Gemalto (Euronext NL0000400653 GTO), the world leader in digital security, has been selected by Bank of Cyprus to supply the world's first EMV biometric dual interface payment card for both chip and contactless payments.

Major conference on AI and Sentiment Analysis in Finance, Hong Kong, 7-8 March 2018

Artificial Intelligence is seen by many as the main driver of the 4th Industrial Revolution. Investment in AI has grown at a phenomenal rate with companies investing $26-39bn in 2016, and, according to IDC, the AI market will grow to more than $47 billion in 2020.  The Finance industry has been leading the way in adoption of AI with a significant projected increase in spending over the next three years.

Linedata (Euronext Paris: LIN), the global solutions and outsourcing services provider to the investment management and credit finance industries, today announced a partnership with London Stock Exchange Group’s UnaVista for transaction reporting requirements, as part of its ongoing drive to provide clients with market leading solutions compliant with the European Union’s Markets in Financial Directive II (MiFID II).

Blockchain and fintech start-up AiX today announced that the highly-regarded global markets and derivatives specialist Steve Compton has joined the company as an advisor. Prior to bringing his 26 years of experience to AiX, Compton worked as a managing director in the Global Markets Division at Citigroup. Most recently at Citi, Steve had global responsibility for G10 Markets Treasury, the Fixed Income Finance business and Collateral Optimisation.

Global network provider BSO has teamed up with software vendor emagine to distribute synchronised time in order for market participants to accurately timestamp their trades to comply with MiFID II.

Mifid II is a key piece of European-wide legislation.

This regulation, along with the incoming GDPR piece of legislation, means that financial organisations will be looking at immediate options to help them decrease their regulatory risk and costs, while also improving the customer experience this year.

The new regulations will have a huge effect as financial organisations’ relationships with regulators will rely upon real-time data to be shared to improve and speed up risk management and market stability, all through the power of APIs.

There’s nothing artificial about the intelligence AI can deliver to an organisation. After many years of debate, we are seeing businesses in the financial sector derive real value from the data deciphered by AI, especially now that this technology is becoming more accessible. Machine learning, neural networks, predictive analytics and AI will allow banks see patterns, anomalies and find insights in their data that the human eye would never spot on their own.

Needless to say, 2017 has been quite eventful for the global fintech ecosystem. From the meteoric rise of bitcoin, to the chatbot invasion, to a host of regulatory changes such as PSD2 in Europe, I could go on and on. Without further ado: here are my predictions for 2018.

Cryptocurrencies’ market capitalization will continue to exponentially rise but...

Way Fund Managers, a British Asset Manager dedicated to the operation of collective investment schemes, has selected OTCFin, a financial technology firm specialized in Investment, Risk, and Regulatory Data Management and Reporting, to assist them with their implementation of the PRIIPS regulation. OTCFin will work in partnership with Morningstar to provide a fully integrated PRIIPS KIDs anEPT solution to WAY FUND MANAGERS that includes both the PRIIPS calculations and the printing of the factsheets.

OTCFin will focus on: