Rising political tensions and the increasing use of sanctions are making companies think twice about relying on long global supply chains, said John Calverley, head of economic research at Standard Chartered. Firms may decide that rather than hedging their bets with production, they will keep it closer to home, he said during a roundtable session yesterday.
The threat of banks de-risking and exiting regions and businesses in fear of sanctions-related fines is upon us, said Juan Zarate, the ex-deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism to US President George W Bush. Zarate was speaking at a Standard Chartered session yesterday morning about his new book, Treasury Wars: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare.
While the average bank heist averages $6000, a cyber-thief can make off with millions. Last year 552 million identities were breached, while every call about a compromised credit card costs a bank $4.
In a recently published white paper on intraday liquidity reporting*, Swift urges financial institutions to initiate programs now to address serious challenges with regard to data availability, centralisation, aggregation and interpretation in meeting Basel Committee guidelines. Greater industry collaboration will also help to accelerate moves towards cost effective and sustainable models and solutions.
Banks can reduce the headaches associated with cost pressure, tough new regulation, legacy business complexity and changing customer demands by outsourcing non-core areas of business. That is the idea behind two new corporate actions products launched by financial technology vendor SunGard.
The consumerisation of technology is driving the development of new services in wholesale banking as much as it is in retail, as customers demand real-time access through mobile channels.
The US Federal Reserve Banks have begun planning for a faster payments system in the US, following research that found US consumers favoured such a system and would be willing to pay more for it.
Societe Generale Securities Services (SGSS) has launched Global Broker-Dealer Services, an outsourcing solution aimed at institutional brokers, mid-tier banks and broker dealers. The fully integrated global service includes middle-office services, back-office processing and post-trade services.
The growth of peer to peer lending demonstrates that there is an alternative to the traditional lending model of banks. But can crowd funders ever replace the incumbents and do they enjoy long-run advantages or face being co-opted?
Changing trade patterns and attempts to ‘de-dollarise’ international commerce are changing the landscape of trade finance, as new partnerships emerge.
The original concept of the ISO 20022 was to create a repository of data used in financial messaging to communicate business information of any type – and to be able to add any types of data that might arise in the future. There has been a lot of focus on the use of the standard in payments and securities messaging roles, this has obscured its current and potential use in other areas.
The financial industry must work with regulators, market infrastructures and among itself to address the major issues it faces says Jamie Forese, co-president of Citi and chief executive of Citi Institutional Clients Group, during the opening plenary address at Sibos in Boston: “Perhaps the most important issue on which we must work together is encouraging regulators to build a coherent, consistent and unified regime of global financial regulation. We can’t build it ourselves; our role must be as advocates and as advocates we need to speak with one clear and consistent voice.”
Collaboration between international financial market infrastructures (FMIs) and the development of industry utilities will be a key factor in removing systemic risk and reducing costs for industry participants.
The competition that will be introduced by the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) Target2-Securities (T2S) project among CSDs is an “opportunity” said Jesús Benito, chief executive at Iberclear. In simplifying the post-trade infrastructure of Europe, T2S is prompting new competitive forces, market entrants, challenges and even creating new words.
More than two-thirds of delegates who attended the Demystifying Regulators and Regulation session yesterday said they had to file reports with six or more regulatory agencies and of those, a third report to north of 11 agencies.
Growth is returning to the payments industry and new market entrants are poised to take a share of that growth away from banks, according to a clutch of payments-focused white papers released at Sibos today.
Misys has launched the Misys FusionBanking Corporate FrontOffice, which it said integrates the corporate to bank relationship more fully. It provides banks with a tool that can aid client onboarding and functionality while enabling end use treasury customers to get commercial lending data, trade finance and payment information – and prices – out of their bank much more easily.
When a new payment system such as Bitcoin arises it tends to be successful “in areas where a need is not being met”, Gottfried Leibbrandt, Swift chief executive told delegates yesterday. He said his fascination with Bitcoin – “both a currency and an innovation” – had not changed in the past 12 months.
Data loads at financial institutions are expected to increase significantly, according to a poll of delegates attending yesterday’s technology forum session on big data.
Sepa Consultancy has launched the Intraday Liquidity Simulator, a liquidity dashboard solution that provides a timeline of events, outcomes and actions in multiple currencies.
BNP Paribas Securities Services has launched Liquidity Access, a solution designed to help banks and broker dealers manage and monitor their liquid assets. The launch comes as various regulations, including Basel III and Dodd Frank, require market participants to hold more liquid assets, closely monitor their liquidity ratios and anticipate the evolution of their liquidity positions. Intraday liquidity management and reporting is likely to be a hot topic this week as the January 2015 deadline for Basel intraday liquidity reporting looms.
Building a single regional market is a goal for many groups of nations; however Europe’s development of a single settlement platform is the only effort to come to fruition.
Forget Bitcoin, cryptographic payments networks will be the real game-changer, according to many people working in the payments world.
Data in all its forms and access to it in real time is becoming ever more critical as financial institutions seek to manage myriad risks.
Crypto and virtual currencies have garnered plenty of headlines in the past couple of years. Now financial regulators around the world are turning the spotlight on these instruments and attempting to bring them into the legal fold.
Global financial markets are experiencing a paradigm shift as governments, regulators and participants recalibrate the processes and structures underpinning global finance. The challenge is to repair and remedy where needed, with dialogue between central banks, regulators and participants, but also to avoid creating fragmented markets or worse, unintentionally reintroducing risk.
Change is a theme at this year’s Sibos. But what type of change? A cross-section of delegates discuss what they think will be the main disruptive forces in their part of the business.
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One of the most attractive cities in the US, Boston is also steeped in history: get your walking shoes on and explore the many historical and culinary delights of the Sibos 2014 host city.
While mobile commerce and payments have been slow to take off in Western countries, the developing world has been stealing a march with innovative services and products.
In early September, cloud computing stories finally became interesting as an apparent hacking attack on Apple’s iCloud released hundreds of photos of ‘celebrities’ in the nude. It was a perfect story for the mainstream media, combining celebrities with nudity and a bit of unintelligible (to them at least) technology thrown in for good measure. Among […]
Banks from as far afield as Brazil, New Zealand and Singapore are among the candidates on the shortlist for the Banking Technology 2014 Awards, announced today, showing the continuing competitive edge regional institutions are gaining over the large international players through technology.
A sustained rally in frontier markets is leading an expansion of size and liquidity as investors seek opportunities that are not available in the developed or emerging markets, according to a new report by research house Aite.
The ISO 20022 standard is 10 years old this year, but its roots go back to some five years before that, and the story of its development and adoption is likely to go on for many years in the future. The datum point is probably the publication in 1999 of a Green Paper from SWIFT called ‘Building Standards for Tomorrow’. The modest proposal in that document is that “the next generation of standards will be based on a structured and formal framework”.
India’s ICICI Bank has launched four new mobile banking apps, as part of a drive to adopt digital channels and spread into India’s vast rural hinterland.
