Future Finance

Finextra and Oracle have gathered together some of the industry's top thought leaders to discuss, debate and analyse the key trends and issues within transaction banking, regulations and retail banking. This group will focus on upcoming regulations, new service offerings and industry debate shaping the new financial services landscape with regular blog posts, video interviews, webcasts debates and surveys.

Dan Barnes Writer at Information Corporation

Equitable investors

Determining who should carry the can for a bank’s bad debts took on a twist last week when activist investor Mark Taber challenged the UK regulator on its demands for a bank to raise more capital. The bank in question, Britain’s Cooperative Bank, is being asked by the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA), the UK banking watchdog, to raise capital...

15 July 2013

Tushar Chitra Vice President, Product Strategy and Marketing at Oracle Financial Services Software

Playing Games With Customers? Part I of Gamification Series

In many a past opportunity, banks have adopted new technology and have stayed in a virtual boundary of what the opportunity represents. Be it presence on social media or bringing text based banking to mobile phones, banks have been great at adopting the technology and introducing their consumers to it. The unfortunate part is that often non-tradit...

09 July 2013

Retired Member 

Three Steps for Success in Unlocking Big Data's Potential

In my last blog post, “The Future is Sooner and Stranger Than You Think” I had talked about the characteristics of Big Data in terms of the 4 Vs (Volume, Velocity, Variety, Value), the 5 Ms (Monitoring, Mapping, Management, Middleware, Measurement). Today Big Data is inescapable in the Financial Services industry, with increasing volumes of custo...

02 July 2013 /regulation

Dan Barnes Writer at Information Corporation

Why would you lend to a bank?

The rules that the European Commission is introducing around dealing with banks that fail – the ‘bail-in’ – are notable for not removing taxpayers from the process. Although they introduce creditors as a buffer before taxpayer money is used they do not make banks stand on their own two feet, as every other business is required to do. These rules a...

01 July 2013

Tushar Chitra Vice President, Product Strategy and Marketing at Oracle Financial Services Software

Bank Payment Obligation: New International Trade Standard

On April 17th, the ICC Banking Commission approved the URBPO contractual rules, which will be brought into effect from July 1st 2013.This recent announcement is likely to create ripples in the financial services industry. In this blog I will review what BPO means, what are the uniform rules (the UR in URBPO) mandated by ICC, and what would be the ...

24 June 2013 /payments /regulation

Dan Barnes Writer at Information Corporation

Buyers beware a 'fair rate'

As the digging into the scandal around London, Singapore, Tokyo and Euro Interbank Offered Rates (LIBOR/TIBOR/SIBOR and EurIBOR) continues, it seems increasingly obvious that many financial benchmarks have a veneer of respectability but little else. There is a push to include transactional data in the submissions to LIBOR, but that would only work...

17 June 2013

Tushar Chitra Vice President, Product Strategy and Marketing at Oracle Financial Services Software

Small Banks Lead the Innovation Agenda

The elephant is always afraid of the ant, said an old jungle lore. Today’s banking environment seems to reflect this adage more than ever. For the sake of simplicity, let us define small banks as banks with less than US$ 5 billion in assets. These small banks might not have substantial budgets to fund extensive research operations like the larger ...

10 June 2013

Dan Barnes Writer at Information Corporation

Killing your correspondent

The cost of know your customer (KYC) programmes is proving to be too much to bear for some of the world’s larger banks. Bankers estimate KYC has increased IT costs in transaction banking by up to 15%. Fines to settle money laundering allegations with American authorities cost UK banks HSBC and Standard Chartered US$2.6billion net in 2012. Firms ar...

10 June 2013

Retired Member 

The Future is Sooner and Stranger Than You Think

“The future is sooner and stranger than you think” – Reid Hoffman We are now at the cusp of the real Digital Age, an age where the network—the Internet today—becomes an organic entity. Various forces are in play that are accelerating the growth of the network—Metcalfe’s Law (economic value), Gilder’s Law (growth in connectivity), and Moore’s Law (...

04 June 2013

Dan Barnes Writer at Information Corporation

The best part of breaking up...

The myth that national regulators are pulling together is blown apart by the ongoing debate around banks and speculative trading. Let us set aside the fact that all trading – whether with rivals or with clients – is speculative. After the US repealed enforced separation of banking and speculation through the Glass-Steagall Act, it took less than a ...

03 June 2013