Optimism among UK financial services firms rose strongly in the three months to March and profitability improved in most sectors, according to the latest quarterly CBI/PwC Financial Services Survey, but despite overall business volumes continuing to increase, the pace of growth was the slowest in a year
Host card emulation specialist Bell ID is enabling the launch of ANZ New Zealand’s upgraded goMoney mobile app, which is set to feature a cloud-based HCE NFC mobile wallet. The project, for the New Zealand division of ANZ Bank, will bring contactless mobile payments to the smartphones of more than 120,000 ANZ customers. The ANZ […]
Despite rapid increases in innovation spending in financial services, many banks are still worried that it is taking too long to roll out new technologies – and that their own fragmented organisation is getting in the way, according to a new report by Accenture.
Long-term investors are deeply concerned about their ability to find liquidity, with nearly 90% afraid that predatory high-frequency traders are preying on their flows, according to a new survey by block-trading network Liquidnet.
Santander has launched the UK’s first standalone ISA mobile app , which was designed and developed with mobile specialist company Monitise.
Türk Ekonomi Bankası is to launch a mobile contactless payment application using Visa Europe’s host card emulation functionality to provide secure contactless payments.
Standard Chartered has named Michael Gorriz as group chief information officer, replacing Jan Verplancke, whose departure was announced earlier this year. Gorriz is currently vice president and CIO at Daimler.
Hotspot, the institutional foreign exchange market owned and operated by BATS Global Markets, is to expand its European presence with the launch of its first Europe-based FX matching engine later this year. The new matching engine will be located in the London Slough Campus data centres and will target Europe and Asia and specific FX currencies that dominate the European and Asian trading hours.
The Banking Industry Architecture Network has announced six new members including ACI Worldwide, Atos, EY and Zafin. Its global network now numbers 58 banks, service providers, software vendors and academic partners.
The Plato Partnership is a consortium of asset managers and broker-dealers working to build a non-profit trading utility in Europe. The group has just signed four more asset managers, including AXA Investment Managers, JP Morgan, Union Investment and Fidelity Worldwide.
Banks have been warned that new entrants will come and ‘eat their lunch’ if they fail to remain relevant to the modern consumer in the face of an ‘unstoppable revolution’. The point was made repeatedly during sessions at the Payments International conference in London this week.
Social media has taken the world by storm over the past decade. Facebook, which is generally considered to be the “grandfather” of social media, was only founded 11 years ago, YouTube the next year and Twitter two years later
The financial services industry faces a daunting task as the European Commission’s MiFID II legislation draws close to its final deadline, and grave concerns about inconsistencies in the rules and the pressures of meeting it remain.
Financial market regulations across the globe are increasingly focusing on risk management. This includes ensuring it is clear who firms are trading with and for, and confirming that firms can identify the instruments being traded. As a result, the field of reference data is increasingly held under the regulatory microscope and that lens extends to the standards used to identify financial instruments, writes Chris Pickles.
The need for a digital strategy has leapt to the top of retail banks’ agendas over the past year, replacing regulatory issues, as they look to fend of competition from tech and e-commerce rivals.
Deutsche Börse, Eurex and the Bombay Stock Exchange have further extended their strategic cooperation offering connectivity services. Participants of BSE will be able to use Deutsche Börse’s resilient low latency N7 network services to connect to BSE back-ends in India through the Deutsche Börse access points in Hong Kong and Singapore.
A three-party alliance between alternative FX market LMAX Exchange, retail FX provider Z.com Trade and retail FX trading platform MT4 have built a combined liquidity pool, which aims to provide ‘last look’ liquidity to a wider market.
Ever since the deployment of Apple’s NFC solution – ‘Apple Pay’, and the various competitors launches since, there’s been speculation around what the future holds for consumer payments and how security will impact it
SIA, in partnership with Colt, has been awarded the contract to connect Hungarian central securities depository Keler to T2S, the new single European platform for the settlement of transactions in domestic and cross-border securities.
The Citi Mobile Challenge, which seeks to unearth innovation and developer talent in some of the most far flung reaches of globe in a bid to get the best talent to help change the way the world banks, has extended its registration deadline to allow more people to take part.
Cloud computing is becoming more prevalent throughout the financial sector but many firms say they are less than halfway to having a firm cloud strategy in place, with controls and security remaining primary concerns.
A Balancing Act Mobile banking and payments are forcing banks to radically reconsider their systems architectures and processes Cloud in financial services How banks learned to stop worrying and love the cloud Biometrics Voice and fingerprint recognition are no longer esoteric or inaccurate – in fact, they’re becoming the norm Nurturing innovation Amy Nauiokas talks about Anthemis’s vision […]
Mobile money is expanding rapidly as global smartphone penetration grows. This year, many providers are looking to expand their range of mobile money services to areas such as credit and savings – but operators must be wary of the remaining challenges, including regulation and market sizes, according to a new report by the GSMA.
Samsung has announced a new mobile payment service called Samsung Pay, that it claims will break the obstacles to mobile wallet adoption by being compatible with older point-of-sale terminals through the use of Magnetic Secure Transmission, which allows terminals using traditional magnetic stripe technology to accept payments.
Nearly two-thirds of Italians will be able to make real-time peer to peer payments using a mobile phone by this summer, according to Massimo Arrighetti, chief executive of Italian payment processor SIA. That’s not the end of SIA’s plans however, as the company focuses on an internationalisation agenda that targets 400 million European current account holders.
Lloyds Bank plans to invest £1 billion in digital banking capability over the next three years, re-investing a third of the savings it hopes to make in its drive to become ‘simpler and more efficient’.
Limited availability of key skills is seen as a threat to growth prospects by 70% of chief executives in the financial services sector. A global survey by PwC shows that the disruptive impact of new technology and new competition in the sector has created new challenges for employers looking to hire in the months ahead. Concerns centre on the shortage of employees with the right combination of skills, with more than three quarters of executives looking for a broader range of skills when hiring than they did in the past.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a currency system seeking successful adoption must be in want of trust. Trust that a representation of value, such as a paper note, is backed by real value or a genuine obligation to repay; trust that those representations will be accepted by others as such; and trust that the representations of value are not counterfeit.
Deutsche Bank and Hewlett-Packard have announced a 10-year, multi-billion dollar agreement that will see parts of the bank’s global IT systems rationalised and migrated to HP platforms10
Citi has opened the doors to entrants for its Citi Mobile Challenge in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, an annual competition that invites developers from around the world to build innovative financial services based on Citi’s digital platform.
Customers are looking for organisations that care about their needs in a way that is personalised, responsible, transparent and – of course – secure. In recognising this, banks are stepping up to the challenge and just as technology is at the heart of this business, so their relationship with IT suppliers is a key component of this value shift.
Online social investment network eToro has moved its core IT infrastructure onto a hybrid cloud system. The platform will allow it to maintain sensitive applications in a private cloud while using a public cloud for others.
Capital markets firms are losing their intellectual property too easily to competitors, business partners and third parties. Most companies could benefit from a tougher approach to IP, including licencing agreements and more use of patents, according to a new report by analyst firm Aite.
The cyber-attack on Sony Pictures at the end of last year highlighted something that IT and security people in financial services have known for some time – the modern networked environment is far less secure than most people are prepared to admit …
Avox, the DTCC’s legal entity reference data subsidiary, has launched a series of web-based application programming interfaces designed to support faster access to data, including legal entity identifiers, legal names, addresses, industry classifications and corporate hierarchies.
Customers are busy and don’t have time to deal with slow banking services and processes. Instead, they want social media banking and more sophisticated personal banking, together with benefits that are convenient to them. This was the message of speakers at the Finovate conference in London yesterday – but not everyone in the audience was convinced about the ability of new technologies to realise that vision.
From the early days of internet distribution, New York-based Alacra has been aggregating reference data. Chief executive Steve Goldstein told David Bannister the company’s story
The UK’s Payments Council has selected Swift to build the country’s new central infrastructure platform in preparation for the next phase of SEPA regulation in 2016, through the provision of an automated central infrastructure platform for collection and maintenance of UK-specific SEPA routing data.
Like opening Pandora’s box, the emergence of swap execution facilities in US derivatives markets has brought unexpected consequences and problems as well as benefits. In some cases, asset managers are actively looking to avoid trading on the new platforms and even turning to other asset classes, according to a new report by OpenLink.
Top African payments and banking experts to convene in Johannesburg In the face of constant payment changes, Cards and Payments Africa is the place to drive business growth and keep up with the latest trends. Join the traditional players, the emerging disruptors and risk-taking visionaries of payments as you check-in to our destination of innovation […]
