The LEI: From interim identifiers to a global standard
It’s not proving easy, but progress is being made on the road to the development of a global Legal Entity Identifier that works and makes business sense.
Analysis
Now that’s what I call an offshore investment
Good news for those with a need for real-time financial market data at their salty fingertips while making crossing the world’s oceans: Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg services have both been benchmarked aboard ship in a proper offshore passage. Brighton-based Beacon Electronic Trading Solutions stress-tested the Thomson Reuters Eikon and Bloomberg Anywhere products on board the […]
Mobile is there for the taking …
Financial institutions have owned the commercial payment space for centuries, but are now seeing a threat to their incumbency from new technologies that have opened up the industry to other business sectors. Mobile transactions in particular are shaking-up banking.
Swift sees expanding role as facilitator for industry collaboration
As delegates gather for the third Business Forum organised by Swift in London this week, issues on the global impact of regulation and the banking industry’s response to it are more pressing than ever Perhaps equally pertinent to the conference – the largest event Swift organises aside from the annual Sibos conference and exhibition, with […]
Mobile account takeover: when device ID isn’t enough
Protect your transactions! Protect your login! Protect your mobile channel! Protect your end users! A layered security architecture is now standard for most organisations. The problem, however, with many of today’s layered security solutions is that they do not correlate information between the various layers (security risks, suspicious events, fraud indicators etc.) and thus fail to see the big picture.
Electronic bonds: fixed income trading platforms proliferate
In contrast to the highly automated world of equities, bond trading is an area of the markets that is still heavily reliant on the telephone as a a trading tool, with person-to-person calls making up the bulk of activity on bond desks.
BCBS: getting back to first principles
At first glance, the Basel Committee’s new Principles for stronger banking risk governance appear to represent another huge change management challenge for global institutions.
IPS 2013 Round-up: market changing faster than players or regulators
By the standards of the rest of the financial services sector, the payments industry has always progressed at a glacial pace. For the past 10 years, the key topic at the long-running International Payments Summit has been the Single Euro Payments Area.
London job market shows signs of spring thaw
There were signs of spring Financial service jobs in London showed growth in the first quarter of the year, but March ended with a month-on-month drop.
Print is not dead – it’s just turned baaaad
As a rule of thumb, the fastest adopters of new technology are pornographers and criminals (two sets that often overlap). So it should come as no surprise that the latest thing to worry security specialists is 3-D printing. You’ll have seen the stories in the papers about how you can create real working guns with […]
Beyond a joke
A journalist, a politician and a banker walk into a bar … sounds like the beginning of a joke, doesn’t it? Feel free to submit a punchline: personally, I’m starting to think that it would be a very sour joke. With banker-bashing now an established national pastime, the press having spectacularly fouled their own nest […]
Welcome to EMIR: the known unknowns of customer classification
With EMIR in force, firms are now wrestling with the challenge of classifying their customers – without an industry viewpoint the dialogue could get ugly …
State banking: reforming the UK infrastructure
At the beginning of March, George Osborne travelled to the English seaside town of Bournemouth to make a speech at the JP Morgan operations centre there. It wasn’t Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day speech, but it may well go down as a watershed moment in the history of the UK financial services sector. Osborne is […]
Same day, same settlement?
The Payment Services Directive in Europe mandated next-business-day settlement – D+1 – for payment transactions between EC states from Jan 2012. But with some European countries already using faster operating standards, Neil Burton and Gareth Lodge ask: is D+1 good enough?
Mirror, mirror: how does your risk data look?
Following the release of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Principles for Effective Risk Data Aggregation, middle and back office professionals in major financial centres now find themselves with a number of difficult questions, that senior management must be able to answer and evidence.
Grand designs
Arun Jain, chairman and chief executive of Polaris Financial Technology, is a great believer in the power of design to transcend ordinary development work and deliver superior results – results that pay. Banking Technology caught up with him at the opening of the firm’s new design centre in Chennai.
London goes contactless
The announcement earlier this week by Transport for London that Londoners have paid for more than 700,000 bus fares using their contactless bank cards since the option for contactless payment was introduced three months ago is proof that contactless payment is finally here, says Bernhard Lachenmeier, head of products and marketing at SIX Payment Services. So why does it feel like this isn’t the case?
Riding the OTC rollercoaster
As new rules for OTC derivatives take hold in Europe and in the US, banks and asset managers face a complex cocktail of mandatory clearing, reporting and increased collateral requirements.
Social media: handle with care
Social media can add value for banks, but they need to be careful that the risk of damaging their brand does not outweigh the potential benefits, according to Jaroslaw Knapik, senior analyst, financial services technology at Ovum.
It’s All about the PIN: Fed Staff Interpretation of Reg. II Creates Precarious Limbo for Debit and Prepaid (April 2013)
Fed Staff Interpretation of Reg. II Creates Precarious Limbo for Debit and Prepaid By Marilyn Bochicchio, CEO, and Brad Fauss, EVP and General Counsel, Brightwell Payments It’s April 3, two days past the effective date for the Durbin Amendment exclusivity routing rules for prepaid. And, many prepaid (and, likely, debit) executives in the United States […]
PFM: looking after the pennies
Personal financial management tools have spluttered in and out of fashion, but a combination of mobile, tablet and internet banking uptake may mean their time has come, Recent years have seen the emergence of a plethora of PFM tools, each of which purports to be the best way to keep track of your finances.
Banking on the real economy
Asset finance has had a lower profile than other types of loan. But the overall squeeze on lending and higher business loan rejection rates have led to an increased demand for leasing arrangements by SMEs. As a result, asset finance is now the third most common source of finance for businesses.
Avoiding spreadsheet Hell
The JP Morgan Task Force Report into its Chief Investment Office’s $6 billion-plus loss found the bank’s Value at Risk was being calculated with an Excel spreadsheet that “required time-consuming manual inputs to entries and formulas, which increased the potential for errors”.
Viewpoint: Early Days for NFC (March 2013)
By Lori Breitzke, E&S Consulting LLC In the initial installment of this article, we addressed how trends in EMV will impact the prepaid sector. But developments in near field communication (NFC) merit an equally close watch, as they, too, should have bearing on the prepaid market and how it plays out moving forward. Let’s start […]
Viewpoint: Early Days for NFC (March 2013)
By Lori Breitzke, E&S Consulting LLC In the initial installment of this article, we addressed how trends in EMV will impact the prepaid sector. But developments in near field communication (NFC) merit an equally close watch, as they, too, should have bearing on the prepaid market and how it plays out moving forward. Let’s start […]
FATCA woes for US au pairs in Switzerland
They were never going to be happy in Switzerland about the US FATCA legislation that will be used to hunt down people avoiding US taxes, but it’s a surprise to hear that some Swiss burghers are feeling sorry for a group of US citizens who have become part of the fabric of society there.
Resistant to digital banking? Consumers have never demanded it more.
In today’s multi-channel age, banks cannot afford to focus all their efforts on a single digital strategy any more than solely on the branch experience – the winners will be those that can see beyond channel-specific efforts and provide a truly integrated offering.
Haynes leads new venture to tackle European equities
Following a period of equity market consolidation, the time is right for a new entrant to step forward and transform the exchange business, according to Alasdair Haynes, chief executive of startup trading venue Aquis Exchange.
Cease & Desist: Ill. Gets Tough with Square and ‘Unlicensed Money Transmitters’ (March 2013)
The Illinois Department of Financial & Professional Regulation recently released five cease and desist orders from January 2013 against six entities for unlicensed activities under the state’s Transmitters of Money Act. These six entities offer a variety of services in Illinois, including domestic and international money transfer, bill payment services and prepaid cards. One of […]
Fed’s Interchange and Routing FAQs Throw Prepaid in a Tizzy (March 2013)
The Federal Reserve Board (Fed) quietly released changes to its FAQs on Reg. II’s restrictions on debit card interchange fees and routing. Five new FAQs were added and one existing FAQ was revised. Changes in two areas directly affect prepaid cards: the exemption for “general use prepaid cards” and the requirement for adding a second […]
One law for the rich, another for …
for a growing number of people, wary of the debasing of currencies through quantitative easing, alternatives such as Bitcoin are becoming more popular.
Blog: NFC Still Top Dog at GSMA Mobile World Congress (March 2013)
March 2013 By Sirpa Nordlund, Mobey Forum So, where were you in the last week of February? If, like me, you work in the mobile industry, there’s a fair chance you visited Barcelona for the GSMA Mobile World Congress. Over three days, 72,000 visitors from more than 200 countries and all corners of the mobile […]
FATCA: joining the KYC dots?
FATCA compliance might not need a separate programme – it ought to be covered by the same approach as AML, RDR and KYC regulations, among others.
The risks of runaway regulation
While laudable in intention, reforms to Europe’s OTC derivatives markets may be in danger of inadvertently adding so much cost for participants that the original purpose is undermined, according to Anthony Belchambers, chief executive officer at the Futures and Options Association.
Banking on digital solutions to build trust and innovation
Rising to the challenge of reconnecting with customers, rebuilding trust and renewing the banking experience, banks are starting to explore digital technologies and solutions.
Risk data aggregation: the great unknowns revealed?
The Basel Committee is planning to start checking on firms’ risk data aggregation plans from early 2013 but awareness surrounding the issues remains low.
Tackling FATCA compliance: using new regulations to win a competitive edge
With the January 2014 deadline looming on the horizon, financial organisations are realising that fast action is needed, and needed now, in order to be able to meet the first FATCA deadline for new account on-boarding.
Squawker prepares algo-free equity market
Capital markets are broken because liquidity is fragmented and there is no way for the sell-side to pool its liquidity – but that will soon change, according to Christopher Gregory, co-founder and chief executive at start up trading venue Squawker.
The problem of plenty: multiple host systems in banks
Globally, there are many banks operating on multiple host systems, the result of cherry picking the best in class systems of the day to meet different needs or occasionally, merger and acquisition. Consequently, they have ended up with a legacy of disparate host or core systems, usually segmented by lines of business, such as deposits, retail loans, corporate loans, and trade finance.
Java in the cloud for financial services
Java is the most ubiquitous programming language out there, but it doesn’t work well in the cloud. One approach to overcoming the problem is featured among the Accenture-sponsored FinTech Innovation Lab London finalists.
