Has the face of payments changed forever?
Marieke Flament, European MD at Circle, discusses how technology is transforming the global payments landscape.
Industry Comment
What You Need to Know about Pa.’s Money Transmitter License Changes
The introduction of new bond requirements for money transmitters in Pennsylvania is in line with an overall trend across states to enforce stricter conditions on money transmitter license holders and applicants. See what the licensing requirements mean for your business.
The Convergence of Prepaid and Fintech Means More Innovation to Come
After his first few months at the helm of the Network Branded Prepaid Card Association, Brian Tate talks about prepaid’s role alongside fintech in the next generation of payments innovation.
MiFID II compliance: the essential confluence of regulation, compliance and artificial intelligence
With the July 2017 publication of its MiFID II Policy Statement, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has signaled the final countdown to the most sweeping changes of governance, protection and transparency for a generation.
FIDO Alliance Addresses PSD2 Screen-Scraping Debate
Despite calls from fintechs to permit screen scraping under PSD2, the FIDO Alliance sees some serious flaws with that approach, including security and privacy issues.
Factors in the Long Wait for EMV and Contactless in the U.S.
As some celebrate 10 years of contactless payments, Bastian Knoppers discusses why cards (not mobile wallets) are still king outside the U.S. and what it will take for the U.S. to catch up to the rest of the world on tap-and-go payments.
Overcoming board-level cybersecurity obstacles in the financial services industry
Today’s financial services institutions are challenged to keep pace with changing and covert cybersecurity threats. Since financial institutions are among some of the most appealing targets for hackers, it is critical for these organisations to remain extra vigilant about securing confidential information.
Top 5 Best Challenger Banks: Spotlight Profiles
Our Top 5 Challenger Bank spotlight series is complete. Get to know the challengers—Cashplus, Varo Money, Revolut, Capital on Tap and Fidor Bank—looking to shake up the status quo with tech and a superior customer experience.
Banks, are you a passive data donor or a proactive data seeker?
With the arrival of new regulations, there are two main options for banks: they can choose to become either “data donors” or “data seekers”. These two positions imply opposite approaches to the new banking market that is in prospect, and sharply contrasting mentalities.
Fintech: beware the fake news
In every aspect of life, sentiment overshoots. We overbuy and oversell securities. The political pendulum swings from left to right. Shops run out of ultra-fashionable goods only to heavily discount excess stock a couple months later. Ben Robinson, chief strategy officer at Temenos, explains how this is not a new phenomenon, but has got worse […]
Top 5 Best Challenger Banks: Fidor Bank
Our final spotlight article for our Top 5 Best Challenger Banks list is the only actual bank in the bunch. See how Germany-based Fidor Bank stacks up against the high street banks and its nonbank competitors.
Fintech Trends: the Expected, Unexpected and What’s Next at FinovateFall
Get a sneak peek at what trends will shape the discussion at FinovateFall, including a few things you might not expect.
Play in Our Sandbox: Why Galileo Processing Opened Its APIs to All
Summer’s almost over, but there’s still time to play in the sand. Our decision to open our sandbox for all developers, not just clients, is a vital move in supporting creativity and innovation in payments. And, it’s speeding time to market.
Top 5 Best Challenger Banks: Cashplus
Meet our No. 1 on the Top 5 Best Challenger Banks list and find out why CEO Rich Wagner says the company belongs there.
How the new EU payments regulation will help prevent fraud
Scott McInnes, partner at international law firm Bird & Bird, discusses how the Second Payments Services Directive (PSD2) will affect companies and what requirements industry players need to know.
Keys to Selecting Development Partners for Your Payments Project
It’s hard to imagine a fintech or payments company that today doesn’t have at least one key business initiative hinging on some kind of software development. Before you sign on the dotted line with a developer, here’s what you need to consider.
Top 5 Best Challenger Banks: Varo Money
“There’s a reason that the bank of the future hasn’t been created yet—it’s extremely difficult,” says Top 5 Best Challenger Bank Varo Money. See if you think they’ve got what it takes to rise to the challenge.
Simplify Back-to-School Season with E-Payments
Prepaid cards and alias-based payments that rely on email or mobile phone numbers can offer students and colleges and universities significant benefits over traditional check disbursement of financial aid.
Why I believe the US State Department is wrong about mobile money in Africa
The US Department of State recently released a report that identified mobile money services as particularly susceptible to money laundering in Africa. It cites services like M-PESA and M-Shwari as “services [that] remain vulnerable to money laundering activities”.
3 Ways to Drive User Experience Success and Value
Designing the user experience consumers expect in digital banking is less about seeing what sticks and more about seeing what stands up to real-world human examination and use.
Cybersecurity progress will require speaking the right language
Elizabeth Denham, the UK’s information commissioner, made an astute point when she recently called for senior bank executives to get the same cybersecurity training as front-line staff, following the global WannaCry ransomware attack. But implementing the kind of comprehensive cyber defence strategy which includes such training will require a monumental culture shift at the top.
Is Your Wallet Ready for 2020?
It’s safe to say mobile is just getting started as a payments form factor, but don’t chuck your plastic cards just yet. Personalization, including QR codes, can boost usage and help you stay top of wallet.
Physical containers – reused in novel ways. Does that include nextgen branch offices?
With standards as simple as what we see with shipping containers, creative folks will begin considering options for almost anything that can benefit from these containers being mobile. The user experience that today we enjoy with mobile devices has changed the very heart of today’s data centre even as we see on-premise IT moving to clouds. Couldn’t a case be made that such flexibility be embraced even more aggressively in the future and couldn’t that change the very way we view banking as it continues to transform?
P2P Payments Push Forward
In the P2P showdown, who will be left standing? See how early entrants like Venmo and Square Cash stack up against Zelle and Apple.
Is this the end of fintech as we know it?
In the age of the internet, fintech dominates finance. In the UK, the sector is currently worth £7 billion, employing around 60,000 people with figures set to increase. The industry is definitely awe-inspiring, but as the lines between traditional banking services and fintech blur, fintech could disappear entirely.
How Banks Can Attract More Millennials
Take a lesson (and an infographic) from the Ohio University School of Economics on how to approach millennials and turn them into lifelong customers.
Time to act: EU Funds Transfer Regulation 2015
The EU Funds Transfer Regulation 2015 (FTR 2015), which has been in effect since 26 June 2017, aims to deliver full traceability of payments. A lack of regulatory clarity is, however, leading to significant implementation hurdles that require urgent action from all stakeholders.
Sharing Funds across Families, Groups and Small Business with Prepaid and Mobile
Prepaid is having a renaissance thanks to real-time mobile and web account access that’s enabling a number of disruptors to offer prepaid solutions for a new set of customers.
Getting to experience thinking
“We’ve got a great idea we think you’re going to love.” Despite its manifest flaws, this is the approach that has long dominated the development of new products and services. While introducing products that people love is an exemplary goal, real omniscience has proven to be distressingly rare.
Three Under-Tapped Markets and Use Cases for Prepaid Cards
Prepaid issuers should look to certain banked consumers, P2P and mobile wallet users to gain top-of-wallet status with a whole new set of customers.
New in regtech: digital ID verification
It’s no secret that increased regulations are a significant pain point for commercial and community banks. According to Thomson Reuters Global Cost of Compliance 2016 Survey, more than one-third of participating financial institutions reported spending at least an entire day each week keeping track of regulatory changes. The good news? Regtech, or regulatory technology, is […]
Connecting Brands and Consumers through Alternative and Mobile Payments
Recent research from Blackhawk Network reveals that mobile and contactless payment options can help brands to engage with consumers by driving traffic and incremental sales, reducing shopping cart abandonment and supporting customer acquisition.
Digital currency: the future or the biggest flop?
From Bitcoins to even newer (and lesser known, but rising) forms of currency, will this level the playing field for people in the future, or is this all just a sham that will die down? As things get digitised, what do we need to know about digital currencies, and does this mark the demise of traditional forms of currencies?
On the Fintech Frontline: Three Key Areas Driving Payments Forward
For any organization regularly processing card-not-present (CNP) payments, boarding the fintech bandwagon is a must. There are three key fintech developments—APIs, regtech and cybersecurity strategies—you need to embrace (or face disruption).
Bold statement four: statements from around the bleeding edge of innovation
Welcome back to these pages – and the almost final installation of a series that was started some months ago, talking about some of the grand sweeping statements that we hear, and make.
An Ant Can Teach A Big Lesson To U.S. FIs
Ant Financial created the world’s largest money market fund in four years by enabling mobile wallet users to move money to the fund simply within the mobile app. The program’s meteoric rise shows that consumers are willing to adopt financial services from new players and the mobile device can supercharge that consumer shift of assets if incumbents don’t react quickly enough.
Lessons from the GDPR compliance journey of a large financial services organisation
In preparation for GDPR compliance, a global financial services organisation embarked on a journey to assess its core information processing environments with the objective of identifying opportunities to strengthen its privacy data protection programs. This article focuses on the technology challenges, approach, and lessons learned for the centralised testing environment.
Find Innovation in a Sandbox, Not in a Lab
For financial institutions lacking the deep pockets of the biggest competitors, investing their limited resources to develop disruptive payments solutions isn’t a viable option. Stated simply, you can never outspend the big guys. What you really need is a more effective weapon to level the playing field.
Behavioural black magic
In 1957 the US market researcher James Vicary claimed he could get moviegoers to “drink Coca-Cola” and “eat popcorn” by flashing messages onscreen for such a short time that viewers were unaware they had seen them. The term “subliminal advertising” was coined to describe this unnerving practice and it was subsequently banned in many countries.
Tap into Consumer Habits to Create Sticky Prepaid Products
Designing products with staying power starts with understanding consumers and then adapting uses cases to solve their problems.
