Spanish bank BBVA has named the 20 finalists for the European leg of its financial services startup challenge, BBVA Open Talent, which will feed into the Next Bank Europe conference in Barcelona next month.
One of the most distinguishing features of the current wave of financial innovation is how the innovators are often not banks, but small fintech firms often led by former bank employees.
Most capital markets firms are still not using big data and even those that do often lack a concerted strategy, according to a new report commissioned by Thomson Reuters.
FinTech developers, designers and entrepreneurs are being challenged to a 36-hour development tournament in the days leading up to this year’s of the Money20/20 event in Las Vegas in November.
The UK Government is to examine the potential of digital currencies as positive force in the wider economy and as a means of encouraging innovation in financial services.
New intraday liquidity reporting tools set out by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision could pose a serious challenge for banks, according to a new white paper by Swift.
The London Metal Exchange is working with Colt to launch a new dedicated network interconnecting all its systems including the LME Clear clearing service.
Entries for the Banking Technology Awards 2014 have been open for a while now, but as we move into the last few weeks, this is always a time when we are flooded with questions about the process. By way of response, here are some guidelines based on my experience chairing the judging panel over the past 11 years.
Spanish start-up support organisation Finnovista is hosting a ‘hackathon’ in Barcelona next month which it says will bring together programmers, designers and business people to develop new software for retail banking, capital markets, payments and big data.
Mobile payments provider LoopPay has secured funding from global payments firm Visa as it pioneers a technology that capitalises on the installed base of magnetic stripe-reader point-of-sale systems rather than NFC, which is the current favourite in mobile payment circles.
The European Commission wants to bring down the barriers to cloud computing in a move that promises to revolutionise the way transaction banks can serve clients.
Italian financial infrastructure company SIA has inked a deal with mobile commerce provider Swish Payments to support mobile payments in Africa and Europe. The two firms claim the deal will help to bring more efficient forms of payment to both regions.
Standard Chartered has launched a mobile wallet in the Philippines through a partnership with Globe Telecom, in a deal that will tap into demand for mobile money in one of the world’s strongest remittances markets.
The mobile wallet is having a transformative effect on people’s lives in developing countries, bringing safer, faster, easier financial services to the people who need it most
A European financial transaction tax on equities and derivatives trades could be damaging for European liquidity levels and the City of London, but it also looks set to impose serious operational challenges for banks, brokers and their buy-side clients following the failure of a UK appeal to the European Court of Justice earlier this year.
Too many vendors are marketing “blind”. What’s missing is quantitative data on how decision makers at financial institutions identify and select technology vendors. Understanding buyers’ influences is critical in helping develop marketing and communications programmes that ultimately help vendors to sell. B2B technology PR consultancy CCgroup partnered with MRops to interview senior decision makers from […]
Mobile NFC services continued to expand in 2013 but the big question is, will this be amplified or disrupted by the introduction of host-based card emulation (HCE) into mainstream operating systems?
Milan-based payment processing specialist SIA says that a migration of its systems to the Red Hat Linux environment has led to a 270% reduction in processing times.
Setting up a bank in the UK is costly, time-consuming, heavily regulated and not easy. As a result, the dynamic, start-up culture that drives innovation in many other sectors is less prevalent within banking and financial services.
MiFID II could cause serious problems for banks, brokers and other market participants in the run up to the January 2017 implementation, according to executives attending a meeting chaired by the European Securities Markets Authority in Paris earlier this week.
David Sear, the former chief executive of the Weve mobile network e-commerce joint venture, has been appointed as group chief commercial officer at Skrill Group.
Analyst firm Juniper Research reckons more people will be using mobile apps for banking than web-based options by 2019, as the 800 million people who used their phones for banking more than doubles to 1.75 billion in five years.
Banks are continuing to spend money on branches, but they are dramatically changing their role to become centres for sale-oriented advice rather than service-oriented transactions, driven by the rapid growth of digital banking.
The EU has set a date for the introduction of MiFID II, the long-awaited legislation from the European Commission which was recently approved by the European Parliament. The decision follows years of consultation and negotiation, but serious reservations remain about how transparency will be applied to non-equity markets.
In a landmark ruling, the US Supreme Court has ruled that the intermediated settlement of financial exchanges is an abstract idea and therefore not patent-eligible. David Puth, chief executive of CLS, which won the case in question. discusses the implications of the ruling.
French trading solutions and connectivity specialist Ullink has agreed to acquire NYFIX and Metabit from ICE Group, as part of a deal the international company says will give it brand recognition in the US and new opportunities in Asia.
Rule Financial, the London-based investment banking consultancy, has been acquired by GFT Technologies, adding some €42 million to the German technology firm’s turnover for the second half of this year.
The annual transaction value of online, mobile and contactless payments will nearly double over the next four years, reaching $4.7 trillion by 2019, up from just over $2.5 trillion this year, with contactless payments primarily driven by card purchases rather than mobile.
In April, US post-trade utility the DTCC called for the US settlement cycle to be moved to T+2, to bring it into line with what’s happening in the rest of the world, which is converging on T+2 settlement cycles – at different speeds.
Combining development and operational deployment of software into a more integrated cycle can greatly improve time to market and improve efficiencies giving “10 times faster software driven innovation”, delegates at the annual SifmaTech trading systems conference and exhibition in New York were told.
As the European Parliament adopted MiFID II/MiFIR on 15 April, the financial services industry was left wondering what exactly the new transparency regime is going to mean. Despite a curiously low EC estimate of compliance costs, at between €512 and €732 million, it is clear that MiFID II will have a large impact on the tens of thousands of firms and counterparties that will now fall under its scope.
Banks are paying lip-service to the concept of customer service and are years behind on innovation – and unless they literally get their act together by collaboratively embracing open software libraries and sharing applications and data, they will not survive.
With the US markets heading in the same direction as Europe and elsewhere, the world is converging on T+2 settlement, albeit at different speeds.
Standard Chartered Bank and Singaporean incumbent telecoms operator SingTel have launched a new mobile money service called Dash, in which customers can move money onto their mobile device and then use it to make payments without ever coming into a bank branch.
Citi has chosen the ‘headliner’ finalists for its mobile innovation competition in Latin America, the Mobile Challenge LatAm 2014, which aims to bring together individuals and companies with innovative ideas to create applications for Citi’s Latin America mobile banking platform.
Collateral management as it is currently known will no longer exist within a few years as increased regulatory demands, rising levels of automation and growth of industry tools to optimise collateral transform the industry, according to a new survey and report by Sapient Global Markets.
Kazakhstan’s Eurasian Bank has launched a mobile banking service which offers basic mobile banking features to Kazakh, Russian and English=speaking customers.
Across the financial services sector, the question is now less about where cloud technology is being used, and more about where it isn’t used. Where do financial institutions draw the line when it comes to deciding whether to keep a process or IT-related service in-house or outsource it to specialists such as Amazon Web Services, SAP and many others?
The speed at which the mobile market evolves is staggering. Just as we started to look at mobile first, where banks need to align their services and strategies to cater for mobile before desktop or other traditional channels, the notion of mobile-only is now creeping to the fore.
More than two years after the UK’s FSA introduced rules on mobile call recording for financial institutions, more than half of those affected still have not rolled out a solution – leaving many at risk of enforcement action, according to a new report by analyst firm Ovum and computer telephony specialist Teleware.
