When the banking world talks about self-service, typically it means promoting the use of the Web by customers to gain access to standard information and account statements, or to perform basic transactions.
Until very recently, when evaluating counterparty risk banks have had to choose between accessible, timely, simple and less accurate measures of exposure calculated by front office systems and less timely, less accessible but more accurate measures of exposure calculated by end-of-day risk management systems.
In a constantly evolving fraud environment, HSBC is continually evaluating new processes to protect its users and their assets. For some types of exploits, out-of-band technology was seen to offer the highest security with the most convenience.
In July 2008 Bank of America made an undisclosed investment in Philadelphia-based Field Diagnostic Services (FDSI) and started to deploy the firm's energy management technology across thousands of US branches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and cut energy costs in half.
Barclays Bank has become the first bank in Europe to pilot Microsoft's Surface technology at a groundbreaking new branch in London that opened in December 2008 and takes its inspiration from leading retailers such as Apple and Nike.
Calculating daily P&L and doing balance sheet substantiation and reconciliation is a complex task for multinational organisations with myriad regional and local systems and legal entities. For a bank like Deutsche Bank, with more than one million accounts, it can be especially difficult.
Bravura Solutions' partnership with Luxembourg's eBRC provides software as a service to help seamlessly connect EMX, the leading UK based electronic funds trading system, with Vestima+, the automatic funds order routing service, which is of one of the largest electronic settlement and custody providers in Europe.
Germany's Commerzbank has deployed technology from UK vendor Cronto that enables online banking customers to authenticate transactions by taking a photo of their PC screens with their mobile phones.
Al Khaliji Commercial Bank is a new bank launched in Qatar in 2008. The Qatar Central Bank requires all retail banks to provide SMS confirmations and advices whenever a banking transaction or event takes place. Because of this, Al Khaliji wanted to build on the mobile messaging infrastructure to provide two way SMS communication and transaction capabilities, and SMS and MMS marketing capabilities in multiple languages.
Bank of Queensland (BoQ) has trialled a new service from tech vendor EDS that helps companies calculate energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions generated by their IT infrastructures.
With best execution requirements under MiFID still ill-defined, trade monitoring systems need to be inherently flexible. eflow global has built on its transaction hub technology to build a comprehensive transaction monitoring platform that also provides a channel to share data and reports with buy-side clients to demonstrate transparency.
With MiFID leading to new venues for European equities execution, the impact of fragmentation has been debated in the industry for some time. But how to track if, and to what pattern, that liquidity fragmentation is happening? Enter the Fidessa Fragmentation Index (FFI).