Italian banking group Instituto Centrale Banche Popolare Italiane has introduced a new trading and recording system across its Milan operations, which it says will help it to better keep up with changing regulation and offer a better service for its traders.
Visa Europe and its majority-owned mobile money specialist Monitise have signed a deal with IBM in a major mobile banking and mobile payment collaboration targeting Europe’s banks.
Poland’s Warsaw Stock Exchange has introduced co-location systems designed to appeal to high-frequency traders, as Italy clamps down on HFT with Europe’s first HFT-specific tax. The moves highlight ongoing national and international divisions over the role of HFT in capital markets.
Dutch cooperative bank Rabobank has chosen tools from SuperDerivatives to help revamp its global FX trading operations.
Half of Europe’s bank branches could be obsolete within the next seven years, according to new research by real estate advisory firm Jones Lang LaSalle.
Visa Europe has appointed Nicolas Huss as its new president and chief executive. Huss will join Visa Europe from investment management firm Apollo Group, where he is chief executive for credit card and customer servicing business Avant Spain and Ireland.
French railway operator SNCF has adopted a mobile payments system from Californian tech firm VeriFone Systems, which allows customers to pay for railway tickets using a mobile device.
Robert Barnes, former chief executive of UBS MTF, is to take up a new role at Turquoise, the MTF owned by the London Stock Exchange. Barnes, who had been advising in a consultancy since he left UBS in February, will replace outgoing Turquoise chief Natan Tiefenbrun, who is understood to be leaving for his own reasons.
De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), the Netherlands’ national banking regulator, has cleared Amazon Web Services for use in the country’s financial sector, clarifying key supervision criteria for Dutch organisations looking to move infrastructure or services to the AWS cloud.
In an effort to improve the protection offered to consumers, and to harmonise data practices, the EU is currently in the process of passing two pieces of legislation: the Cybercrime Directive and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Few people have given much thought to how these will align with international financial regulation.
The Royal Bank of Scotland has chosen Canadian IT firm CGI Group to help its corporate clients manage the transition to SEPA, the European Union project to simplify bank transfers denominated in euros.
Spain’s CaixaBank is planning to target Brazil’s payments industry via a new joint venture with US transaction processing firm Global Payments that builds on the bank’s experience of digital channels its home market.
For firms who remember MiFID I, and those that don’t, round two is almost upon us. This month, the Council of the EU agreed their general approach, meaning that the draft of MiFID II/MiFIR is free to advance to the European Parliament. If all goes according to the current plan, the new combined legislation will be with us in time for 2015 implementation.
Securities trading in France, the Netherlands and Belgium is to move to T+2 settlement in October 2014, following a decision by Euroclear to pre-empt Europe-wide settlement reforms.
A mobile wallet offering built by Kalixa Group claims to be able to turn just about any phone – including the iPhone – into an NFC payment device. The toolkit has launched in the UK, marking the first step in the firm’s plans for Europe-wide NFC mobile payments.
German exchange Deutsche Börse is to launch a new block trading service in partnership with Liquidnet, the buy-side crossing network.
The on-going turf wars that have held back the adoption of using mobile phones as a payment device at the point-of-sale will soon be a thing of the past if the progress made in Bratislava over the past year is any indication. The success of a project involving Visa Europe, Tatra Bank, Telefónica Slovakia’s O2 operation and a substantial number of retailers makes the Slovakian capital a showcase market for contactless technology.
The London Stock Exchange’s plans to establish a new central securities depository in Luxembourg reveal the way regulation can have unintended consequences – in this case a proliferation of CSDs.
Clearstream, Euroclear and Eurex Clearing have signed an agreement with the ICMA European Repo Council to create a joint project aimed at improving the efficiency of the repo market.
European securities regulator ESMA has started the latest round of consultation on OTC derivatives clearing with the release of a discussion paper on regulatory technical standards for the European Market Infrastructure regulation, the new pan-European rulebook.
BNP Paribas Securities Services is to use Swift’s value added network service to connect to T2S, the single European settlement platform due to roll out in 2015-16.
NYSE Euronext has launched EnterNext, a market for small- and medium-sized companies, in the Netherlands for the first time – a move the exchange says will help local SMEs to get the financing they need.
Spanish business to business payment platform Licuos has been named as the winner of Innotribe Startup Disrupt, a competition to find the most innovative financial services startups in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world.
The Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive threatens to have a significant operational impact on the industry. Fund managers will soon be subject to a host of new requirements including increased KYC and due diligence, better risk and liquidity monitoring, and new reporting and disclosure requirements. However, in the UK the transition looks to be particularly […]
Spanish bank Sabadell has released a mobile app that lets consumers withdraw cash without a debit card.
Fixed income trading venue MTS is to launch a new platform called MTS Swaps designed for buy-side firms that want to have more control over how they trade interest rate swaps.
A new joint project between Spanish financial services project Next Bank Madrid and Swift’s Innotribe innovation wing aims to unleash the potential of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American start-up companies in financial services.
Asset management firm BlackRock and Euroclear Bank aim to unlock the potential of the European exchange-traded fund market by making settlement for ETFs cheaper and more efficient.
As the first deadline for implementation of the Single Euro Payments Area approaches in February 2014, you could be forgiven for thinking that it is pretty much all over – or at least will be by October 2016, when the second deadline arrives. Don’t count on it, cautions Ruth Wandhöfer, global head, regulatory & market strategy, Citi Transaction Services.
ICE Clear Europe is to begin clearing for NYSE Liffe’s London derivatives market on 1 July, marking the end of NYSE’s migration from LCH Clearnet, and the beginning of ICE’s integration with NYSE Euronext, which it purchased in December for $8.2 billion.
Further uncertainty in the Eurozone has been prompted by unconfirmed reports that the European Commission is considering watering down the 11-nation proposals for a financial transaction tax – but any revisions may have to wait until September, following elections in Germany, according to sources close to the subject.
Spanish banks La Caixa and Santander have partnered with telecoms firm Telefónica to create a joint venture offering mobile payment services and a digital wallet designed to relegate conventional payment methods to the history books.
Portugal’s central securities depository Interbolsa is to use Swift’s value added network to connect to T2S, the single European settlement platform due to roll out in 2015-16.
Europe’s post-trade infrastructure is undergoing significant change, driven by the implementation of the single settlement platform Target2-Securities and the forthcoming CSD Regulation. As a result, market participants need to review their current back office system capabilities.
US post-trade services company the DTCC and Belgian settlement specialist Euroclear are planning to create a joint service that aims to provide better, safer collateral management for market participants.
The European Commission has published proposals designed to make it easier for European consumers to understand and compare the bank services they receive and switch bank accounts if they are not happy with their existing provider.
A legal framework for the standardised clearing of OTC derivatives has been established in Germany with the approval of standardised documentation by the German Banking Industry Committee, the Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft. The DK has published the framework agreement, called the CRV – Clearing-Rahmenvereinbarung – for use by German banks and their buy-side customers with immediate effect. The document […]
Discontent with regulation cast a cloud over delegates on the first day of the TradeTech conference in London, as senior industry executives pondered on the politicisation of the debate and the perceived failure of regulators to deliver efficient markets.
Regulators in the UK are concerned that some European governments will force through regulations that will close off legitimate market practices such as algorithmic trading because they do not fully understand the markets, said a panellist at the TradeTech event in London. Tim Rowe, head of the trading platforms and settlement team at the UK’s […]
Bankers can seem a little bit schizophrenic when it comes to regulation – much of the time they complain about the sheer weight of the regulatory burden they face, but at other times they talk of regulation as an opportunity. It could well be that as they have finally realised regulation – and plenty of it – is inevitable, some banks have decided to make a virtue out of it.
