Duco, the global fintech provider of data control services, today announced a new engagement with World First, the international payments company. World First will use Duco Cube, the award-winning self-service data control platform, to automate a variety of tasks across treasury and middle office functions.

To see over a quarter of financial services firms making clear their intention to move either jobs or activity from London to another city in Europe is not a surprise. Banks and other financial services companies like certainty and there is currently no clarity on the type of access the UK will have to the Single Market after Brexit, something which will be key to many of these firms’ business models.

SmartStream Technologies, the Transaction Lifecycle Management (TLM^®) specialist, today announced the release of Corona Retail Payments Control, its reconciliations and exceptions management product, capable of supporting a wide-range of retail payments to significantly improve operational efficiency for customers.

The World Trade Board today announced the addition of a new initiative on sustainable trade, alongside its existing three initiatives, as part of its pledge to advance standards and digitalisation in global trade finance.

 Award-winning Horizon Software announced today that it will give clients unparalleled control over their algo trading strategies, with the ability to modify the built-in templates in the Horizon Platform for Automated Trading. The three new templates which can be modified are Quote Reply Market Making, Hedge Volatility Order and Options Arbitrage.

Financial services firms are growing increasingly concerned over the mounting costs and reduced effectiveness associated with customer due diligence. Not only do banks have outdated legacy systems, they are plying them with poor quality data when analysing customer risk. This is what generates such high numbers of false positives.

Gemalto, the world leader in digital security, is partnering with Veridos, a German company specializing in Identity Solutions, to supply contactless electronic ​identity cards (eIDs) to the Macao Special Administrative Region Government (Macao SAR Government). Under the collaboration, Gemalto is the subcontractor responsible for providing the physical cards, enhanced with security features and seamlessly inc​orporating Veridos' operating system software solution.

I got a very interesting heads-up yesterday to a campaign the European FinTech start-ups have kicked off to try and stop the big, nasty banks screwing them with their version of PSD2.  I’ve previously blogged that the banks will implement non-standard APIs to make it difficult to access their services without writing code to work with each bank’s API’s.  This issue goes further than that.  Here’s what they have to say

 Findings of the Industry Sandbox Consultation have been published today.  The Consultation was chaired by Innovate Finance, the UK’s membership association for global FinTech, on invitation by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

The Industry Sandbox Consultation Report identified use cases and design requirements for a successful sandbox development environment that could enable FinTech players to validate innovations as well as to partner in developing new solutions in a neutral ‘off-line’ environment before accessing the market.