Finance
J.P. Morgan: Private, Digital Identities Key to Scaling Financial Blockchains | PYMNTS.com
What can blockchain technology do for financial services in a friendly regulatory environment?
With a new president coming in 2025, the ecosystem is about to find out. Donald Trump has promised to the industry that he — the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under his administration — would be more crypto-friendly.
Against a backdrop where traditional financial players are warming their cold shoulders to the blockchain space, when banks are discussing real-world use cases for crypto, they tend to default to stablecoins for payments.
For example, on Thursday (Nov. 7), UBS announced it had created and piloted UBS Digital Cash, a blockchain-based payment solution, while a day earlier on Wednesday (Nov. 6), J.P. Morgan announced a significant enhancement to its own blockchain platform, recently rebranded from Onyx to Kinexys.
But that’s not all J.P. Morgan announced. The banking giant also released a whitepaper entitled Project EPIC: Fueling Tokenized Finance with On-Chain Enterprise Privacy, Identity, and Composability (EPIC).
The paper, as the title implies, explores the use of blockchain technology to enhance privacy, identity and composability within financial ecosystems.
“Our aim is two-fold: to articulate the challenges and opportunities in this space and to catalyze industry-wide dialogue and action,” the bank said.
As the regulatory landscape evolves, that appears to be an increasingly common view held by traditional financial institutions (FIs).
Read more: A Pro-Crypto President: What Trump 2.0 Holds for Blockchain’s Future
Unlocking the Full Potential of Tokenized Assets
One of blockchain technology’s core features is transparency — a double-edged sword in finance. The open nature of blockchains offers a high degree of trust and visibility, enabling anyone to verify transactions. However, the lack of privacy presents a significant obstacle for many potential users, particularly institutional participants wary of publicly sharing sensitive financial information.
In a world where sensitive financial data and transactions may be increasingly exposed to public scrutiny on-chain, there’s a pressing need to address privacy and identity challenges within crypto.
Per the J.P. Morgan paper, “the lack of mature, on-chain cryptographic privacy solutions, coupled with the absence of consensus on implementing privacy-preserving digital identity, continues to create operational friction in tokenized asset interactions. While these challenges are not entirely gating — as demonstrated by the $2-3B raised through on-chain funds and approximately $200B in stablecoins, protocol treasuries and public chain lending protocols — solving for them could broaden adoption.”
In an interview with PYMNTS posted Friday (Nov. 8), Raj Dhamodharan, executive vice president of blockchain and digital assets at Mastercard, explained that the real potential of blockchain can only be realized when users can interact with the network in a trusted, verifiable manner.
“But while the underlying infrastructure enables you to transfer value, it doesn’t really lend itself to doing so in a very easy way,” he added, noting that the “experiences are hard.”
As PYMNTS Intelligence’s latest report revealed, regulated industries, including healthcare and financial services, must adhere to numerous requirements, such as know your customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML) and data privacy regulations. Blockchain could help these industries in that regard.
Read more: Visa, PayPal and Others Could Bring Utility and Legitimacy to Stablecoins
How Solving Privacy and Identity Challenges Could Broaden Adoption
“Privacy-preserving, reusable digital identity solutions are fundamental to unlocking tokenization’s full potential, enabling streamlined onboarding, real-time verification, and programmable compliance,” the J.P.Morgan report noted.
However, this journey requires a collaborative effort from developers, regulators and industry stakeholders to ensure that these solutions are both technically feasible and regulatory compliant.
In the near term, the momentum of stablecoins, protocol treasuries and on-chain lending demonstrates the system’s viability.
PYMNTS recently sat down with Ran Goldi, senior vice president, payments and network at Fireblocks, and Nikola Plecas, head of commercialization, Visa Crypto, to dissect the benefits and myths surrounding blockchain-based payments, how to think about real-world applications and how to unlock new revenue streams using blockchain. Stablecoins, the panelists said, offer advantages over existing payment systems, including native programmability, strong auditability, fast settlement, self-custody options and seamless interoperability.
However, as tokenization becomes more integral to the financial sector, privacy and identity will transition from “nice-to-haves” to essential requirements. Meeting these needs will be key to fostering a secure, scalable and inclusive ecosystem where tokenized assets can truly thrive.
Finance
I’m not financially literate. Here’s how I could be. – The Boston Globe
If you asked me what the process for setting up a Roth IRA looked like, I doubt I could offer you a thorough response. The same goes for mortgages and loans and interest. When I had to fill out my first W-9 form, I was admittedly more than a bit confused.
In short, financial literacy isn’t my forte. And that’s because, like many Massachusetts public school students, I’ve never had to take any sort of personal finance class.
Indeed, throughout the debates over eliminating MCAS as a graduation requirement for high schoolers, we heard quite a bit about the state’s educational gold standard. So is it not the least bit shameful, or at least embarrassing, that our state does not require high school students to take a financial literacy class when a majority of states do?
Absolutely. And it needs to change.
Twenty-six states, including Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, have passed legislation making a personal finance course mandatory for high school students. Meanwhile, Massachusetts received an “F” from the Champlain College Center for Financial Literacy, which released a report card in 2023 evaluating how each “state delivers personal finance education in its public high schools.” In addition, a 2023 report card(link?) from the American Public Education Foundation gave the state a “C” for its financial literacy requirements — a score worse than or equal to all but six states.
Meanwhile, across the state, credit card and student loan debt have spiked to eye-popping levels. As of the second quarter of this year, the average Massachusetts resident had a credit card balance of $8,556 and $33,710.38 in student loan debt. The latter is particularly troubling for young people like myself. For the next four years, countless high school seniors throughout the Commonwealth will be attending college, paying tens of thousands of dollars on top of day-to-day expenses.
The need for personal finance courses in Massachusetts is tremendous — a need that, as per a 2021 report from the state’s Office of Economic Empowerment, is recognized almost universally among teachers and, importantly, students.
Yet, as a result of being taught next to nothing about personal finances, many of us are left ill-prepared for these new circumstances. Our understanding of credit cards is limited to, as State Treasurer Deb Goldberg so eloquently articulated to GBH, “The parent puts a plastic card into the wallet and boom: out comes money.” And so the cycle of taking out loans, accumulating massive debt, and working for years before being able to pay it off persists.
Why perpetuate the cycle when it is so clear that these classes work? According to a 2021 Ramsey Solutions survey, among the teenagers who have completed a personal finance class, nearly 80 percent said that they’ve created a monthly budget for themselves, 94 percent felt confident about saving money, and 87 percent understood how to pay income taxes. And, as noted in the OEE’s report, personal finance courses are tools that “increase social mobility for low-income or immigrant students.” Requiring such classes really couldn’t make much more sense.
At my own high school, Brookline High School, financial literacy is offered in the form of a popular elective, “The World of Money: Practical Studies in Finance and Investment,” which “integrates the basic principles of economics, money management, investing, and technology,” according to the course catalog. Every spring, as course selection rolls around, hundreds of students eye this semester-long course, but with only so many spots, most cannot take it — and, consequently, miss out on an opportunity to learn about financial literacy.
Recognizing the imminent need to educate ourselves on matters of taxes, loans, investments, and more, several members of Brookline High School’s Student Council, including myself, have proposed amendments to our student handbook that would incorporate a financial literacy component in our graduation requirements and incorporate personal finance lessons into our weekly advisory classes. Our work would ensure that such important life skills are accessible to all students, not merely for those lucky enough to find a place in the class.
But while such efforts are certainly a step in the right direction on this issue, they are not enough. Financial literacy should not be a privilege for schools with a proactive student body; it is a fundamental aspect of our lives, and our state’s education system must begin reflecting that. The state must require personal finance courses for graduation — it’s the smartest investment we can make.
Ravin Bhatia is a senior at Brookline High School.
Finance
NexPoint Real Estate Finance, Inc. Announces Series A Preferred Stock Dividend
DALLAS, Dec. 24, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — NexPoint Real Estate Finance, Inc. (NYSE: NREF) (the “Company”) today announced a dividend for its 8.50% Series A Cumulative Redeemable Preferred Stock (NYSE: NREF PRA) of $0.53125 per share. The dividend will be payable on January 27, 2025, to stockholders of record at the close of business on January 15, 2025.
About NexPoint Real Estate Finance, Inc.
NexPoint Real Estate Finance, Inc., is a publicly traded REIT, with its common stock and Series A Preferred Stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “NREF” and “NREF PRA,” respectively, primarily focused on originating, structuring and investing in first-lien mortgage loans, mezzanine loans, preferred equity, convertible notes, multifamily properties and common equity investments, as well as multifamily and single-family rental commercial mortgage-backed securities securitizations, promissory notes and mortgage-backed securities. More information about the Company is available at nref.nexpoint.com.
CONTACTS
Investor Relations
Kristen Griffith
IR@nexpoint.com
Media Relations
Prosek Partners for NexPoint
pro-nexpoint@prosek.com
View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nexpoint-real-estate-finance-inc-announces-series-a-preferred-stock-dividend-302339003.html
SOURCE NexPoint Real Estate Finance, Inc.
Finance
Stock market today: Nasdaq, S&P 500 edge higher ahead of Christmas break
US stocks opened higher to kick off the final, shortened trading session before the Christmas holiday. The benchmark S&P 500 (^GSPC) edged up about 0.2%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) rose roughly 0.3%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) hugged the flatline.
Wall Street is looking to enter its Christmas break rejuvenated, after tech stocks including AI chip giant Nvidia (NVDA) led the march higher on Monday. Markets close at 1 p.m. ET today and are off tomorrow for Christmas Day.
Sizable gains on Friday and Monday have put the indexes back on the path toward their record highs, from which they took a Fed-fueled nosedive last week.
Wall Street is reassessing the path of interest rates next year as it grapples with the reality that the Fed mostly pulled off a so-called soft landing — but couldn’t fully shake the US economy’s inflation problem. According to the CME FedWatch tool, most bets are on two coming holds at the Fed’s January and March meetings, followed by a toss-up in May.
Meanwhile, many eyes continue to be trained on Nvidia, which saw a more than 3.5% gain on Monday. As Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley writes, 2024 was Nvidia’s year, with the stock up some 180%. But 2025 could contain plenty of challenges.
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