Andrea Galeazzi, director of network services at Italian payments and technology infrastructure company SIA, has taken up a new role as chairman at Italian telecoms firm Emmecom. The move is part of SIA’s acquisition of the smaller firm, which took place in July and forms a key part of its European expansion plans.
Pan-European clearing houses EMCF and EuroCCP have received approval from the UK consumer authority the Office of Fair Trading to go ahead with their planned merger, announced in July.
Banco Itaú Suisse, the Swiss business of Latin American bank Itaú Unibanco, has chosen a private banking business system from software vendor ERI as part of a drive to make the Swiss unit a central hub for the Group’s European private banking business.
Swift has completed network acceptance testing for its connectivity service for T2S, the EU project to reform Europe’s post-trade infrastructure.
Sell-side only block trading network Squawker has completed its pan-European rollout, connecting 70 sell-side firms to the new venue, which promises ‘algorithm-free’ trading in 13 European countries.
Spanish operator group Telefónica has teamed with local bank CaixaBank to set up a company offering consumer financing for mobile handsets and devices.
The public is ready to adopt mobile payments in many aspects of their lives, but service providers need to have a defined role in the ecosystem and an understanding of how they interact with other players and the consumer.
Polish IT specialist Comarch has launched a mobile business banking solution aimed at banks that want to give corporates, SMEs and micro business customers a mobile offering.
BATS Chi-X Europe’s upcoming move into the European listings space will help bring a much-needed reduction in costs that could help to make the European ETFs market stronger, according to Mark Hemsley, chief executive at BATS Chi-X Europe.
Senior financial industry executives have expressed disappointment at the failure of the US and European securities regulators to realise a deal over derivatives reforms and swap execution facilities, the new category of US execution venues brought in under the Dodd-Frank Act.
The European Commission has expressed concerns that the US government shutdown is preventing a deal between the EU and US regulator, just as new swaps rules come into force for firms based both inside and outside the US.
European commercial bank UniCredit has chosen payment processing company First Data Corporation to help it pursue its mobile payments plans.
Less than one in ten UK consumers has used a mobile wallet, despite the widespread availability of the technology, a new study has found.
Eurex clearing, the post-trade arm of Germany’s Eurex derivatives exchange, is to act as the clearing house for new securities borrowing and lending venue SL-x Trading Europe when it launches in Q4 this year.
EBA Clearing has signed five financial institutions, 11 European service providers and two corporates for its MyBank E-Mandate pilot, which will begin in October and will test the firm’s solution for Sepa core direct debits for reliability, security and usability.
Momentum is building behind the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) Target2-Securities (T2S) settlement platform. With the ECB confirming the platform will be delivered on time, further proof of the industry’s confidence in the initiative has come via a series of announcements regarding connectivity to T2S.
For those involved in European payments, the final months of this year are likely to be characterised by a frenzy of activity as the deadline for migration to single euro payments area instruments looms.
Germany’s Boerse Stuttgart has chosen Nasdaq OMX to provide it with a new trading engine, which it says will decrease latency and increase throughput for members on the exchange. The Stuttgart exchange is focused on corporate bonds and investment funds for private investors, and has an average volume of €370 million per day. The exchange […]
Here’s what you don’t know about how the European Parliament is going to stretch your time and budget in 2014 …
Germany’s DAB bank has chosen a new data distribution tool called Diffusion from vendor Push Technology, which it says will help it to deliver real time data to customers. DAB Bank is an internet bank and direct broker. Founded in 1994 and based in Munich, the bank calls itself Germany’s first discount broker. The bank […]
Italian banking group Instituto Centrale Banche Popolare Italiane has introduced a new trading and recording system across its Milan operations, which it says will help it to better keep up with changing regulation and offer a better service for its traders.
Visa Europe and its majority-owned mobile money specialist Monitise have signed a deal with IBM in a major mobile banking and mobile payment collaboration targeting Europe’s banks.
Poland’s Warsaw Stock Exchange has introduced co-location systems designed to appeal to high-frequency traders, as Italy clamps down on HFT with Europe’s first HFT-specific tax. The moves highlight ongoing national and international divisions over the role of HFT in capital markets.
Dutch cooperative bank Rabobank has chosen tools from SuperDerivatives to help revamp its global FX trading operations.
Half of Europe’s bank branches could be obsolete within the next seven years, according to new research by real estate advisory firm Jones Lang LaSalle.
Visa Europe has appointed Nicolas Huss as its new president and chief executive. Huss will join Visa Europe from investment management firm Apollo Group, where he is chief executive for credit card and customer servicing business Avant Spain and Ireland.
French railway operator SNCF has adopted a mobile payments system from Californian tech firm VeriFone Systems, which allows customers to pay for railway tickets using a mobile device.
Robert Barnes, former chief executive of UBS MTF, is to take up a new role at Turquoise, the MTF owned by the London Stock Exchange. Barnes, who had been advising in a consultancy since he left UBS in February, will replace outgoing Turquoise chief Natan Tiefenbrun, who is understood to be leaving for his own reasons.
De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), the Netherlands’ national banking regulator, has cleared Amazon Web Services for use in the country’s financial sector, clarifying key supervision criteria for Dutch organisations looking to move infrastructure or services to the AWS cloud.
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.
The Royal Bank of Scotland has chosen Canadian IT firm CGI Group to help its corporate clients manage the transition to SEPA, the European Union project to simplify bank transfers denominated in euros.
Spain’s CaixaBank is planning to target Brazil’s payments industry via a new joint venture with US transaction processing firm Global Payments that builds on the bank’s experience of digital channels its home market.
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.
Securities trading in France, the Netherlands and Belgium is to move to T+2 settlement in October 2014, following a decision by Euroclear to pre-empt Europe-wide settlement reforms.
A mobile wallet offering built by Kalixa Group claims to be able to turn just about any phone – including the iPhone – into an NFC payment device. The toolkit has launched in the UK, marking the first step in the firm’s plans for Europe-wide NFC mobile payments.
German exchange Deutsche Börse is to launch a new block trading service in partnership with Liquidnet, the buy-side crossing network.
The on-going turf wars that have held back the adoption of using mobile phones as a payment device at the point-of-sale will soon be a thing of the past if the progress made in Bratislava over the past year is any indication. The success of a project involving Visa Europe, Tatra Bank, Telefónica Slovakia’s O2 operation and a substantial number of retailers makes the Slovakian capital a showcase market for contactless technology.
The London Stock Exchange’s plans to establish a new central securities depository in Luxembourg reveal the way regulation can have unintended consequences – in this case a proliferation of CSDs.
Clearstream, Euroclear and Eurex Clearing have signed an agreement with the ICMA European Repo Council to create a joint project aimed at improving the efficiency of the repo market.
European securities regulator ESMA has started the latest round of consultation on OTC derivatives clearing with the release of a discussion paper on regulatory technical standards for the European Market Infrastructure regulation, the new pan-European rulebook.
