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.
Myanmar’s Yoma Bank is to install a new core banking system provided by vendor Misys, as part of a major transformation project at the privately-owned bank. Yoma especially wanted to be in a position to benefit from the growth of mobile technology in the country.
Misys has launched a banking app prototype for the upcoming Apple Watch, which is due to launch in April, that allows users to make transactions by speaking at their watch.
Four out of five banks believe they will have to replace their core banking system in the next three to five years, with nearly 90% in favour of including SaaS or cloud based services as part of the infrastructure, according to a new survey of senior bank executives.
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.
Swift has hired David Lefferts as managing director, market initiatives for the Americas. Lefferts joins Swift after eight years at Markit, where he held product development, cross-product strategy, and senior business development roles over his eight year tenure.
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.
ABN Amro Clearing will offer clearing and settlement of trades at MEFFPower, cleared by BME Clearing. The Spanish Power derivatives market is one of the top five markets in Europe and has experienced great growth in the past decade. The maturities offered by ABN Amro Clearing as swaps and futures will be: annual, quarter, months, weeks, week-ends and […]
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.
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.
Temenos has moved into the fund administration business with a €235 million acquisition of Luxembourg-based Multifonds, which counts a number of Tier 1 institutions as users of its fund administration platform.
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Swift has added peer assessment to its Sanctions Testing service. An optional service it will allow financial institutions to compare the performance of their sanctions filters against those of other participating institutions.
Tungsten Bank can now provide banking services in Germany, France and Italy following approval from the UK’s Prudential Regulation Authority
Fenergo has enhanced its Regulatory Rules Engine software, used by investment banks investment banks and capital market firms for client lifecycle. The software enables financial institutions to comply with a range of regulatory frameworks based on a single, out-of-the-box repository of rules.
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’.
Arising out of developments in standardised messaging, eBAM is one step towards the future of more accessible, safer banking
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.
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
In the Oscar-winning film The Theory of Everything the lead character Stephen Hawking lays out his vision of a single equation that explains all physical aspects of the universe. This rarefied scientific debate has echoes in the more prosaic world of Transaction Cost Analysis in financial markets, where the availability of more granular data coupled with pressure from regulators is driving a whole new wave of research and analysis, says ITG’s Michael Sparkes.
Continuing its policy of offering products that fit across user workflows, Bloomberg has moved in to the transaction reporting space in Europe. The company’s Trade Order Management System has been granted approval by the Financial Conduct Authority to report securities with an ISIN and OTC derivatives as part of the UK’s Approved Reporting Mechanisms regime.
The Financial Conduct Authority plans to conduct a market study of the investment and corporate banking sector to decide if competition in the sector is working properly. It may also look into the asset management later in the year.
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.
Poland’s Idea Bank has launched an experimental branch aimed at corporate clients. The ‘Idea Hub’ bank branch was created to test the idea that innovative bank branches can attract customers and provide a complementary service to online and mobile banking services.
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 …
A company’s Net Promoter Score has become an important measure of customer satisfaction. It asks them a simple question: how likely they are to recommend that company to a friend. The responses split the audience into three groups: promoters, passives and detractors. By subtracting the percentage of detractors from the promoters, banks obtain their NPS. NPS has been a valued metric in many consumer-facing industries for several years, but its importance and influence in financial services is growing fast.
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.
Protecting your banking infrastructure from cybercriminals is one of the toughest IT challenges in banking. It keeps getting harder, even though banks are working tirelessly to protect both customers and assets. Attacks are growing in size, and new developments such as the Internet of Things mean attack surfaces are growing, as well as the number of endpoints that can be used to launch attacks.
Lloyds Banking Group is to allow customers to upload images of identification documents required as part on an online account opening application, removing the need to visit a branch.
Initially the new electronic identification and verification checks, which will start to be rolled out to customers from next week, will be available to customers who want to add an additional party to an existing account.
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.
London-based Orwell Group, founded in 2005, has launched a pan-European current account called Ipagoo in the UK, France, Spain and Italy. The product aims to take on services provided by traditional banks, using open architecture software and promising consumers greater choice and less hassle.
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 […]
