Last year we set out to determine how IT leaders think about open source, why they choose it and what they intend to do with it in the future. The result was The 2019 State of Enterprise Open Source: A Red Hat Report, and the findings were clear and confirmed what we see happening in the industry.

Kahina van Dyke, one of the leading women in the Fintech sector, has joined Standard Chartered’s Corporate, Commercial and Institutional Banking division (“CCIB”) as Global Head, Digital Channels and Client Data Analytics.

Kahina joins from Ripple, the blockchain-based enterprise payments company, where she was Senior Vice President, Business & Corporate Development. She was previously Global Director, Financial Services and Payments at Facebook, and previously spent several years at Mastercard and Citigroup.

The Swedish tech bank Northmill hires Arash Eftekhari as its new Chief Product Officer. Arash has extensive experience from scaling up and boost efficiency in product organizations and most recently he held the role of Product Manager at Klarna. In that position, Arash led the development of services such as Shipping Service and Instant Shopping. Previously, Arash held similar roles at Qliro and Schibsted. His mission at Northmill is to lead product development aiming to strengthen the connection between the product and the user. Arash becomes part of the bank’s Management Team.

Worldline, the European market leader in payment and transaction services, has been selected to provide state-of-the art payment solutions to Subway® restaurants across Europe. Worldline’s solution includes POS and E-Commerce acceptance as well as payment terminals operating with the new NEXO retailer protocol. This sets the standards for easy interoperability with all NEXO-compliant cash registers. The roll-out is planned across multiple markets starting in 2020.

OTB Ventures (OTB), a leading venture capital fund specialised in investments in technology companies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), today announces the launch of its early growth technology fund – the largest venture capital fund in CEE - with $100m in commitments from international institutional investors, including the European Investment Fund (EIF), and high-profile backers including Greg Jankilevitch.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the premier post-trade market infrastructure for the global financial services industry, today announced that 138 clients have signed up to adopt, and more than 30 vendors have partnered with, DTCC’s multi-award winning Global Trade Repository (GTR) service, in order to meet their regulatory obligations under the forthcoming European Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR).

Israel Discount Bank announced today that it has partnered with Integral to deploy new eFX workflow automation and trading technology to drive business growth. 

What is the Product/Service?

As their customers have become increasingly reliant on online and mobile services in the past few years, banks have undergone massive transformation. The ongoing quest to offer better experiences for today’s digital-first consumers has forced banks to transition into software businesses as much as they are financial services providers. However, a transformation of such magnitude has introduced new challenges, which have seen the banks blighted by increasingly frequent IT failures.

Services in real time are already part of the customers’ everyday life – financial institutions also follow this trend. Česká spořitelna, the biggest commercial bank in the Czech Republic, is a company of the Viennese Erste Group Bank AG and, since autumn 2019, provides real-time payments for its customers. For this purpose, valantic’s Real Time Payment Engine has been implemented. For more than 20 years, the technology company develops software for payment, investment banking and transaction management.