Hamish Monk - Community Author: Finextra Research

Fixing finance from the ground up: The fight for afforestation

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Fixing finance from the ground up: The fight for afforestation

Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest just hit its highest level in over 15 years, despite Brazil – along with 100 other world leaders – promising to end deforestation by 2030, at Glasgow’s Climate Summit, COP26. According to official data from Brazil's space research agency, Inpe, 13,235 sq km has been lost during the 2020-21 period. This rate o...

29 November 2021 /sustainable

Busting sustainable finance myths: Why Tariq Fancy is only half right on ESG, part 2

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Busting sustainable finance myths: Why Tariq Fancy is only half right on ESG, part 2

Blackrock’s former sustainable investing chief, Tariq Fancy, has made nine key claims against the environmental, social and governance (ESG) movement. While the ensuing discussion has shone a light into some of the asset management industry’s darkest corners, there are some myopic myths that need to be busted. Finextra, alongside founder of Respon...

16 November 2021 /sustainable

Busting sustainable finance myths: Why Tariq Fancy is only half right on ESG

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Busting sustainable finance myths: Why Tariq Fancy is only half right on ESG

A controversial series of articles criticising the asset management industry’s approach to sustainable investing, authored by Blackrock’s former sustainable investing chief, Tariq Fancy, has thrown into question the efficacy of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) movement. As would be expected, the salad of responses to Fancy’s position...

01 November 2021 /sustainable

Women’s Equality Day: Working toward gender parity in financial services

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Women’s Equality Day: Working toward gender parity in financial services

It is Women’s Equality Day today – and over two years since the publication of the UK government’s last mandatory gender pay gap report, due to coronavirus-induced cancellations for the 2019/20 reporting year. With just over five weeks until the next gender pay gap report – for 2020/21 – is issued, it is time to take stock of the how the fintech a...

26 August 2021 /people

Curbing the cost of payment failures with straight through processing

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Curbing the cost of payment failures with straight through processing

Automating high volumes of transactions across different geographies and jurisdictions is yet to be a seamless process. In fact, failed payments remain a common challenge for the industry. A recent research study by Accuity, ‘The True Cost of Failed Payments’, estimated that in 2020, failed payments costed the global economy $118.5 billion. Agains...

20 August 2021 /payments

The future of NFTs: Democratising space and digitising endangered species

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

The future of NFTs: Democratising space and digitising endangered species

Earlier this year, the non-fungible token (NFT) bubble had swollen to colossal proportions. With the likes of musical artists such as Grimes selling $6 million worth of cryptoart in February, and artist Beeple’s ‘Everydays – The First 5000 Days’ piece pulling in $69 million at Christies in March, the NFT goldrush was in full swing. By April, howe...

17 August 2021 /sustainable

The IPCC climate change report: How is the fintech community responding?

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

The IPCC climate change report: How is the fintech community responding?

A ‘code red for humanity’ has been declared, in the form of the first major review of climate change since 2013, and the sixth report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – published on Monday. In response, the fintech community has called for further collaboration, and widespread investment in natural capital and clean t...

10 August 2021 /sustainable

Demystifying the role of the fintech CIO

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Demystifying the role of the fintech CIO

This series of articles looks to demystify the various C-level roles within fintech companies today – exploring the career paths taken by top managers, their critical skills, daily responsibilities and challenges, and even how the pandemic has impacted their understanding of running a successful business. This fifth instalment in the C-suite Serie...

14 July 2021 /people

Demystifying the role of the fintech CFO

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Demystifying the role of the fintech CFO

This series of articles looks to demystify the various C-level roles within fintech companies today – exploring the career paths taken by top managers, their critical skills, daily responsibilities and challenges, and even how the pandemic has impacted their understanding of running a successful business. This fourth instalment in the C-suite Seri...

09 July 2021 /people

The future of payments: New assets - new security challenges

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

The future of payments: New assets - new security challenges

By some, blockchain technology is considered a strong means of combatting rising cases of chargebacks, which come hand-in-hand with financial fraud. Indeed, it can be extremely difficult for fraudsters to extract customers’ information from a blockchain system, since it is decentralised, and distributed across a network of computers that form digit...

28 June 2021 /crime

The future of payments: Perfecting payments protection

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

The future of payments: Perfecting payments protection

With merchants leaning on card-not-present payments during the pandemic, and consumers themselves further embracing online banking, new opportunities have been created for financial criminals to exploit weaknesses in the digital payments system, and defraud people out of their hard-earned cash. Therefore, financial institutions are adjusting their...

23 June 2021 /security

Leveraging fraud and risk data to enhance customer experience

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Leveraging fraud and risk data to enhance customer experience

In the wake of the widespread shift to digital banking and commerce caused by national lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic, fraud teams have seen a sharp increase in cybercrime. This has been an upward trend for some time. Since 2011, financial crime has more than tripled, to $32 billion in 2020. By 2027, it is expected to exceed $40 billion by...

16 June 2021 /crime

Long reads