Worldline, the European market leader in payment and transaction services, has been selected to provide state-of-the art payment solutions to Subway® restaurants across Europe. Worldline’s solution includes POS and E-Commerce acceptance as well as payment terminals operating with the new NEXO retailer protocol. This sets the standards for easy interoperability with all NEXO-compliant cash registers. The roll-out is planned across multiple markets starting in 2020.

Easy integration of payment devices into the sales process is part of a smooth and efficient customer journey in all businesses. This is crucial for Subway®, as a large Franchise organisation with a huge base of franchise owners. Worldline is the only payment technology provider in Europe that was able to offer Subway® a fully future-proof payment infrastructure based on the YOMANI terminal. An entirely new level of flexibility is enabled by implementing the new NEXO retailer protocol that facilitates the connection between the card payment infrastructure and the retail POS system.

Worldline has been awarded a 3-year contract including POS and online acceptance. In several European countries, Worldline supports the Subway® brand with its comprehensive knowledge around the commercial agreement and the technical deployment of such projects in the Franchise environment.

Subway® and its franchise owners will benefit from Worldline’s commitment to omnichannel solutions when it comes to management information: a consolidated reporting of all payment flows, regardless of their origin, provides valuable insight and decision support at all levels. Through its intuitive onboarding portal, Worldline enables franchise owners to have the payments functionality for their business up and running in no time. Additional features include the optional DCC (Dynamic Currency Conversion) in tourist or multi-currency locations as well as POS-advertising capabilities.

Justin Goes, Regional Director Europe Subway International said: “The Subway brand highly relies on all our locations to deliver a smooth customer experience. In order to support our franchise owners to live up to this ambition, we strive for a maximum ease of operations, also and in particular when it comes to payments. Working with Worldline as our central payment technology provider ensures a right performance at check-out as well as maximum flexibility now and in the future.”

Vincent Roland, Managing Director Merchant Services of Worldline, said: “Worldline has a proven track record with large Franchise organisations, and we are particularly proud to be able to support Subway with the latest payment technology, our pan-European reach and our comprehensive know-how in deploying our solutions in the complex, multiple-stakeholder environment.”

OTB Ventures (OTB), a leading venture capital fund specialised in investments in technology companies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), today announces the launch of its early growth technology fund – the largest venture capital fund in CEE - with $100m in commitments from international institutional investors, including the European Investment Fund (EIF), and high-profile backers including Greg Jankilevitch.

Focusing on early stage, post-product, start-ups in the CEE region - spanning Cyber Security, Big Data and AI, Fintech, IoT and Robotics, as well as Cloud and SaaS industry verticals - the new investment vehicle is targeting investment in a total of 16 companies to comprise its portfolio by the end of 2022.

The $100m fund is set to be the largest fund in CEE with a long-term investment time horizon of up to 10 years. The fund will deploy up to $15m per company and will typically acquire a stake of 10-15% in a given company.

OTB’s mission is to empower entrepreneurs to scale their businesses globally, while keeping a strong focus on technology advancement. It focuses on start-ups with unique IP and disruptive ideas in every technology domain with strong regional footprint across CEE. OTB invests in companies at the post-product stage with demonstrated revenue streams, as well as potential for high growth and willingness to scale up internationally.

OTB has a proven track record as an adviser, supporting the expansion of portfolio companies to international markets with the highest technology consumption. The fund has already invested in 8 companies, including Cosmose, SpaceKnow, Silent Eight, Minit, BabbleLabs, Segron, FintechOS and ICEYE.

ICEYE is OTB’s largest investment to date, with $10m committed in May 2018. The business produces and develops novel micro satellites used to capture images of the Earth and is considered to be among the biggest breakthroughs in the European space industry to date.

In November 2019, OTB invested $5m in FintechOS, a digital platform for financial institutions for creating front-end digital products. FintechOS provides one of a few low-code platforms digitising customer-facing processes for financial institutions and is currently expanding its offering for European clients to Asia.

The launch of the OTB fund reaffirms the company’s commitment to early growth market and the start-up ecosystem in CEE, as well as support for the next generation of innovative entrepreneurs. OTB has previously co-invested with leading international venture capital funds, including  DNX, Draper Associates, Wavemaker Partners and True Ventures, as well as corporate venture capital investors, such as Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Samsung Next, Salesforce Ventures and Standard Chartered Ventures.

Adam Niewiński, Managing Partner and co-founder at OTB Ventures, said: “We are grateful for this backing from new and existing investors who share our vision to develop the start-up ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe. Our deep market knowledge and investment experience proved to be central to the successful international expansion of our portfolio companies. As the largest VC fund in the region investing in post-product and revenue-generating technology companies, we are excited to be able to support more entrepreneurs with investment and guidance on their journey towards building successful and sustainable businesses for the long-term.”

Marcin Hejka, Managing Partner and co-founder at OTB Ventures, said: “We believe in companies with strong technological capabilities and global aspirations. Central and Eastern Europe is a cradle of  talented engineers and IT specialists, pioneering innovative companies. We see a huge investment potential in these companies with up-and-running products and initial business traction in international markets. The purpose of our fund is to discover, develop and realise this potential on a global scale.”

Alain Godard, EIF Chief Executive, said: “Our core objective is to support highly innovative small businesses across Europe and in particular start-ups and companies at the scale-up stage of their development. We are excited to work with OTB Ventures to provide funding for aspiring technology businesses and foster entrepreneurship and innovation across Central and Eastern Europe. OTB already have 8 successful investments under their belt and we are confident that they are well positioned to meet the strong demand for equity among later-stage businesses in the CEE region.“

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the premier post-trade market infrastructure for the global financial services industry, today announced that 138 clients have signed up to adopt, and more than 30 vendors have partnered with, DTCC’s multi-award winning Global Trade Repository (GTR) service, in order to meet their regulatory obligations under the forthcoming European Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR). SFTR is expected to take effect for banks and broker-dealers in April, for exchanges and CCPs in July, and for buy-side firms in October this year, followed by non-financial counterparties in January 2021.

DTCC opened industry-wide user-acceptance testing (UAT) for SFTR last October so that clients could benefit from an extended period of testing, increasing their levels of preparedness for regulatory compliance on day one. Since then, additional phases have rolled out including UAT with final XML schemas and validations rules.

“Delivering a great client experience while enabling firms to meet their reporting obligations for derivatives and securities financing transactions are top priorities for DTCC,” said Chris Childs, Managing Director, Head of RDS, DTCC and CEO & President, DTCC Deriv/SERV LLC. “Back in 2019, we were delighted to reveal Barclays, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, SEB and Societe Generale as our valued clients leveraging the GTR service to meet their SFTR obligations. Today, we are happy to add Citadel, Franklin Templeton, Nordea Investment Management and PIMCO to our growing community. We’re grateful to the industry for placing its trust in DTCC and for their continued support.”

“There are now only two months to go until the implementation of SFTR begins for the broker-dealer community and eight months until the compliance date for the buy-side,” said Val Wotton, Managing Director, Product Development & Strategy, RDS at DTCC. “Broker-dealers have made good progress in their readiness for SFTR implementation and our goal is to help support asset managers as they look to do the same. We’re ready to assist them as they prepare for this new mandate.”

The GTR service is offered by DTCC’s Repository and Derivatives (RDS) division.

Israel Discount Bank announced today that it has partnered with Integral to deploy new eFX workflow automation and trading technology to drive business growth. 

• Product Reviews
• 19.02.2020 08:22 am

What is the Product/Service?

Form3 is a leading Payments-as-a-Service technology provider. Our award-winning, cloud native API-based technology platform combines deep payments expertise with a cutting edge technology stack and highest security, Active-Active-Active with AWS.  We already enable access to UK Faster Payments, Bacs, SEPA CT/DD and SEPA Instant on both direct participant and sponsored basis through a single API. In addition we are building our International Payments solution, delivering the first API based global transaction platform for SMEs. But we’ve only just started. Our mission is going to take us beyond the UK and Europe to enable access across continents and our customers are coming with us on that journey.

It is our belief in making access to payments available to all and we focus on that vision in everything we do.

What does the solution do?

Form3 enables Financial Institution’s to take advantage of technology innovation and eliminate proprietary payment infrastructure enabling them to build and deploy new customer propositions quickly and scale easily without the need to maintain expensive hardware or software.

Essentially, can help FI’s replace Capex cost with an Opex managed service.

What are the core functions?

Form3 provide cloud-based connectivity, payment processing, clearing and settlement services. Form3’s platform enables direct technical access to regional clearing systems with fast and easy integration through a single Json Restful API. The platform is cloud-native and highly scalable using microservices architecture.

We couple our technology with banking partnerships to facilitate settlement services through clearing and settlement systems including:

•       UK Faster Payments (Real-Time)

•       UK Bacs

•       SEPA Instant Credit Transfer

•       SEPA Credit Transfer

•       SEPA Direct Debit

•       CHAPS

•       International

•       Swift

Form3’s competitive edge and key features

The use of cloud-native technology, APIs and micro-services-based solutions has changed the way organisations look at their payment’s infrastructure requirements. This has also been combined with rapid innovation in the way payments are made including an obsessive focus on improving the user experience.

Form3’s cloud based PaaS solves the challenges of legacy payments infrastructure with simple cloud based access to multiple payment schemes through a single API.

Benefits:

• No proprietary infrastructure required (data centres, servers, communication)
• Fast and easy integration through REST API and file exchange
• Payment Process Automation increases straight through processing
• Intelligent transaction routing
• Simple pay-per-use model with low set up fee
• Cost transparency on a per-transaction basis

Target audience

We work with:

• Regulated financial institutions, including leading banks
• Non-bank financial institutions
• Regulated fintechs (payment institutions, e-money providers, and pre-paid card providers). 

Services in real time are already part of the customers’ everyday life – financial institutions also follow this trend. Česká spořitelna, the biggest commercial bank in the Czech Republic, is a company of the Viennese Erste Group Bank AG and, since autumn 2019, provides real-time payments for its customers. For this purpose, valantic’s Real Time Payment Engine has been implemented. For more than 20 years, the technology company develops software for payment, investment banking and transaction management. With the customised solution, the bank’s customers can process transactions in Czech crowns and in real time. In addition to instant payments, the open, modular structured payment hub solution supports the processing of several payment types such as SWIFT or SEPA. Česká spořitelna has a balance sheet total of 33.7 billion euros, more than 10,000 employees, more than 600 branches and five million clients. In total, the parent company Erste Group is present in seven countries and serves more than 16 million customers in Central and Eastern Europe.

One hub for all payment modes

valantic’s Real Time Payment Engine (RTPE) integrates different payment channels such as e-banking, manual recording of payments or payments via third parties. The software comprises numerous flexible gateways, features a multi-channel and multi-instrument capability and is easily adjustable to country- and bank-specific requirements. Thus, all payment transaction services which may arise in a bank can be processed out of one central hub; costs can be reduced and valuable IT resources are available for other tasks. The web-based user platform monitors all payments, visualises complex XML transactions and gives an overview of the current processing status. The platform provides a high-performance, reliable, scalable and flexible technology which cooperates with all current payment processing systems and allows a nearly hundred per cent straight through processing (STP).

Efficient payment processing

“The very small margins in the banking sector and increasing pressure on efficient payment handling make modern and future-proof IT solutions necessary. Furthermore, with regard to speed, the customers are accustomed to a high standard by other payment providers,” said René Lemme from valantic. Corporate customers can benefit from real-time payments as well – by using functionalities like hourly payroll and just-in-time inventory management. Modern real-time payment systems like valantic’s RTPE additionally allow the access to more data which are transmitted during transactions and facilitate the coordination and report creation. Banks are able to provide extended services and to create further added value for their clients. The bank’s corporate customers especially benefit from a real-time overview of the current available liquidity. 

FIS™(NYSE: FIS) announced today that Opel Bank in Germany has chosen its next-generation core banking system, FIS Modern Banking Platform, to power its online bank. Opel Bank is the first European-based bank to choose the new platform since its introduction in January.

Opel Bank serves more than 40,000 deposit customers primarily through online channels without the need to maintain an expensive branch network. The bank was looking to replace its legacy core platform with a digitally rich banking platform that provides expanded functionality, faster time to market, and a modern client experience.

FIS will provide Opel Bank with an end-to-end solution including the Modern Banking Platform, the FIS Digital One omnichannel solution, and the FIS Code Connect application programming interface (API) gateway. Through its leading-edge design tools, the new FIS platform will allow Opel Bank to enhance its client experience through a modern end user interface.

“We are excited to welcome Opel Bank as the first non-U.S. user of our groundbreaking Modern Banking Platform,” said Bruce Lowthers, president of Banking Solutions at FIS. “Along with Digital One and Code Connect, this new platform provides a truly modern, powerful core banking solution that will support Opel Bank well into the future.”

Through its modern architecture, the FIS Modern Banking Platform helps today’s banks overcome many of their pain points by providing:

• Speed to market. The solution is built to support open banking through extensive application programming interfaces (APIs) – enabling banks to tap into the wider ecosystem of FIS and third-party applications to deliver innovative new services to customers.
• Ease of integration. Modern Banking Platform is component-based, allowing individual system components to be upgraded or replaced without impacting other bank functions or data.
• Personalization. The solution is designed to be customer centric and leverages the power of data analytics and artificial intelligence to help banks understand the specific needs of their customers better and offer more targeted, personalized financial products.
• Resiliency and scalability. The system is cloud-native, providing high resiliency, scalability and cost efficiencies that come with secure cloud delivery.
• Regulatory compliance. With strong security and fraud detection, the solution is built to help institutions meet complex and changing regulatory requirements.   

Available for existing or new FIS clients, the Modern Banking Platform is delivered through a flexible Software-as-a-Service subscription model that enables banks to speed deployment while minimizing capital investments. 

Standard Chartered today announced business targets for supporting its clients as they transition to a low- carbon economy as part of the Bank’s sustainability aspirations. By the end of 2024, the Bank commits to:

• providing USD40 billion of project financing services for infrastructure that promotes sustainable development
• providing USD35 billion of project financing services, M&A advisory and debt structuring services for renewables and clean-tech projects (solar and wind)

Underpinning the aspirations, Standard Chartered also intends to reduce its emissions across its global properties by 2030. With an office footprint spanning 60 countries, including many large emerging markets, the Bank will achieve net zero emissions by only sourcing energy from renewable sources and continuing to pursue energy efficiency measures across its 12 million square feet of property.

Tracey McDermott, Group Head, Corporate Affairs, Brand & Marketing, commented: “Over the past 18 months, we have made a series of commitments which are all geared towards supporting the Paris Agreement on climate change and the transition to a cleaner, greener, fairer economy. We know that the investment required cannot be provided by governments and NGOs alone, so it is critical that investors embrace the Sustainable Development Goals at pace and scale.

“Our unique footprint means we are well placed to help get finance to where it matters most. That is why, as well as ceasing support for clients who generate more than 10% of earnings from thermal coal by 2030, we also have a renewed target for financing and facilitating USD35 billion of clean technology and renewables, and USD40 billion of sustainable infrastructure.”

Standard Chartered has a broad range of sustainable finance product offerings that can be deployed to help clients pivot their business towards a more sustainable model. In October 2018, it created the Sustainable Finance team and has since launched sustainable deposit products in London, Singapore, Hong Kong and New York; plus, a EUR500 million Sustainability Bond, the proceeds of which will be used to provide finance in areas aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals – including clean energy projects, smaller business lending and microfinance loans.

 The Emerging Payments Association Asia (EPAA), the leading pan-Asian payments association in Asia, has released a ground-breaking research report on Open Banking in APAC, outlining challenges, opportunities and recommended approaches for Asia-Pacific’s financial sector. The report was presented to ABAC (APEC Business Advisory Committee) in Sydney on February 14, 2020 to assist with APEC Interoperability policy. 

The report notes that there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to introducing Open Banking, presenting an opportunity for regulators, industry and other stakeholders to collaborate in order to tailor approaches that are appropriate to the local context, and that would involve continued diversity, experimentation and adaptation.    

The benefits of Open Banking include empowering consumers to control their own data, consumer choice, and creating new opportunities for competition, collaboration, and innovation. Companies such as Fintechs and Payment Technology Companies (Paytechs) are moving into this new market poised to provide innovative services to customers. 

John Ryan, Director General of Policy and Projects at EPAA, commented, “The report notes that Open Banking, properly implemented, will modernise the payments ecosystem and deliver great benefits to consumers. The extent to which success can be achieved in Open Banking depends on connectivity and in particular the standards around data communication.”  

Dr. Brad Pragnell, one of the lead contributors to the report noted, “Open Banking will foster innovation and competition across the sector, leading to more seamless and frictionless user experiences. Ultimately, it holds the promise of providing consumers with greater control over their data and greater choice in the products and services they use.”  

The survey highlights some key focus areas for the future. This includes the importance of interoperability (including supporting cross-border capability), data standards and an appropriate role for regulators.  Some of the learnings include:

1. Open Banking is inherently multi-disciplinary, and requires the coordination and leadership of regulators, central banks and government agencies.
2. Inclusive consultation and implementation processes that go beyond “big banks” to also include smaller institutions, new entrants and Fintechs.
3. Development of APIs with consideration of what has been done in other jurisdictions will be beneficial (for example, Australia leveraged the UK API standards).
4. Open Banking is more than a technology solution; it goes beyond the standards and rules around APIs.
5. Consideration of Faster Payment, Digital Identity and Consent Management initiatives will support the development of Open Banking.

Given the diversity in Asia Pacific, the roadmap for Open Banking development varies. Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia have focused considerable amount of energy towards Open Banking, followed by India, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, Chinese Taipei, New Zealand, Bahrain and UAE. Their efforts and focus can be understood and analysed in terms of (i) Open API adoption, (ii) regulatory guidelines, (iii) Fintech ecosystem, and (iv) adoption of new technologies.    

“The diversity, experimentation and adaptation seen within the Asia-Pacific and globally, combined with the potential to bring about significant consumer benefits signifies that we are still in a very early phase for Open Banking”, concluded Mr. Ryan. 

Given its multi-disciplinary nature, many parties have a stake in the development of Open Banking, including but not limited to consumers, traditional banks, neo banks, neo/virtual banks, financial technology companies, technology vendors/service providers, and regulators. The set of specific opportunities and risks for each party varies, but they all point towards the need to build a robust infrastructure and ecosystem for the principal purposes of interoperability and innovation. 

Rapyd, a global B2B Fintech as a Service provider, today announced a new agreement with Visa (NYSE:V) that will help Rapyd expand its worldwide business operations.