RISKS AND REWARDS IN FINANCIAL TECHNOLOGY

The purported Chinese curse, May you live in interesting times, remains as apt as ever in the global financial markets and for those providing financial technology services. Fintech delivery has never been straightforward at the best of times, but the changing geopolitical landscape presents new uncertainty for a sector that has barely recovered from the aftermath of the global economic downturn.

As technology markets evolve, geopolitics has become an unlikely determining factor in a firm’s technology strategy and its ability to grow and meet the needs of its business. Whether viewed from the point of a fintech provider or consumer, geopolitical factors now almost certainly play a role in the outcome of technology projects.

Firms are having to react accordingly by adopting their own geopolitical stance. Earlier this year, a Russian IT services supplier was forced to relocate its headquarters to Switzerland in light of the growing tensions between East and West. Its clients, including several European banks, were forced to place key IT initiatives on hold until this relocation ‘workaround’ was agreed.

MARKET READINESS FOR HOST CARD EMULATION (HCE) MOBILE PAYMENTS

Mobile payments continue to make headlines. Trials have come and gone and cross-industry relationships have been set up and crumbled after the honeymoon period. Many of us, I’m sure, have questioned whether mobile NFC payments would ever become a mass-market reality.

Google changed all of this with one announcement in 2013. The incorporation of host card emulation (HCE) into the Android platform brought significant relief to many of the key banks and service providers that have been trying to make progress in launching mobile payments using USIM secure elements.

THINKING BEYOND FINANCE – USING DATA INSIGHT TO DRIVE BUSINESS CHANGE

Once you’ve gone through an efficiency drive, streamlined operations and automated processes within your business, a common question is often ‘what’s next?’  Nowhere is this truer than the finance department – as an organisational cost centre it’s frequently one of the first areas of a business to be put under pressure to cut costs and do more with less.

This process often starts with accounts payable often the most admin- intensive operation within the finance department and indeed perhaps the whole business. For many organisations, the volume of invoices being received, tracked, processed and paid requires significant time and resource to run smoothly. Automating this process and being able to scan, track, process and store invoices automatically streamlines day-to-day operations, leading to fewer errors, reduced document storage requirements, faster processing and a more efficient use of human resources. Rather than spending considerable amounts of time on processing invoices manually, AP staff are freed up to deal with out of the ordinary issues and queries and improve the service they offer.

375 MILLION CUSTOMER DATA RECORDS COMPROMISED

a global leader in data protection solutions, today released the highlights from its SafeNet Breach Level Index (BLI) for the second quarter of 2014. Between April and June of this year, there were a total of 237 breaches that compromised more than 175 million customer records of personal and financial information worldwide.  

 

For the first half of 2014, more than 375 million customer records were stolen or lost as a result of 559 breaches worldwide.  The retail industry had more data records compromised than any other industry during the second quarter, with more than145 million records stolen or lost, or 83 per cent of all data records breached.  Less than one per cent of all 237 breaches during the second quarter were secure breaches where strong encryption or authentication solutions protected the data from being used.

WHAT THE BANKS CAN LEARN FROM ONLINE FOR DATING

The banking or finance sector could learn a trick or two from the online dating industry is laughable. After all, while the former is heavily regulated, deeply complex and integral to our economy; the latter is frivolous by comparison.

Dating, as is often said, is a numbers game! And organisations such as Match.com, eHarmony and Zoosk rely on very sophisticated technology as they sift through vast customer bases to create the most compatible couples. Specially, they rely on data to build the most nuanced portraits of their members that they can, so they can find the best matches. This is a business-critical activity for dating sites – the more successful the matching, the better revenues will be.

One of the ways they do this is through graph databases. These differ from relational 

TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT BANK OF MONGOLIA HAS SUCCESFULLY

Trade and Development Bank  the oldest and the largest corporate bank in Mongolia, has successfully issued the country’s first ever offshore CNH 700 million bond listed in Singapore Stock Exchange on 14 January 2014.

 

HOW BANKS ARE OVERCOMING THE IT INFRASTRUCTURE CHALLENGE

Advancing technology provides both a big opportunity and a big challenge to businesses in all sectors 

 

today. It has created a generation of consumers who demand ever more freedom and accessibility to services, while also granting companies an unparalleled chance to understand and engage with their customers. While it affects all aspects of business, none feel it more keenly than the world’s banks, that face constant pressure to build a customer-centric  

framework but are faced with many technical and regulatory limitations