Middle and Back Office Solutions Insights

The year 2020 has proved unusually testing for the financial services industry. Yet, in the face of added pressures created by the pandemic, efforts to migrate to the new global standard for payments messaging – aka ISO 20022 – have continued, albeit with a few added changes. Recognising concerns that many banks would struggle to... read more

The ISO 20022 messaging standard will see banks sending and receiving payment messages with far richer data than before. Many are – understandably – preoccupied with the practical challenges that this will bring, such as how they can translate between MT and MX message formats. However, what should not be forgotten is that the new... read more

The UK is a leader in the field of open banking. 2019 was a mammoth year for the country’s open banking ecosystem, when UK open banking hit one million users, regulated providers grew to 204 and there were 1.25 billion API calls. There is no doubt open banking has helped lift London into a position of global leadership in the fintech... read more

In September the UK’s Open Banking implementation body (OBIE) announced a significant uptake in the number of Open Banking service uses in the UK, with over two million people now benefiting from Open Banking products. This represents a 100 percent increase in users in just over six months since the start of the global pandemic. Both... read more

A vaccine to the coronavirus will not bring much change in consumer confidence in the next quarter, according to a panel of finance directors at  this year’s CFO Virtual Agenda. “At the moment, we are working on a scenario that the first half of next year most closely looks like the second half of this year,” said Will... read more

By Jean-Christophe Lacour, head of merchant services, payments, Amadeus It’s an unprecedented period in the history of the global travel industry, with the pandemic continuing to suppress the intrinsic demand for air travel that has helped the industry grow in the mid-to-high single digits, for each of the last ten years.  Clearly the... read more

Even though investment firms have very different primary business models and risk profiles as opposed to lending institutions, to date, for regulatory purposes many have been considered credit institutions and accordingly report under the Basel-driven capital requirements regulation (CRR). The CRR approach is too broad to effectively account for... read more

Despite having registered over two million users in the UK, Open Banking is still failing to meet its objectives of creating a more competitive retail banking landscape. “Everything that it's looking to achieve in terms of improving competition and transparency amongst the incumbent banks, and diluting a little bit the reliance on the... read more

The disruption and financial pressures caused by the pandemic are likely to give rise to some common challenges for businesses across sectors, whether the problem concerns a supplier or a customer. While each case will require specific advice, parties should be generally aware of some recent changes to legal remedies available when approaching a... read more