Ivobank is a new online bank created in 2008 to provide merchants and consumers across a range of internet market sectors with secure, convenient and competitively priced payment services.
Competition among European execution venues and the resulting liquidity fragmentation have led to a need for new types of data feeds and routing capabilities. In December 2008 Fixnetix and Skyler launched Europe's first European consolidated direct feed ticker showing best bids and offers across all major European market venues, as well as the executed prices.
Fast-growing US market operator IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) has launched an internal social networking site to enable staff to communicate with colleagues and find information. Using technology from Jive Software, ICESpace serves as the company's corporate intranet and collaboration platform.
Finextra highlights the most innovative technologies, products and projects in financial services over the last 12 months.
Barclays has deployed an end-to-end automated testing solution from Level Four and Ascert to support the biggest ATM refresh project by a UK bank in over a decade. The bank is moving away from proprietary ATM software and migrating more than 3,000 ATMs to an open standards environment, implementing Windows and packaged software such as Base24 and ProCash.
One of the problems with dark pools of trading liquidity is the "chicken-and-egg" problem of having to place a live order first just to see if there is liquidity available. Liquidnet has helped its buy-side customers avoid this, by delivering streaming liquidity and algorithmic strategies direct to traders.
In December 2008 Lloyds TSB introduced an internal artificial currency and stockmarket in ideas in a bid to foster an innovation culture at the UK bank. Participants in the innovation market publish ideas and identify the best through trading.
Card-not-present fraud incidents are growing, and this is an area of fraud that many companies are trying to address. While EMV smartcards are commonly deployed with unconnected readers to generate one time passwords, Lockstep's Stepwise is the first to fully exploit public key cryptography in chip devices. Thanks to its modifications to traditional the digital signature approach, and use of a connected card reader, it is inherently resistant to man-in-the-middle attacks.
The London Stock Exchange's Exchange Traded CFDs (ETcfds) service will revolutionise the trading of contracts for difference (CFDs) by allowing them to trade alongside the underlying equity in SETS - Europe's most liquid order book for UK equities.
Morgan Stanley has applied to build an off-grid data centre powered by tidal energy in Scotland's Pentland Firth. The proposal follows the acquisition in September 2008 of the US investment bank's Current Resources tidal energy and project management business by Singaporean turbine manufacturer Atlantis. The transaction gave Morgan Stanley a majority stake in the business.
In pilot from August 2008 the NFC Contactless mobile payments service is the first Australian mobile application of near-field communication (NFC) payment technology, loading a NAB Visa credit card securely onto a Telstra SIM card within a mobile phone handset.
Neovia's Net+ cards provide e-wallet customers with cost-effective options for safely shopping online, or withdrawing cash or purchasing at ATMs and retail points of sale that support MasterCard.