Tag: fintech

Blockchain is an emerging technology that has the potential to create a paradigm shift in the way we think about financial transactions. It has the ability to record transactions via a shared ledger and can be applied across many industries and currencies. The first major application of blockchain was Bitcoin, an unregulated cryptocurrency that was very resource intensive to mine. But business applications for blockchain will likely differ in several key areas.

At The Boeing Center’s 9th annual Industry Conference in October, Ed Corno, Client Technology Leader at IBM, gave a presentation on blockchain from the IBM perspective. He claimed that the technology’s business applications will focus on identity over anonymity, selective endorsement over proof of work, and assets over cryptocurrency.

Ed Corno, Client Technology Leader at IBM

Corno defines the four key tenets of a shared, replicated, permissioned ledger (as characterized by blockchain’s business applications) are consensus, provenance, immutability, and finality. This shared ledger would serve as the one record of all transactions across the business network, and participants would be able to see only relevant transactions.

According to Corno, the requirements of blockchain for business are the aforementioned shared ledger, a smart contract embedded into the transaction database, the privacy to ensure that transactions are secure and verifiable, and trust between all participants.

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Jim McKelvey, entrepreneur and co-founder of Square, will be the keynote speaker at the Second Annual Wealth and Asset Management Research Conference to be held at Olin Aug. 22-23, 2017. Hosted by the Wells Fargo Center for Finance and Accounting Research (WFA CFAR), the meeting brings together researchers and practitioners who share the common goal of better understanding the capital markets to create better outcomes for investors. The conference will feature research from leading academics with audience discussions lead by industry experts in each given field of research.

McKelvey was appointed as an Independent Director of the St. Louis Federal Reserve in January 2017, but is better known for his involvement in several St. Louis-based startups including Cultivation Capital (general partner and co-founder), Six Thirty (co-founder), LaunchCode (founder), Third Degree Glass Factory(co-founder), Mira publishing (founded when he was a WashU student), and Square, the mobile payment company he founded in 2009 with Jack Dorsey.

McKelvey graduated from Washington University in 1987 with degrees in Economics and Computer Science. Earlier this year, he donated $15M to the University to build a new computer science and engineering building named in honor of his father, James McKelvey, Sr. who is a former dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

In addition to research topics, the one-and-a-half-day conference will feature presentations by noted industry experts including attorney Jerry Schlichter, and author William Cohan.

Link to register.
Sessions will be held in Emerson Auditorium, Knight Hall.

Conference Schedule:

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

12:00 – 1:00 pm  Registration – Knight Hall, Frick Forum1:00 – 1:15 pmWelcome & Opening Remarks Richard Ryffel, Senior Lecturer in Finance, Washington University

1:15 – 2:00 pm  Presenter – Bob Dannhauser, Head, Global Private Wealth Management, CFA Institute, “The Art and Science of Wealth Management: Looking to the Future”

2:15 – 3:00 pm  Presenter – Dan Bergstresser, Associate Professor of Finance, Brandeis International Business School, “Changes in the Municipal Bond Landscape since the Global Financial Crisis”

Discussant – Linda Matkowski, Chief Operating Officer, Stern Brothers & Co.

3:00 – 3:45 pm  Presenter – Andy Kalotay, President, Andrew Kalotay Associates, “Tax Optimization of Municipal Bond Portfolios”

Discussant – Steve Wood, Principal, Stephen A. Wood Consulting, LLC

4:00 – 5:00 pm   “Remembering Steve Ross: The Man and His Ideas” – Phil Dybvig, Boatmen’s Bancshares Professor of Banking and Finance, Washington University, Rick Antle, William S. Beinecke Professor of Accounting, Yale University, Michael Griswold, Senior Director, Risk Managment and Asset Allocation, Ascension Investment Management

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

8:00 – 9:00 am
A Discussion of the Importance of Financial Services to the Economy – William Cohan, Author,  “Why Wall Street Matters“

9:15 – 10:00 am   Presenter – Jerry Schlichter, Founding and Managing Partner, Schlichter, Bogard, & Denton, “Litigation Pitfalls for 401k Plan Fiduciaries”

10:15 – 11:00 am   Presenter – Matt Ringgenberg, Associate Professor of Finance, David Eccles School of Business,  “On Index Investing”

Discussant – Hans Fredrickson, CIO, Oak Summit Capital

11:00 – 11:45 am   Presenter – Todd Gormley, Associate Professor of Finance, Washington University, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Effect of Passive Investors on Activism”

Discussant – Charles Stucke, Chief Executive Officer, Lepercq

12:00 – 12:45 pm   Presenter – Emily Gallagher, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Household Finance, Washington University, “Financial Challenges of Low-Income Households”

Discussant – Chris Krehmeyer, President and CEO, Beyond Housing

2:00 – 2:30 pm   FinTech Showcase – Presenter – Cliff Holekamp, Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship, Academic Director for Entrepreneurship “How Venture Capital Pays”

2:30 – 3:30 pm   FinTech Showcase Panel – Ben Harrison, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-founder, DealCloud, Inc., Josh Smith, Co-founder and CEO, Solovis, Laurence Stock, COO and Co-founder, Numerated Growth Technologies, Inc., “Automation in Asset Management”

Moderator – Joe Maxwell, Managing Partner, Cultivation FinTech

3:30 – 4:15 pm  FinTech Showcase – Keynote Address – Jim McKelvey, General Partner and Co-founder, Cultivation Capital, Co-founder and Director, Square.

Todd Gormley, Associate Professor of Finance, comments on OpenInvest, a new fintech venture that focuses on “ethical investing,” and uses algorithms to determine which firms to invest in.

“The key idea is you’re just trying to get the return of a wide set of firms without trying to pick which ones you think are going to perform better,” says Professor Todd Gormley from the Olin Business School at Washington University, St. Louis. Passive funds, like the portfolios built by OpenInvest algorithms, are the “new normal” because they’re less expensive for investors, and there’s no real evidence that actively managed funds actually do any better, Gormley continues.

Link to article “This Man’s Algorithms will Manage Your Money — With a Conscience” published Jan 19, 2017 on Ozy.

Prof. Gormley

Professor Gormley’s most recent research has analyzed the impact of passive institutional investors on both firms’ governance structures and the strategic choices of outside activists.

Link to his faculty page.