Financial IT speaks with Todd Clyde, CEO of Token at Open Banking Expo 2019. Todd Clyde highlights the importance of PSD2 compliance for banks.

There’s little dispute about the economic clout of Generation Z – The adults born after 1997 represent $44 billion in buying power. By 2020, they will make up 40 percent of U.S. consumers. One-quarter of the U.S. population belongs to this group, so it would seem that brands would scramble to court its members.

You have probably seen the headlines about banks not being ready for PSD2 – as the deadline approached and then passed, they were hard to miss. While it is true that less than 50% of banks have met all of the requirements mandated by the EU legislation, this is far from the full story. The open banking outlook for Europe is, in fact, brighter than perhaps you have been led to believe.

Ingenico Group , the global leader in seamless payment, is pleased to announce the appointment of Panteha Pedram, Director of Risk at Ingenico ePayments to Merchant Risk Council’s (MRC) European Advisory Board. The Merchant Risk Council (MRC) is a global trade association providing year-round support and education to fraud and payments professionals globally.

Following the success of its Instant Transfer feature in the U.S., PayPal and Mastercard recently extended the service to Mastercard cardholders in Singapore and a number of European countries.

Mastercard Send™ is an application that leverages the card network infrastructure to facilitate the secure availability of funds in real-time*. With Mastercard Send™, PayPal users can transfer their account balances to eligible Mastercard cards seamlessly and conveniently, typically within seconds*.

The new functionality will utilise Modulr’s Direct Debits Mandate, adding another essential feature that Revolut customers can use in their everyday lives.

This new feature allows Revolut’s EEA customers with local UK account details to make all their regular GBP Direct Debit payments straight from their Revolut accounts, whether that be retail customers paying for their gym memberships, phone contracts, utility bills or subscriptions, or business customers paying supplier bills or regular invoices.

Bankable, the global provider of “Banking as a Service” solutions, and Visa today announced a strategic collaboration within the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) region. Bankable aims to work with Visa to accelerate the digital capabilities of financial institutions’, build and launch digital banks, reduce cash usage and increase Fintech sponsorship in CEMEA.

The service, named Apex, was developed to ensure that private investors can benefit from guaranteed best execution on a European regulated market.  

Apex will be available for the most liquid and fragmented equities and ETFs across the major European markets and guarantees a multilateral and MiFID II compliant trading environment. The new service is backed by Equiduct's pool of liquidity providers and active brokers.  

Though it may seem like everything in the payments space is geared towards boosting conversion, i.e. the amount of times a potential customers completes the intended action of clicking “buy” – and this is indeed the case – I’m here today to tell you about three specific ways in which payment technology can raise the conversion rate, i.e. the amount of times a potential customer completes the intended action of clicking “buy” divided by the amount of website visitors.

Gartner forecasts that by 2020 there will be 21 billion connected “things” in the world. In the coming years, financial institutions will not be able to avoid wondering how this multitude of IoT devices can help their business. Let’s touch upon some IoT use cases in financial services.

How the Internet of Things Changes the Banking and Finance Industry