Now that you’re back in the office and once again glued to your computer screen, you’ll continue receiving the industry news, insights and analysis you’ve come to expect from Paybefore. But it won’t exactly be business as usual for Paybefore this year.
To attract the key millennial demographic, banks must look to prepaid and mobile.
Of any industry, the financial services sector might be the most contradictory when it comes to loyalty program effectiveness.
In a recent press release, the CFPB called on financial institutions to “voluntarily” disclose to the public its financial product marketing agreements made with colleges and universities.
As we approach year-end, the Canadian federal government has introduced three items of significance to federally regulated financial institutions (FRFIs).
With regulators agreeing that “higher expectations” must be met by G-SIFIs for risk data aggregation and reporting by 2016, firms are now under huge pressure to provide data strategies and implementation plans and end denial about any shortcomings.
Bank of America is working with Facebook’s Open Compute project on a radical revamp of its systems. David Reilly, head of its Technology Infrastructure unit, tells Banking Technology why Software Defined.Infrastructures are the way ahead.
The technology that banks offer clients can be thought of as a true gift, enabling improvements that can reduce risk, increase efficiency and ultimately put firms on a surer footing. And it is the most advanced and newest platforms which grab everyone’s attention.
Moving to improve and clarify payroll card industry practices, MasterCard today released new standards requiring all employers and payroll card providers involved in offering MasterCard-branded payroll cards to meet specific protocols for consumer choice and transparency
With new arrivals from big names including FATCA, MiFID, Dodd-Frank and the AIFMD, 2014 is set to be another eventful year in the regulatory space. So what are our Top 10 predictions?
With no fewer than 70,000 pages of regulation, and some record fines, 2013 will be a year to remember (or possibly to forget) for many financial services professionals
Basel III has transformed liquidity risk management departments into glorified regulatory functions, according to a new report by analyst firm Celent. As if this good news was not enough to be getting on with, the research house also inevitably concludes that banks will have to change their risk data, models, appetite, organisational and analytics frameworks too.
The data management aspects of compliance can run into tens of thousands of man-hours per institution, each year. Firms have to adapt and find new techniques to manage this increasing burden.
Former SunGard chief executive Cris Conde writes about the importance of training in firms’ governance, risk management and compliance strategies and why they should treat it as an investment.
A new role for CIOs in the banking sector was highlighted at the recent Gartner Symposium: to maintain their future relevance and position, they need to be seen as consultants in the technology space, not just providers.
If ever there was a prize for solving a first world problem, creating the ability to buy a coffee for a friend or acquaintance by sending a tweet would be Nobel- worthy. But if the goal is to keep Starbucks in the conversation around the office (and sell more coffee), this should work.
Consumer expectations of mobile banking and prepaid are escalating rapidly, and the industry needs to respond aggressively, and think differently. As consumers demand more from their financial services providers, putting the mobile channel first in your strategy is key.
Is there an industry more obsessed with fads than banking?. Maybe it’s because it is such a follow-the-leader industry. Perhaps it’s because banking is a very me-too business with few (if any) real brand distinctions. Or is it simply that senior management is so obsessed with the needs of shareholders.
On Nov. 27, the bitcoin was trading at a record $1,000. While some applaud its decentralized nature, others, including regulators, have become wary of its potential effects. We asked two analysts to square off with Viewpoints on the pros and cons of the volatile virtual currency.
Bitcoin (and the tsunami that has ensued) has been characterized as the next stage in the revolution of payments—more precisely, of money.
If Bitcoin manages to become wildly successful, it’s likely that several similar currencies will appear alongside it. The focus of hackers all across the globe will then surely turn to these anonymous stores of virtual value rather than to traditional account-based payments.
Enlightened buy-side firms are facing the challenges of high-touch regulation, fragmented liquidity and ongoing cost pressures head on and developing new business models and approaches at every stage of their workflow.
With the rise in mobile payments and wallets, cash is dead and so is the ATM business, right? Not according to the ATM manufacturers, who are all being remarkably sanguine.
Financial software giant FIS is sitting in the middle of the move to mobile, with its customers serving 21 million users. Doug Brown, senior vice president, e-banking, says that’s just the beginning.
If Facebook can garner trust from enough of its active users to adopt Autofill by Facebook, there are billions of dollars at stake. But, no one goes to PayPal to post baby pictures. No one congratulates 12-year-olds for winning a soccer game on Amazon. Facebook wandering into payments easily could be as awkward, especially as users become more leery of how their information is shared between Facebook and its partner sites.
The No. 1 barrier to consumer adoption of flexible spending accounts (FSAs) has been removed. The U.S. Treasury and IRS on Halloween announced they were changing their stance on the so-called “use-or-lose” rule, enabling consumers for the first time to rollover up to $500 from their FSAs instead of forfeiting those funds back to their employers.
MiFID II is almost upon us. Expect it to be the topic of conversation very soon. So what do you need to know about it?
Swift’s head of banking talks about how the industry co-operative plans to build services based the data flowing through its interbank messaging systems.
Separating customer billing from core systems can have dramatic effects on the bottom line – a study by Boston Consulting Group at one bank found that 17% of clients were unprofitable.
Change is coming to the prepaid card industry, whether by regulation or legislation, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray promised lawmakers this week at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, but he declined to provide a timetable. “[Prepaid cards] are one of the problem areas in consumer financial protection because they’re a hole in the […]
As Ts are crossed and Is are dotted by financial institutions and corporates preparing for the Single Euro Payments Area some recent announcements point to the glittering world of opportunity beyond mundane SEPA compliance.
Conduct risk is gaining teeth, and with MiFID II on the way it’s set to gain a whole load more. But there is just one problem: nobody quite agrees on what conduct risk means or where its boundaries are set.
New OCC guidance reminds financial institutions that third-party oversight is where it’s at.
Compliance concerns are causing nearly one-third of banks to turn away business, according to a new report from Aite Group.
It’s unclear whether the prepaid industry will have the CFPB’s proposed rules for GPR cards by Dec. 31, or if the wait will extend into 2014.
The chaos of the crisis did not spark renewed interest in innovation: no ideas of note were created within banks and surprisingly few people left their jobs to launch start-ups – the innovation gap in the financial sector has been largely filled by the growth of the fintech start-up sector.
Payroll card industry participants should brace for more potential negative news as lawmakers and plaintiffs’ attorneys around the U.S. continue fishing for outlier examples of payroll card abuse, observers say. The industry’s antennae shot up earlier this week when Pennsylvania lawmakers followed through on an earlier promise and proposed legislation to ban payroll cards. Separately, […]
PayPal’s pending acquisition of Braintree will broaden its scope of innovative digital commerce solutions, support its developer platform overhaul and bring P2P competitor Venmo into the fold.
Issuers or program managers that focus marketing efforts on the savings that can be achieved through HSAs could increase account take-up and improve the profitability for those accounts at the same time.
Commodity traders are rapidly adopting new analytics tools to help, testing how a combination of powerful cloud-based processing systems and increasingly sophisticated analytics tools can boost their bottom line.
