The arrival of Open Banking is a key reason why the world of financial services in October 2018, as this year’s Sibos conference gets underway in Sydney, is different from the world of financial services one year previously, at the time of the Sibos conference in Toronto. The second Payments Services Directive (PSD2) of the European Union (EU) came into force on 13 January 2018; the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), on 25 May.

SWIFT has today published a blueprint for common API standards following collaboration with European banking standards bodies, STET and Berlin Group NextGenPSD2 – who together represent many of the region’s banks and payment service providers

As pressure from regulators and customers shift banking towards more open access to financial services, SWIFT is playing a lead role in unlocking the potential of API technology by providing the neutral collaboration platform to develop the common data standards the industry needs.

ADVA (FSE: ADV) announced today that its fully open and disaggregated packet optical solution is now commercially available. Built upon the Telecom Infra Project's (TIP) Voyager system, the new solution presents customers with a turnkey approach to developing packet optical networks.

Shield Financial Compliance (Shield FC), a specialist RegTech provider, will be joined by Thomson Reuters and KPMG in London on 7

American Express Company (NYSE: AXP) and Ethoca, a leading provider of collaboration-based technology solutions for merchants and card issuers, today announced they are working together to help American Express U.S. merchants and card members more quickly resolve disputes related to card purchases. American Express has deployed the Ethoca Eliminator solution in its latest step to help merchants reduce time and costs spent handling disputes.

BT and the Mexican Stock Exchange, part of BMV Group, today announced the signing of a new contract that will make it easier for global investors, market data vendors and service providers to access Mexico’s financial markets. The deal will enable BT to distribute the latest BMV multicast feeds over the BT Radianz Cloud, one of the world’s largest secure financial markets cloud communities. 

After having grown its revenues by 137% since 2016, 8x those reported in 2015 (when the company was founded), Perkbox, Europe’s fastest growing employee engagement platform and UK’s market leader in serving SMEs, is today announcing its expansion into Europe, with first stop France.

Holidaymakers are losing up to 13% exchanging unused foreign currency after trips abroad due to the rates on offer from foreign exchange providers, financial data analytics experts Consumer Intelligence warn.

QuantHouse, the leading independent global provider of end-to-end systematic trading solutions including innovative market data services, algo trading platform and infrastructure solutions, today announced access to Quantitative Brokers’ (“QB”) best execution algorithms for futures and fixed income.

QB is a global, independent technology company providing advanced execution algorithms and analytics for global futures and US cash treasury markets.

CryptoCompare, the global cryptocurrency market data provider, has today published the ‘Cryptoasset Taxonomy Report’. The taxonomy provides retail and institutional investors, regulators and the industry as a whole with an independent classification of cryptoassets, based on the depth, breadth and scope of CryptoCompare’s global datasets.