years and adoption has been slower than anticipated.

Some analysts are now saying that the start of the widespread use of mobile payments won’t happen for some time.

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OCBC ‘Pay Anyone’ integrates with Siri and iMessage

Singapore’s OCBC Bank is the first in Asia Pacific to enable secure payments via Apple’s Siri and iMessage, enabling customers to make e-payments powered by voice and messaging technology. This is the latest in a series of digital innovations that OCBC Bank has introduced to make day-to-day banking and payments more simple, fast and accessible for customers.

Diebold Nixdorf “Extreme” ATM Concept Live at Money20/20

How consumers will interact with their money in the future is of course the whole point behind the Money20/20 conference, where companies of all kinds are demonstrating solutions to help the everyday consumer–and merchant–have a better experience with money.

This includes companies like Diebold Nixdorf, which is dedicated to forging—in its own words—“the future of connected commerce;” at Money 20/20 Diebold appears to be offering a middle ground between cash today and the cashless future with its “Extreme ATM” concept.