Hamish Monk - Community Author: Finextra Research

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How can banks automate effectively?

Automation in financial services encapsulates a range of tools and techniques which have the effect of reducing human intervention in business and information technology (IT) processes. On the business side are repetitive tasks that hobble workflows. It is estimated that companies lose 20-30% of their revenue to such inefficiencies every year. Au...

6 hours /ai

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

$Trump: The new presidential meme coin

Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20th January was followed by a salad of executive orders, including the ejection of the USA from the Paris climate accord, the termination of birthright citizenship, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, withdrawal from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the enforcement of a two-sex gender poli...

22 January 2025 /crypto

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to use APIs

According to a global survey on application programming interfaces (APIs) by McKinsey, 81% of respondents said APIs are a priority for business and IT functions. “Large banks are launching API programs and allocating about 14% of their IT budget to APIs, on average,” claims the survey. So what exactly are APIs, and how should institutions be using...

21 January 2025 /payments

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to comply with PSD3

In June 2023, the European Commission (EC) announced plans to update its Payment Services Directive, which was originally designed to drive integration across the payments market, level the playing field for payment service providers (PSPs) and enhance security across the value chain. The latest proposed changes will swap the existing second Paym...

14 January 2025 /regulation

Consumer Duty: How to go beyond compliance

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Consumer Duty: How to go beyond compliance

In force since 31 July 2023, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)’s Consumer Duty regulation was designed to improve financial services protections for consumers. Since the go-live date, firms have made numerous improvements, and better, fairer outcomes are being delivered to customers. Yet, there remains room for firms to improve, and to build...

06 January 2025 /regulation

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to comply with ISO 20022

The deadline for ISO 20022 – the new standard for electronic data interchange between financial institutions – is November 2025. Once fully implemented, ISO 20022 will be a game-changer for the global payments space; instilling enhanced interoperability, streamlined processing times, richer data, increased accuracy, lower maintenance costs, and e...

31 December 2024 /regulation

Four festive payment frauds to watch this Christmas

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Four festive payment frauds to watch this Christmas

Payments in the UK are feeling the chill this Christmas – especially in the retail sector, which rose only 0.2% last month, despite the Black Friday flurry. This figure is part of a wider trend of sluggish economic recovery in the wake of the pandemic, slumped consumer sentiment, as well as a general lack of confidence following Labour’s divisive ...

24 December 2024 /crime

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to choose a core banking provider

In simple terms, core banking points to the technology platform a financial institution deploys to sustain its key processes. It can be thought of as a central nervous system, delivering – from the back end to the front – vital services, such as transactions, onboarding, account management, currency exchange, card issuance, financial accounting, ...

17 December 2024 /payments

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to pick a SaaS solution

Software-as-a-service, or SaaS, delivers software and applications over the internet, via a subscription model. It is one of the three constituents of cloud computing – along with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) – and has revolutionised business operations; mushrooming from its market valuation of $237 billion i...

10 December 2024 /cloud

How AI can be embraced by financial services

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How AI can be embraced by financial services

While artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new concept, having been first explored by a research group in the 1950s, its widespread industrial application has only just begun. This is an excerpt from The Future of AI in Financial Services 2025 report, which was a special edition for the inaugural Finextra event, NextGen AI. Click here to read th...

10 December 2024 /ai

How to establish a correspondent banking relationship

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to establish a correspondent banking relationship

Correspondent banking lays the groundwork for a healthy international ecosystem of financial services. According to SWIFT data, however, the number of correspondent banking relationships has been in decline globally for the last decade. Compounding the issue has been a simultaneous rise in the volume and value of cross-border payments – suggestin...

03 December 2024 /payments

Redressing the ageing market data workforce

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Redressing the ageing market data workforce

The talent pool in the market data industry is contracting, as the challenge of recruiting into the sector builds. At a fundamental level, this trend is being felt across the financial services sector, with news outlets lamenting a ‘brain drain’ issue for some time. More specific to the market data industry, however, is that its talent pool is ag...

28 November 2024 /people

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