IBS Intelligence Global FinTech Interviews

Finacle is Infosys product subsidiary Edgeverve’s core banking product, used by banks across 100 countries, serving more than 1 billion customers. Arun Krishnan of Finacle discusses how Covid-19 has opened up the gates to faster innovation in banking and payments and how the pace of change is actually increasing despite the pandemic – could this be blockchain’s big moment? The competition is now a...

The Covid-19 pandemic is fundamentally changing the business model of client management for private bankers and wealth managers. Face to face client meetings are effectively off the table, meaning that having the right digital solutions has become key for wealth managers wanting to serve their clients with relevant and timely information (even more then before). Digital transformation is no longer...

FinTech entrepreneur Peter Ramsey is carrying out an investigation into just how well the UK’s leading challenger banks stand up against their traditional counterparts in terms of customer experience. How? Simple, he set up 12 bank accounts and directly compared how the banks performed as he attempted to open an account, make a payment, freeze a card, etc. So, are the challengers just clever marke...

Covid-19 has created the prime opportunity for banks to adjust their strategy. But not through continued job cuts as they are not sustainable in the long term as experienced employees are needed to help steer out of the current situation. As European banks, in particular, continue to lose market share to their Wall Street rivals, Vikas Srivastava at Integral explains to Sunniva Kolostyak at IBS In...

The supranational Financial Action Task Force has recognised that geolocation data is a necessary part of digital identity and KYC verification. Separately, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority recently included geolocation data as one of the criteria to be used for the purpose of KYC/territorial compliance for AML. If a taxi driver (Uber), barista (Starbucks) and waiter (Doordash) all know their...

How do you turn a crisis into an opportunity? Suntec CEO Nanda Kumar offers his views on how banks can take the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic and turn it into an opportunity to reinforce customer trust and value, reducing the risks to their business. While taking a back-to-basics approach to customer-centricity, he also advocates a low-risk approach to digitisation without the need to replace...

The iconic IBSI Sales League Table is back, and bigger than ever! In this interview, V Ramkumar, Senior Partner, Cedar Management Consulting International, explains the importance of the IBSI Sales League Table, how it is compiled and curated, the insights it provides on evolution and state of the banking technology industry, and the perspective it offers on activity levels in different global mar...

A Temenos survey has found that over three quarters of bankers believe that AI will be the technology to separate ‘winners’ from ‘losers’ over the next five years. Sunniva Kolostyak, reporter at IBS Intelligence, speaks to Mark Gunning, Global Business Solutions Director at Temenos, about the report ‘Forging new frontiers: advanced technologies will revolutionize banking’.

How do you create a bank for a group of people that constantly work and travel across borders, and how do you service them when mobility halts? Reporter Sunniva Kolostyak speaks to Guy Kashtan from Rewire, a digital banking service for migrants and international workers, about growth, serving a target audience, and social responsibility during COVID-19.

Is the neobank market overcrowded? How will the challenger banks cope in the era of Covid-19? What will be the focus of the next wave of neobanks coming to the banking market? Global Processing Services (GPS) is the payments technology provider powering several of the players in the first neobank cohort, including the likes of Revolut, Starling Bank and Curve. GPS CEO Joanne Dewar offers her persp...

Cybersecurity specialist VMware Carbon Black has published its latest annual Modern Bank Heists . The report shows that 80% of surveyed financial institutions reported an increase in cyberattacks over the past 12 months, a 13% increase over 2019. How can financial institutions better protect themselves in the current cybersecurity landscape? And was it inevitable that during the Covid-19 pandemic,...

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has expressed concern that the current Covid-19 crisis will affect the financial strength of payment service providers (PSPs) and consumers’ ability to access cash and payment services. Given the FCA’s renewed focus on the payments sector, PSPs should proactively review and, where necessary, update their compliance policies and procedures, particularly in r...

Capgemini and Efma’s latest World Insurance Report 2020 reveals that consumers of all ages are adopting a “millennial mindset”, and increasingly trusting their own research to source information and purchase insurance products themselves. The report recommends that to remain relevant to customers, insurers need to better connect with their policyholders by providing them with hyper-personalised an...

US FinTech Securrency successfully raised $17.65 million in its Series A round earlier this year, led by strategic investor WisdomTree investments. Securrency is a pioneer of blockchain-based financial markets infrastructure technology centred on its identity and compliance framework to support global digital securities transactions. Now, the FinTech has partnered with Saudi investment management...

 Sunniva Kolostyak, reporter at IBS Intelligence, speaks to Signicat’s John Erik Setsaas about how Scandinavian countries are using verified digital identities in most aspects of their digital lives, about entering the Benelux market and its recent acquisition of Connectis, and how collaboration is an important element of fighting cybercrime, particularly in a COVID-19 environment. 

 In a single home today, it’s not uncommon to find more than a dozen devices connected to the internet. As people connect more, it is only a matter of time before we see a huge increase in unauthorised purchases being made via these technologies. The Internet of Things (IoT) has great potential but there are questions to be resolved over how payment systems interact with IoT, warns Steve Durney of...

Middle East and Africa (MEA) retail banks are the strongest believers in a cashless society, prioritizing digitalization to drive financial inclusion, according to a study released by Temenos. The report, prepared by the Economist Intelligence Unit, reveals that the Middle East is poised to encourage digital financial inclusion, with young populations and smartphone use predicted to hit 74% by 202...

 The “new normal” has placed an added importance on digital workers needed to automate mission critical tasks. Robotic process automation (RPA) pioneer, Blue Prism has been helping UK group Leeds Building Society handle the upsurge in customer enquiries over the deferral of mortgage payments. Payment holiday requests exceeded 2,000 a day and this is all now being handled by the RPA solution develo...

 Finastra has $1.9 billion in revenues, 10,000 employees and over 8,500 customers, including 90 of the top 100 banks globally. The firm’s focus in recent years has been very much centred around platform development and getting the customer experience right. Anand Subbaraman of Finanstra explains how platformification is evolving from its original focus on retail banking. 

 Pelican offers an open API interoperability hub and is seeing increasing interest from banks in this area as they look to capitalise on the opportunities of open banking. The firm believes a highly functional API development and deployment environment is essential for banks to provide innovative solutions. In this interview Pelican’s Founder and CEO, Parth Desai, and the firm’s Sales Director, Ab...

 Small businesses represent 43% of the US economy, yet many are struggling to access Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration, under the US Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Many US banks are unable to offer services to new small business customers in a timely manner, due to the complex nature of Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) rules...

The password is a dying breed, and biometrics and digital identities are taking its place. However, consumers are still cautious when it comes to using fingerprints, facial recognition and voice to authenticate payments. In this episode, reporter Sunniva Kolostyak speaks to Daniel Kornitzer at Paysafe about embracing the benefits of biometrics and raising awareness. 

Most people in the UK still use a traditional bank as their primary account, with digital banks typically used for other secondary activities. However, in the midst of the Coronavirus crisis, we’ve seen people turning to FinTech apps, with usage increasing 72%. The disruption of the global pandemic will expose the gaps in traditional banks’ digital infrastructure and could see many providers accel...

 Strong Customer Authentication is coming. Or is it? The Covid-19 pandemic may be a factor in a further delay to SCA but it is not the only rock in the path over which the plans may stumble. Paul Rodgers, Chairman of Vendorcom and panel member at the UK Payment Systems Regulator, outlines the issues facing the adoption of SCA. Vendorcom is a multi-stakeholder membership organisation that connects...

 Within the Finance and IT sectors, data analytics solution provider iDelta believes many are very well placed to continue to operate on a business as usual footing in the face of the pandemic. While finance sector PLCs are inherently risk averse, iDelta believes there is a broader risk attached to any cancellation or suspension of programmes of work – many SMEs in the sector would be forced to sc...