A total of 45 banks including Barclays, Citi, Deutsche Bank and many others have signed up to a new payments innovation initiative headed by Swift, which is due to launch early next year. Announced in December, the initiative aims to dramatically improve the customer experience in correspondent banking by increasing the speed, transparency and predictability of cross-border payments.
Financial services are becoming “modular”, with digital distribution platforms, new product providers, alternative sources of capital and a growth in outsourcing likely to reshape the industry, according to a new report by global management consultancy Oliver Wyman.
New peer-to-peer platforms that match lenders with borrowers are proving to be more efficient than banks at connecting those with money and to those that need money. Known as marketplace lenders, this new industry is still very much in its infancy, currently representing a tiny proportion of total loans compared to bank lending
Aspiration doesn’t look like it used to. The face of Eighties ambition was a power dresser, clad in a suit with shoulder pads as they rushed to Wall Street to earn as much as they could, whereas today’s bright young things are more likely to be found sipping lattes at a co-working space in Silicon Valley
The distributed ledger – the central nervous system of the Bitcoin system – is the most sweeping departure from the long-standing financial bookkeeping practices followed since the codification of the Medici’s double entry accounting system.
A range of financial services and technology firms are backing efforts by The Linux Foundation to develop “an enterprise grade, open source distributed ledger framework”.
R3, the bank-led consortium developing the use of distributed ledger technology in financial services, has added 12 new banks as it looks at how to extend its activities to work with buy-side and non-bank institutions in the New Year.
Millennials – those highly sophisticated, tech-savvy men and women born between 1980 and 2000 – present enormous opportunities for banks and other financial institutions. Yet to be successful, these businesses must understand and meet the needs of a generation that grew up having it all, seeing it all, and being exposed to it all since early childhood – and that is no easy task.
Outdated legacy IT systems are a major stumbling block for traditional UK high street banks as they look to fight back against their often more agile rivals, widely known as ‘challenger banks’, who unhindered by complex, unwieldy IT infrastructures are typically better positioned to innovate.
Swift is planning to launch a global payment innovation initiative, which it says will dramatically improve the customer experience in correspondent banking by increasing the speed, transparency and predictability of cross-border payments. The platform is due to launch early next year.
The latest edition of our flagship magazine – Banking Technology – is out now, packed with news, analysis and insights, case studies, research and expert commentary.
Deutsche Börse has renewed its contract with Stockholm-based independent surveillance technology provider Scila, signing a five-year agreement to continue using its software.
2015 has been a year of extensive discussion about what role blockchain can play in making processes in the financial services industry more efficient. It has also been a year where both banks and start-ups have been testing whether distributed ledger technology can adequately replace costly legacy systems and improve securities processing, writes Brian Collings. […]
The sensors built into mobile devices offer a whole new way of identifying their users though biometric techniques, according to security expert Uri Rivner.
Just under two-thirds of the world’s top nations in capital markets have now adopted international best practices, according to a new report on financial market infrastructures, but more work is needed on trade repositories.
Retail banks often claim that customer service is their primary focus, but 75% of banks believe they haven’t concentrated efforts on improving it. Instead, annual reports focus on the financial results. Whether these two stories can become one remains to be seen, according to a new whitepaper by bank technology vendor Misys.
RBS has awarded a contract to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for the implementation of a new image-based cheque clearing service in response to UK regulatory changes that require all cheques to be processed digitally by 2017, under HM Treasury’s Future Clearing Model.
Financial information provider Markit and foreign exchange settlement service CLS have launched a new service for the cross currency swaps market.
Despite predictions over the last few years that banks were just a heartbeat away from adopting cloud technology, only 1% of banks are actually running core processing in the cloud today, according to a new report by Temenos.
Financial market infrastructures must work with the “broader ecosystem” to improve the resilience of the international financial system in the face of “inevitable” cyber-attacks. The latest guidance document from the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures and the International Organization of Securities Commissions – Guidance on cyber resilience for financial market infrastructures – looks to […]
Post-trade technology company Kynetix has launched a blockchain consortium, focused on using distributed ledger technology in commodities markets. The move comes as financial institutions increasingly explore ways to integrate the blockchain concept into mainstream financial services.
Non-profit organisation the FIX Trading Community has started posting its projects on developer repository GitHub, as part of a drive to get all of the important resources freely available in one place using a single sign-on. The move was done to encourage wider access and to speed up the development of standards for high-performance trading applications.
It is a well-known fact that banks have two types of technology: Cold War-era IBM mainframes running Cobol-based batch programmes and Evil Genius HFT systems. The mundane truth is that any financial services operation will have a range of hardware and software systems of different vintages and spend a lot of time and money living with the consequences.
Either the distributed ledger is the greatest revolution in financial services for a generation, or it will make little difference to anything, according to the strongly divided opinions expressed by speakers at the Mondo Visione Exchange Forum in London last week.
Financial network BT Radianz has added Volante Technologies’ tools to the BT Radianz Cloud, in a move the two firms say will improve the reliability of clearing, settlement and payment transaction processing while cutting costs.
Banks from around the world were in attendance at the 16th Annual Banking Technology 2015 Awards ceremony in London last night to hear the names of the winners that had been selected from more than 120 entries, all of which were submitted to the scrutiny of an expert panel of judges. Hopeful entrants travelled from as far […]
There is no doubt that IT and IT projects are becoming increasingly critical to banks’ success, yet a recent survey by Accenture found that only 6% of the directors of the world’s largest banks have any IT experience …
The UK’s payments system infrastructure is widely recognised as market-leading. However, evolving customer expectations and innovation in the fintech sector dictate that now is no time to rest on laurels. Work must begin today to develop the payments experience that will be taken for granted in 20 years.
Tim Fitzpatrick has been appointed as the new chief executive of CHAPS, the UK’s same day high-value payment system. Currently HSBC’s Global Payments and Cash Management chief operating officer and group head of payment services.
The threat of competition from technology companies, startups and non-banks is causing serious worry to nearly three-quarters of retail banks, causing four-fifths of them to invest in so-called ‘disruptive’ technologies, according to a new study by Infosys and non-profit organisation Efma.
SIBOS Video: Gordon Gray, SunTec
SIBOS Video: Max Speur, SunTec
SIBOS Video: Nanda Kumar, SunTec
Standard Chartered is to invest $3 billion in “strategic opportunities” and its technology infrastructure as part of a wholesale reorganisation of the bank in the wake of a $139 million third-quarter loss. The restructuring will see 15,000 jobs – 17% of its workforce – go over the next three years.
Global regulatory body the Financial Stability Board has released two guidance papers which aim to solve the “too big to fail” scenario and prevent a re-run of the financial crisis by promoting the resolvability of systemically important financial institutions.
Deutsche Bank is to shed 9,000 full-time staff and 6,000 external contractor jobs in its global technology and operations infrastructure as it sets out to “modernise its outdated and fragmented IT architecture” and improve control systems.
Eight years on from the global financial crisis, and banks continue to face a growing number of challenges. Many have ceased or significantly reduced proprietary trading, with the resulting reduction in both risk and reward. This period has also seen lower risk appetite among many investors and continuing global competition which has put pressure on profit margins,
Cashfac Technologies, a specialist market leader in bank-to-corporate cash management solutions has launched Cashfac Analytics, a real-time data analysis and reporting module that enables banks and corporates to better understand their cash movements.
SIBOS Interview: Christian Westerhaus, Deutsche Bank
The fact that London’s financial services sector is also a hot spot for technology innovation is not news. In 2014, investment in financial technology firms grew by 136%. Earlier this year, George Osborne identified London’s financial technology sector as a particularly bright spot in the recovering economy – not surprising when you consider the transformational effect that information technology continues to have on the industry
