Swift’s Innotribe Start-up Challenge is to be unveiled in Latin America. The best fintech start-ups will be able to showcase their products at the Swift’s Latin American Regional Conference (LARC) this summer. Get your applications in! This is the first time the Swift innovation arm – Innotribe – has partnered with LARC, which will take […]
Blockchain gets another boost as IBM has made nearly 44,000 lines of code available to the Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Project to help developers build secure distributed ledgers. IBM has also made a range of announcements spanning technology and business consulting to “rapidly advance the use of distributed ledger technology across multiple industries”. These […]
HSBC is launching voice recognition and touch security services in the UK, which will be available to 15 million banking customers. Customers of First Direct, a division of HSBC, will be offered the biometric recognition system over the next few weeks, followed by HSBC’s in the summer. HSBC is not the first to do this […]
New York-based Digital Asset Holdings, a developer of distributed ledger technology (aka blockchain), has teamed up with Accenture, Broadridge and PwC. Digital Asset says it has entered into non-exclusive strategic business relationships with the companies, and Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset, says the alliances will “accelerate innovation” and “drive growth”. The Accenture relationship will […]
India’s ICICI Bank has launched an ‘ICICI Appathon’ as it looks for innovations in mobile banking apps. The bank wants participants in India to create new APIs in five different categories – retail banking, corporate banking, treasury, ‘ICICI Group’ (such as insurance and securities), and ‘Partner APIs’. The latter comprises Visa and National Payments Corporation […]
Estonia’s e-Residency platform will use a blockchain-based e-voting service to allow shareholders of companies listed on Nasdaq’s Tallinn Stock Exchange, to vote in shareholder meetings. The country’s e-Residency platform is an electronic identity system used by both Estonian residents and those with business interests in the country to access government services through e-Residency digital authentication. The program […]
Central securities depositary Euroclear and consultancy Oliver Wyman have issued a report on the use of blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that underpins Bitcoin transactions, in capital markets. The firms arguing that major existing players will have to work with newcomers to create a framework that operates between firms and under regulatory obligations. Blockchain and […]
Distributed ledger technology provider Ripple and Japanese financial services firm SBI Holdings have announced the creation of a joint partnership, which will expand Ripple into the Asian market. Ripple, which focuses on the using blockchain-like technology for payments, is based predominantly in San Francisco with presences in New York, London and Sydney. SBI is a US$28 […]
BNP Paribas Corporate and Institutional Banking (CIB) has announced that it has appointed Rudi Collin as Head of Digital Transformation for CIB. Previously Collin was head of Electronic Business and Markets for the Global Markets business and prior to this, was chief operating officer for the fixed income division of the bank. In his new role, […]
In a new whitepaper, the US post-trade infrastructure provider Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), has voiced its belief that the financial services industry “has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine and modernise its infrastructure” by employing blockchain in a coordinated manner. Blockchain is the transaction model used to transfer ownership of crypto-currency bitcoin. It was developed […]
Cross-border payments and ACH operator Earthport has launched a distributed ledger hub, which it says will help banks to make cross-border payments cheaper and more efficient.
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”.
Technology is transforming trust to the point that people find themselves trusting others with whom they’ve had no experience, on eBay or Facebook, more than banks they’ve dealt with their whole lives.
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.
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.
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. […]
Swift’s Innotribe initiative is to expand its programme to support innovation in emerging fintech ecosystems, including Africa and Latin America. It has also announced a new Industry Challenge programme under which the Innotribe team will work with Swift members to identify business areas that could benefit from collaborative solutions.
The sensors built into mobile devices offer a whole new way of identifying their users though biometric techniques, according to security expert Uri Rivner.
If the global payments industry were to be designed from scratch, nobody would design the system which we have today. Yet distributed ledger technology has the potential to bring about dramatic change– if it can overcome the unanswered questions over to what extent the industry should collaborate or compete and whether there will be one model or many different ones, according to speakers and delegates at the European Payments Regulation conference in London on Wednesday.
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.
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.
Trust – or more often, the lack of it – has become a recurring theme in financial services over the last few years. But if financial institutions really wanted to rebuild trust, they might start by looking at some of the safety improvements made by other industries such as the aviation industry, many of which rely on data, according to speakers at the Mondo Visione exchange forum in London.
Santander has launched a competition to support startups using distributed ledger technology in financial services. Through its subsidiary InnoVentures, the bank hopes to promote distributed ledger tools that could improve banking processes.
Nasdaq’s first fruits from its enterprise-wide blockchain technology plan,the Linq share ownership platform, has attracted an initial group of users it was announced at the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas this week.
Banks should not kid themselves that they can simply appoint a ‘chief innovation officer’ and that will be enough to combat the threat posed by new technologies and the non-bank companies that are using them to steal business, warned panellists at the BBA conference in London on Thursday.
The fintech revolution is now firmly established, and disruptive technologies are blooming all across the sector. From securities to payments, everyone in the sector is watching to see how the next innovation will affect their business.
The distributed ledger is one of the hottest topics in financial services. Born out of the crypto-currency bitcoin, the blockchain concept has gone mainstream and the first area to feel the impact is likely to be payments.
Nine major global investment banks have formed a partnership to explore the potential of distributed ledger technology in financial markets. The project, led by financial technology company R3, aims to create early standards for the emerging technology that will make it easier and more efficient as it grows.
Swift has named the 20 finalists for the 2015 Innotribe Startup Challenge finale, which will take place at Sibos in Singapore this October. The finalists include companies focused on personal finance, foreign exchange, data protection, mobile banking and e-commerce as well as social media, big data, payments and many other areas.
Barclays and startup accelerator company Techstars have opened the application process for the third cohort of their Accelerator programme in London, which will give ten businesses a chance to “shape the future” of financial services, the bank has said.
Ten financial services startups have been chosen by startup accelerator Startupbootcamp FinTech to participate in its annual London program, which seeks to find the best new companies in financial services and bring them to market. Notable themes among the finalists include Bitcoin and the blockchain, big data, algorithms, cloud computing and social networking.
The Innotribe Start-up Challenge attendees selected the five finalists from the African leg of the Start-up Challenge to compete at Sibos Singapore in October. The showcase was held yesterday alongside Swift’s African Regional Conference.
Citi has opened the doors to entrants for its Citi Mobile Challenge in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, an annual competition that invites developers from around the world to build innovative financial services based on Citi’s digital platform.
Capital markets firms are losing their intellectual property too easily to competitors, business partners and third parties. Most companies could benefit from a tougher approach to IP, including licencing agreements and more use of patents, according to a new report by analyst firm Aite.
Banks have been struggling to work out the balance between the potential of new technologies, and the propensity (or otherwise) of customers to use them. After years of standardisation between platforms, the answer may actually be to carefully analyse and categorise customers based on their digital propensity and level of financial engagement – and to make sure that each kind of customer is handled differently, according to a new report by analyst firm Celent.
One of the trends of 2014 was its delivery of technology that we had been promised for years but had fallen short until now. Siri, Cortana and Google Now all make good on the sci-fi staple of the voice-activated computer. Virtual reality has been attempted many times, but it seems that the Oculus Rift may have finally cracked it. And biometric authentication, while often included in devices but rarely used, is now commonly used by owners of new iPhones to unlock their devices thanks to Touch ID.
Banks will be judged on how well they provide mobile services and social media interaction in the coming years. Instead of being just another channel, these forms will be the first point of contact for customers, according to a new report by analyst firm Celent.
Biometric identity verification mechanisms were prominent among the raft of new product announcements at the Money20/20 event in Las Vegas, which opened this week.
Yantra Financial Technologies, an electronic payment systems developer, has integrated its latest system for risk scoring of payments with the Ripple real-time settlement protocol. The integration means that institutions using the Ripple protocol can analyse transactions in seconds, including what other payments the customer recently made and potential concerns regarding a specific transaction. Risk levels can be assigned to certain transactions based on pre-determined criteria.
