Nets, a market leader in the European payments industry, and Bankart, a leading Slovenian company in the field of processing of modern payment instruments, are ready to go live with an instant payment solution in Slovenia after final approval from the Slovenian Central Bank. In February, Bankart will go live with Nets´ RealTime24/7, enabling transactions between Slovenian banks to be cleared in less than a second.

Financial scouts note that European stock markets now face many incoming cues that are really mixed. The biggest current news on both sides of the spectrum is the Brexit uncertainty and the meaningful progress towards resolving the U.S.-China trade war.

Millennial technologies such as the internet of things, artificial intelligence, cognitive process automation and public cloud are heralding what is commonly called Industry 4.0 – erasing the lines between the physical and the digital world. Industry 4.0 is disrupting everything from utilities to healthcare, and from media to mining. The financial services industry is no exception, as it finds itself being reshaped at the hands of technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA), blockchain and biometrics.

XPS Pensions Group, the largest purely pension consulting and administration firm in the UK, has signed an agreement with financial technology business RiskFirst to continue to deliver fast, high-quality and transparent reporting and modelling to clients through PFaroe’s comprehensive suite of analytics.

Israeli startup Hailo, developers of a proprietary processing architecture for deep learning on edge devices, has expanded its Series A funding round to $21 million. 

• Led by ICBC as the world’s most valuable banking brand (US$79.8 billion), China’s banks dominate top four spots of the ranking
• Chinese banks grow 28%, achieving US$407 billion in total brand value, over US$100 billion more than US banks
• All US banks, with the exception of Wells Fargo (-9%), Chase (-7%), and BankUnited (-6%), improve their brand value
• Growth of European banks is pedestrian, with German banks losing 24% of value

It appears that many organisations will begin the New Year by reviewing their security infrastructure and taking a ‘back to basics’ approach to information security. This is according to the latest in a series of social media polls conducted by Europe’s number one information security event, Infosecurity Europe 2019.

Sphera, the largest global provider of Integrated Risk Management software today announces that Petrotechnics, a Sphera company, has been named a leader in the Verdantix ORM Green Quadrant benchmark report. 

PSD2 and GDPR are making their presence felt in Europe.  As a result European banks are prioritizing how they respond to changing customer behavior and demands (56%), new technologies (49%) and regulatory fines (46%), according to an in-depth study released today by Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the banking software company.