Sometimes the least obvious changes can have a big effect, and very often those changes are in areas that might considered outside the remit of the people best placed to make them. Bank staff remuneration, for instance …
Call it immediate, instant, fast(er) or real-time, the drive to speed up payments is being discussed in almost every country. As part of that discussion Banking Technology and ACI Worldwide brought together international participants from Australia, Europe, the UK and the US review the opportunities and challenges ahead.
PULLING TOGETHER Banks are losing corporate business to alternative providers. What can they do to fight back? PREVIEW: SINGAPORE SLINGS AND ARROWS Innotribe takes centre stage at Sibos 2015 – what’s left for the traditionalists? SURVEY: LEGACY REPLACEMENT Multiple overlapping and redundant systems are holding back modernisation ROUNDTABLE: THE INTERNATIONALISATION OF IMMEDIATE PAYMENTS Call them […]
For those who attend Sibos every year, it can seem as though the conference never actually ends – it simply adjourns until the following year. This year, the rise of distributed ledgers and the role of non-bank players in financial services look set to top the agenda – but there will also be a strong focus on innovation, women in finance and millennials.
When ANZ decided to make its acquisition of New Zealand’s National Bank into a single brand, it had some wide-ranging rationalisation ahead of it to reduce costs while expanding service coverage. Software from Californian geographic information systems specialist Esri helped.
An interesting trend is developing in the halal sector: regional hubs are developing in places that have some local demand but not the size that would be significant markets on their own. Think of Malaysia (the largest) or Dubai or tiny Brunei. Each sees the halal sector as being strategic to their economic growth, and for Dubai and Brunei at least, as key aspects of their economic diversification. This trend has the potential to support global growth in the Islamic economy as well as SME development but need a lot of (costly) infrastructure put in place to open up the international side to SMEs
A new online market for buying and selling financial research has gone live in Europe. Focused on providing buy-side firms with more transparency, the new RSRCHXexchange is based in the cloud and is aimed at helping institutions comply with MiFID II research unbundling requirements.
Online-only bank Fidor has launched in the UK, promising to change the way retail banking works by letting the customer build the services and products they want to use. The bank is part of a new wave of fresh banks entering the market, many of which focus their efforts online rather than on the high street.
Saxo Bank is to allow access to its multi-asset trading and back office infrastructure through a new open API that will allow developers and partners to integrate Saxo’s trading functionality into their own applications and systems.
Nine major global investment banks have formed a partnership to explore the potential of distributed ledger technology in financial markets. The project, led by financial technology company R3, aims to create early standards for the emerging technology that will make it easier and more efficient as it grows.
UK building society Nationwide has begun a £500 million project to improve its branch network using NCR latest generation of self-service ATMs. The project aims to bring the kind of self-service experience customers can get at supermarkets to the retail bank branch.
Saxo Payments isn’t a bank, and the chief executive isn’t a banker. So how does he think he’s that’s going to help shake up international payments?
The London Stock Exchange has sold its Proquote market data and retail trading services business to Australian financial technology specialist Iress, which is expanding its capital markets and funds operations in the UK.
Pascal Augé, head of global transaction and payment services, Société Générale speaks to Daily News at Sibos about the growing importance of transaction banking for corporate customers
Last year, the ISO 20022 standard celebrated its 10th birthday, and consequently it may seem a bit odd to say that after more than a decade since its inception, the financial community really should start taking assertive action. Since 2004, the ISO 20022 standard has, thankfully, witnessed substantial adoption but it has been what could be termed an “uncontrolled adoption”. So why is action so critical now?
Central banks need to play a greater role in the provision of infrastructure for low value payments and existing models revised to balance risk and rewards, according to new research published by the Swift Institute.
The London Stock Exchange says that the launch of Turkish derivatives on its derivatives market represents part of the long-cherished goal of growing its derivatives business around the world. It also represents the exchange’s ‘open access’ policy.
The UK payment services market has been under the spotlight in recent months with the introduction of a new Payment Systems Regulator created with the intention, amongst other things, of opening up the industry to new and emerging payment service providers.
Russia’s central securities depository NSD has implemented back-to-back settlement technology for off-exchange delivery-versus-payment transactions with securities denominated in Russian rubles. The bank accounts and transactions may be in rubles, US dollar, Euro and Chinese yuan.
The Payment Systems Regulator, the new economic regulator for UK payment systems, today confirms the line-up of the Payments Strategy Forum it has set up to set the strategy for innovation in payment systems where the industry needs to work together.
Mitigating risk while rewarding success has become a complex and growing concern in banking. Recent regulatory changes stemming from the financial crisis mean modern banks face regulations from several entities and multiple levels of government that require them to govern, monitor, audit, and report their incentive plans with higher levels of detail than ever before. Many organisations are now challenged to meet these internal and external compliance requirements.
Post-trade processing company Bloomberg STP Solutions and post-trade and risk specialist Traiana have begun a joint effort to develop a straight-through processing infrastructure for FX options. The partners say it will help to reduce post-trade costs for market participants, which have typically remained higher than execution costs.
Figures from Link, the UK’s cash machine network, show that the number of ATMs in the UK reached 70,180 in July, passing 70,000 for the first time. ATM figures from July, show that the total amount withdrawn from cash machines in July 2015 was £11.3 billion, up 4% compared with July 2014.
The International Securities Services Association adopted a set of compliance principles to address the “critical challenges” posed by financial crime. The new principles aim to establish “a clear global standard for the opening and maintenance of cross-border securities accounts”.
Swift has named the 20 finalists for the 2015 Innotribe Startup Challenge finale, which will take place at Sibos in Singapore this October. The finalists include companies focused on personal finance, foreign exchange, data protection, mobile banking and e-commerce as well as social media, big data, payments and many other areas.
Target2-Securities, the European Central Bank project to harmonise Europe’s post trade infrastructure, has finally gone live in Italy – three months after Italy’s last-minute decision to drop out of the first wave earlier this summer.
BNY Mellon expects to have its SunGard InvestOne system back to normal today following testing over the weekend and the US Labor Day holiday and have caught up on the generation of net asset values for clients.
ANZ has signed a five-year, A$450 million (£208 million) strategic agreement with IBM, the centrepiece of which is the establishment of a cloud-based Innovation Lab based on IBM’s Bluemix cloud development platform-as-a-service.
More than £2.5 billion was spent in the UK using contactless cards in the first half of 2015 and this is likely to increase even more as the upper limit for contactless payments increases from £20 to £30 from today.
Credit unions play a critical role in local economies of countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, serving as a vital savings and credit conduit to vast numbers of people, especially those in the lower rungs of the income pyramid who are in many cases, priced out of the traditional banking system
Global capital markets specialist, Hatstand, has launched a cyber-security risk assessment service that will enable businesses to better understand the current state of their preparedness against the risk of cyber-attacks and identify any shortfalls in their existing governance programmes.
Service provider Ciber claims to have solved one of the most expensive problems in business: upgrading legacy systems to make them secure and cloud friendly. Its new system, Ciber Momentum, converts the code from languages such as Cobol, Ada and Pascal into a more cloud-ready format.
The UK payments industry and regulators should focus on four main priorities to ensure the country has a ‘world class’ payments framework, according to Payments UK.
Digitally enabled supplier finance networks and alternative lenders now pose a significant threat to every part of the commercial lending business, with 84% of banks seeing pressure on the pricing of loan products as a challenge.
Equifax, the consumer and business information specialist, has launched a new service providing real-time, integrated data on companies and the individuals who own and run them.
Let’s be clear: banks do a very difficult job – they store the value of society expressed as money. We trust them and they can’t get it wrong, but they are nothing but people and IT. Everything they own is on computer and they don’t like to take risks with this. Consequently, IT change for banks has been slow and safe. It has been incremental: bit by bit, byte by byte.
Historically, the large banks have been Lords of the Manor, between them owning every scrap of land as far as the eye can see. However, times are changing: invaders offering services the banks cannot provide as competitively have begun to disrupt the peace and take small pockets of land for themselves. Likening the march of the fintech new entrants to a land-grab by an invading force, the disruptors began with a neglected allotment here and there, then moved to take a meadow and now some are on the verge of swallowing up villages and small towns …
The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures and the International Organization of Securities Commissions are seeking comment on proposals for harmonising the Unique Transaction Identifier used to be used for OTC derivatives trade reporting.
Kuala Lumpur-based Hong Leong Bank Berhad has selected the Intellect Global Transaction Banking platform as the basis for a digital transformation of its wholesale banking services.
Mobile phones will take an increasingly leading role in the payments space over the next five years as a result of technologies that allow safe storage of payment details in smartphones, according to a report prepared by the Consult Hyperion on behalf of Payments UK.
