The US payments industry is undoubtedly ripe for change. Before the unprecedented shock of COVID-19, digitization and payments transformation initiatives had been organic, piecemeal and predominately the preserve of the largest banks.

Now, increasing pressure means that financial institutions of all sizes are working to define a digital strategy to unlock new opportunities, drive business value, and stay competitive. But beyond the immediate impact of COVID, what underlying trends are accelerating digitization in the US?

Ideal Prediction (Ideal), the independent trading analysis and data science company for capital markets, has won the FX Markets award for ‘Best Surveillance Provider’ for the second consecutive year.

Quorsus, providers of consultancy services to financial institutions, has announced the appointment of former Markit executive, Jeff Gooch as its first non-executive director. In this position, having joined in September, Jeff will provide strategic insight into business planning, financial governance, and management decision making.

AxiomSL,  the industry’s leading provider of risk and regulatory reporting solutions, today announces that VP Bank, one of the largest banks in Liechtenstein,  has selected AxiomSL’s ControllerView® data integrity and control platform, as a foundation for its risk and regulatory compliance across Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Sing

Hakbah, an alternative financial saving platform based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, today announced that it has joined Visa’s Fintech Fast Track program. Through the Fast Track program, Hakbah is now able to expand its innovation around alternative financial savings to accelerate financial inclusion, cashless adoption, and launch new services and products for underbanked individuals supported by Visa’s solutions.

Amana Bank, a leading Islamic bank in Somalia today announced that it has selected iMAL, the AAOIFI-certified core banking platform from Path Solutions to replace its legacy IT system and deploy a single, cloud-based digital banking platform to underpin its banking operations.

Refinitiv today announced a strategic agreement with Trading Central for the provision of Reuters digital news and Refinitiv analytics capabilities to disruptive news portal, TC Market Buzz. 

TC Market Buzz is a news curation application for Wealth Management firms helping to modernize and differentiate digital investor portals by tackling information overload and focusing on the delivery of a consolidated view of news trends beyond the noise. 

UK banks achieved the biggest reduction in card fraud losses last year among 18 countries across Europe, according to the updated FICO European Fraud Map. More than half of the countries saw increases in card fraud losses in 2019 according to the report, based on data from Euromonitor International and UK Finance.

Lockdown has presented a huge opportunity for the banking industry. The sector has been forced to modernise its IT infrastructure to cope with the ‘new normal’ and in doing so, has made more progress in its digital transformation journey in the last six months than it has in five years.  

The last six months have presented the banking industry with challenges never before seen in our lifetime.