Transatlantic friction over data protection isn’t exactly a new problem – the industry has been faced with pending regulations for over a decade, but the conflicting demands of European data privacy and US intelligence gathering legislation are coming together to make the issue a serious problem for banking technologists.
Big banks and their large corporate clients are in the final stages of preparation for the SEPA end date of February next year, but what about the smaller clients in the non-euro countries?
February 2013 By Adam Perrotta, Assistant Editor Dozens of prepaid program managers are scrambling to find a new bank issuer with First California Bank (FCB) exiting the issuing business ahead of its acquisition by PacWest Bancorp. In November, PacWest agreed to pay $231 million for FCB’s parent company, Westlake Village, Calif.-based First California Financial […]
Recovery and resolution plans have been on the minds (and to-do lists) of ops and tech departments at the world’s biggest banks ever since they were mandated by the G20 in 2011.
As the global method of identifying entities and their ownership structures, the Legal Entity Identifier forms a central part of the G20’s crisis-prevention toolbox. After a few chaotic years of LEI debate and design, regulators are finally nearing the long anticipated starting line for use of the world’s first singular identifier.
2012 seemed like the year of regulators taking a prolonged look at computer trading – defining what it might be, its potential effects, why it may be problematic. It is still far from clear that we have answers to these fundamental questions.
Payment protection insurance has dominated the coverage of complaints against banks for some time now, but many observers think that it is just the beginning of a wave of grievances about to engulf the retail banking industry.
Technical problems at Nasdaq and BATS have reinforced the impression among many market observers that there may be something seriously wrong with equity market structure. Recent history reads like a catalogue of disaster for many of the world’s most prominent trading venues.
Regulatory demands and improved profitability are fuelling a move to dynamic capital planning, but few banks have firm plans.
US financial services regulators have not properly evaluated the impact of rules they have proposed or introduced in implementing the Dodd-Frank Act, and should improve their co-ordination says a critical report from a congressional watchdog.
Faced with flatlining IT budgets, global CIOs must better exploit the business potential of technology to achieve results – currently they realise only 43% of that potential says Gartner. Top of the priority list is what the research firm calls ‘digital technologies’. In this it includes mobile, analytics, Big Data, social media networking and cloud, […]
Far from coming out of a post-crisis period of grieving and re-learning how to engage with the wider world, the financial services industry looks like it is returning to its old belligerent self.
While the internet has provided inumerable benefits, it has also been the field for new types of fraud and rights infringements. If the financing used by people who illegally upload or otherwise exploit content were cut off, might it be possible to combat the spread of their activities?
The remit of the World Bank and the Gates Foundation is to focus on flows of money to developing economies, so much of the publicity is about those and as a result, much of what we understand about remittances is about those markets. And they are not to be underestimated.
San Francisco-based startup Cardfree is taking a merchant-centric approach to mobile wallets, leveraging a leadership team that has worked on mobile programs for some big-name retailers.
January 2013 By Bill Grabarek, Senior Editor If anyone thought last year couldn’t compare with the events of 2011, they quickly were proved wrong as 2012 turned out to be every bit as transformational. In the U.S. market, we saw a fledgling federal watchdog agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), go from crawling […]
Brokers are being forced to consider novel approaches to doing business – including outsourcing of areas that have been previously seen as core – as they struggle to work out viable economic models for their products and services.
December 2012 By Adam Perrotta, Assistant Editor When MasterCard and global mobile carrier Telefónica joined forces to bring mobile financial services to 12 South American countries in early 2011, Richard Hartzell, president, Latin American and the Caribbean, MasterCard, said the initiative would help arm the card network with “the right artillery to strengthen our […]
Since the 2007 global financial crisis there has been a lot of debate on potential changes across the banking services industry and the potential consequences. Recent market surveys suggest that surprisingly little progress has been made in risk and compliance management and some lack of clarity as to what to do next. Reacting to regulatory change is one thing, but the real goal is to build clarity and confidence that banks are doing the right thing in the right way at the right time
Mobile and NFC payment technologies have been on the rise in recent years. But with many merchants and retail outlets still reluctant to invest in the new technologies, and with the rise of fraud in existing solutions, industry participants are divided over how and whether the technology will ever gain widespread acceptance in developed markets.
