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.
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More financial institutions are moving into the banking-as-a-service market to tap into demand from corporates looking to offer multiple payment options and enhance customer loyalty.
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Nobody doubts that cross-border payments could be more efficient and less laden with intermediaries. But are JPMorgan and Oliver Wyman right to suggest that central bank digital currencies are the answer?
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Proponents of the technology have described non-fungible tokens as a unique opportunity to establish ownership of specific assets across the trade finance spectrum. Are they right?
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A new blockchain-based payments platform is backed by JPMorgan, DBS and Temasek. It is the source of some pride to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, as the new business is the result of a long-term financial experiment.
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Citi hopes to gain an edge in the highly competitive – and lucrative – securities services market by teaming up with data cloud company Snowflake to improve information flows across transactions.
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A new poll by the data-room technology provider finds that worries over the potential for post-deal value destruction because of climate change have added to a risk environment already heightened by the coronavirus pandemic.
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All-in-one TMSs are not about to disappear, but with fintechs developing solutions focused on specific treasury functions, using more than one platform is a viable option.
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JPMorgan’s move into the in-vehicle payments market reflects the ever-growing impact of financial technology on the automotive industry.
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Liquidators are the hidden predators lurking in decentralized finance protocols waiting to snap up collateral at big discounts from the unwary.
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The only way banks can fully embrace the blockchain technology now transforming finance is by dealing in cryptos.
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Francesca Nenci, the recently appointed global head of trade finance at UniCredit, talks to Euromoney about the bank’s trade finance business and the client trends that will shape her approach to her new position.
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As conventional banks, asset managers and regulators embrace crypto, the institution warns this large and volatile asset class poses new risks to the world financial system.
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Many parts of Africa present formidable obstacles to financial inclusion. Euromoney speaks to some of the pioneers that are using technology to bring far-flung populations into the financial system.
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Widespread use of digital currencies will reshape the way liquidity is managed, but it will also force banks and corporates to move away from long-established practices.
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The vast majority of Bangladesh’s consumer economy happens through small shops shackled by logistics, scale and access to capital. ShopUp aims to bring some of the fintech and financial inclusion principles we have seen elsewhere to this highly populated and fast-growing country.
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After reaching 10 million users this month, the firm is raising funds and seeking licences in Turkey and the EU.
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The likely use of central bank digital currency for payments, in addition to stablecoins and altcoins, would suggest that reports of the demise of the correspondent banking model may be premature.
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Neobanks are targeting less wealthy people in both developed and developing markets – a constituency that has traditionally been neglected by incumbent banks because of legacy costs. But it’s an increasingly political issue and where does this leave people who still need access to cash and branches?
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Societe Generale’s decision to launch a joint treasury management solution with Kyriba is just the latest example of banks and technology vendors collaborating to offer more sophisticated treasury functionality.
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The US bank has launched the next generation of its global virtual account management solution to clients in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands.
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Australia is an interesting market for those wondering how neobank models might evolve, as it has already experienced success, failure, and sale to the incumbents.
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While big banks and institutional investors spent years trying to bend blockchain for use in traditional finance, they missed out on the boom in crypto prices and the income from decentralized finance. Now, alarmed by stretched valuations and zero yields in conventional markets, they just want in. The race is on to build a sturdy infrastructure to support the stream of old money into new digital assets that could become a flood.
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High net-worth individuals once eschewed cryptocurrencies. When Covid hit, many learned to embrace them. They see the danger of endless QE and the returns to be generated in the world of decentralized finance.
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With venture capital flooding in, the world’s biggest neobanks are more confident than ever. They still face serious questions about their long-term profitability and regulators are certainly paying them more attention, but amid the upheaval of Covid-19, freedom from legacy infrastructure has proved even more important than ever. The incumbents are rightly worried.
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A joint venture between the Asia-heavy bank and a Chinese supply chain tech player aims to make trade finance an alternative asset class with digital efficiency.
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Digital identities are evolving fast as lenders, tech firms and governments roll out platforms to make it easier to shop, invest and constantly prove who you are. Banks – still trusted despite myriad scandals and crises – are at the heart of this process: a situation that is unlikely to change.
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With one of the earliest fintechs now offering bitcoin, it seems that established finance is taking over crypto. Or could it be the other way around?
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Various fraud prevention technologies are deployed across the payments industry, but there are still areas where technology is underutilized in combatting fraud related to cybercriminal attacks.
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Institutions need more than custody to invest in fast-changing digital assets. The new firm will build administration and risk management too.
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As fintechs approach 10% of the banking and payments universe, the pioneer venture investor and founder of Capital One says banks must learn to partner with them or begin to lose ground.
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IPC and Overbond aim to feed bond algos with voice trade conversations as structured data. They will then apply them to riskier and less liquid debt.
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Newer data formats offer greater treasury efficiency, but geographical restrictions and limited standardization mean that many corporates remain reluctant to abandon older specifications.
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The $33 billion valuation in neobank Revolut’s latest funding round puts it in the same league as lenders with trillions of assets and billions in profit.
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Banks are slowly realising the commercial promise of data and data analytics products, but there is still a long way to go for many institutions to move beyond services that deliver limited business insight.
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Given the standardization and interoperability challenges facing digital letters of credit, could wider use of digital trade finance platforms accelerate the development of alternative solutions?
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New platforms that underwrite and process invoices due from large creditworthy payers may encourage bank and institutional financing for small and medium-sized enterprises.
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Fintechs are caught in a brutal competitive squeeze between losses on businesses they are good at and the urgent need to offer new ones.
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More fintechs are selling out to big incumbent banks, but the German pair would rather merge to achieve their vision of savings as a service.
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Digitalization may be a hot topic in the treasury world, but many financial institutions remain unconvinced that the benefits justify the cost and disruption involved in moving away from in-house servers or manual signatures.
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As provider to the London Stock Exchange and DBS on digital new issue platforms, Nivaura is laying the foundations for the future of DCM.
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A platform that promises to shake up the FX swaps market has taken another tentative step towards its objective of reducing banks’ liquidity buffer challenge.
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We are at the peak of the hype cycle for central bank digital currencies, now being touted as one of the most fundamental innovations in the history of central banking. It is time for central banks and governments to be honest with unenthused populations. CBDC can’t deliver all the many promised improvements. As we come to design choices, there will be trade-offs. We might get improved payments but less credit. We could see greater financial inclusion but will lose privacy. Are the few benefits really worth the risk of disrupting the financial system?
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With margin requirements rising sharply, banks must do a much better job managing surpluses and shortages of collateral across all their businesses.
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Paytm, whose largest shareholder is Ant Group/Alibaba, could raise India’s largest-ever IPO. It should be smoother than Ant’s own failed attempt, and that tells us something about changing regulatory positions.
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Payments company prices above range as it shrugs off regional valuation constraints on Nasdaq debut.
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Banks have responded to fintech innovation in credit risk assessment by introducing more sophisticated processes for determining the financial health of trade finance customers.
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Holding digital assets on corporate balance sheets demands a clear strategy for securely managing these assets alongside traditional stores of value.
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Corporates looking to acquire digital assets for treasury purposes need to take care in their accounting treatment.
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There are hopes that the innovation will assist with financial inclusion. But is gold ownership the way to achieve this?
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With a focus on the relationship between an issuer and its bond underwriters, the fintech reckons it can fill a gap that is not being addressed by others.
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The leading FX banks have introduced notable enhancements to their electronic trading platforms in recent months in an attempt to make them more attractive to traders that are still working away from their offices.
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Fnality applies for a DLT-based sterling payment system pointing the way to faster and more resilient decentralized financial market infrastructure.
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Bob Diamond, chief executive officer of Atlas Merchant Capital and former CEO of Barclays, explains that while US banks are now well and truly safe, it is focused specialists and upstart technology companies that will drive innovation.
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The Ethereum software company is a pioneer of decentralized finance but also works with the conventional lenders and central banks it threatens.
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The UAE was already a fintech pioneer but Covid turned it into a leader. Banks and government agencies are furiously rolling out blockchain-backed services that do everything from seamless KYC checks to detecting fraud in supply chain financing.
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The cost advantages for some fintechs will become compromised as they begin to build physical operations. Euromoney speaks to Sergio Furio, CEO of Brazilian secured lender Creditas, about moving into the real world.
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JPMorgan’s blockchain units have launched a new validation solution called Confirm. It is another small step towards mainstream use of the technology in payments.
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The Israeli fintech grew fast through the pandemic turmoil. As it prepares a full launch in the US, it will be listed on Nasdaq, but not through an IPO.
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A lack of standardization, together with patchy appreciation of its potential, means open banking continues to struggle to gain traction in many regions.
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The former Commerzbank chief executive and co-head of wealth management at UBS heads a strong team to help company founders with running a public company.
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Yet another platform is attempting to crack the notoriously challenging corporate peer-to-peer FX market with the promise of simplifying trading for buy-side clients.
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Komainu aims to build crypto prime brokerage on top of its institutional-grade custody for digital assets, following $25 million funding round.
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The country’s banks have become accustomed to the disruption caused by the new challengers, but XP Bank could take this to a whole new level.
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Large-scale working from home has raised the spectre of internal fraud, and treasury departments are finding it harder to conduct effective investigations.
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Accelerated technology adoption prompted by the coronavirus pandemic has enabled treasury teams to push ahead with digitalization programmes.
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The dinosaurs of the banking world have recognised the threat from crypto. While there is no simple choice yet for fast and cheap cross-border payments, near instant domestic payments are the new reality.
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More companies are preparing to accept payment in crypto as the number of customers with digital wallets swells. But a confusing proliferation of payment methods means that innovation has made collecting payments harder, not easier.
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Investors modelling prices from data across fragmented and illiquid bond markets find that cloud computing brings speed, while AI offers precision.
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Crypto enthusiasts have hailed the electric car company’s announcement it will accept payment in bitcoin as a ringing endorsement – but not everyone is convinced.
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A fintech built by a team of former Deutsche bankers in Singapore has became the first recipient of investment and partnership from Marketnode, a new venture between Singapore Exchange and Temasek.
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For years, trade finance and cross-border payments have looked ripe for disruption by distributed-ledger technologies. Asia provides some firm examples of breakthroughs, but – in the second of a two-part series – Euromoney asks whether trade finance will always be just that little bit too complicated for the blockchain?
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The fintech’s fast growth highlights the large banks’ inability to adapt their technology to provide basic finance to small businesses.
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Brazil's Nubank is the world’s most valuable fintech in the digital banking space – now worth over $25 billion. In his first interview this year, chief executive and co-founder David Velez explains why he’s in no rush to IPO and why he would rather focus on the huge opportunity left in Brazil and elsewhere in the region.
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SoFi had plenty of options, so its choice of a Spac validates that structure for listing and raising capital. Can it now challenge the biggest US banks?
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New treasury competencies will be needed to cope with future analytical demand after the unprecedented events of 2020.
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After seeing its IPO scratched, China’s Ant Group may have thought that things couldn’t get any worse. But they have, as Beijing takes a hammer to the humbled financial technology firm.
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With the launch of new blockchain and digital currency business Onyx, JPMorgan hasn’t let Covid delay new ideas; in fact, the crisis has helped. Two years after a structural change in treasury services, the bank has updated its ambitions.
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Open banking is making direct bank-to-bank customer payment transfers easier in the ecommerce world and is set to reduce the role of credit cards.
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With investment in technology supporting its Crédit du Nord merger, the bank hopes that product partnerships and a lower cost-to-serve will make it stand out in French retail.
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Brazil’s fintechs and digital challenger banks are making more ground than traditional firms with the central bank’s new payments system.
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The Singapore-based bank believes it is the first in the world to launch a fully-fledged exchange for digital assets, including tokenization, cryptocurrency exchange and custody.
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As a Swiss consortium completes a wholesale central bank digital currency proof-of-concept, is the payments industry ready for CBDCs?
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Speaking at a virtual forum on Tuesday, Guo Shuqing left no one in any doubt as to how China views its big fintech firms. Beijing has come to distrust and even fear them, and the era of big regulation has just begun.
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Fintechs that help smaller banking organizations reap the digital benefits; the pandemic drives short-term results, but the strategy is defensive.
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To get an edge in trading, check the weather forecast.
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The digital dividend dominated the cash management market in 2020. Corporates responded well to those banks that digitalized the services they needed to stay afloat in the choppy waters of a global pandemic.
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The last-minute decision by a unit of China Construction Bank to cancel a trailblazing digital bond sale on a virtual exchange in a Malaysian island tax haven appears connected to a Chinese clampdown in the wake of the axing of Ant Group’s IPO.
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China has done very well out of Singapore’s new digital banking regime, with Ant and Tencent both represented. Grab and Singtel fly the local flag.
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China’s decision to scrap Ant Group’s IPO made headlines around the world. But why did the Party act so late and why is it so concerned about Ant? Euromoney looks at the reasons behind the decision and asks what the future holds for a firm hemmed in by a raft of new rules on everything from online lending to anti-trust and data privacy.
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A new Swiss-Singaporean enterprise styles itself as the world’s first digital asset bank. It is regulated, resembles the structure of a mainstream bank and has some high-visibility advisers and investors, among them Peter Wuffli. Will it work?
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As the rest of the world’s central banks try to catch up with China, one can only wonder about the potential of programmable money.
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The large Japanese lender joins PNC in taking the loan underwriting and monitoring system developed by a new lender to UK SMEs and tested through Covid.
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In the second part of Euromoney’s focus on transaction monitoring, we look at the value of the financial intelligence being generated and how it can be shared more effectively.
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Initiatives to collaborate on financial crime in the payments space continue to be hindered by poor data and compliance systems.
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Fear of Chinese advances with programmable money and Facebook’s Libra are pushing central banks to digital currencies, which may transform financial markets.
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An SEC-registered transfer agent buying an SEC and Finra-registered broker dealer and alternative trading system may boost trading of private equity security tokens.
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Covid-19 adds to the urgency of reorientating retail to e-commerce. Combining Openbank with consumer finance is the logical next step in Santander’s cloud-based banking transformation.
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dLocal payments platform 'exists to solve complexity'
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Within three years a quarter of Europe’s bank branches could be closed – more if the rising M&A wave strengthens. When banks shout about investing in digital for their customers, they want investors to hear they are cutting costs. In the rush to become tech companies could they lose what keeps customers loyal?
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Banco Inter’s chief executive João Vitor Menin is a banking revolutionary. His vision of the bank’s future is a super app, supporting both e-commerce and financial services. He is refreshingly fearless about upsetting the established order.
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Swift regulatory clearance raises fully fledged new bank’s hopes for smooth path to profit in an under-served market segment.
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Private banking and wealth management might sometimes look like the last hold-out against fintech disruption. But experts say talk of competition between technology and the human touch is misplaced: the opportunities for partnership are vast.
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A pilot scheme taking place in Shenzhen this week offers a glimpse into China’s plans to build the world’s first national digital currency.
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No country faces a greater challenge in turning cashless than Myanmar. But KBZ’s digital wallet is making progress, under the supervision of a 29-year-old member of the family dynasty.
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New transaction-services platforms may need more than good digital technology to make headway.
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Brazil’s largest fintech has 5% market share and now poses strategic challenge to market leaders.
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The banking-as-a-service provider enjoys a boost as older banks accelerate digital transformation. It also harbours ambitions to become a cross-border clearing bank.
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The world’s largest asset manager and banking leader work with Saphyre to take the pain out of custody and broker account opening for asset managers.
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Large banks have spent billions on IT to efficiently process standardized products, leaving an opening for local lenders that offer a banker to talk to.
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Despite the fanfare around their announcement, many of the proposed benefits of the 'fintech bridges' or bilateral agreements the UK government has reached with regulators around the world have yet to be realized.
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Grab Financial launched a suite of new products on Tuesday, continuing a swift expansion that has yet to be accompanied by profitability.
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The turmoil created by the coronavirus has given blockchain trade-finance platforms a boost, but many still seem to be talking in terms of potential, rather than actual, business done.
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Rather than just handling payments, one mobile-phone technology entrepreneur wants to extend small lines of short-term credit to the financially excluded.
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Now an independent firm outside ING, Katana is upgrading its algos and scanning more bonds for correlation trades between pairs not normally linked.
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As card fraud, identity theft and cybercrime surge, international banks need cutting edge technology to protect the weak spots in their correspondent networks.
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FX trading algorithms are getting smarter at dealing with crises – and getting more popular as a result.
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Fears that the Covid-19 virus might live on banknotes and coins has focused public attention on once esoteric experiments with central bank digital currency. The virus has also exposed the slow pace of emergency government support payments through the conventional banking system, so what once sounded futuristic may be coming soon. CBDC just got real.
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A shift away from cash due to the Covid-19 lockdowns should be a godsend for firms such as Revolut, N26, Monzo and Starling. But venture capital funds were already getting fed up with neobanks’ growth-first strategies before the coronavirus caused a slump in core payments revenues. Those with weaker equity backing may struggle to survive.
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Europe’s online-only challenger banks are still losing money, despite millions of retail clients in their home continent.
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Everyone is hungry for data to help navigate the coronavirus crisis, but thorny questions remain about consent and privacy.
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Leading firms in emerging Europe welcome a surge in interest in digital payments products and online lending.
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Bank of America has seen mandates increase in the last month as digital solutions become increasingly important to overcome isolation and social-distancing rules.
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Financial technology is not being employed to its best effect, while the coronavirus financial relief effort is struggling. Banks need to innovate and work with fintechs if they are to ensure that the most vulnerable do not get left behind.
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Banca d’Italia plays a key role behind the scenes in embedding distributed ledger at the core of the country’s banking system.
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Machine learning powers new software that can help companies chase down overdue invoices and failed payments without driving customers away.
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Sell-side research is integrating alternative data to navigate the current coronavirus crisis. It’s the future for bank research, but it’s not an easy transition.
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Alternative data can tell in near real time the story of economic and financial market disruption now playing out, but asset managers need artificial intelligence to read it.
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Recruited to set up a national payments system, the central bank’s Olga Skorobogatova has overseen initiatives to protect consumers and promote competition in Russia’s banking sector. In her first interview with international media, she talks sandboxes, blockchain and the challenges of regulating bank ecosystems.
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With offices deserted across the world as coronavirus takes its toll, a virtual dataroom and online M&A software service company may be more relevant than ever
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For a sector reeling from money laundering scandals, it’s tempting to imagine that technology could be a low-cost way of solving such problems. AI could be a game changer for detecting low-level crime, but corporate-scale laundromats will remain tough to crack.
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Digital asset manager Wave Financial may have found just the right moment to launch its whiskey fund.
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Investors, governments and central bankers are using new sources of data to understand the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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True innovators look for new data points to predict delinquency, as traditional credit raters load more transaction history into their scoring models.
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In June, Singapore’s regulator will hand licences to three new wholesale digital banks in a bid to better serve under-banked SMEs. Euromoney talks to Arival Bank, a fintech firm aiming to snag a licence and use it to fuel its global ambitions.
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Retail banking has been disrupted. Now comes wholesale’s moment, as banks shift into a higher gear to meet the increasingly onerous demands of digitally connected corporates. Only the best and most adaptable firms are likely to survive.
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A fully insured, low-cost bitcoin tracker fund with institutional-grade custody is the latest effort to build a bridge for mainstream investors into crypto.
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First central banks ignored cryptocurrencies, then they mocked them, next they fought them and now they are building their own. Before long central bank digital currencies will be in use, with possibly startling consequences. What will it mean for privacy and personal freedoms? And could the backstop to banking become the banking system itself?
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After turning French banking upside down, Compte Nickel is taking its tech-savvy approach to financial inclusion abroad. Insiders say its barebones account service will spread further and keep its dynamism under BNP Paribas ownership. But can a bank for outsiders with a physical network also be the fintech champion of Europe’s banking establishment?
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The premium price for its acquisition of Plaid shows Visa’s determination not to be left behind in the fintech-led transformation gathering pace across financial services.
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Banks in emerging Europe are touting their fintech programmes and credentials, but is the enthusiasm reciprocated by the startup community?
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Partnership with digital investor platform is the latest move by bank’s Sprint fintech team.
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Swift hopes its know your customer (KYC) registry, now open to corporate partners, will succeed in ways in which others have failed, given the institution's not-for profit and cooperative position.
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Singapore-based trade finance portal CamelOne has put blockchain on the backburner to get to market more quickly.
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Small companies with short trading histories and thin credit files make up a growing part of the economy that established banks are not set up to serve.
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BayanPay, a digital payments company owned by London-listed Finablr, has received regulatory approval to operate its mobile money platform in Saudi Arabia, as the Kingdom looks to a future without cash.
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Origin’s simple, scalable technology solution to the inefficiencies of generating final legal documents for MTNs shows the path to success for fintechs in capital markets.
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As the number of financial technology startups in Brazil balloons, there is a growing sense that the pin to puncture their growth is one critical area of operation: credit. Full service in the digital age is a serious, long-term challenge for new entrants and traditional players.
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Facebook has come in for some robust criticism since the announcement of its Libra digital currency.
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The SoFi co-founder’s second act involves eliminating ‘rent seekers’ from the capital markets. Securitizing blockchain-originated loans will go some way towards demonstrating if it can be done.
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The Trade Club Alliance, a new 14-bank partnership to match SME exporters and importers, reflects greater willingness among banks – especially in Europe – to work together against low-cost newcomers, while relinquishing their own global ambitions.
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VTB has long lagged state-owned rival Sberbank in terms of profitability, but with sanctions limiting access to capital the pressure is on to close the gap – chairman Andrey Kostin explains why digital transformation and aggressive retail growth hold the key to success for Russia’s second-largest lender.
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Driven by changes in technology and many new entrants to the business, transaction banking is no longer a boring, old, but stable revenue earner, chugging along in the background. Instead, trade finance and cash management are becoming an exciting and critical area of banking.
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Korea’s first two digital banks have had very different starts: one, kakaobank, is a clear success story; the other, K Bank, badly needs funding but is caught up in a problem around its would-be-biggest shareholder. Korea’s regulator is in it for the long haul and is inviting new digital banks to join them.
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As in financial advisory, so too in asset management: data scientists are the new talents Lazard is seeking to bring in alongside its portfolio managers and analysts.
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The winners in M&A advisory are supposed to be the firms with the best-connected and most-knowledgeable industry experts to advise chief executives, but Lazard’s CEO wants more data scientists to help advisers upgrade their tools for predicting how shareholders will respond to takeover deals.
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Fintechs, banks and government are working together to build clever new digital services and boost financial inclusion in a country where millions are unbanked. For now, collaboration is the name of the game.
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Corporates' increasing need to use treasury resources more efficiently has persuaded BNP Paribas to partner with fintech Kantox to offer a new dynamic hedging solution to clients.
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The company is expanding its UK-tested platform through an agreement with Euronext to bring the retail bid into follow-on offers from listed SMEs across Europe.
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Automation and artificial intelligence are transforming the payments industry into one of the most dynamic sectors of transaction banking. But there are still many teething problems in an industry that has been catapulted onto centre stage.
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Despite being a global leader in IT and semiconductors, Taiwan has long been a digital laggard. The regulator has just issued the island’s first digital banking licences, but is it a simple case of ‘too late’ rather than ‘better late than never’?
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Regulators, politicians, competition authorities and central bankers have all been outlining objections to the Libra project from the first day Facebook announced plans to let its 2.4 billion users exchange payments in a new virtual currency. Don’t be taken in. Facebook wants the burden of compliance with all those KYC, AML and CFT rules. Being able to identify what its users are paying for is a treasure trove. The banking system and the world’s central banks, as the more enlightened already see, had better gear up for new competition.
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Banorte CEO says market will be 'surprised' by what comes next for the bank; fintech growth unlikely to impact bank growth in the short-term.
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Any market sell-off in advance of coming recession will raise the cost for banks of holding their customers’ cash and make them look again at open banking.
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Israel has become one of the world’s most important fintech hubs, attracting millions in investment from some of the biggest global brands and venture capital funds. Can its start-up culture now evolve to grow large fintech businesses at home?
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A reluctance to dispense with legacy technology, combined with heightened regulatory oversight and changing liquidity provision from banks, has seriously complicated the execution management system (EMS) selection process for FX traders.
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Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize trade finance, but a lack of standardization will hinder its adoption.
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Bradesco’s digital bank start-up has grown rapidly and is already looking to leave the bank’s existing corporate structure.
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Digital-obsessed chief executive Ralph Hamers has pushed ING towards what is perhaps the biggest bank transformation in Europe. Can it become a model for how to build a globally competitive retail bank, straddling the continent’s fragmented markets?