5 blockchain fintech start-ups and what they’re up to

Financial Technology, known as fintech, can benefit the banking industry by adding chatbots for customer service, biometrics for stronger security, and machine learning and AI for fraud detection. There are many blockchain fintech start-ups around today, all with a similar aim.

Fintech is a new approach to traditional financial services, with an aim to disrupt the whole industry. It uses technology to improve activities in finance, focusing on making a more accessible service for the general public.

Here, we will go through some of the exciting blockchain fintech start-ups.

Circle

Circle is a global finance company with a goal to make it possible for anyone, anywhere to help change the global economy. Founded in 2012, Circle believes money should work like the internet – open source, free, and usable anywhere. Unlike other existing systems which are closed and proprietary, Circle uses open standards and protocols to build their products.

Their products include Circle Invest, which makes it easy to invest in crypto even for people who have never invested before and have no knowledge. It allows you to set up a Circle Invest account in a matter of seconds and move money from your bank instantly, so you can buy as soon as the opportunity strikes.

Another of their products is Circle Pay, which allows its users to send money like a text. Money can be sent across a table or across the ocean in seconds. It is available in 29 countries, in GBP, USD, and EUR. The massive benefit of this is there are no exchange rate fees and so it’s free to send money to any place in the world. Ironically, even though Circle is built on the blockchain technology, it no longer supports Bitcoin.

PayKey

PayKey aims to provide banks with a solution to the rise of P2P payments providers. Situated in Israel, the blockchain-based platform integrates with social media apps like Twitter and WhatsApp, giving their users the option of mobile payment functionality without needing to use a separate feed like Circle.

Their white label solution easily integrates with the API level and retains the bank’s authentication without compromising the security level. This allows for fewer steps for users at the entry level. Banks like Santander and Nationwide are already utilising PayKey in different forms.

Users can access any financial service from within all apps, with no need for a dedicated app. The service offers banks multiple solutions, including creating new channels for financial services, communication, and information.

iPopulous

Populous World is a new global invoice trading platform. It is built on blockchain’s distributed ledger technology, which allows connections between invoice buyers and business owners around the globe.

Invoice financing is reported to be a $3 trillion a year global market, and it helps businesses with cash flow by allowing them to sell invoices immediately after they have been raised (instead of waiting for the 30, 60, or even 90 days payment terms requested by debtors).

Populous World aims to help companies sell invoices for typically 95% of their value for an invoice with 30-day payment terms. This extra 5% of value can be gained by passive investors who need to wait until the payments come through before realising their gains. Interestingly enough, the gains realised from invoice financing will be in a native populous GBP token that will function as an ERC-20 stablecoin backed at 1:1 by investor profits on the platform.

Swissborg

Swissborg offers a transparent crypto wealth management solution using smart contracts and AI on the blockchain. Their mission is to give universal access to the new financial world, and have a simple and fair wealth management ecosystem.

According to Swissborg, 80% of ICOs fail and less than 10% ever make it to an exchange. Their holistic ICO platform allows contributions in both fiat and crypto as well as an integrated KYC/AML process and other essential services.

Their mobile app has industrial-grade technology and gives its users a sleek and seamless investing experience with an added bonus of access to sophisticated investment tools.

ThinkYoung

ThinkYoung is a blockchain framework created three years ago which focuses on supporting digital assets, smart contracts, equity transactions, and other applications. The ThinkYoung smart contract platform is a visualised development environment with easy-to-use operations.

The company was one of the first semi-finalists at the Fintech Awards in Luxembourg, with its founders in Beijing boasting that the platform is faster and easier to use than Ethereum. It has also been optimised for efficiency and safety outside of the blockchain technology.

The platform is also multi-credit shared and allows members to share credit enquiry data, borrow data, and also lend profits. Another benefit of ThinkYoung is that the hash value is saved on the blockchain, so the real data is always safe and never lost.

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