10 hot global fintechs that could be about to disrupt the banks

by Dramelin 1:00 AM 0 comments

Ripple is a payments-focused blockchain technology fintech that has raised $93.
6 million so far in consecutive angel, seed and Series A and B venture capital (VC) fundraising rounds from Core Innovation Capital, IDG Capital Partners, Santander InnoVentures and SBI, among others.
It was founded in 2012 by Arthur Britto and Chris Larsen (pictured R, with CEO Brad Garlinghouse).
Larsen previously co-founded and led Prosper, a peer-to-peer (P2P) crowdfunder.
Ripple started out as a payment protocol offering retail payment, foreign exchange (FX) and other end uses, but wants to grow effectively into a global network that can serve corporates, banks and others that need to transfer money globally.
It uses blockchain technology, which is best described as a distributed ledger secured by mathematical algorithms that provides a record of events for multiple parties.
Applications are numerous for the still evolving technology but include settlement, data storage for insurance claims, diamond authentication purposes, trade finance and payments.
The ledger can be public, open source and available to all, as per the original bitcoin (BTC) cypto-currency ledger, or it can be a private "permissioned" chain that enforces standards and vets and manages invited participants.
There are many other blockchain ecosystems such as Ethereum and the Linux-hosted Hyperledger project and consortia such as R3.
All of them rely on distributed ledger technology (DLT), which is the formal name for blockchain technology.
Ripple might eventually rival SWIFT for international cross-border payments, and is certainly gunning for this pivotal position in world finance.
But that organization has its own global payments innovation (gpi) DLT Proof of Concept (PoC) third stage project, which is trying to catch up, to protect its incumbent position as the processor of global cross-border payments.
SWIFT`s DLT PoC has its own rival collection of partner correspondent banks and uses Hyperledger instead of the Interledger blockchain variant system that Ripple replies on.
Who attracts the banks and volume is likely to be the winner.
Onfido (London, UK).