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Elton Cane

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

SEPA testing high on the agenda

With SIA-SSB and EBA Clearing putting the final touches on the SEPA Services for STEP2 over the next month, banks are gearing up to begin testing credit transfers from July, with testing windows for direct debits coming later in the year. Giorgio Ferrero, Chairman of EBA CLEARING, says 90 banks have already signed up for Sepa credit transfer testin...

/payments EBAday

Elton Cane

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Predictions for changes in the Finextra50

The constituent companies of the Finextra50 index at its launch this week comprise a momentary snapshot of an industry in a rapid state of flux. If we had conducted the same index compiling exercise just two or three months ago, at least three companies would have appeared that now don't -- Bisys, Corillian and J Harland. And I anticipate that in...

/retail /wholesale Finextra50 fintech index

Elton Cane

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

HSBC Australia shoots the messenger

Banks and their customers have very different ideas about what constitutes "sensitive data", and what communication should take place if data security is compromised. And one bank in particular has an interesting approach to managing the media fall-out when such a lapse occurs. Over the past 6 weeks, a journalist at Computerworld Austr...

/security /retail Information Security

Elton Cane

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Chasing the US core banking market

After many years of talking about the need for core banking system replacement among US banks, it seems that foreign and domestic vendors are finally making some headway. But if the predicted boom in replacement projects emerges, where will the banks and vendors find the required technical and business staff to do the work? i-Flex has been target...

/retail /wholesale Trends in Financial Services

Elton Cane

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Outsourcing, offshoring and ABN Amro share price performance

If ABN Amro hadn't agressively pursued an outsource/offshore strategy over the past two years, would it have been broken-up and sold off much earlier? The answer is probably yes. In its 2006 annual report, the bank claimed that Services IT (responsible for group infrastructure and managing the recent offshore/outsourced arrangements) realised its E...

/retail /wholesale

Elton Cane

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

HSBC bluetooth marketing: Spam, or not spam?

Spam (noun) is commonly defined as an unsolicited commerical message sent indiscriminantly to mass recipients. Is this what HSBC is trialling in the name of marketing? The initial message it is sending out to all activated phones near its branches is certainly unsolicited (though one could argue that if people leave their bluetooth turned on all th...

/retail Trends in Financial Services

Elton Cane

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Payments-mobile comms convergence - the real-estate model

Last week, as Visa USA president and CEO John Coghlan called for closer collaboration between the payment card and mobile industries (see Finextra article here), how this collaboration might work in practice was being discussed at the Digital Money Forum event in London. O2 is one of the network operators currently investigating near-field communic...

/payments /retail Trends in Financial Services

Elton Cane

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Bank branch technology and the leapfrog effect

I was talking today to Andreas Andreades, CEO of core banking system vendor Temenos, about the company's tie-up in the US with Metavante (more on that in my next post). Something he said as an aside particularly caught my attention: "Bank customers in Thailand get a better in-branch experience than bank customers in the UK." The context ...

/retail Trends in Financial Services

Elton Cane

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

ABN AMRO carve-up: the IT implications

The business pages over the weekend featured coverage of the merger talks between Barclays and ABN AMRO. Whether or not Barclays succeeds, the pressure from hedge fund investors and the number of other suitors interested in parts of the Dutch bank’s global business means that a break-up of the group is increasingly likely, though not certain. But...

/retail /wholesale Trends in Financial Services

Elton Cane

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Trouble in India, and its impact on outsourcing

Finextra received some interesting feedback from a reader today about this story, which covered NAB considering further Indian outsourcing. Our reader pointed out that with Maoist insurgents having slaughtered 40 Indian policemen this week, moving operations there now requires a hard second look. “Forget the weather issues, training, infrastruct...

/regulation Trends in Financial Services

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