Services Insights

Extreme remote banking – a term encompassing the provision of banking services to extremely remote, rural communities – should be a key focus for every UK retail bank right now. Why? There are potential ramifications of new legislation on banks as well as ethical reasons for banks maintaining access to financial services for small... read more

Four gambling businesses have been fined £4.5 million for failing to put in place effective safeguards to prevent money laundering as the UK Gambling Commission works to improve anti-money laundering (AML) compliance for online gambling. The announcement - a result of an ongoing investigation into online casinos - comes on the heels of the... read more

Many banks and Financial Services (FS) firms have considered deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address specific challenges or improve particular functions within their organisation. A number of them are already on their own AI journey, and the ROI and benefits of AI in their businesses are becoming clearer and more tangible. One area of... read more

The Eurosystem project to consolidate TARGET2 and T2S and to meet changing market needs by enabling a truly real-time 24x7 settlement infrastructure for cash, securities and collateral aims at increasing efficiencies and optimising liquidity management across all TARGET Services. The go-live is scheduled for November 2021, with a big bang... read more

Former RBS exec Caroline Rainbird named FSCS CEO UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) has appointed Caroline Rainbird as its new CEO, effective of May 4. Rainbird brings with her over 30 years of experience, including senior positions at RBS between 2009 and 2017. Commenting on the transition, FSCS chairman Marshall Bailey... read more

Front-to-back is this season’s new black. Accelerated by the rapid rise of alternatives, which presents new costs and challenges, buy-side firms are now seeing the benefits of multi-asset, end-to-end solutions. With increased volumes of data and the complexity of alternatives instruments, the need to consolidate fragmented, inhibiting and... read more

A fintech agreement between Cambodia and Singapore authorities provides an opportunity for the former’s underbanked and underbanked population, according to lawyers, while the vice president of both Cambodia and Singapore’s fintech associations says lessons can be learned from both central banks’ implementations of blockchain. ... read more

In 2017, the US joined the global move towards real-time payments (RTPs) with The Clearing House’s launch of the RTP system. Rapid take-up since then among the largest banks means the system now covers almost half of the total demand deposit accounts in the US. However, volumes remain low and many banks are still not connected. So,... read more

A number of large conglomerates with exposures in European commodity derivatives are still relying on manual processes such as Excel to collate data and comply with the second Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II), according to lawyers. “Some of our clients have had to do it manually, so they’ve had to allocate people... read more