Payments services provider Circle has commenced its operations in Europe, starting with euro availability in Ireland and Spain. The expansion will enable people in the EU/EEA region to send and receive person-to-person (P2P) payments with native Euro support to friends and family within their countries and across borders instantly – with zero fees.
Want to save some time but be in the know of the latest funding initiatives in the fintech space? Then read on.
BFC Bank, a subsidiary of the Bahrain Financing Company money transfer group, has received authorisation from the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as it finalises its launch as a UK bank. For its technology, BFC will be using an outsourced “bank in a box” version of ERI’s Olympic core banking system. […]
India-based microfinance entity Ujjivan Financial Services is converting into a small finance bank (SFB), and has signed for Financial Software and Systems’ (FSS) end-to-end payments solution.
Wirecard AG and Orange have launched a parent-supervised, prepaid mobile payment service for teenagers called Orange Cash Jeune. Parents go online to create an account for their children who are younger than 18, signing up via the Web interface of Orange Cash before the app is installed on their children’s smartphones.
A new mobile payments platform from FIS aims to make shopping easier for consumers at gas stations and convenience stores. Called BuyWay, the technology “unites all points of contact within a transaction to deliver seamless, secure, personalized shopping experiences at thousands of gas stations and convenience stores across the nation,” FIS said this week.
Despite the 60 percent growth of mobile e-commerce to $120 billion in 2015 from 2014, many merchants are doing little to sway consumers to use their apps versus using a mobile browser, according to a Javelin study. Last year, consumers’ purchases via Web browser totaled $75.3 billion, while retailer apps accounted for just less than $47 billion.
Experiments with mobile order-ahead continue to be on the menu for many companies in the fast-casual dining vertical, with popular burger chain Shake Shack launching a test run of the service this week as part of its first-ever app. At the moment, the order-ahead function only works at one Shake Shack location, in midtown Manhattan, which the company said will serve as a market test for the service before rolling it out to “additional markets.”
Tieto says it is the first Nordic company to appoint artificial intelligence (AI) to the leadership team of a new data-driven businesses unit. The AI, called Alicia T, will help the management team to become “truly data-driven”; assist with unspecified “innovative ways”; and possess the capacity to cast votes. Ari Järvelä, head of data-driven businesses […]
Symphony Software Foundation has launched an open developer platform. The foundation hosts open source development, bots, apps and integrations on the Symphony platform. It will also provide community contributors and foundation member organisations with access to the Symphony API, as well as development tools. Gabriele Columbro, executive director, Symphony Software Foundation, says open source “fuelled […]
Online commerce accounts for 8.5 percent of all card transactions but 45 percent of fraud, according to Javelin Strategy & Research. As more transactions move to online and mobile channels, fighting fraud in those channels will become even more challenging. Discover Global Network discusses the latest fraud-prevention tools that offer protection without adding friction.
Fintech start-up Configo has launched a project to aggregate the API portals launched by financial players around the world. It is not commercial driven but is “just a small project to put everything in order”, says Yosi Dahan, co-founder and CEO of Configo.
Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions has launched electronic document submission (eSubmit) for account opening. The service is available in “select” Western European countries and allows clients to complete the account opening process by returning electronic versions of documentation rather than paper. Sabine McIntosh, global head of account services product, Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions, says […]
Accenture has acquired London-based design consultancy Allen International as it looks to boost its digital banking ambitions. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but Accenture says Allen International has worked with more than 350 banks around the world including nine of the top 20 banks. Customers include Emirates NBD, Bank of Ireland, CIBC, Banorte, […]
The desire to spend more time with family and the rigors of travel have compelled Charlie Scharf to step down as Visa Inc. CEO, according to an Oct. 17 announcement by the payments network. Replacing him is American Express veteran Alfred Kelly Jr., who was unanimously appointed by the board of directors.
Verifone said Oct. 18 that it had adopted and deployed a new mobile API standard designed to better tie together payment and loyalty applications for customers at gas stations and convenience stores.
A group of Australia’s biggest banks have launched the latest salvo in their dispute with Apple over third-party access to the iPhone’s NFC hardware. In a joint filing to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the banks rebuffed Apple’s claims that they should not be allowed to collectively negotiate with the tech giant over making their own mobile payment apps available on iPhones.
Payment card data from shoppers at the online store operated by the National Republican Senatorial Committee have been stolen by Russian cyber criminals, according to a Dutch security expert.
US Bank is offering a Visa-developed geolocation service, a new, opt-in technology integrated into the bank’s mobile apps that enable the location of a card transaction to be matched to the location of the user’s phone. By matching the location, US Bank says it can help ensure that transactions on customers’ cards are approved and […]
Payments firm IbanFirst has raised €10 million for its growth plans and launched Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) for SMEs in Europe. IbanFirst offers an online multi-currency platform “in BaaS mode” – which it calls “an alternative to banks”. It was founded in 2013 by Pierre-Antoine Dusoulier (former head of Western Europe at Saxo Bank) under the name […]
Australia and New Zealand-based banking group, ANZ, has opened up its mainframe and two banking systems to about 20 new application programming interfaces (APIs). The move is a way of getting around replacing its systems – in this case the legacy CAP deposits and loan system and Vision Plus credit card platform. The latter is […]
Amicus Finance, a UK financial services group, has submitted a banking licence application to the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). It hopes to get the banking licence in 2017. In advance of authorisation, Amicus will convert £30 million of the debt currently used to fund its lending activities into equity […]
More than 60 of financial institutions around the world (including many top-tier banks) are involved in the R3 consortium, with considerable financial and resource commitments. The international consortium promises to build a common blockchain-based platform – called Corda – but the end-result is still a number of years away.
Yes Bank, India’s fifth largest in the private sector, has partnered with Lastmile.mobi to introduce the IRIS EMV POS solution. The device allows biometric authentication through iris scanning, and can act as a POS terminal as well as an ATM. Lastmile.mobi provides a cloud-based platform accessible by a biometric enabled mobile device. The solution integrates […]
Vermilion Software, a UK-based supplier of client reporting and communications software, has been selected by active equity specialist Martin Currie. Edinburgh-based Martin Currie has chosen its client reporting suite and pitchbook facility as a means of “consolidating” its reporting and marketing materials. In addition to adopting Vermilion’s V4.0 reporting technology, Martin Currie has also purchased […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a final rule Oct. 5 to correct “certain clerical and non-substantive” errors it found in Regulation E, which implements the Electronic Fund Transfer Act. The rule was published in the Federal Register Oct. 12 and the corrections take effect Nov. 14, 2016.
With the U.S. rollout of EMV making it harder for fraudsters to target merchant POS systems, thieves increasingly have set their sights on ATMs. But cash machines won’t be such an easy target for long, as the same technology that has increased POS security is steadily making its way to ATMs.
U.K banks don’t report all the cyber attacks directed at them, according to a Reuters report. The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority reports at least 75 cyber attacks against financial institutions this year, but the news agency quoted experts who said that total is likely underreported. That’s in part because British banks are not required to report every such attack.
Japan might remove its 8 percent sales tax on bitcoin and other virtual currency transactions, according to reports. The plan stems from the country’s Ministry of Finance and the Financial Services Agency, according to an Oct. 14 report in Japan Today. It said regulators intend to study the issue via a committee; among the questions is what constitutes a virtual currency.
BNP Paribas has selected Fidessa’s derivatives trading platform to underpin the bank’s futures and options agency trading business. The platform will support the workflow requirements across Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America. It will also provide BNP Paribas with a suite of specialised derivatives algorithms, including benchmark algos and advanced synthetic order types to normalise trading […]
Acorn Financial Partners (AFP) has submitted a banking licence application to the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA). On authorisation, AFP will be called Redwood Bank, a new UK-based SME challenger bank, and it anticipates receiving its licence early in 2017 and opening to customers later the same year. AFP’s majority […]
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has signed for a “cloud-ready single platform” from its long-standing software supplier Misys to support its corporate banking operations outside Australia.
DZ Bank’s group treasury division has implemented its collateral management operations with the help of Sapient Global Markets. DZ Bank, Germany’s third largest bank by asset size, worked with Sapient to “optimise and automate the collateral allocation process”. This project began with a proof of concept, using anonymised production data, to create a system assessment […]
Provident Credit Union in California and MountainOne Bank in Massachusetts have gone live with new core banking software – PhoenixEFE from D+H Corporation.
UAE-based Islamic Finance House (IFH) has upgraded its core banking system to Temenos’ T24 R14 platform. IFH has been using T24 since its inception in 2004, and says the latest enhancement “has given way to resource optimisation, scalability management and shortened approval processes”.
Friday’s not the best for NatWest. Today (14 October), there have been some issues with its debit card payments and its customers are unable to make purchases. The bank says it is “aware of some issues” and is “working hard to fix them”. On Twitter, customers are either confused or venting their fury. We’re aware […]
Bitcoin wallet provider Blockchain.info has been the victim of a hack attack on its DNS servers. It experienced an outage for several hours while under attack, and Peter Smith, the CEO and co-founder, says its internal systems “alerted our infrastructure team who immediately began to assess the attack” but it “became clear the attackers gained […]
Alibaba has revealed a new payment service that lets virtual reality (VR) shoppers pay just by nodding their heads. Called VR Pay, it’s been developed by Ant Financial’s (Alibaba’s financial arm) incubator F Lab, and it’s another innovation in the lively and overcrowded payments arena. With the tech, shoppers (bovine at the best of times) […]
Validata, a specialist in enterprise software testing and release automation and Temenos’ partner, has announced a number of client wins and go-lives.
Goldman Sachs has unveiled Marcus, an online platform offering unsecured personal loans to consumers. Named after Marcus Goldman, one of the firm’s founders, the platform provides consumers with a way to “consolidate their high-interest credit card debt”. Borrowers can apply for fixed-rate, no-fee personal loans of up to $30,000 for periods of two to six […]
