Row 1 - Latest/Ad/Opinon/Ad
Row 1 - Latest/Ad/Opinon/Ad
Fintech: Latest
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MBridge, China’s cross-border digital currency initiative, has entered the minimum viable product stage. It is the world’s most advanced cross-border CBDC and stands on the cusp of playing a pivotal role in the de-dollarization process.
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The absence of staking and the earlier approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds have sucked much of the excitement out of the SEC’s surprising decision to greenlight spot Ethereum ETFs.
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As securities markets shift to T+1, repo is already going intraday with DLR the first of what may be many digital trading platforms to offer JPM Coin for the cash leg.
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Unlike other firms in Latin America, BTG Pactual hides its growing retail digital banking business within its wealth-management division. Why?
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The latest in a string of big appointments at debt capital markets-focused fintech NowCM is a reflection of how the firm must increasingly institutionalize itself as it grows. Markus Sauerland tells Euromoney why change is so difficult in the financial world.
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Banks and regulators are keen to use instant payments to reduce the influence of Visa and Mastercard on the European payments industry – but replacing these two dominant players will be far from easy.
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Blurring the lines in foreign exchange between automation, traditional AI and generative AI runs the risk of undermining trading services by setting unrealistic expectations.
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Twenty-five years ago in Spain, ING launched a branchless bank – still its biggest greenfield retail operation. Euromoney asks Iberia chief executive Ignacio Juliá Vilar what still makes it stand out from both incumbents and newer arrivals.
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Corporates’ longstanding complaint on banks’ payments offerings is that they don’t know what they are being charged for but suspect it is too much. Airwallex now provides an alternative at global scale.
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Digital negotiable instruments offer the prospect of improved working capital and better liquidity, but they face implementation challenges.
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The Brazilian neobank is growing its number of clients faster than perhaps any financial institution on earth. Combine this with static unit costs and the operational leverage potential is big. CFO Guilherme Lago explains how its business model is now focused on the next five to 10 years as open banking generates unprecedented price transparency, customer portability and opportunity.
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Intesa Sanpaolo’s Isybank is the latest in-house neobank to run into trouble. But the desire to migrate core-banking systems onto the cloud is still encouraging other banks to follow this strategy.
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UK fintechs attracted more investment than all European rivals combined in a tough funding market last year, but a broken IPO market leaves them with nowhere to go.
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When clients talk to the world’s biggest listed hedge fund, market complexity, the use of technology and the need for customised solutions loom large in the conversation. Man Group’s president Steven Desmyter tells Euromoney how the firm’s evolving structure and approach reflect the priorities of the asset allocators it serves.
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The challenges around distributed ledger technology implementation and integration for bond issuance have proved more significant than early proponents had hoped.
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XP has succeeded in Brazil by using its technological efficiencies to win on digital experience and price. But now the incumbents are catching up and XP chief executive Thiago Maffra is focusing on developing service beyond pure online delivery.
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Asset managers and industry regulators face operational challenges around the tokenization of private assets.
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The UK startup is now a fully regulated bank and private funds are backing its vision to embed regulated banking in non-financial companies as well as fintechs.
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Many vendors believe corporate treasurers should be doing more to eliminate superfluous accounts, protect payment data and direct resources to improving paper-based processes.
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The leading neobanks in Brazil seem to have hit their stride in terms of profitability just as some of the traditional banks have stumbled. Are these firms the future of Brazilian banking?
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Domestic companies launch banking-as-a-service models as the country's central bank creates space for new entrants.
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Traditional custodians are maintaining their dominance in the face of growing fintech activity in the sector.
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No industry will be more overwhelmingly affected by new forms of artificial intelligence – both generative-AI and other technology to come – than banking. Costly but cost-effective, it is up to banks to make AI work for them, not the other way around.
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Investors will be hoping that the fall in the value of Bitcoin since US regulators approved the listing and trading of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded products is not a sign of things to come.
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They already dominate the investment banking business in Europe, and now the leading US banks have their eyes on an even bigger prize. They see their vast investments in the digital technology transforming payments and transaction services and their retained global presences as the keys to winning even greater revenues from Europe’s midsize corporates.
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Collaboration between national banks has seen widespread adoption of mobile payments schemes. The French and German-led approach of focusing on a single European scheme could therefore be seen as a distraction. But is it the only real way of keeping US payment companies at bay?
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Siemens is anchor client for a new rules-based approach to banking.
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More and more bond trading is automated. As volatility now shifts from rates to credit that will provide a stern examination of new trade execution tools.
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The use of AI for ESG reporting and assessments is spreading, and regulators can’t keep up. Lenders need to factor in a new set of governance risks that are hard to identify.
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Kenyan authorities have cleared Flutterwave of wrongdoing following an anti-money-laundering case in the East African nation. Nevertheless, industry confidence in the Africa-focused payments company remains mixed.
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While the air at the Singapore Fintech Festival was full of grand ideas about GenAI, real innovation was taking place in the weeds of fintech development.
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Sector shows strong profit performance in the third quarter as asset quality improves.
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Corporates are taking a big punt on markets remaining relatively benign, given their apparent lack of confidence in existing FX technology and systems.
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Transaction banks must help their corporate clients to make the best use of new technologies, but without burdening them with unsustainable IT spending commitments.
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The big custody banks are pursuing a variety of digital-asset custody strategies to encourage wider market participation from institutional clients.
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While banks have accelerated digital solutions across business lines, accomplishing end-to-end digitalization of global trade remains far beyond their reach. The complexity of supply-chain finance remains a challenge, and banks continue to hunt for scalable solutions. Embedded finance could be the answer.
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The inability of trade-finance participants to fully leverage the value of the data generated by transactions remains a source of frustration, particularly for small businesses.
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Banks may be retreating from lending directly to small and medium-sized enterprises, but by lending to credit specialists with good technology they can still be a source of funding for the sector.
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It took five years for the invoice finance specialist Accelerated Payments to advance its first €1 billion, but just nine months for the next €500 million.
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Digital banks look to online games to help drive retention.
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Euromoney talks to Jacques Levet, chief digital officer at BNP Paribas, about the competitive advantage that newly acquired FX fintech Kantox offers.
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As other investment banks cut staff, HSBC has been hiring to build a leading bank in tech and healthcare.
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For decades, transaction banking was a profitable but largely ignored corner of the banking industry. Then Covid happened. Today, bank chiefs see it as critical to everything they do. Given the challenges ahead – collaborating with fintechs and embedding ESG principles in global supply chains – the revolution under way in this business is unstoppable.
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The Brazilian bank is focused on new initiatives aimed at boosting active-user rates, including a new global app and buy-now-pay-later product.
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Corporates appreciate the value of APIs when it comes to connectivity for services such as payment order transfers, cash balance updates and payment status updates. But a lack of uniform data standards continues to hinder their wider adoption.
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While central banks announce the latest controlled tests on blockchain-based digital money, a handful of leading commercial banks are already in full production.
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With Apple set to take an even bigger bite out of UK in-person transaction volumes, rival providers of payment technology will be looking to up their game.
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Credit growth is a key driver of stellar earnings from India’s banks as the country completes its recovery from Covid-19, but another driver is digital traction.
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With artificial intelligence already widely used for tasks such as trend analysis, the focus has turned to how artificial general intelligence could chat with FX traders to help them fine-tune their decisions, as well as automate order execution and currency monitoring.
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What African fintechs need is supportive regulation, local capital and the development of talent. Singapore wants to show them the way.
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Tyme Bank’s experience with grant recipients in South Africa demonstrates the need to link up banking innovation to the real-world requirements of customers.
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Better AML controls across traditional financial systems have increased the appeal of international trade as a conduit for fraud.
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Japan is the first major market to put a regulatory environment around stablecoins into law.
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Leading firms join a new network of networks, but crypto natives see just another walled garden.
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Recent developments in crypto have hardened the view that convergence between digital and fiat currency trading structures is both inevitable and desirable.
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The big transaction banks are becoming increasingly active in the B2B marketplace as they seek to cash in on corporate digital transformation.
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The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has fuelled an abrupt end to venture-capital exuberance. There are vital implications for fintech and for the banking industry.
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The acquisitive fintech group reckons it can accelerate the transition from legacy FX technology by making it easier for tech firms to get their products to market.
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Growing treasury demand for advisory services from banks suggests that investment in predictive analytics applications at the latter is starting to bear fruit.
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The French investment bank is taking a bet on a double-edged blockchain technology to stay ahead of both the tokenization and sustainability trends.
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A flurry of collaborations and the acquisition of Nivaura’s technology is putting NowCM in a key position in the digital capital markets ecosystem. Its focus on real-time issuance and its ownership of a regulated marketplace may have just become even more relevant.
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Pakistan has been trying to improve financial inclusion for the last 20 years with little success. Are new digital licences the answer?
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The former Barclays chief executive is set to scale up the core banking-technology provider that aims to do banking 10 times better.
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Patents are a high-profile demonstration of a bank’s commitment to innovation, but they are not the only option for those looking to encourage new ways of thinking.
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Droit helps traders decide in milliseconds if deals comply with the ever-changing rules and aims to do the same for wealth managers.
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Tokenization is spreading fast. Regulated finance is finally embracing blockchain technology just as most cryptocurrencies stand revealed as overleveraged Ponzi schemes. The institutional herd is moving, but can the blockchains they are shifting onto bear the load?
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Banks’ digital-transformation ambitions continue to be checked by difficulties in combining customer data from disparate systems and sharing information across the industry.
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As the EU prepares to vote on its Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation in April, the UK government is hoping to steal a march as a location for cryptoasset businesses.
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The volume of FX trading where there is a possibility of one or more parties failing to deliver on the terms of the trade has prompted various initiatives to find better options for settlement – but the talk is still more about potential than delivery.
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New platform acts as central account keeper under Luxembourg law for first ever sterling bond deal on blockchain.
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As the crypto edifice teeters, there is still one last chance for decentralized finance. If it can encode regulatory compliance into real-world financial assets issued in tokenized form and then trade, clear and settle in seconds at negligible cost and low risk, it might just survive.
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The Australian Securities Exchange took a leap of faith in commissioning Digital Asset to build a blockchain replacement for its clearing and settlement engine five years ago – perhaps too big a leap. Here, Digital Asset’s CEO explains what went wrong and what was learned.
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Three years ago, LTS Ventures was tasked with building a simple microfinance platform for Laos’s army of village banks and savings unions. It took off like a rocket, boosting financial inclusion, cutting fraud. Now the firm is eyeing fresh external funding and expansion across southeast Asia.
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Concerns about the wider economy and its impact on disposable income have eroded individuals’ appetite for FX trading, despite attractive levels of volatility.
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While other economic blocs aren’t so convinced of the merits of issuing retail central bank digital currency, the eurozone is ploughing ahead. In doing so, however, it is having to water down the project to such an extent that its usefulness will be limited.
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The dominance of embedded finance and BaaS by fintechs is now being challenged by established financial institutions.
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The DAC space is crowded. Nevertheless, BNY Mellon has gone further than most of its peers in embracing crypto.
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DeFi is touted as a solution to the multi-trillion dollar global trade-finance gap, despite tech concerns.
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In a highly unusual step, Singapore’s sovereign wealth vehicle has spelled out how and why it bought into the FTX story.
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NatWest digital SME bank Mettle has broken new ground in its partnership with Polish fintech firm Vodeno.
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The chief executive of JPMorgan’s Onyx blockchain business explains why it has been a long slog, and where the interest lies today after the crypto collapse.
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While fintechs have been thriving in Brazil and throughout Latin America, the region’s local stock exchanges have failed to attract IPOs.
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Three-quarters of a century ago, the state of Israel didn’t exist. Today, it is a leader in technologies ranging from plant-based meat to cybersecurity. Huge sums of new wealth are being created by ambitious entrepreneurs, much of it recycled into new ideas by risk-taking investors.
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DBS, JPMorgan and Japan’s SBI combined to launch a groundbreaking decentralized finance trade stewarded by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. It was a great deal of work, but to what end?
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The French bank has continued its string of direct investments in fintechs this year and is looking for more with VC fund Anthemis.
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As corporate APIs are catching up their consumer-focused equivalents, many doubt they can replace legacy options.
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Banks must keep spending on systems that deliver more efficient anti-money laundering as crises spur financial crime.
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The $100 million line of credit from Dai holders to a Pennsylvania community bank to support commercial loans should have been a breakthrough, but further deals are on hold as the crypto purists fight back against the pragmatists seeking more exposure to real-world assets rather than digital ones.
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When the founders of Belgian digital disruptor Abbove held a meeting with 120 wealthy families, all had the same tale of woe, unable to grasp the complexity of their money and getting little help from their private bankers. Abbove set out to create a platform to let them do just that.
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The launch of new digital banks backed by Standard Chartered, FairPrice, Grab and Singtel comes at an interesting time. Both emerge into a very different world than the one in which they applied for licences. Success will rest upon exploiting the ecosystems of their founders.
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In its latest funding round, Brazilian-based Creditas proved that valuations for the stronger fintechs can buck the falling trend seen among the large, publicly listed startups.
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A new automated bookbuilding system lets asset managers gather orders from peers and retain control of the toughest equity trades in thin markets.
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New trading protocols offer some hope that investors may find the other side of the trade, but turnover in normally liquid bonds can suddenly collapse.
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Holders of cryptocurrency pay a heavy price for greater privacy.
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UK regulators have pushed big banks to establish an innovative form of payment that could leave fintechs struggling.
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The failures of we.trade and HSBC’s Serai highlight the challenges that blockchain-based solutions face.
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Businesses are tying up cash in payroll that could be used to boost working capital.
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BRI’s digital banking unit is using a vast agent ecosystem to distribute its products to Indonesia’s gig economy.
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The blockchain-based cross-border payments platform will operate across 15 countries.
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The International Chamber of Commerce is confident the UK Centre for Digital Trade & Innovation will spur standards.
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Digitalizing and automating its FX risk management has notably improved a pharma's treasury function.
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The stablecoin is preparing an audit with a top 12 firm, chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino tells Euromoney. Why is Tether not already providing more transparency on its reserves?
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Artificial intelligence has revolutionized cash-flow forecasting at educational services provider Pearson.
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A new approach to crypto derivatives could signal big structural shifts for traditional financial derivatives away from intermediaries and central clearing.
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Demographics and technology are creating new markets for financial services in population segments long ignored by traditional banks. The region is seeing a feeding frenzy in fintech startups – and the banks are responding with a new strategy: get ready to meet ‘co-opetition’.
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Banks in the Gulf are embracing blockchain, fintech, cryptocurrencies and AI as they look to cater to changing consumer demands and a rapidly evolving financial landscape.
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As their involvement in fintech matures, large banks are focusing on building standalone digital businesses rather than just taking stakes in third-party startups through venture capital funds and accelerators. Can these new in-house ventures disprove the thesis that incumbent banks can’t create disruptive business models?
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Payment service providers have welcomed the UK Payment Systems Regulator’s plan to promote account-to-account payments, but much needs to be done to boost take-up.
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BNP Paribas’s top private banker talks to Euromoney about his love of Brittany’s rough seas, the power of ESG, and digital’s ability to transform and improve every step of the client journey.
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The UK bank’s new fund aims to deliver metaverse-themed investment opportunities to wealthy clients in Hong Kong and Singapore.
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Egypt’s supportive regulation, together with the impact of Covid, saw cashless payments in the country grow by more than 230% last year. Now fintechs, banks and state-owned platforms all want a piece of the action.
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South Korea’s KakaoBank is unusual among Asian pure-play digital banks, in that it is not only growing fast but is also profitable. Having harvested the low-hanging fruit of wallet balances, it is now building higher-fee products. And last year’s listing showed just how much belief there is in the story.
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The rule change will be phased in, but shares in publicly listed fintechs dip.
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From cash management to cybersecurity, Euromoney looks at where treasury teams are likely to be spending their money in 2022.
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China’s approach to central bank digital currency offers clues to how it may build a unique version of decentralized finance.
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Despite China’s ambitious plans for its digital currency, the e-yuan will struggle to become a lead player in international trade finance without notable changes, most importantly to capital controls.
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Sovereign wealth funds, other investors and banks will soon have to use cryptocurrencies to buy equity in companies building the decentralized web.
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After the 2020 sale of its US bank, BBVA’s global ambitions in retail are alive and well. It has entered Brazil with digital bank Neon, ploughed more capital into UK app-based lender Atom Bank and launched in Italy in a way that presages branchless growth across the eurozone.
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Despite the current financial turmoil, proponents of de-dollarization still have a mountain to climb. But blockchain and digital currencies could put their goal within eventual reach.
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The early days of war in Ukraine saw the price of bitcoin rise. New technology now improves the prospect that wealth stored in crypto may be spent.
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Oligarchs that use shell companies and fake identities may dodge the pain of Russian banks being shut out from Swift, heaping it on innocent people instead.
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Wyoming is wild, rugged and libertarian. It is now also America’s leading crypto state, home to thriving digital asset banks like Avanti, run by Wall Street veteran Caitlin Long. Can these young firms now get much-prized master accounts with the Federal Reserve?
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If regulated investors are to buy bonds on blockchain, incumbent infrastructure providers such as CSDs must embrace the very technology that threatens their traditional role.
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Portion’s Jason Rosenstein explains why he paid $1.2 million for a plot of virtual land amid the goldrush of corporations launching their brands in the metaverse.
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Money is pouring into the metaverse as investors try to pick the winners from the coming transformation of e-commerce through Web 3. Banks are struggling to find their role. They must do so, because the biggest risk is missing out.
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Beny Podlubny, head of XP Private, talks to Euromoney about the metaverse, risk appetite, international expansion and why Brazilian clients like to keep things close to home.
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Facebook never recovered from the regulatory hostility that first greeted Libra. It is now selling what is left of Diem while building the very metaverses that might make its stablecoin useful.
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The launch of ISY Bank spearheads a new cloud-banking strategy at the Italian lender as it seeks to reduce costs, counter fintech and target international retail growth.
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The float of LIC will shatter all of India’s records in the equity capital markets. It is also an opportunity to prove a newfound maturity in India, already illustrated by a range of highly successful tech deals in 2021.
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Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are muscling in on the booming market for private share trading – and potentially disrupting existing technology platforms.
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Non-bank lenders are offering growing volumes of embedded finance both wholesale to merchants selling on e-commerce marketplaces and to their retail customers.
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The former CFTC chair who first authorized bitcoin futures sees regulatory complexities ahead for crypto, blockchain and DeFi companies.
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Citi’s decision to withdraw from consumer banking in Mexico demonstrates the extent to which fintech players have transformed this market. How prepared are the other incumbents to take on the competition?
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Analysts see augmented reality creating new economies worth trillions of dollars in the metaverse, where people are already spending real money on virtual real estate and will want to spend virtual earnings in the real world.
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As legacy banks plough billions into fintech, their valuations – especially compared to standalone fintech players – are far from seeing the desired benefit. Spin-offs and subsidiary IPOs are part of a growing push to make these fintech investments more independent and visible, and to force a sum-of-parts valuation. Is the answer to restructure into a listed financial holding company, of which the legacy bank would just be one part?
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The digital banking expert and recently appointed chair of the UK board of Zip is confident that the buy-now-pay-later sector has nothing to fear from forthcoming regulation.
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Liquidnet’s network of asset managers might see big benefits from automating new issue data and workflows from TC Icap’s bank customers.
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The Peronist playbook is back in force: Argentina’s monetization of fiscal deficits relies on the banking system buying central bank and government securities. This time around the movie has a new subplot: credit growth in both the corporate and retail sectors is increasingly taking place outside the traditional banking sector.
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Chief executive of commercial banking Doug Petno says advanced payments technology rather than lending is the key to winning mid-market clients.
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Banco Pan’s turnaround has taken another step forward with its acquisition of ecommerce platform Mosaico. Chief executive Carlos Eduardo Guimarães talks to Euromoney about the importance of growth with profitability.
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A new venture capital investment firm targeting private technology companies is deploying a multi-directional strategy that it hopes will make money from start-ups that are overvalued as well those on the rise.
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Bank of America’s global and Asia-Pacific heads of receivables tell Euromoney how their artificial intelligence-powered intelligent receivables service has slashed client-matching error rates.
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Private wealth clients, niche asset managers and sophisticated trading firms could all have appetite for tokenized trade finance.
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Designed to bring fixed-rate term financing to DeFi protocols offering only volatile overnight rates, Pairwyse could impact traditional swaps and repo.