Misys, the leading financial software company, has been awarded Best Trade Finance Tech-solutions Company in this year’s Trade Finance Awards for Excellence.

This is the second year in a row that Misys has been awarded the accolade by Trade Finance magazine. The winners are voted for by the industry, allowing the trade finance community to express its views on which companies have demonstrated that they have best met the challenges of globalisation, digitisation, regulation and risk to deliver market-leading solutions for their customers.

Diasoft is pleased to invite Vietnamese financial institutions to attend its business-breakfast “An Introduction to the Digital Banking” which will take place on 30 June 2015 in HoChiMinh City, at Intercontinental Asiana Saigon hotel and on 2d July 2015 in Hanoi, at Intercontinental Hanoi Westlake hotel.

Fines aren’t fine any more. That should be a message resonating loud and clear around financial institutions, as another year of the rolling regulatory tsunami gets fully underway. We’re braced for the ever-rising tide of compliance-related complexities and non-compliance penalties. We need more than ‘business as usual’. Why?

When I spoke at the Goldman Sachs financial services conference last Wednesday, we got into a good discussion about how little insight investors are given into bank IT spending (one audience member described it as a "black box").

The Government has made spurring the growth of the UK's financial technology sector a priority for 2015. After reviewing the responses to its recent Data Sharing and Open Data in banking report, it is committing to delivering an open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) standard within two years. It’s a decision savvy banks will welcome because customer demand for change has already grown to such proportions that require banks to act.

According to new figures from The Payments Council, cashless payments in the UK have overtaken the use of notes and coins for the very first time. The figures published show the total number of cash payments made by consumers, businesses and financial organisations in the UK fell to just 48% of all payments received last year.

When I started working in FinTech, the first question I had was: "Do banks seriously give us all that data to analyze?" To be honest, I was mainly concerned about my own privacy instead of dreaming about the benefits I could get by giving some of my information to third parties.

Wearables, attachables or implantables are going to become household names for most of us within the next few years. The next generation of smart devices is certainly evolving in that direction, especially in sectors like healthcare (medicine, fitness & wellness), heavy industries, retail and military.

Trying to prevent financial crime before it occurs is not a new concept for the financial services industry. In instances of fraud, for example, there is a clear obligation for financial institutions to do whatever is required to prevent the completion of these transactions. This helps ensure that the financial institutions protect themselves, but more importantly their customers. However, in the case of suspected money laundering, the waters are somewhat murkier.

Financial institutions would be well advised to start investigating now whether they need to ensure compliance in line with the proposed Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB). That’s according to a white paper released today by risk and regulatory technology firm Wolters Kluwer Financial Services. In fact, proposed changes may mean firms that currently do not consider they have a trading book actually will do so under the new definition that could come into effect as soon as 2017.