Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia
What do you do when the bills are piling up, but you're a bit short of the government sanctioned fiat currency? Well you could try paying your bills in a more creative manner - as a man in Australia recently attempted. The email trail is what really makes this story. Who knows, if enough people believed drawings of spiders to be of value, we migh...
19 November 2008 /retail
One hopes that vetting procedures for accessing Swift's secure SwiftNet network are much stricter than those for its online community forums at swiftcommunity.net. It seems that a Nigerian 419 fraudster was able to register, get a username and password, and send the usual "investment opportunity" email using the internal message system. E...
13 November 2008 /security /regulation Information Security
That's what bearish Oppenheimer analyst Meredith Whitney told Reuters at the the Reuters Global Finance Summit yesterday. In her view, the bank is unlikey to be profitable for several years. Its strategy was that its many financial services businesses could boost their revenue by selling products to one another's clients. "But that does not ...
11 November 2008 /retail /wholesale
This story got me thinking about how many businesses have been spun out of Citi's tech and business support subsidiaries over the years. Besides the sale of this unit, and the BPO unit that went to TCS last month, there were also I-Flex (now Oracle Financial Services Solutions, but first founded by Citi in the mid 80s to support the bank's Indian ...
04 November 2008 Finextra50 fintech index
This ruling is going to have a huge impact on the financial and software industries if it's not overturned on appeal (which I hope it isn't). Interesting to see that State Street Bank started the questionable process of patenting business practices. Personally I think it's a good thing to put these to the (common sense) test before the patent is g...
31 October 2008 Business Knowledge for IT
French police have arrested six people in their investigation into the high-profile fraud attack on President Sarkozy, but believe they are only minor figures in a wider plot. What's more interesting is the internal bank investigation at the SocGen branch where he holds his account. Apparently more than 150 staff members have consulted the account,...
31 October 2008 /security /regulation Transaction Fraud Systems and Analysis
It's not often that you see a full breakdown of exactly how much money a bank has spent on different projects within its overall IT budget. At least not in the public domain. But at Westpac's earnings announcement yesterday, CEO Gail Kelly picked the bank's technology operation as its most notable "low light" during their financial year....
31 October 2008 /regulation /retail Finextra50 fintech index
As banks now more than ever are looking to cut costs wherever they can, it's not surprising that they're still very keen on offshoring despite the political sensitivity of sending jobs abroad. But the large Indian service companies that provide offshore services, as well as providing people locally in the UK, are finding that banks are cutting back...
02 October 2008 /retail /wholesale
With corporate social responsibility on the conference agenda at Sibos for the first time, I thought it would be interesting to have a chat with Swift's own CSR manager to talk about the co-operative's efforts to be greener and leaner. As a major operator of data centres, and organiser of large global events, calculating the carbon footprint is a c...
18 September 2008 /sibos Going green
Further to my recent post -- It's not all doom and gloom for financial technology -- I've been reading a few predictions for IT spending in 2009. Some choose to focus on the positive -- for e.g. spending on risk management systems is growing. While others look at the state of software and IT services more broadly, and are much more pessimistic....
20 August 2008 /retail /wholesale Finextra50 fintech index
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