Buying and selling shares through matching mechanisms, whether automated or not are functions which are regulated by the Financial Services Board. After the Financial Services Board announced that existing OTC market operators are trading illegally, Singular Systems, the company that built the country’s leading OTC platform, Equity Express, set about to bring to life a mechanism that would still allow companies to remain unlisted while giving their shareholders a legal framework to trade shares...

As many a CFO and Company Secretary would attest, the analysis of a share register is somewhat subjective and this begs the question; what is the most accurate way of reporting on the shareholder base of a publicly listed company?

Why would you spend your hard earned money on something with no obvious value? Gold for example can be seen and held, fiat currency that can be used in shops at your convenience? What is it that makes cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin worth over R60 000 on South African exchanges? As a Fintech company, Singular Systems, asks why the world is placing their confidence in this technology.

In our last article we detailed some of the experiences we had while developing for the Blockchain. However, with so many cryptocurrencies and Blockchain options out there, it is important to look into what makes them different from each other. At the end of 2016 one of our clients came to us with a vision of how cryptocurrencies would change the world, at first we were somewhat sceptical before they described Ethereum and its use of smart contracts.

Our development team unpacks their expedition into the new and exciting world of Blockchain development. There are many software languages around. The beauty is that a large part of them differ only by syntax, and it is still relatively easy for a developer to read, understand and develop in a language different to the one you have started out or already gained experience in.

Most would agree that banks and other traditional financial institutions should not be at the bleeding edge when it comes to adopting new technology, however, once new tech has been validated and proven many of these FI’s really struggle to take advantage of it. At least this was the general consensus with a group of innovation leaders from traditional FI’s at a recent FinTech dinner.

So how do you get it right? How do you ensure that the business challenge you are facing is being solved in the right time frame, at the appropriate cost and with the appropriate risk profile? Based on the 2014 yearly Global Outsourcing Survey Deloitte indicated that developments in enterprise mobility, big data, hosted virtual desktop, business process as a service and cloud computing would increase outsourcing. The 2016 survey tells us that cost cutting, enabling core business functions, an...