#financial stack

[hackingfinance]

Payments Lego companies share some typical characteristics. They all offer simplicity both in the sense of removing redundant processes in the value chain and by being easy to plug into. They all offer speed both in transaction time and ‘go live’ time. They offer transparency in pricing and business models. Finally trust is paramount to these firms. They all invest heavily in compliance and security so that their customers can rely on them.

http://www.thecurrencycloud.com/news/blog/looking-to-change-finance-build-it-with-financial-lego Building the 21st century financial "stack" brick by brick... cf. http://www.parkparadigm.com/2009/12/28/platforms-markets-and-bytes-video/

[parkparadigm]

Think about most of the bad customer interactions we end up having to have on a typical day — to do anything in business, really. We get on a phone and we get voicemail. We wait a few days for our purchase order to be approved. If software is eating every industry and every type of economic activity, then the force that is replacing it is actually software talking to other software. That's the API. This world has been a long time coming. We've heard enough about e-business thanks to huge ad budgets by enterprise IT consultant behemoths! But rather than those huge wasteful IT firms, the people bringing it to us are the hacker-oriented dev-savvy API companies like Stripe, Twilio and Lob. Where there is paper to push, a call to answer, or a purchase to approve, there is an API coming to replace it.

The API-ization of everything - garry's posthaven

Have been pushing this theme since c. 2002 (when still at DrKW); might have been a bit early ;) but this is the future and at the heart of our thinking behind how we're building the Anthemis ecosystem...

[hackingfinance]

Hence the idea of the "near-bank", the service that looks like a bank but that actually provides financial services from a mixture of bank and non-bank providers.

Electric fences and the rise of the near-bank