Own goal?

Last week saw Lazio (the Italian football club) fall victim to a brazen online scam, resulting in the club paying the final €2million instalment for the transfer of a player, Stefan de Vrij, to fraudsters using fake Feyenoord FC email account. Lazio received an email that appeared to be from the Dutch team asking for the €2million, along with their ‘supposed’ bank account details, and duly sent the money.

Mastercard is looking to inspire the next generation of curious minds with its first-ever appearance at the USA Science and Engineering festival.

To many in the banking industry, the short-term landscape is colored ominous and opportunistic in equal proportions. Some will see the end of banking as we know it. Others foresee the transformation of the financial services industry. 

It is likely that both visions are accurate, to some degree. 

Changes in the market 

We live in an era of instant gratification. Everything we need has to be delivered on demand–anytime, anywhere we want it. Financial services are no different either. As the Internet and smartphones increasingly facilitate real-time payments, fund transfers, settlements and other financial transactions, customer expectations from their banks, insurers and mutual funds continue to evolve rapidly.

A new Digital Innovation Centre is being established at Gazprom Neft, for the development and implementation of digital technologies in logistics, processing and sales. As part of its activity, the Centre will bring together Russian technology and IT start-ups, developers and the scientific community to pool resources to research and develop innovative solutions that will improve business efficiency.

corfinancial, a leading provider of specialist software and services to the Financial Services sector, has supported US outsourcing provider Archer in bringing a number of new clients onto its salerio solution for post-trade processing.

Headquartered in the Philadelphia region, Archer provides a robust ecosystem of technology and services to the asset management industry. Archer’s rapid business expansion has been bolstered by salerio’s progressive post-trade processing, reporting, and alert tools.

Last year, retail banks increasingly debated how they would cope in a post-Payments Service Directive II (PSD2) world. The directive (which came into force on 13th January 2018 in the UK) is shaking up the financial industry, as high street banks look set to go head to head with tech giants and FinTech start-ups. In a move designed to create a more competitive landscape and provide consumers with a more extensive and cost effective array of financial services and products, retail banks need to be thinking seriously about how they will operate throughout 2018 and beyond.

Paysafe, a leading global payments provider, today announced the appointment, with immediate effect, of Karim Ahmad to the newly created role of Chief Product and Transformation Officer.  The new executive role reflects Paysafe’s intensified investment in extending its products and capabilities via an integrated, global payments platform as well as its ongoing strategic drive to transform and grow its business.  Meanwhile, Daniel Kornitzer, who previously held the role of Chief Product Officer, has been named Chief Business Developm

BNP Paribas Securities Services, a leading global custodian with over $11.3 trillion in assets under custody, and Janus Henderson Investors (NYSE:JHG) (ASX:JHG), today announced that Janus Henderson's middle and back office operations in the US have been transferred to BNP Paribas, marking a major expansion of the bank in the country. The transaction was announced on November 9, 2017.

marcus evans will host the 12^th Edition Model Risk Conference on June 25-27, 2018 in New York. This conference will provide firms with practical tools to enhance infrastructure capabilities and improve model lifecycle management, in order to foster faster responses to changing regulatory demands. Attendees will explore best practices for employing advanced analytics and improving quantitative capabilities to help further optimize model validation techniques. Finally attendees will evaluate the CCAR 2018 results to improve 2019 submissions.