Even before the pandemic, the global digital banking market had been growing rapidly, with millions of people choosing an app or web-based bank over a traditional high-street financial institution.

However, the COVID-19 had accelerated the shift to digital banking like never before, as customer expectations changed during the pandemic.

According to data presented by AksjeBloggen.com, the global digital banking market is expected to hit a $2.5trn transaction value in 2021, a massive 70% increase in a year.

The Number of Users Almost Tripled Amid the Pandemic

Digital banks, also known as neobanks or online banks, changed the way people handle and manage money. These app or web-based banks offer a line of mobile banking services that can be used entirely from smartphones, which especially became useful amid the COVID-19 lockdowns.

In 2019, the global digital banking market hit $836.5bn transaction value, revealed the Statista data. After the pandemic struck, the transaction value jumped by 81% YoY to over $1.5trn. However, the following years are set to witness even more impressive growth. Next year, digital banking is forecast to become a $4trn worth industry. By 2025, the transaction value of all digital banks worldwide is expected to double and hit nearly $8.3trn.

The number of people using online banking services has also surged. Statistics show the number of users almost tripled to 141 million since the pandemic struck. In the next four years, this figure is set to jump to 334 million globally.

The US to Generate One-Third of Total Transaction Value in 2021, UK Market to Grow by 70% YoY

In global comparison, the United States is the leader in digital banking services. Home to some of the world's largest neobanks like Chime, SoFi, and Robinhood, the US market has multiplied over the years. In 2021, the transaction value of the US digital banking market is expected to jump by 62% and reach $820bn, or one-third of all transactions this year.

However, the United Kingdom, as the second-largest market globally, is expected to witness even more impressive growth in 2021, with transaction value growing by 70% to $430.7bn. The largest digital bank in Europe and the second-largest globally, UK`s Revolut, has also grown rapidly over the years. In February 2018, the London-based challenger with the highest number of customers of any European online bank announced that they had hit 1.5 million users. This figure grew to 10 million last year.

As the world's third-largest digital banking market, Russia is expected to hit a $313.7bn transaction value this year. Brazil and Germany follow with $178.6bn and $138.1bn, respectively.

The full story can be read here: https://aksjebloggen.com/digital-banking-market-to-hit-2-5t-transaction-value-in-2021-a-massive-70-jump-in-a-year/

GovGrant, the R&D and IP specialists, has today announced the launch of its Elevation platform, a new tool which will empower accountants to take control of R&D tax claims and support them through the process with access to additional expert help and resources as required. The platform helps accountants handle claims for clients spending up to £35,000 on their R&D more efficiently. This size claim accounts for just under one-third (30%) of all claims on the R&D scheme and equates to a total value of £70m, demonstrating the value accountants can add to their clients through use of the platform.

With an increasing number of ineffective R&D solutions being brought to market, it is becoming impossible for businesses and their accountants to know where to go for solid, reliable advice when it comes to R&D tax. Taking feedback directly from accountants, the Elevation platform provides them with greater clarity on the eligibility of businesses for tax incentives and gives them full control, visibility, and transparency over a client’s claim journey.  The focus of Elevation is on quality and providing the appropriate tools to match the types of client needs while helping accountants to upskill with the right knowledge and guidance on a secure, reliable platform for data transfer between third party R&D specialists and accountants.

It is a tech enablement solution that is using technology to help drive standards and underpin the integrity of the scheme and is being provided free of charge to accountants. Based on the accountant’s knowledge of the client, they will be able to build the claim report on behalf of clients in a plain English, powered by a benchmark of over 7,000 claims.

Luke Hamm, CEO of GovGrant, comments:

“We want to empower accountants to have the innovation conversation so they do not fall into the hands of unscrupulous ‘advisors’ throwing money at marketing, with zero experience, quality or concern for tax payers money. We are very proud of what we do and why we do it so Elevation allows us to open our doors and give accountants the tools, insight and total transparency needed to ensure their clients are in good hands and the government can continue to rely on R&D tax credits as a powerful tool to turbocharge the economy. 

“The R&D tax advisor market has sadly turned into the wild west and our hope is that Elevation puts a few more Sheriffs out there to protect clients and protect the scheme.”

•  € 100 million for online companies that have outgrown the start-up phase ∙ Loan volume between € 1 and € 7 million 
•  RBI one of the first corporate banks to offer targeted debt capital for digital  industries 

Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) has launched one of the largest European  financing programs for digital growth companies. With a total volume of € 100  million, online companies that have already outgrown the early start-up phase will  be supported.  

RBI as a pioneer 

RBI is one of the first commercial banks to offer so-called scale-ups uncomplicated  and fast corporate loans. Although demand for this product is high and growing  strongly, this customer segment has been virtually unserved in this respect. For the  founders and owners of fast-growing online companies, financing through debt  capital is very attractive compared to additional equity capital, for which they would  have to give up further company shares. "I have experienced this myself as a scale up founder," explains Joerg Bartussek, who now heads RBI's Digital Department and  developed the Digital Basket. "The more valuable the company shares you still hold  as a founder become, the more willing you are to pay interest for financing, and not  give away more shares." 

With its local knowledge and strengths, RBI serves this corporate segment  throughout Central and Eastern Europe, where it has been particularly difficult to  access traditional corporate loans even for top scale-ups. 

Fast and uncomplicated processing, no additional costs 

The Digital Basket loans do not incur any costs other than interest. The term is  between one and five years, depending on the customer's needs, and early  repayment is possible in principle. RBI is now starting to build up a portfolio of top  growth companies. The individual loan amounts range between € 1 and € 7 million. 

The first pilot financing under the Digital Basket has already been completed. Only  14 days passed from the start of credit check and contract negotiations to  disbursement. 

Qualification criteria  

To qualify for the Digital Basket, a scale-up must have annual revenues of at least  € 5 million, have gained the trust of renowned investors by raising at least € 3 million  in equity financing, and continue to grow profitably.  

Companies in Western Europe as well as in the entire geographic footprint of RBI in  Central and Eastern Europe are qualified. The Digital Basket does not focus on  specific industries; top SaaS companies, eCommerce platforms and apps are  financed just as much as innovative gaming providers, MedTechs or new mobility  players. The only exception are scale-ups in the financial sector, so-called FinTechs,  which are the target of RBI's Elevator Venture program. 

In addition to the track record of the founders or managers, other selection criteria  include a presence in at least two markets, an established internal controlling  system and an acceptable debt/equity ratio.  

Ignition, the global provider of advice technology, and Altus Consulting, specialist provider of consultancy services to the financial services sector, have today launched a blueprint for improving the use of digital capabilities in the financial advice market. This includes  recommendations on how the UK market can reduce the advice gap and ensure appropriate, affordable financial advice is available for all that want it. 

The paper was published in response to the global coronavirus pandemic and seeks to provide the industry with informed insights as to the best approach for advice firms to engage new and existing clients, drawing on the lessons learned from the wider economy over the past 15 months.

Whilst previous analysis in this space has sought to further the cause of either ‘robo’ or traditional, human advice, ‘Reimagining financial advice’ espouses a third way forwards: hybrid advice – a method of advice provision whereby technology enhances, rather than replaces, the work of a financial adviser. 

Terry Donohoe, CEO Europe, Ignition, said:

“The pandemic and the accompanying social distancing measures have forced us to rely on technology more than ever before. In some areas, this overnight change has provided a much-needed impetus to encourage businesses to re-think old habits and provide what is actually a better consumer experience.

“We have seen that there is real demand in the UK financial services market for true digital advice, which seamlessly combines technology and human expertise to provide an easy-to-use service that helps customers make better financial decisions. As our whitepaper shows, there are still significant hurdles to clear before this model becomes the norm, but we are now closer than ever to revolutionising the advice industry and closing the advice gap.” 

The white paper also includes a review of how M&G Wealth, the global wealth manager, has been working with Ignition to implement a hybrid advice platform for both new and existing clients.

Sam Turner, Consultant, Altus Consulting, said:

“Despite recent advances in technology, the current UK advice landscape is testament to the fact that pure digital advice remains a challenging proposition to deliver profitably. The initial hype around so-called ‘robo advice’ seems to have cooled and the industry is now turning towards a more hybrid model, which works in various forms to combine digital tools and human expertise.

“The recent rapid shift in working habits brought on by the pandemic has done a lot to accelerate change in the sector and alter attitudes towards the use of digital capabilities. The market may well be primed for a significant and lasting digital transformation, but implementing change on this scale is never a straightforward matter and our research has identified a number of key challenges that businesses will need to overcome over the next few years.”

Ignition launched in the UK in May 2021 and provides fully-compliant, digital advice journeys across investments, pensions, and insurance. The technology facilitates hybrid, adviser-led and direct to customer advice journeys, marking an evolution in the UK advice market.

Ignition clients include both global players in the financial sector as well as domestic and midmarket enterprises and was recently appointed by UK wealth manager M&G Wealth for delivery of its digital advice offering for its advisers and customers.

The full whitepaper can be downloaded for free, here.

With fraudsters becoming increasingly smarter and more collaborative in trying to get round those systems with the weakest links to commit their fraudulent crimes, now more than ever is the time for payments and wider financial services businesses to ensure they have all the right ingredients to stop fraud.

Which is why Kompli-Global, the leading FraudTech specialist, has today announced the launch of The Great Kompli-Global KYB Bake-Off challenge. The aim of the challenge is to put businesses’ standard fraud prevention systems to the test, find out which from a range of sample companies they would onboard and if their current procedures have all the right ingredients to keep pace with today’s fraudsters.

Alongside the Bake-Off challenge, Kompli-Global recently announced the launch of Kompli-Investigate™, a rich research utility, fraud prevention and detection system that allows for deeper investigation of corporate entities and the individuals connected to those organisations. A key component of the Kompli-Investigate™ system is Kompli-Konnect™, the most complete and accurate corporate structure data available that has collated and reconfigured all of Companies House data since 1986. Kompli-Global linked and connected all Directors, owners, companies and addresses to provide the most accurate and current entity resolution available. Furthermore, it updates all new and changed information and re-maps the entire database every night. In-house experts then overlay known fraud characteristics and suspicious Modus Operandi (MO) scenarios to give a totally unique risk prognosis for users, as well as alerting entities to criminal activity that fraudsters want to remain hidden.

With this in-house and technological expertise, Kompli-Investigate™ completes the potentially missing pieces of the fraud prevention puzzle by enabling payments and fintech companies to make connections, before conducting deep due diligence for convictions, allegations of criminality and associations to adverse events and activity. Additionally, if a newly registered company is looking to open an account, Kompli-Investigate™ can flag all connected businesses and individuals to that company. This added investigative tier, adds a unique predictive layer to due diligence and shows Companies that are potentially predicated to commit a crime.

Speaking on the launch of this unique challenge, Martin Pashley, Chief Commercial Officer at Kompli-Global, explains: “Today’s fraudsters know exactly how to work the system but what we have designed significantly enhances payment providers’ fraud prevention efforts by supplying them with the information they need to really question the business they are taking on. Therefore, we feel this is an important challenge to set those businesses either sending, receiving, processing or facilitating payments so they can see how complete their KYC jigsaw is.”

He adds: “By taking part in our simple challenge, we can quickly show companies the information they might be missing and the potential of already available technology on the market. We’re so confident that Kompli-Investigate™ provides the most complete and accurate KYB insight, we challenge all companies to a ‘Bake-Off’.”

The Great Kompli-Global KYB Bake-Off challenge has been designed for companies to test their systems with real life examples, to determine if they would onboard those individuals posed. To find out more about The Great Kompli-Global, KYB Bake-Off challenge, visit: https://www.kompli-global.com/products/investigate/#Bakeoff

To find out more about Kompli-Investigate, visit: https://www.kompli-global.com/products/investigate/

To find out more about Kompli-Global’s suite of customer due diligence technologies, visit: www.kompli-global.com

Glue42, the company that delivers integrated desktop experiences to financial institutions globally, and Deephaven Data Labs, a start-up that provides capital markets participants with a next-generation data platform, are collaborating to reveal actionable insights from massive datasets. Initial use cases include more effective management of pre-trade risk and regulatory compliance for users across trading, risk and compliance desks.

The partnership follows a pilot at a top 10 investment management firm who, with the help of both vendors, is building a unified portfolio management platform for all of its applications. The hedge fund’s primary objective is to help users better manage critical datasets and simplify their trading workflows to reduce operational errors. Next in line is a common look and feel of all applications as well as access to a centralized app store. 

While Deephaven enables front, middle and back-office users across the firm to rapidly build analyses, models, reports and dashboards across huge quantities of real-time, historical and alternative data sources, Glue42 is enabling their user interfaces to communicate with each other as well as other external systems, to create intuitive and simplified user experiences, even within a single screen if desired.  

As a direct result, during the pilot portfolio managers were able to outperform the market. More so, they significantly reduced pre-trade risk as they no longer had to constantly switch between various applications and disparate datasets to complete regulatory and compliance checks.  

“Excelling in high volume and high volatility trading sessions is the difference between outperforming and underperforming funds,” said James Wooster, COO, Glue42. “This partnership equips our client’s portfolio managers to operate at peak performance when it matters most. The combination of deep insight and a responsive user experience creates an industry advantage for our clients that other firms have not been able to match.” 

He continued, “The exciting aspect about our joint capability is its intuitive nature. There is no learning curve or knowledge ramp for traders as the environment instinctively reacts to the way they work.” 

Portfolio management is just the beginning. The partnership applies to any scenario across the financial market that would benefit from new insights and efficiency. 

Enterprises are constrained by data locked away in their legacy systems that could generate more value and profit. Glue42 offers firms the opportunity to unlock the power and value of this data and create user-friendly hubs connecting various technologies. Providers like Deephaven can be part of a bigger infrastructure which services much larger and diverse teams with user experiences that require less mental maintenance and fewer clicks 

In this instance, the partnership between Deephaven and Glue42 also shares a similar vision of making high-value technology widely adopted and easily accessible by their open-source offerings. In addition to the current integration of both vendor’s enterprise editions, Deephaven Community Core, Deephaven’s opensource version, will be making its debut in the near future.  

“We are preparing for open-sourcing the data interrogation piece of our solution in the next six months,” said Pete Goddard, CEO, Deephaven. “Combining this open capability with Glue42’s open-source web integration platform, Glue42 Core, will allow developers to integrate web applications seamlessly. In fact, we will be able to containerize our open-source solutions with Glue42 and it will just work.” 

As the partnership evolves, more use-cases are being developed such as extending order management workflows to include pre-trade analytics that provide traders with the execution insights they require.  

Over 20 new offerings announced including cloud OS upgrade and cloud-native database 

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today unveiled a new one-stop e-commerce livestreaming solution to help global merchants of all sizes launch live, interactive channels to offer personalised online shopping experience. Livestreaming e-commerce solutions are quickly evolving as a response to the increasing demand during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Built upon Alibaba Cloud’s extensive content delivery networks (CDNs) with over 2,800 nodes in more than 70 countries and regions, the new solution leverages the cloud leader’s large-scale and distributed real-time video processing technology to ensure an uninterrupted signal transfer between sellers, buyers and the nearest distribution centre.

Its proprietary cloud transcoding technology, Narrowband HD™, guarantees image quality while reducing bit rates, enabling a high-resolution livestreaming experience with low bandwidth costs. It helps address challenges surrounding the quality of audio and video, high cost of essential software such as real-time video transcoding and low efficiency in traffic management and CDNs. Users can enjoy livestreams with a latency of around two seconds, essential to the experience of flash sales.

Built on Alibaba Cloud’s immersive technology, the solution provides a rich range of essential features with minimal latency for virtual sales sessions, including livestream replays, product video showcases embedded into livestreaming windows and real-time subtitle translation for cross-border livestreams, among others. It also supports end-to-end and device-to-cloud livestreaming, making it easier for smaller merchants to launch their own sales sessions.

Starting from June 1, this year’s Tmall 618 Mid-Year Shopping Festival has seen a majority of merchants and brands using Alibaba Cloud’s livestreaming service. Sales generated from Taobao Live in just the opening hour of the event surpassed that of the entire first day in 2020.

The livestream solution was issued alongside over 20 other products, solutions and updates during today’s virtual Alibaba Cloud Summit 2021 to further help businesses on their digitalisation journeys. Among the offerings, the seventh generation of Alibaba Cloud’s Elastic Compute Service (ECS 7) and an updated cloud-native Data Management Service (DMS) will debut in Asia followed by the rest of the global markets.

Jeff Zhang, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, commented during the summit: “As one of the leading providers and trusted partners in the global cloud market, technological innovation is at the heart of Alibaba Cloud’s long-term development. Introducing new products and solutions and continuously enhancing product features helps us deliver on our promise to our global customers and partners. The acceleration of the digital transformation agenda and adoption of emerging technologies is particularly encouraging in Asia, motivating us to constantly improve our innovative and R&D capabilities to stay at the forefront of the industry.”

Other new products and updates unveiled during the summit include:

Infrastructure product upgrades

Alibaba Cloud Linux 3 (Alinux3) cloud operating system (OS): an upgrade from Alinux2, the Alinux3 cloud OS, which is now available globally for the first time, delivers a better developer experience with improved security and greater stability and runtime performance. With Alinux3, runtime performance for mainstream end-to-end applications such as Redis, Mysql and Nginx has been improved by up to 40% compared with the previous generation. Alinux3 is compatible with Alibaba Cloud’s self-developed software ecosystem as well as RHEL/ CentOS 8. Starting from the launch, it also provides the developer community with eight consecutive years of free software maintenance and technical support.

ECS 7: introduced as part of Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure upgrades, ECS 7 runs on Alinux3 and simultaneously supports trusted computing and encrypted calculation, a world-leading computing capability that is enhancing the level of security on the cloud. Powered by X-Dragon Architecture and third-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Ice Lake), ECS 7 improves computing power by over 40% compared with its predecessor. Hong Kong and Singapore will be the first markets outside of mainland China to have access to ECS 7, beginning in the second half of 2021.

DMS: the one-stop cloud-native data management platform

Data silos are a challenge for many enterprises when it comes to data security, governance and mining, as core data assets are often stored in a variety of databases and warehouses. The DMS platform supports data management for over 30 data sources on hybrid cloud. This is possible because the gateways between the self-built and cloud databases have been integrated, seamlessly linking all databases and enabling full-cycle data management across production, storage, transmission, processing and computing.

The update will be available initially in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore starting from later this year.

Other commercial releases of Alibaba Cloud database products include major MySQL version coverage for PolarDB, a new elastic mode for AnalyticDB, MyBase, ClickHouse and cloud-native multi-model database Lindorm, among others.

Yapily, the leading Open Banking infrastructure provider, has today announced the launch of its new Open Banking bulk payments service, with Comma, the SME payments platform, already live and benefiting from the service in the UK. 

Working in close partnership with Comma, Yapily has simplified the complex process of bulk payments - under Open Banking - in the UK. The proposition provides customers such as Comma with the API connection they need to create a reliable, secure and scalable bulk payments feature for their accountancy, payroll and bookkeeper clients. 

Until now, bulk payments in the UK have only been available to medium to large scale businesses that have corporate banking accounts. As such, many SMEs have been forced to rely on legacy, inefficient payment processes causing significant headaches and issues when it comes to paying staff, suppliers and customers on time, every time. 

Harnessing Yapily’s bulk payment offering, Comma’s accountant and bookkeeper customers can create and share payment runs with clients; who in turn can bulk pay bills, taxes and salaries on their phone or desktop, in a few clicks from their own bank account. This enables accountants and bookkeepers to offer new payment services to clients - something demanded of them for many years. Operational efficiency is an essential benefit as SMEs look to rebuild post-pandemic. 

Tom Beckenham, CEO and Founder of Comma said, “Comma was developed out of a passion for helping small businesses. Paying anything manually is a tedious process and often affects the small business owner. Working closely and transparently with Yapily, we’re now able to provide our customers with a magical payments experience. It gives them the time back to focus on growing their businesses. We look forward to continuing our collaborative partnership with Yapily.”

Leveraging its direct and deep connections with many of the UK’s largest banks, Yapily is the first Open Banking infrastructure provider to test and release bulk payments functionality for 7 financial institutions’ in the UK. 

The FinTech has worked tirelessly with Comma and UK banks to highlight inconsistencies in behaviour, bugs and cases where API documentation isn’t reflective of what’s in production to launch the most technically robust bulk payments offering to market. The work done by Yapily & Comma reduces the chances of customers being caught out by inconsistencies and ensures the success of bulk payments across the board. 

Stefano Vaccino, CEO of Yapily said, “We’ve seen a real, increasing demand from our customers for bulk payments capabilities. We’re proud to say that after some hard work, we’ve built a reliable bulk payments feature for our customers in the UK. We’ve been lucky to work with pioneering clients like Comma who have supported us in stress-testing the functionality so we can deliver the most robust service possible. 

“What might seem on the surface to be a simple implementation of the required endpoints, has been a huge team effort, and a big learning curve for us as an Open Banking infrastructure provider. We’re already working on rolling this out into Europe and we’re excited to be working with Comma and other customers on developing even further.” 

Yapily’s bulk payment service will be rolled out to customers in Germany in the coming months, and will look to power new bulk payments propositions with more European customers in the future.

 Reach, the global payment localisation provider, has appointed Tyler Barry as Chief Technical Officer to support the business’ continued success throughout 2021 and beyond.

Barry, a twenty-year veteran of the technology industry, has been appointed to develop and execute the company’s strategic technology action plan and position the brand as it demonstrates explosive growth. A vastly experienced and talented leader, Barry has a proven record of success, and brings a wide range of expertise in areas such as scalable systems, distributed transaction settlement, mobile banking, and payment method integration.

Tyler Barry joins Reach after a decade of consulting directly with banks and fintechs in the North American and European markets. Over that period, Tyler led the overall design and work of the technical teams to conduct the first international blockchain-based currency transfer for a Canadian financial institution; delivered the solution design and delivery of numerous mobile payments solutions such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and Interac Etransfer for multiple financial institutions; leveraged open banking standards to deliver forward-looking solutions; and drove the design of software architecture for real-time fraud systems and highly scalable service-based environments.

Tyler will now turn his wealth of experience toward developing the Reach Platform, supporting improvements in transaction performance, dynamic processing, scalability, insight, security, and user experience.

Barry commented: “Reach is at an inflection point. We have an exceptional management team, a phenomenal customer base, and a market leading solution for merchants going global. I am energized to be part of the Reach team and to be able to serve the entire organization in propelling the growth of our services and platform for our customers.”

The Reach platform is designed to allow merchants to take advantage of the benefits of selling locally in a global marketplace, using its innovative service model to deliver higher conversion rates, lower costs, and a better end user experience for customers across the world.

Localised payment processing is a potential gold mine for global merchants, who are often saddled with higher fees and lower approval rates when processing foreign payments. For many businesses outside of the major multinationals, this has previously been unachievable due to requiring an ‘in-country’ business presence. However, by working through Reach’s platform, merchants can utilise Reach’s core connections and corporate structure to process localised payments from any country across the globe.

Thanks to Reach’s innovative platform and corporate relationships, businesses can take advantage of the best wholesale FX rates, along with presenting costs in local rates across more than 100 geographies worldwide, to deliver better service and increased value.

Sam Ranieri, CEO at Reach, said: “After a period of exceptional growth for our business, we’re thrilled to be welcoming Tyler as our new CTO. Tyler brings a wealth of invaluable experience to our senior team, with his track record of success speaking for itself. With his knowledge and support, we are well placed to continue disrupting the global ecommerce space through 2021 and the years ahead.”

“We saw a seismic shift in the commercial landscape in 2020, with the pandemic forcing businesses to rapidly refocus on ecommerce as their essential business model. This move exposed a huge number of businesses to new challenges, including volatile exchange rates and cross-border commerce risks. By adding talented individuals such as Tyler to our team, we’re ensuring that our solution will be ready to support merchants worldwide as they look to take advantage of cross-border ecommerce opportunities.”

Finastra today announced that Arkéa Banking Services, a subsidiary of Crédit Mutuel Arkéa and a major player in the provision of banking and insurance services in France, has selected Finastra’s Fusion Risk solution to help streamline operational processes and reduce operational costs for local banks.

The move sees Arkéa Banking Services providing Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services for banks’ IT and risk management activities with Finastra’s Fusion Risk. The Arkéa service is already in use at one bank in France and has now been taken up by a new retail bank in region. 

The Arkéa Banking Services team will use the Asset Liability Management (ALM), Funds Transfer Pricing (FTP), and Regulatory Compliance including Liquidity Risk Engine and Reporting modules of Finastra’s Fusion Risk to help local banks meet regulatory demands and to provide powerful analytics and insights to optimize business performance. This includes both day-to-day operational oversight and long-term strategic business planning.

“Fusion Risk is a proven solution, and one that Crédit Mutuel Arkéa already uses to support its internal needs, so we are very confident about using it as part of the hosting and outsourcing operations we provide,” said Marc Chereau, Head of IT at Arkéa. “Finastra’s Fusion Risk offers both functional and technical excellence. As well as using the solution to manage risk, margin monitoring, balance sheet optimization and regulatory reporting, Fusion Risk will also support us in managing other banks’ technical operations, ensuring the highest standards of security, resiliency, performance and operating excellence.”

“Local financial institutions will benefit from Arkéa's experience and technical expertise in retail and corporate banking and risk management, supported by the proven capabilities and powerful analytics of Fusion Risk, helping them to transform operations and enhance business performance,” said Arnaud Picut, Global Head of Risk at Finastra. “We’re delighted to work with the Arkéa Banking Services team and to provide technology solutions that support the pivotal role they play in supporting financial institutions, insurers and fintechs in France.”