MoonX today announced the launch of its new trading technology in the UK, offering a full suite of financial software and hardware systems for exchanges, brokerages, hedge funds, financial institutions and traders.

MoonX’s offering includes the world’s fastest exchange software, matching 25 million Transactions Per Second (TPS). This makes MoonX 150 times faster than its closest competitor; meaning traders can place 150 times more orders in the same time frame. MoonX processes one order in 6 nano seconds, by that time light would have only travelled 1.8 metres, making MoonX the fastest exchange in the world.

MoonX’s processing speed is delivered by its patent pending Matching Engine technology. Superior to any systems on the market, the Matching Engine produces computational and processing speed advantages which had never been achieved in the past. The exchange is built with enterprise-grade security, is hosted on physical servers, and uses AI, facial and mood recognition technology to go beyond 2-factor authentication.

MoonX is engineered by an expert team with a combined 200+ years’ experience and has an institutional client base on the likes of TPICAP and CME

In addition to its Exchange Software, MoonX also offers its clients:

• Custodian services: In place of using traditional clearing houses and custodian services, MoonX uses blockchain technology to store data on securities transactions and for taking custody of securities, enabling greater transparency, military grade protection of assets, speed and cost efficiency. Blockchain also enables unparalleled scalability; the processing speed doesn't slow down even at huge numbers of transactions.  
• Wallet solution: Crafted for Stock & Commodity Exchanges, Blockchain Powered Exchanges, Forex Traders, Banks, OTC’s & Brokers.
• Risk management system: MoonX is building a powerful AI-based financial risk automation toolkit for futures, options and leverage trading that minimises financial risk and keep businesses protected and pro-active against financial risks.
• Security consulting services: A unique service unlike any other provider, ensuring clients have the correct controls in place to prevent exchange wallet or co-location transaction hacks.  MoonX offers security consulting services to Exchanges, Wallets, Integrators and Co-location participants.
• NOC and SOC services: Monitoring and handling cyber security incidents with manual systems and advanced AI algorithms.  

Dr Nithin Palavalli, Founder and Chief Executive, MoonX comments:

“We observed that the flow of trading is often hindered by obsolete technology and redundant dataflow structures, used by many parts of the financial services industry.  Although, the use of blockchain technology in the financial sector is maturing. However, the underlying foundation, exchange technology has been stuck with little to no improvements, despite heavy investments.

Running an exchange on cloud only infrastructure hinders security and exponentially lowers the operational speed. There is a great need for running the exchange on bare metal servers with proprietary Gateways and Binary APIs. With our MoonX exchange and suite of solutions we are delivering speed, scalability, security and smart surveillance solutions. The speed we provide to businesses means we enhance their efficiency by bringing more opportunities for savings that too consistently for a longer period of time. We welcome institutions to explore our platform and witness transactions throughput at the lightning speed.

We are using trusted traditional financial technologies and the blockchain architecture to meet the needs of the modern financial market and enhance trading capabilities in the UK.”

Finastra today unveiled Fusion Treasury Essential – a packaged solution designed for smaller banks that don’t already have a dedicated treasury system, but are looking to automate and modernize the treasury function. The packaged solution enables banks to do away with spreadsheets and supports over 80 percent of the core products and transaction volumes of the standard bank treasury. It can be implemented in the cloud or on premise in around 90 days.

Fusion Treasury Essential is ideally suited for banks that have limited IT resources in-house but are looking to benefit from proven treasury market practice. Moving away from manual processes will also help these banks increase efficiencies to compete more effectively and also demonstrate to regulators that they have a robust overall operating model in place to prevent systemic risk.

“Thousands of smaller banks and challengers that rely on manual processes and spreadsheets to manage their treasury function can now quickly benefit from a solution that automates routine processes, reduces manual errors and maximizes straight-through processing of treasury transactions,” said Pedro Porfirio, Global Head of Capital Markets at Finastra. “Until now many of these organizations have considered specialist treasury solutions to be out of their reach in terms of the expense and the complexity of implementation. But Fusion Treasury Essential changes that.” 

Using the tried and tested capabilities of Finastra’s core solutions, Fusion Kondor and Fusion Opics, Fusion Treasury Essential provides automated product workflows in a fixed-cost packaged solution that’s fast to deploy. It offers front-to-back automated processing of bonds, loans and deposits, repos, call accounts, FX and money market transactions. It also supports manual deal capture, data interfaces to Reuters and Bloomberg, position keeping, trade workflows, decision support and updates to the bank general ledger.

Finastra’s global partners will work with banks to roll the solution out over a timescale of around 12 weeks. Sunder Ganesh, Vice President and Client Partner at ITC Infotech, one of Finastra’s global partners who has already successfully deployed the solution on Microsoft Azure said, “We are excited to collaborate with Finastra in delivering a quick to market, straight-through processing, front to back treasury solution by building a golden copy that is pre-configured and certified for deployment. Fusion Treasury Essential offers clients the opportunity to modernize their growing treasury business and with a 90-day schedule, the solution can be up and running in no time, on premise or in the cloud.”

Brad Bailey, Research Director at Celent said, “The demands of running a small bank treasury today are daunting from a business, regulatory, and client demand perspective. Most firms introduce unnecessary complexity, risk, and error because of reliance on manual processes. Ideally, they need a treasury solution that can automate, streamline, and optimize their needs today, but can also scale, as they move along their future growth trajectory.”

New research  from JGOO, the next generation mobile payments platform, reveals that of those companies currently marketing goods and services in China, 67% say sales in this market have grown over the past 12 months.  Furthermore, for those that don’t trade with the world’s second largest economy, one in five companies (20%) are now considering doing this.

Over the next five years, the findings reveal that 40% of British businesses think that the Chinese market will become important for the companies they work for.

However, many organisations looking to trade in China highlight several obstacles that they believe are in their way.  Some 27% say they have had a past poor experience of trying to sell in China and this has put them off attempting to do so again.  One in five (22%) said they don’t know how to ‘sell’ in the country, or where to go to get support for this.  Some 16% say they don’t have any Chinese employees and that this has deterred them from targeting China.

Richard Morecroft, Director and Co-Founder of JGOO said: “With Brexit on the horizon, British businesses need to review their overseas sales and marketing strategies.  As the second largest economy in the world and one of the fastest growing with over one billion people, China should be at the top of the list for UK businesses that have products and services that could appeal to this market.”

“Made in Britain’ is a positive message that resonates with many Chinese consumers, and if you are thinking of targeting the Chinese market, you don’t necessarily have to have operations on the ground given that online shopping there is huge.”

Through their official partnerships with WeChat Pay and Alipay, JGOO provides brands with direct trading access to the Chinese market, connecting UK and European brands to Chinese shoppers and tourists. It not only provides a payments gateway for them to pay for British goods when visiting the country or when buying online via WeChat Pay and Alipay, it also has a team of Chinese nationals in the UK to help clients develop social media marketing campaigns via the WeChat platform – China’s most powerful marketing tool.

The findings from JGOO’s study have been highlighted in a report titled ‘Chinese consumers and their growing focus on the UK’.

ICS Financial Systems (ICSFS), the global software and services provider for banks and financial institutions, and a Gold level member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN),  announced the adoption of the latest Oracle technologies for production use-cases in the banking sector.

At Oracle OpenWorld 2019 in San Francisco, ICSFS delivered three main sessions and joined multiple discussions where live production use-cases were provided on many innovative and emerging technologies. ICSFS showcased its awards-winning banking software application; ICS BANKS, in utilising these technologies in real-life cases for the banking industry. 

ICSFS’ sessions comprised of many hot topics such as Blockchain, Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (Oracle JET), and one of Oracle’s new trending cloud services; Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP), which is built on the self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing Oracle Autonomous Database.

“It is our privilege to be part of the world's largest and most prominent business and technology conference, and are privileged as well to be one of the first in utilising Oracle’s latest products and services, especially Oracle Cloud services. We are dedicated to equip our customers with agile and innovative business and technology software solutions, and are always striving to indulge our solutions with the latest technologies provided.” Robert Hazboun, Managing Director, ICS Financial Systems.

ICSFS had major announcements during Oracle OpenWorld 2019 of which:

- ICSFS one of the first in the world to go-live with Oracle Blockchain Platform Enterprise Edition to revolutionize the cross-border payments

- ICSFS to be one of the first to go-live with Oracle Database 19c and Oracle’s latest Fusion Middleware 12c in Africa and worldwide

- ICSFS adoption of Oracle JET – JavaScript Extension Toolkit in the new version of ICS BANKS

"ICSFS has demonstrated an outstanding level of innovation in delivering Oracle Cloud solutions that solve our customers' critical business challenges," said Jenny Tsai-Smith, Oracle vice president of product management. "We are committed to investing in empowering our partners with the right skills and helping them deliver customized cloud-led transformation projects.”

Paidy, a Japanese instant credit startup, has raised $83 million in a Series C extension joined by PayPal and secured an additional $60 million in debt financing.

As much as 13% of banks’ payments revenue in China, or US$61 billion, is likely to be displaced by the growth of digital payments and competition from non-banks, as payments become more instant, invisible and free, according to a new report from Accenture (NYSE: ACN).

The report found that payments revenue in the Chinese mainland will likely grow at an annual rate of 9.1%, from about US$292 billion in 2019 to US$494 billion by 2025, while in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (S.A.R.) that’s set to rise at a 2.1% rate from US$9.5 billion to US$10.7 billion. Only banks that change their business models to adopt the latest technologies and focus on providing value-added services to customers will capture a share of the more than US$200 billion in incremental revenue growth.

Titled “Banking Pulse Survey: Two Ways To Win,” the report is based on a revenue-risk analysis model that Accenture developed to measure trends in how consumers pay and projected changes in merchant behavior, technology and regulation. The research is complemented by a survey of 240 payments executives at banks across 22 countries to determine how they plan to mitigate and capitalize on the disruption in payments to grow customer loyalty, revenues and profitability.

The report showed that global payments revenue in all markets surveyed will likely grow to more than US$2 trillion by 2025, creating a US$500 billion opportunity for banks in those countries.

The report notes that over the next six years, banks will face further pressure on income from card transactions and fees, with free payments putting 5.2% of payments revenue at risk in the Chinese mainland and 23.9% in Hong Kong. In addition, competition from non-banks in invisible payments — where payments are completed in a ‘virtual wallet’ on a mobile app or device — will put 4% of bank revenues at risk in the mainland and 2.6% of revenues in Hong Kong. Card displacement by instant payments, where funds are settled and transferred in real-time and banks make little to no interest, is projected to put an additional 3.6% and 2% of payment revenues at risk respectively in the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong.

This builds on current declines in income from card transactions and fees, with regulation triggering fee compression and technology displacing the role of banks in payments. Already between 2015 and 2018, revenue from business customer credit card transactions dropped 33% globally, revenue from consumer debit card transactions dropped nearly 15%, and revenue from credit cards dropped almost 12%.

The research found that the industry is aware of the challenges posed by new technologies in payments. More than two-thirds (71%) of the banking executives surveyed globally agree that payments are becoming free; nearly three-quarters (73%) believe that most payments are already invisible or will become so over the next 12 months; and even more (78%) said that payments are either already instant or will become instant over the next 12 months.

In response to these key market challenges, 18% of respondents said the main priority for the bank is to build security into retail payments transactions. Nearly one-quarter (22%) cited artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning and innovative payments hubs as the key platform technology capabilities they need to adapt their core systems to high-speed and continuous payment flows.

About the Accenture 2019 Global Payments Survey

Accenture conducted an online survey of 240 retail and corporate payments executives globally from the largest banks in the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States. The survey was conducted between Feb. 14 and March 10, 2019. The overall margin of error is +/- 1.55 percentage points at the midpoint of the 95th percentile confidence level.

The payments industry is undergoing heavy consolidation and internationalisation. Nets is actively taking part in this development with the ambition of building a leading European payments player. Recently, several newly acquired companies have been integrated into the group, and Nets has decided to focus on and invest into its strongholds and scalable businesses within merchant services and processing.

To enable the next phase of the strategic journey, Nets now brings new competencies into the Executive Committee.

Torsten Hagen Jørgensen will become the new CEO of Issuer & eSecurity Services

Torsten Hagen Jørgensen will join Nets as the new CEO of Issuer & eSecurity Services. Since 2011 and until recently, Torsten has been part of Nordea’s Group Executive Management in several different roles, most recently as COO and Deputy CEO. The appointment means that Thomas Jul, who has been heading Issuer & eSecurity Services the past two years, is leaving Nets

“Thomas Jul has been instrumental in installing a commercial mindset as well as a strong customer and product focus in Issuer & eSecurity Services. We are now embarking on the next phase of our journey and given his vast experience within financial services and his network and extensive knowledge about issuers across Europe, Torsten Hagen Jørgensen is the right profile to make us a leading European issuer services provider,” says Bo Nilsson, CEO of Nets Group.

Gianluca Ventura will become the new Group CHRO

Gianluca Ventura will join Nets as the new Group CHRO. He comes from a position as Group HR Director at Vodafone that he joined fifteen years ago at the beginning of their international expansion, and he has played an essential role in several waves of transformation. Consequently, Thomas Kolber, who joined Nets in 2017, is leaving the company.

“With his international curriculum and vast experience within transformation and cultural change, Gianluca will be key in continuing the transformation of Nets, as we continue our European consolidation. At the same time, he will be building on the strong foundation that Thomas Kolber has created during his time at Nets, when it comes to strengthening the people agenda across the Nets Group,” says Bo Nilsson and continues:

“I want to thank both Thomas Jul and Thomas Kolber for their dedication and strong contributions during their time at Nets, and I wish them both all success in the future.”

The changes take effect from today. Until Torsten Hagen Jørgensen starts as CEO of Issuer and eSecurity Services on 1^st December, Bo Nilsson will be acting CEO of the division. Gianluca Ventura will start as Group CHRO on 6^th November.