In an effort to improve the protection offered to consumers, and to harmonise data practices, the EU is currently in the process of passing two pieces of legislation: the Cybercrime Directive and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Few people have given much thought to how these will align with international financial regulation.
With an evolved platform and new B2B focus, NYC firm is making a buzz in “Engagement Banking”.
For firms who remember MiFID I, and those that don’t, round two is almost upon us. This month, the Council of the EU agreed their general approach, meaning that the draft of MiFID II/MiFIR is free to advance to the European Parliament. If all goes according to the current plan, the new combined legislation will be with us in time for 2015 implementation.
The introduction of seven-day account switching in the UK in September is a fundamental pillar of UK government plans to inject more competition into retail banking. But the plan has its critics – some of whom warn it may achieve the opposite of what it intends.
With six months before the 4th Capital Requirements Directive comes into force, many will be asking what technological improvements will be necessary to efficiently manage risk going forward. Before they embark on a costly overhaul of their data systems, firms should look at what regulatory trends are likely to require similar changes in the future and adjust their specification accordingly.
Predicting the future is never easy, but trying to anticipate likely developments in a particular area is essential in order to take timely action. With that caveat, Stephen Lindsay, head of standards at SWIFT, sets a boundary on a discussion on the Future of Standards: “What we are trying to do is extrapolate a little bit from where we are now to where we might be in a few years’ time,” he says.
With lots of different regulatory benchmark efforts now underway, the industry could be forgiven for not taking a common stance. With IOSCO issuing final principles, ESMA and the EBA are simultaneously consulting on a European set of principles. Meanwhile the UK is moving ahead with its own reforms.
The National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) again is urging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to prohibit overdraft on prepaid products and limit the ways in which credit and prepaid may be associated.
Patrice Peyret of Banking Up responds to a front-page article in the New York Times, “Paid via Card, Workers Feel Sting of Fees.”
The securities markets are changing rapidly in the face of regulation and technology shifts, and none more so than the fixed income markets.
Brazil, according to a long-standing joke, is the country of the future and always will be. Founded by a mixture of Portuguese explorers and colonists, indigenous peoples, and European and African immigrants, Latin America’s largest country boasts a population of 200 million and a GDP that eclipsed that of the UK in 2011. The country’s banking infrastructure reflects both its rapid rise in recent years and its historic status as an emerging market.
As the value of global cross-border payments such as workers’ remittances increases, billions of dollars are being lost to inefficient legacy systems – but that could be about to change, according to Hank Uberoi, executive director at Earthport.
The extent to which a targeted series of acquisitions over the past few years have moved Temenos from being simply a core banking system vendor to a fully-fledged financial technology specialist became clear at its recent annual user event, this year held in Abu Dhabi.
Recent months have seen rising tensions over the seemingly insurmountable demands for collateral prompted by tough new financial regulation. With US Treasury estimates ranging as high as to $11.2 trillion in stressed market conditions, some observers are deeply concerned that the industry could be in danger of sliding into a black hole
The latest figures from UK retailers show a significant move to debit cards and new mechanisms like PayPal as consumers shy away from cash and credit cards.
Banks need to cross a psychological barrier and embrace the concept of outsourcing their payments operations if they are to compete on product innovation and customer service rather than simply on cost.
The $400 billion global remittances market is moving from cash to account-based transfer, but costs, regulations and new competitors are still the key issues.
The themes of security, identity and mobility ran strongly through the Cards and Payments Middle East conference in Dubai this week – and not just because the event itself is sandwiched between related and interlinked events focusing on Mobile and Identity.
The funds industry is going through a time of great change, with a combination of regulation, cost pressure, consolidation and globalisation forcing many participants to take a close look at their business and operating models and consider what their future role in the ecosystem should be. For some, this means outsourcing activities, creating opportunities for […]
Harrogate, where the Building Societies Association holds its annual conference, is located at the end of a branch railway line from York. The route takes in the town of Knaresborough, crossing a picturesque gorge with a river at the bottom and the remains of a medieval castle up on the hill. Arriving at the BSA conference venue the taxi driver observed, with a distinct sense of regret, that “there aren’t as many building societies around as there used to be.” That’s true
In the debate about the future of UK retail banking, the role of the building society is often overlooked, but technological change is playing to their strengths.
It’s not proving easy, but progress is being made on the road to the development of a global Legal Entity Identifier that works and makes business sense.
In contrast to the highly automated world of equities, bond trading is an area of the markets that is still heavily reliant on the telephone as a a trading tool, with person-to-person calls making up the bulk of activity on bond desks.
By the standards of the rest of the financial services sector, the payments industry has always progressed at a glacial pace. For the past 10 years, the key topic at the long-running International Payments Summit has been the Single Euro Payments Area.
With EMIR in force, firms are now wrestling with the challenge of classifying their customers – without an industry viewpoint the dialogue could get ugly …
At the beginning of March, George Osborne travelled to the English seaside town of Bournemouth to make a speech at the JP Morgan operations centre there. It wasn’t Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day speech, but it may well go down as a watershed moment in the history of the UK financial services sector. Osborne is […]
The Payment Services Directive in Europe mandated next-business-day settlement – D+1 – for payment transactions between EC states from Jan 2012. But with some European countries already using faster operating standards, Neil Burton and Gareth Lodge ask: is D+1 good enough?
Following the release of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Principles for Effective Risk Data Aggregation, middle and back office professionals in major financial centres now find themselves with a number of difficult questions, that senior management must be able to answer and evidence.
Arun Jain, chairman and chief executive of Polaris Financial Technology, is a great believer in the power of design to transcend ordinary development work and deliver superior results – results that pay. Banking Technology caught up with him at the opening of the firm’s new design centre in Chennai.
Anti-Money Laundering systems and controls continue to make news in the wake of the high profile failures of 2012. On 5 February, the proposal for the updated EU Anti-Money Laundering Directive was finally released. The proposal imposes a number of new requirements significantly increasing the scope and volume of firms’ KYC processes likely to be required by 2014.
As new rules for OTC derivatives take hold in Europe and in the US, banks and asset managers face a complex cocktail of mandatory clearing, reporting and increased collateral requirements.
Social media can add value for banks, but they need to be careful that the risk of damaging their brand does not outweigh the potential benefits, according to Jaroslaw Knapik, senior analyst, financial services technology at Ovum.
Benchmark manipulation and fallout from it is not new news, but the global drive to regulate benchmarks is. Europe has made the first move to controlling benchmark manipulation but global co-ordination is needed to create an approach that works for everyone.
Personal financial management tools have spluttered in and out of fashion, but a combination of mobile, tablet and internet banking uptake may mean their time has come, Recent years have seen the emergence of a plethora of PFM tools, each of which purports to be the best way to keep track of your finances.
The JP Morgan Task Force Report into its Chief Investment Office’s $6 billion-plus loss found the bank’s Value at Risk was being calculated with an Excel spreadsheet that “required time-consuming manual inputs to entries and formulas, which increased the potential for errors”.
The Illinois Department of Financial & Professional Regulation recently released five cease and desist orders from January 2013 against six entities for unlicensed activities under the state’s Transmitters of Money Act. These six entities offer a variety of services in Illinois, including domestic and international money transfer, bill payment services and prepaid cards. One of […]
The Federal Reserve Board (Fed) quietly released changes to its FAQs on Reg. II’s restrictions on debit card interchange fees and routing. Five new FAQs were added and one existing FAQ was revised. Changes in two areas directly affect prepaid cards: the exemption for “general use prepaid cards” and the requirement for adding a second […]
Structural reforms and overhauls of financial infrastructures are intended to turn Moscow into an international financial centre, but there is still a long way to go.
FATCA compliance might not need a separate programme – it ought to be covered by the same approach as AML, RDR and KYC regulations, among others.
While laudable in intention, reforms to Europe’s OTC derivatives markets may be in danger of inadvertently adding so much cost for participants that the original purpose is undermined, according to Anthony Belchambers, chief executive officer at the Futures and Options Association.
