Altcoin News: JPMorgan Chase: “Banks and Cryptocurrency Startups Can Cooperate”
March 22, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
The representative of JPMorgan Chase, Ron Karpovich in an interview with CNBC, said that financial institutions can cooperate with cryptocurrency companies.
According to the head of Global eCommerce Solutions at JPMorgan Chase, there is “more partnership than competition” between banks and cryptocurrency start-ups, especially in the field of payments. To a question from a CNBC presenter about how the banking giant is ready to compete with new players using blockchain and cryptocurrency technology to provide the same services as the “old guard”, but with lower prices, Karpovich said:
“Ultimately behind the scenes, they [crypto innovators] are going to have to use a bank to move funds. There’s more partnership instead of competition in that space. […] When it comes to margins and capabilities — payments is never something that grows in margin, nobody wants to pay for a payment. That’s one of the hardest parts of this process: you have limited resources in the capability to sell, so you need highly efficient and large players.”
According to Karpovich, the blockchain can really make a revolution in the payment industry, but in the future, it can also turn into a basic technology that will simply ensure the effectiveness of costs and time for providing services.
Regarding JPM Coin’s recently introduced stablecoin, Karpovich rejected the suggestion that this step marks a thaw in the bank’s position on cryptocurrencies, especially given the negative opinion of them by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon.
“I think there’s a difference between trading a cryptocurrency that’s in the market that’s ubiquitous versus using the technology to enhance your payments infrastructure. We look at the technology as being a means to doing things faster and cheaper: every CEO would like to make things faster and cheaper. So from that standpoint I think it represents a buy into the concept of using blockchain,” he said.
According to Karpovich, this is consistent with the current initiatives of JPMorgan Chase, the “major player in the blockchain industry,” who developed the private blockchain Quorum as part of a partnership with Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, as well as a system for interbank payments based on the blockchain.
Information provided regarding JPM Coin is ambiguous. This allowed some to consider the release of stablecoin a very positive thing for the industry, while others criticized its proprietary and closed network structure, arguing that it would increase the fragmentation of the financial sector.
Author: Marko Vidrih
