Euroclear Bank, the Brussels-based international central securities depository (ICSD), and China Construction Bank (CCB) have today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to further develop the offshore Renminbi (RMB) capital market. 

CCB Chairman Wang Hongzhang, Euroclear group Chairman Marc Antoine Autheman, and Euroclear Chief Technology and Services Officer Lieve Mostrey attended the signing ceremony, joined by the Prime Minister of the  People’s Republic of China, Li Keqiang, and the Belgian Prime Minister, Charles Michel. 

Thirty six fintech startups in France have banded together in a bid to foster a national ecosystem for innovation in financial services.

 Although 73 percent of respondents to a recent Reval survey of more than 200 finance professionals report that they have already centralized control in payments management, 70 percent indicate they will centralize further in 2015.

For a technology still searching for dominance, wallets have come an awful long way. It wasn’t actually long after the birth of the internet, that the notion of a digital wallet, where consumers store and spend money online, emerged. Many forget that the pioneer electronic wallets of the mid-nineties were desktop software.  And since PayPal launched and Amazon patented stored-card, one-click payments, our biggest technology companies have tried to innovate by finding new ways to optimise offline payment mechanisms for a digital world.

Atom, the designed for digital challenger to the UK banking market, is partnering with FIS™ (NYSE: FIS), a global leader in banking and payments technology as well as consulting and outsourcing solutions, to serve banking customers on the go.

The 2015 Digital Leaders 100 list honours the highest digital achievements from across the UK’s public, private and non-profit sectors, celebrating individuals and organisations which are leveraging digital to transform the UK’s public services and its social and economic opportunities.

The new biometric identification feature is being rolled-out to CEO Mobile iPhone app users in 2016. The bank says that identifying a combination of customers’ faces, voices, and mobile devices will make it extremely difficult for bad actors to spoof the true user.

“Biometric technology is emerging and accelerating change in financial services,” says Danny Peltz, executive vice president and head of treasury management at Wells Fargo. “We continue to explore and test new safeguards for our business customers.”

SimCorp announces that it has signed a license agreement with one of the UK’s largest and longest established investment houses.

The investment manager has selected SimCorp’s Investment Book of Record (IBOR) to provide position information across all asset classes, including cash, to be available as needed by the front office and other stakeholders. The IBOR functionality will be based on SimCorp’s investment management solution, SimCorp Dimension.

Through this agreement FinWire has widen its distribution by entering into a global redistribution agreement with Thomson Reuters.

The agreement enables all FinWire news consisting of FinWire Small Cap and FinWire Social Media to become globally available in Thomson Reuters Eikon and Thomson Reuters Feed Solutions.

Recent SWIFT data shows that the growth in RMB payments is supported by an increasing number of banks. In May 2015, 1,081 financial institutions used the RMB for payments with China and Hong Kong, representing 35% of all institutions exchanging payments with the latter across all currencies. This is a 22% increase in the number of institutions using the RMB and a 6% increase in adoption, up from 29% two years ago.