The Emerging Payments Association (EPA), which celebrates collaboration and innovation within new and existing finance companies, has published a first of its kind guide to address the need for increased access to bank accounts.

Ten account providers from the United Kingdom (UK) have contributed in their own words to the report, entitled, ‘Guide to Payment Account Providers’, including e-money institutions (EMIs), digital banks and other Account Servicing Payment Service Providers (Payment institutions/PIs). The guide examines what kind of accounts they offer, their risk appetite and schemes they support, as well as providing clear and practical guidance for those opening accounts with them.

Historically, the payments industry is often subject to criticism for closing its doors to businesses, due to an increased level of de-risking by UK banks, however, this report provides an objective summary and extended invitation to all UK providers for contribution.

The EPA previously launched a survey on banking access to its members, with 48% of respondent companies having been refused a banking service. However, the EPA’s guide illustrates how far the industry has progressed in recent years, and supports the ability of EMIs, PIs, digital banks to open and keep open bank accounts for safeguarding funds and everyday trading, and to secure a widely accepted understanding of the scale and nature of de-risking and its impact on financial services and businesses.

Clay Wilkes, CEO of Galileo, said: “It is with pride and pleasure that Galileo Financial Technologies sponsor this first edition of the Emerging Payments Association’s Guide to Payment Account Providers. We are honoured that we can count leading UK and European fintech organisations among our friends, colleagues and clients. We look forward to expanding these relationships over the coming years and deepening our association through our mutual support of the EPA.”

Tony Craddock, Director General of the Emerging Payments Association, said: “We must ask ourselves, is the market for bank accounts open and competitive? This report highlights that with some notable and worthy exceptions, there are precious few providers of bank accounts to companies operating in payments which is approaching a market failure. We call on the government and regulators to sit up and take notice.”

He added: “The EPA will continue to encourage new providers of bank accounts and scrutinise apparent attempts to curtail competition by incumbent providers.”

The guide will act as a live document, with more payment providers lined up to contribute to the next edition in six months’ time. The guide recognises the work of U.K. Finance and it’s Access to Payment Account Services, a Good Practice Guide, which provides an excellent summary of the regulatory and legal requirements for providers. The EPA will continue to work with UK Finance and other trade bodies to champion increased open access to accounts and payments within the UK.

Moneyfarm, the leading European digital wealth manager, today launches a campaign urging those entering their 40s and 50s to invest in their plans for later life now, after identifying a “mid-life opportunity” which could see them benefit from thousands of pounds extra income to help them realise their retirement goals.

The research found that, between the ages of 35-55, family pressures are the main barrier preventing those surveyed from saving for retirement (19%). However, when looking at the amounts spent annually supporting family members, the average person spends £8,300 less by the age of 55 than they did at 35.

When this cash is reallocated to a self-invested personal pension (SIPP), those investing can begin to make big strides towards achieving their retirement goals. For instance, those aged 45 looking to retire at 66 could benefit from extra income in retirement of up to £9,831 a year by investing the money saved from family members becoming less financially dependent in Moneyfarm’s P7 portfolio.^[1]

In addition, there’s evidence that other opportune moments that help people achieve their retirement goals arise as they enter new life stages.

As children leave home and forge their own paths, one in seven (14%) of those surveyed plan to move into a home more suited to their needs as they near retirement, while 19% said the extra time means they can work a part-time job to help give a boost to their retirement fund.

Considering those aged between 55 and 64 are also the most likely to receive a big windfall of inheritance money^[2], the mid-life opportunities presented to this group to begin realising their retirement goals are substantial.

Meanwhile, it was found that almost half (48%) have no idea what the cost of achieving their retirement goals is. Of those that did know, it was estimated that they would need to save an average of £27,213 to reach these goals. For a 45-year-old looking to retire at 66, this is the equivalent to investing £82.58 extra monthly in Moneyfarm’s P7 portfolio, whereas as a 35 year old could stand to benefit even more, needing to invest just £48.83 extra a month.

Despite the mid-life opportunity to maximise your funds for later life, nearly a third (30%) say they are not saving for retirement at all, with four in 10 (40%) say they do not know where to start when it comes to saving enough to reach their retirement goals.

When looking at what specific goals Brits want to achieve in retirement, travelling the world (34%) topped the list, followed by looking after family (29%), volunteering in the community (17%) and making new friends (15%). Yet, as well as the most popular, travelling was found to be one of the most expensive retirement goals, estimated to cost retirees £22,047 on average. Despite this, going travelling in later life is becoming increasingly common, supported by recent figures showing the number of over 65s travelling abroad rising by 35% over the last 20 years^[3].

Aiming to help those planning for retirement with simple financial know-how to achieve their goals, Moneyfarm has partnered with travel guru and broadcaster Andy Mossack, who is Editor of TripReporter.co.uk, to give an expert view on how to make the nation’s most desired retirement goal a reality.

Andy’s advice for those set on travelling the world in retirement is:

1. Choose a method of travel that suits you:
2. Famous as the mandatory gap year experience where sleeping on the train saves hotel expenses, interrailing for adults takes on a whole new perspective – and you can do it in style. For instance, unlimited 1^st class travel across 31 countries stretching from Portugal’s Atlantic coast to Turkey’s Asian border within one month currently costs just £759.
3. Air travel is the most expensive and less environmentally friendly but, if you’re set on air travel, make sure to fly with airlines that can offer highly flexible round the world tickets through their global partnerships. Often these tickets give you considerable savings compared to booking flights separately, allowing you to stop-off for a set number of times depending on how many miles you intend to fly in total.
4. Alternatively, if you’re looking at embarking on a cruise, make sure that the all-inclusive offer includes all meals, drinks, excursions and tips. Cruises can be pricey but can turn out to be excellent value in the long-run if you go with a provider that covers in-destination costs

1. Take the path least travelled. Travel to destinations and at times where your money will go further:
2. The UK has suffered with exchange rates in Europe and the US over the last few years but there are many destinations where sterling remains strong. Destinations such as South Africa, Vietnam, Argentina and parts of eastern Europe such as Romania and Bulgaria for example can make your pound go a lot further. The flights might not be cheap but once you arrive you will quickly notice the difference.
3. The beauty of retirement is that you’re not forced to take holidays at certain times of the year. Peak-times are always the most expensive and there are many savings to be found visiting a country off-peak. A good example is the Caribbean which is always seen as just a winter sun destination. The truth is in our summer it may be their rainy season but that normally means a short strong shower in the afternoon, while the temperatures are still perfect. Be travel-wise and you can save considerably.

1. Be savvy when you choose your destinations in-country:
2. There can be huge variations in price depending on which regions of a country you pick. The south of France is an excellent example. The French Riviera is a wonderful destination and Nice, Cannes and St. Tropez may well be on your bucket list. However, the truth is they are often crowded and pricey. Further west in the Languedoc region you’ll find the same coastline with much better beaches for much lower prices and far less people.
3. The same situation for Italy and Amalfi, which is another stunning location but very crowded in summer. Head instead to the Cilento coast which is about a 30 minutes’ drive further, but you’ll see prices fall dramatically as well as the number of tourists. A much better experience all round.

1. Invest in your retirement travel goals now
2. Travelling the world can be a hugely rewarding experience, and if you make the right financial decisions now, it’ll make this goal a lot easier to achieve.
3. Moneyfarm has identified a mid-life opportunity that, if handled with care, can help you make the most out of your retirement. So, whether you’re planning a river cruise down the Ganges or boarding the Orient Express from St Pancras, have the confidence to plan for your retirement and be reassured your goals are attainable.

With travelling the world in retirement estimated to cost £22,047 on average, Moneyfarm has outlined what those aged 35, 45 and 55 would need to invest on monthly basis to make this retirement dream come true. For instance, someone aged 45 aiming to retire at 66 would need to make monthly contributions of £145 in a P7 Moneyfarm Pension to have enough to travel in retirement and live a comfortable lifestyle, £25.67 less a month than if they were to save that money in cash only.

Anjali Sarin, Head of UK at Moneyfarm, said:

“Our research shows that, as a nation, we have big hopes for retirement. Despite this, we’re taking little action to ensure our retirement goals are realised. It’s important people have access to the right advice and the right financial products to achieve their goals, and that’s something we at Moneyfarm go above and beyond to provide our clients.

“Investing in a Pension and an ISA is a great way to make sure you’re keeping on top of your retirement funds, allowing you to benefit from tax-free allowances and ensure that you’ve got that little extra to tick things like travelling the world off the bucket list.”

Moneyfarm provides all its clients with personal advice and support so they can feel confident about their investments. Their investment portfolios are tailored to clients’ investment plans and are managed by a team of experienced portfolio managers, using a proven investment strategy.

Moneyfarm’s convenient online platform and mobile app provide complete transparency, making it easy for clients to stay in control of their investments and track their progress towards retirement goals. Their team of investment advisers are always on hand to provide guidance and answer any questions.

Moneyfarm offers Pensions, Stocks and Shares ISAs and General Investment Accounts, aimed at helping investors make better decisions with their money to reach their dream retirement.

Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the banking software company, announced that it has delivered new industry first Banking Distribution Services as part of the award-winning Temenos Infinity digital front-office banking product. Temenos Infinity is the first core-agnostic product to give banks the ability to continuously transform at scale, creating AI-driven customer experiences. Through upgradeable, standalone distribution services banks are able to retain their own apps and digital banking experience but offer deeper personalized customer engagement capabilities. As the first to deliver a packaged, API-driven, digital front-office capability allowing banks to create hyper-personalized experiences while building on cloud-native, cloud-agnostic microservices, Temenos uniquely enables continuous renovation at scale of sales, servicing and marketing capabilities For the largest banks worldwide, requiring an architecture that abstracts the underlying complexity from delivery of personalized service across channels, to small banks wanting to differentiate through innovation and services, Temenos Infinity delivers agility and extensibility to both through its new microservice distribution. Temenos Infinity is available “out-of-the-box” with Temenos Transact or as a package of services for use on any core, in any architecture. 

Max Chuard, Chief Executive Officer, Temenos, said: “At Temenos, we recognize that distribution has split from manufacturing in response to open banking and other structural changes in the banking industry. Last year we launched Temenos Infinity and Temenos T24 Transact to offer banks more choice in how they wish to transform and today we are launching another Industry first with the delivery of API and microservice based distribution services in Temenos Infinity. This major milestone, unmatched in the digital banking market, gives banks the ability to offer personalized, explainable AI driven products, rapid development and deployment, and reduced cost of operation up to an enterprise-wide scale. While other digital banking products put limits on the biggest banks, Temenos Infinity gives a path to the future”.  

Building on its already-extensive set of standalone Temenos Infinity services, Temenos now offers banks these new distribution services:

• Originations and Onboarding. Consistency and low friction for onboarding and origination of customers and/or products are of paramount importance. This is incredibly difficult to achieve when banks have different products in different systems with differing requirements. The Originations Distribution Service manages the business processes associated with onboarding of customers and origination of products encompassing business processes workflows, associated rules, task assignment, in-flight applications persistence and fulfilment in one place. This distribution service provides optimization in the user journeys through Journey Analytics irrespective of the platform on which apps are built. Smart AI-driven credit scoring of the applications with full explainability of the decisions is fully embedded into this service offering high accuracy, transparency and automation while accepting/rejecting the applications.
• Marketing Catalogue. Banks typically have between 50 – 500 products for sale at any one time. As a customer of the bank, how do I know what product is best for me? Temenos Infinity Distribution service is a complete source of system-independent data of product details and marketing content crossing all the banks products, and capable of consuming products and services outside of the bank. Examples include products offered by fintechs (such as payment devices) or real banking products that can be sold and marketed on behalf of other banks. Temenos AI-based customer needs analysis learns and deciphers models to allow better products and increased cross-selling across the entire spectrum of the banks desired product placement and marketing strategy.
• Real Time Engagement for Marketing. Contextual banking is the ability to understand the client at moment they are engaged with the bank; e.g. a large purchase could offer immediate goal-based decisions on whether to pay with cash, card or short-term personal finance. This distribution service stores offers and allows banks to utilize AI with input captured from multiple sources to deploy engagement campaigns in real time. These are used in conjunction with real- time analytics and AI models covering customer attrition, customer lifetime value, next best product, and transaction outlier detection.
• Multi-Party Services. Multiple systems, multiple customer records and inconsistent data, are routinely a day in the life of every bank. Given that onboarding is automated, a customer of the bank expects one place to go to change any and all data related. This data needs to be up-to-date for regulations such as KYC tax and even groups and corporate structures as applicable. This distribution service contains all Party information and structures needed to support sales, servicing and marketing the bank undertakes making those processes low friction. It provides a central repository of high quality Party data for Retail, SME, Corporate and wealth customers. KYC refreshes, Taxation, Groups and hierarchies among parties are examples of information provided in this central data store.
• Holdings and Arrangements Services. Designed as high performance, always available, read-only Distribution services, this provides balances and transaction details of all arrangements that customer has with a bank on any digital channel through APIs. For open banking and PSD2 aggregation of external accounts and the ability to transact over them is provided by this unique capability of Temenos Infinity. It enables banks to deliver high performance open banking experiences. The balances and transaction data is further classified and aggregated. Where possible they categorized at a more granular level using AI-driven automation and learning. Manual categorization possibility further enhances this process. All of this leads to a deeper more meaningful personalization capability of the data for sales and real time engagement.
• Payment Initiation. A distribution service dedicated to capture, validate and submission of international, domestic and instant payments of various regions independent of core/payment execution system. The services provide the ability to reserve funds offer advice on the fastest, best and or cheapest route for the money flow providing exceptional customer experience. The customer can accept the payment route before execution or change as needed. Based on AI-driven transaction prediction and smart payment routing models, this distribution service can offer personalized payment services at an account level based on learning and additional models.
• Funds Authorization service: This service provides the ability to check and reserve funds on an account for all payments that are initiated in a bank before the payment is executed in any core/ payment system. This ensures digital payment services are available without any interruption even if payment systems are unavailable. The risk to the bank, therefore, is greatly reduced when banks sometimes, and with legacy cores, operate in the “acceptable risk” zone of when the core is closed for processing.

In the open banking environment, banks are moving to separate product distribution from manufacturing to take advantage of opportunities for distribution across multiple channels and to establish new business models and meet the demands of their customers. Temenos Infinity distribution services allows this.

Packaging of these distribution services separate from core manufacturing makes Temenos Infinity the first to deliver a modern layered bank architecture with the banking features, salable products and marketing capability all inbuilt.  Additionally, for large banks aspiring to lead development of their own AI-driven personalized open banking experiences, building on packaged microservices will allow a quicker delivery that is more agile and better able to adapt to Open Banking, regulations and market change opportunities.   

Another innovation for Temenos Infinity is the separation of applications from the API-driven distribution services. This gives each bank the ability to consume Temenos Infinity products at their desired level. For banks requiring a packaged solution to address retail, business or corporate banking, or wealth management customer journeys, Temenos Infinity Apps provide an extensible business solution. For banks wanting to take greater control of their trajectory and build their own apps from a proven set of API-driven distribution services, Temenos Infinity gives them a low risk, fast to market, upgradeable option which allows the bank to quickly adapt and adopt any new or enhanced distribution service offering more capability, combined with the ever learning AI capability models being drawn in from a global audience.

Temenos Infinity is the first to offer banks an API driven product delivery, where the banking platform is delivered as a set of API accessible services, and the user visible journeys are created by the bank using their preferred design tools. Its cloud-native, cloud-agnostic standalone distribution microservices allow banks to focus on differentiating customer experiences, while benefiting from a packaged set of services for the difficult data collection, security, AI based personalization and FinTech integration behind the scenes. It addresses the realistic needs of banks continuously renovating a mixed environment of core systems.

Temenos Infinity enables banks to easily integrate with banking and non-traditional third parties using open APIs, taking advantage of the open banking opportunities. It is the most open and agile SaaS product available, allowing banks to continuously extend and expand their digital experience for all or portions of the customer lifecycle. Temenos Infinity is available on premise, as a SaaS offering, or in the cloud via Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. Temenos Infinity can be deployed alongside any core banking system or pre-integrated with Temenos T24 Transact, the market leading core banking product. 

Radware®, a leading provider of cyber security and application delivery solutions, released its 2019-2020 Global Application & Network Security Report. The report found that more than one in four respondents attribute attacks against their organisation to cyberwarfare or nation-state activity. In 2018, 19% of organisations believed they were attacked by a nation-state. That figure increased to 27% in 2019. Companies in North America were more likely to report nation-state attribution, at 36%.

“Nation-state intrusions are among the most difficult attacks to thwart because the agencies responsible often have significant resources, knowledge of potential zero-day exploits, and the patience to plan and execute operations,” says Anna Convery-Pelletier, Chief Marketing Officer at Radware. “These attacks can result in the loss of sensitive trade, technological, or other data, and security teams may be at a distinct disadvantage.”

These findings come at a time of heightened anxiety for security managers. Organisations are increasingly turning to microservices, serverless architectures, and a mix of multiple cloud environments. Two in five managers reported using a hybrid environment that included cloud and on-premises data centers, and two in five said they relied on more than one public cloud environment. However, only 10% of respondents felt that their data was more secure in public cloud environments.

As organisations adapt their network infrastructure to enjoy the benefits of these new paradigms (such as microservices and multi-cloud environments), they increase their attack surface and decrease the overall visibility into their traffic.  For example, 22% of respondents don’t even know if they were attacked, 27% of those who were attacked don’t know the hacker’s motivations, 38% are not sure whether an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet hit their networks, and 46% are not sure if they suffered an encrypted DDoS attack. 

Convery-Pelletier added, "This report finds that security professionals feel as though the battlefield is shifting under their feet.  Companies are increasingly adding and relying upon new paradigms, like microservices, public and hybrid clouds, and IoT, which means the infrastructure is harder to monitor for attacks. These new technologies force a shift in security implementation into the development teams.  Security is often an afterthought as businesses march forward, and there is a misconception that ‘good enough’ is enough.”

In addition, the report also found:

The emergence of 5G networks. As the push for 5G grows, there exists an important opportunity to build security into networks at its foundations. Despite the increasing buzz around 5G networks, only 26% of carriers responded that they felt well prepared for 5G deployment, while another 32% stated that they were somewhat prepared.  

Be careful what you wish for in terms of IoT. 5G promises to advance organisations’ implementation of and the value they derive from IoT technologies, but that promise comes with a corresponding increase in the attack surface. When it comes to IoT connected devices, 44% of respondents said malware propagation was their top concern, while lack of visibility followed at 20% and Denial of Service at 20%.

Data loss is top concern. About 30% of businesses stated that data theft as a result of a breach was their top concern following an attack, down from 35% the previous year, followed by service outages at 23%.  Meanwhile, 33% said that financial gain is a leading motivation for attacks.

SteelEye, the compliance technology and data analytics firm, has announced a partnership and first joint client with TeleMessage.

Recent regulations, such as MiFID II, have introduced highly prescriptive rules about the recording, storage and access requirements of voice and electronic communications relating to financial dealings. These have been relatively straight forward to manage for email and desk phone communications. However, many firms have struggled with how to monitor and capture the wealth of communications channels used on mobiles and how to manage the behaviours often used on these devices. These challenges are magnified when firms use a BYOD (“bring your own device”) policy, with FCA, among other regulators, increasingly investigating the relating risks.

In response to these challenges, many banks have banned the use of mobiles from the trading floor. However, in today’s world, customers expect a level of responsiveness which can only be achieved with mobile devices. Further, workplace happiness has been found to be closely linked with the ability to communicate freely with friends and family during the working day. The ban of mobile devices has therefore brought with it a number of other challenges. As a result, we are seeing an increasing number of firms looking for ways to effectively and compliantly monitor and capture mobile communications.

To enable firms to meet this ambition, SteelEye has partnered with messaging and communications technology firm, TeleMessage. 

TeleMessage enables financial firms to communicate freely via mobile channels whilst complying fully with FCA and MiFID II requirements.

SteelEye was designed to enable firms to Comply Smarter™ by managing their compliance holistically and offers solutions for record keeping, trade reconstruction, MiFID II and EMIR transaction reporting, trade and communications surveillance and best execution.

Through this partnership, TeleMessage clients can integrate their mobile communications with SteelEye in real-time. This covers both corporate and BYOD phones for Android and iOS devices across all mobile carriers, and includes voice calls, SMS, MMS and WhatsApp chats and calls.

All mobile data from TeleMessage is ingested, indexed and compliantly stored within SteelEye in line with record keeping obligations under MiFID II and other global regulations. The data is also made instantly available for use within SteelEye’s RegTech solutions for transaction reporting, trade and communications surveillance and best execution. 

“Over the past 5 years, mobile reporting requirements have become increasingly granular and onerous” says Matt Smith, CEO of SteelEye. “By integrating TeleMessage’s mobile archiving solution on the SteelEye platform, we enable clients to address these requirements in an increasingly straight forward and cost-effective way. Further, the ability to monitor mobile communications alongside other financial and regulatory data is an opportunity to gain enhanced business insight.”

"We are excited about this joint offering with SteelEye," said Guy Levit, CEO of TeleMessage. "Our complementary technologies offer UK-based financial firms flexible and compliant use of mobile communications, while reducing operational complexity, both rapidly and transparently.”

Leading customer onboarding and KYC technology firm, HooYu, has announced a partnership to digitalise Vanquis Bank’s KYC processes.  The HooYu KYC journey has been selected to provide additional identity proofing during the customer lifecycle when customers perform a potentially high-risk action on their accounts.  

Vanquis Bank is part of the Provident Financial Group, a UK and Ireland business with over 140 years’ experience in lending to consumers who are not well served by mainstream lenders. With millions of customers, Vanquis needed to find a way to help balance fraud prevention and KYC with a great customer experience. 

Existing customers calling in to the change the details on their account were in some cases having to wait weeks before the change could be approved.   The team at Vanquis Bank is continually looking to improve how their products work for their customers and that they are easy to apply for and manage.  Vanquis Bank decided to implement an ID document validation solution that would speed up customer lifecycle management and improve the customer experience. 

Sue Singleton, Process Change Assurance Manager at Vanquis Bank said, “By adding HooYu to our KYC tools, we can improve some of our higher risk customer processes and can now facilitate customer requests without asking the customer to post in copies of documentation. Our agents deal with thousands of customers a day and now what could have been a delay of weeks for our customers, can be achieved in a matter of minutes with HooYu”. 

David Pope, Marketing Director at HooYu said, “It’s been great to see the results of Vanquis implementing the HooYu digital journey and how the HooYu UI and UX tools are helping their customers though the KYC process.”  

Temenos, the banking software company, announced that it has delivered new industry first Banking Distribution Services as part of the award-winning Temenos Infinity digital front-office banking product. Temenos Infinity is the first core-agnostic product to give banks the ability to continuously transform at scale, creating AI-driven customer experiences. Through upgradeable, standalone distribution services banks are able to retain their own apps and digital banking experience but offer deeper personalized customer engagement capabilities. As the first to deliver a packaged, API-driven, digital front-office capability allowing banks to create hyper-personalized experiences while building on cloud-native, cloud-agnostic microservices, Temenos uniquely enables continuous renovation at scale of sales, servicing and marketing capabilities For the largest banks worldwide, requiring an architecture that abstracts the underlying complexity from delivery of personalized service across channels, to small banks wanting to differentiate through innovation and services, Temenos Infinity delivers agility and extensibility to both through its new microservice distribution. Temenos Infinity is available “out-of-the-box” with Temenos Transact or as a package of services for use on any core, in any architecture. 

Max Chuard, Chief Executive Officer, Temenos, said:

“At Temenos, we recognize that distribution has split from manufacturing in response to open banking and other structural changes in the banking industry. Last year we launched Temenos Infinity and Temenos T24 Transact to offer banks more choice in how they wish to transform and today we are launching another Industry first with the delivery of API and microservice based distribution services in Temenos Infinity. This major milestone, unmatched in the digital banking market, gives banks the ability to offer personalized, explainable AI driven products, rapid development and deployment, and reduced cost of operation up to an enterprise-wide scale. While other digital banking products put limits on the biggest banks, Temenos Infinity gives a path to the future”.

Building on its already-extensive set of standalone Temenos Infinity services, Temenos now offers banks these new distribution services:

• Originations and Onboarding. Consistency and low friction for onboarding and origination of customers and/or products are of paramount importance. This is incredibly difficult to achieve when banks have different products in different systems with differing requirements. The Originations Distribution Service manages the business processes associated with onboarding of customers and origination of products encompassing business processes workflows, associated rules, task assignment, in-flight applications persistence and fulfilment in one place. This distribution service provides optimization in the user journeys through Journey Analytics irrespective of the platform on which apps are built. Smart AI-driven credit scoring of the applications with full explainability of the decisions is fully embedded into this service offering high accuracy, transparency and automation while accepting/rejecting the applications.

• Marketing Catalogue. Banks typically have between 50 – 500 products for sale at any one time. As a customer of the bank, how do I know what product is best for me? Temenos Infinity Distribution service is a complete source of system-independent data of product details and marketing content crossing all the banks products, and capable of consuming products and services outside of the bank. Examples include products offered by fintechs (such as payment devices) or real banking products that can be sold and marketed on behalf of other banks. Temenos AI-based customer needs analysis learns and deciphers models to allow better products and increased cross-selling across the entire spectrum of the banks desired product placement and marketing strategy.

• Real Time Engagement for Marketing. Contextual banking is the ability to understand the client at moment they are engaged with the bank; e.g. a large purchase could offer immediate goal-based decisions on whether to pay with cash, card or short-term personal finance. This distribution service stores offers and allows banks to utilize AI with input captured from multiple sources to deploy engagement campaigns in real time. These are used in conjunction with real- time analytics and AI models covering customer attrition, customer lifetime value, next best product, and transaction outlier detection.

• Multi-Party Services. Multiple systems, multiple customer records and inconsistent data, are routinely a day in the life of every bank. Given that onboarding is automated, a customer of the bank expects one place to go to change any and all data related. This data needs to be up-to-date for regulations such as KYC tax and even groups and corporate structures as applicable. This distribution service contains all Party information and structures needed to support sales, servicing and marketing the bank undertakes making those processes low friction. It provides a central repository of high quality Party data for Retail, SME, Corporate and wealth customers. KYC refreshes, Taxation, Groups and hierarchies among parties are examples of information provided in this central data store.

• Holdings and Arrangements Services. Designed as high performance, always available, read-only Distribution services, this provides balances and transaction details of all arrangements that customer has with a bank on any digital channel through APIs. For open banking and PSD2 aggregation of external accounts and the ability to transact over them is provided by this unique capability of Temenos Infinity. It enables banks to deliver high performance open banking experiences. The balances and transaction data is further classified and aggregated. Where possible they categorized at a more granular level using AI-driven automation and learning. Manual categorization possibility further enhances this process. All of this leads to a deeper more meaningful personalization capability of the data for sales and real time engagement.

• Payment Initiation. A distribution service dedicated to capture, validate and submission of international, domestic and instant payments of various regions independent of core/payment execution system. The services provide the ability to reserve funds offer advice on the fastest, best and or cheapest route for the money flow providing exceptional customer experience. The customer can accept the payment route before execution or change as needed. Based on AI-driven transaction prediction and smart payment routing models, this distribution service can offer personalized payment services at an account level based on learning and additional models.

• Funds Authorization service: This service provides the ability to check and reserve funds on an account for all payments that are initiated in a bank before the payment is executed in any core/ payment system. This ensures digital payment services are available without any interruption even if payment systems are unavailable. The risk to the bank, therefore, is greatly reduced when banks sometimes, and with legacy cores, operate in the “acceptable risk” zone of when the core is closed for processing.

In the open banking environment, banks are moving to separate product distribution from manufacturing to take advantage of opportunities for distribution across multiple channels and to establish new business models and meet the demands of their customers. Temenos Infinity distribution services allows this.

Packaging of these distribution services separate from core manufacturing makes Temenos Infinity the first to deliver a modern layered bank architecture with the banking features, salable products and marketing capability all inbuilt.  Additionally, for large banks aspiring to lead development of their own AI-driven personalized open banking experiences, building on packaged microservices will allow a quicker delivery that is more agile and better able to adapt to Open Banking, regulations and market change opportunities.    

Another innovation for Temenos Infinity is the separation of applications from the API-driven distribution services. This gives each bank the ability to consume Temenos Infinity products at their desired level. For banks requiring a packaged solution to address retail, business or corporate banking, or wealth management customer journeys, Temenos Infinity Apps provide an extensible business solution. For banks wanting to take greater control of their trajectory and build their own apps from a proven set of API-driven distribution services, Temenos Infinity gives them a low risk, fast to market, upgradeable option which allows the bank to quickly adapt and adopt any new or enhanced distribution service offering more capability, combined with the ever learning AI capability models being drawn in from a global audience.

Temenos Infinity is the first to offer banks an API driven product delivery, where the banking platform is delivered as a set of API accessible services, and the user visible journeys are created by the bank using their preferred design tools. Its cloud-native, cloud-agnostic standalone distribution microservices allow banks to focus on differentiating customer experiences, while benefiting from a packaged set of services for the difficult data collection, security, AI based personalization and FinTech integration behind the scenes. It addresses the realistic needs of banks continuously renovating a mixed environment of core systems. Temenos Infinity enables banks to easily integrate with banking and non-traditional third parties using open APIs, taking advantage of the open banking opportunities. It is the most open and agile SaaS product available, allowing banks to continuously extend and expand their digital experience for all or portions of the customer lifecycle. Temenos Infinity is available on premise, as a SaaS offering, or in the cloud via Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. Temenos Infinity can be deployed alongside any core banking system or pre-integrated with Temenos T24 Transact, the market leading core banking product.

TransferGo, one of the world’s fastest growing money transfer companies, today announced it is partnering with global payments platform Currencycloud to facilitate cross-border payments and launch in 14 new markets during Q1 of this year. As a result, the TransferGo and Currencycloud partnership will be available in 69 countries globally.

Remittance flows to developing countries are on the rise, with the World Bank estimating that annual remittances to low- and middle-income countries reached $529 billion in 2018, a 9.6 per cent increase from the previous year and a figure that eclipses the total GDP of Argentina.

Yet transferring funds across borders can be cumbersome, with bureaucracy and fees imposed by banks for processing payments in other countries and currencies.

Through partnerships with leading payments platforms such as Currencycloud, TransferGo will undo this trend and democratise remittances for users across markets including Kenya, Japan, Malaysia, the UAE and many more.

Commenting on the partnership with Currencycloud and global expansion, TransferGo CEO and co-founder Daumantas Dvilinskas said: “Our mission is to create financial options and access for hardworking migrant communities around the world. At the same time, we recognise that our customers the world over have unique money transfer needs. Our partnership with Currencycloud will help us meet these varying needs with further scale and reach.”

Digby Try, VP of Sales, EMEA at Currencycloud said: “Currencycloud was launched with the intention of democratising cross-border payments. Working with TransferGo is a perfect example of how we envisaged helping to make the complicated, opaque and expensive process of sending money overseas far more simple.”

Based in London, UK, TransferGo is the quickest, most reliable remittance company in Europe, rated ‘excellent’ on Trustpilot (4.8) and with an NPS score of 75, it has built a much-loved brand based on transparency, trust and user experience. Last year the company announced a fee-free offer – the first completely free international money transfer service.