Crypto fever is over. Banks do not understand whether blockchain is better than existing technologies

Crypto fever has truly broken. That was a big takeaway this week from the Paris Fintech Forum, one of the biggest annual gatherings of its kind in Europe. On Tuesday and Wednesday, about 3,000 entrepreneurs, investors, bankers, and regulators descended on the neo-classical Palais Brongniart, once home to the stock exchange. Last year, with Bitcoin and its imitators soaring, attendees jammed discussions on blockchain technology.

“I nearly lost my whole team to cryptocurrencies,” said Will Andrich, the CEO of Switzerland’s Thaler.One, which says it creates real estate-backed digital securities. No such problem this year. With the top 10 crypto assets down 80 percent in the last 12 months and skepticism mounting, many fintech pros concluded that the technology may not be ready for prime time, especially in an industry this heavily regulated.

Instead, the conference was about getting back to banking basics. With Europe’s new payments law now requiring banks to share customer account data with fintech firms, the prevailing vibe was that there’s plenty of action without messing around with crypto. Leibbrandt countered that for two years, Swift’s latest payment standard revitalized its system, letting customers track a payment like a FedEx package, and cutting transfer time to hours. Unlike Ripple, which has struggled to sign up major banks, Leibbrandt said the world’s top 60 lenders are utilizing its technology, which is already embraced by regulators. “Banks are not ready for a model where you convert into a crypto and then convert back again,” Leibbrandt said. “It’s not clear to us that blockchain is better than what we have today.”

Crypto Fever Is Over, the Paris Fintech Summit Show, Bloomberg, Feb 04