Join the Community

23,928
Expert opinions
40,638
Total members
387
New members (last 30 days)
207
New opinions (last 30 days)
29,259
Total comments

Innovation in Financial Services

A discussion of trends in innovation management within financial institutions, and the key processes, technology and cultural shifts driving innovation.

Bo Harald

Bo Harald Chairman/Founding member, board member at Trust Infra for Real Time Economy Prgrm & MyData,

We all know where we are heading

We all know that administrative processes will be fully automated in the future and continue their march towards real time. Still far too many of us continue to sit on our hands - perhaps not hoping that this inevitable change is a bad dream - but not having the energy or time needed to get out of daily chores. All this despite the whole process b...

Retired Member

Retired Member 

WhatsApp and the future of the Banking Industry

Blinded by the mega deal between Facebook and the 50 employees company WhatsApp for obscene amount of 16 Billion USD, for many followers of digital gossip, the news about the acquisition of Simple Bank by the Spanish group BBVA went almost unnoticed. It’s true that the value of the deal, EUR 100 Mio looks ridiculous in comparison, however I want t...

/wholesale

Paul Blank

Paul Blank e-Trading Solutions at TradAir

Single-Dealer Platforms and SEFs

Last week saw the introduction of mandatory execution on new SEF platforms for certain standardised interest rate swaps. Such swaps will no longer be executed bilaterally between banks and their clients, but rather must be executed anonymously on SEFs. The move to SEF trading has however been tentative, with many buy-side firms holding back, nonet...

/wholesale

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Can't Get There From Here

There was a skit on Saturday Night Live many years ago about a game show based on directions for getting around New England, and one of the punch lines was, "can't get there from here". Today, many large banks are finding this to be true when it comes to restoring their returns on equity (ROE) to pre-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) levels....

/retail

Alex Noble

Alex Noble Account Director at McAfee

The Growth in Voice Biometrics for Banking

It’s been an interesting week for those interested in Financial Services and how biometrics could be used in the industry. It was the subject of my last post on Finextra (“Voiceprints can counter ID theft, but other threats remain”), looking at Barclays’s use of Nuance and Cisco Voice Portal and last week on Finextra brought out some of the indust...

/retail

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Bitcoin's problem No.1

Security flaw(s) and other related issues apart, Bitcoin has one fundamental problem - its proponents position it as digital currency. Sure, some of the high-profile VCs do highlight BTC's potential as "secure distributed P2P transactional platform" - but (a) it is an open question how secure BTC really is, and (b) P2P that relies on th...

Bo Harald

Bo Harald Chairman/Founding member, board member at Trust Infra for Real Time Economy Prgrm & MyData,

Consumer ombudsmen - protecting costs - not consumers

In my previous post I recommended transparent charging for services - covering the costs as a minimum - to guide the consumers to act in their own interest. Oddly enough this is not widely supported by consumer ombudsmen. They seem to do all they can to delay visible pricing and nudging customers into better and more economical services. Do they no...

Bo Harald

Bo Harald Chairman/Founding member, board member at Trust Infra for Real Time Economy Prgrm & MyData,

Charge for it!

When we launched e-banking back in 1982 for consumers and SMEs at Union Bank fo Finland we pretty soon started to charge for the service. We thought that getting banking into homes and offices was worth paying a very small monthly fee for. Somebody even said that value and convenience for free is stupidity per defenition.. There still are of course...

Bo Harald

Bo Harald Chairman/Founding member, board member at Trust Infra for Real Time Economy Prgrm & MyData,

Everybody writing - nobody reading?

Everybody is writing and nobody reading? Writing takes all the time available.. I should of course not complain as my posts here have soon generation one million page views... But we do live in a time of COMMUNICATION CRISIS as the technology and information avalanche is fragmentating audiences into ever smaller groups - where everyone has less tim...

Pat Carroll

Pat Carroll Founder/Executive Chairman at ValidSoft

Malware , the Achilles Heel of Mobile Adoption

Malware is hitting mobile like nobody’s business. It is a sad fact of life - hackers, fraudsters, cyber-criminals and the like will never go away and will evolve and adapt as our payment landscape evolves too. The real question is whether we have the tools to counter those malware attacks so our customers can securely do their business on their mo...

/payments

Now Hiring