Leading payments technology in Australia, Commonwealth Bank will become the first major bank to provide Alipay to customers in store.

Coconut, the current account combining banking and accounting, today launches its new limited company current accounts and invoicing tool. 

Larry Thompson, who served in a variety of senior-level roles at The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), including General Counsel and, most recently, Vice Chairman of the firm, will retire at the end of this year after more than three decades at the company. 

“Larry has been a trusted colleague, mentor and partner over the years, playing a significant role in many of our organization’s most important endeavors and helping to shape the company we are today,” said Michael Bodson, DTCC President and CEO. “Larry’s experience and wisdom have been invaluable to us as a management team, but just as important, the impact of his actions and words have touched virtually every part of the industry. We thank Larry for all his contributions to the industry and DTCC over these past 37 years and wish him and his family the very best of health, happiness and good fortune in the future.”

Thompson began at The Depository Trust Company (DTC) in 1981 as Associate General Counsel and was appointed Senior Vice President in the early 1990s. He was named General Counsel of DTC in 1999, and in 2005, Thompson was appointed General Counsel of DTCC, with responsibility for all legal and regulatory activities of the firm and our subsidiaries, including oversight of the Legal, Compliance, Government Relations and Regulatory Relations departments.

Thompson has played a key role during virtually every major crisis impacting the industry while at DTCC, including acting as Chief Liaison with the New York City Office of Emergency Management and state government officials following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, managing the fallout of the 2008 global financial crisis and responding to the devastating effects of Superstorm Sandy.

Following the financial crisis, Thompson initiated and led DTCC’s public policy outreach efforts. He has testified before the U.S. Congress on several occasions and has appeared before other legislative bodies globally. 

Thompson plans to continue serving on the Board of Directors of the

Federal Home Loan Bank of NY, a position he has held for several years. He is currently Vice Chairman of the Board.

MANY UK Businesses are risking penalties by failing to adhere to GDPR legislation. 

A survey of 1,002 UK workers in full or part-time employment, carried out by technology services provider Probrand.co.uk, has revealed that an incredible 64% of people admitted to having forwarded a customer email to their personal email account in the four months following the introduction of GDPR.

Given that earlier research from the company found that more than half (55%) of all UK based businesses were breaching GDPR laws by not having an official process or protocol for disposing of obsolete IT equipment, this news is perhaps less surprising.

Worryingly, according to the data, 84% of the workers who admitted to forwarding customer emails to their personal accounts didn’t feel they were doing anything wrong (as there was no malicious intent behind their actions) despite the fact that this notion of innocence would likely be deemed irrelevant if it came to a legal judgement over whether there had been a breach of GDPR laws. 

Matt Royle, marketing director at Probrand comments: “What may seem like an innocent and even helpful action of workers trying to catch up on work out of hours is actually a clear breach of GDPR laws. This is because the worker in question will have unwittingly forwarded sensitive personal customer information and/or their own employer’s Intellectual Property to a third party outside of the corporate network. 

“Of course, in the vast majority of cases this will have been done with the best intentions, with the employee simply planning to pick up their work at home - but given the amount of publicity around GDPR it is perhaps surprising that more workers (and employers) are not aware of the basics of what is required for GDPR compliance.

Royle went on to add: “...It is clear from these findings that businesses need to do more to educate their employees on the laws surrounding GDPR and data protection.  Seemingly innocent actions could have substantial repercussions. A GDPR breach can result in fines that potentially run into the millions – this financial impact along with the knock on effects this can have for businesses, including reputational damage, the loss of customer loyalty and trust, can be hugely damaging for companies in the long term.”

Thales and Gemalto announce today that they have received merger control Regulatory Clearances from both the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Mexican competition authority (Comisión Federal de Competencia Económica), following Thales's commitment to divest its general purpose hardware security modules (GP HSM) business globally¹ to a suitable purchaser. This clearance is effective immediately. 

Together with the antitrust clearances obtained in China, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa, Turkey, and the European Union, and clearances relating to foreign investments in Australia, Canada and the USA (CFIUS), Thales and Gemalto have now obtained 11 of the required 14 Regulatory Clearances.

Thales and Gemalto continue to work constructively with the competent antitrust authorities to obtain the remaining merger control Regulatory Clearances in Russia and the United States. In addition, Thales and Gemalto are seeking Regulatory Clearance relating to foreign investments from the competent authority in Russia.

The transaction should close shortly after all of the Regulatory Clearances have been secured, which is expected to occur in the first quarter of 2019, as announced in the joint press release dated 11 October 2018.

Further announcements will be made if and when a Regulatory Clearance has been obtained or the Offer Condition with respect to Regulatory Clearances is satisfied, waived or has become incapable of being satisfied, or as otherwise required by applicable law. As announced on 10 August 2018, the Acceptance Period has been further extended by Thales in accordance with an exemption granted by the Dutch financial markets authority (AFM) and will end two weeks after the fulfilment of the Offer Condition with respect to Regulatory Clearances or the waiver thereof (but no later than the Long Stop Date).

Finastra has appointed Eric Duffaut as President and Global Head of Field Operations. Based at Finastra’s London Headquarters, Duffaut will take responsibility for the company’s entire go-to-market organization including global sales, services and consultancy, as well as overseeing the Finastra partner ecosystem.

“Eric will play a key role in accelerating market adoption of our leading solution portfolio, as well as our shift to subscription-based and cloud-based models. He brings a wealth of experience in global sales strategy, supporting digital transformation and delivering growth and customer value,” said Simon Paris, CEO, Finastra. “We have a fantastic opportunity to build on what we’ve already achieved as we continue to evolve from a software solution company to a platform company with FusionFabric.cloud. Eric is a visionary and inspiring business leader and will help us to deliver our mission of taking Finastra into the future as a market maker for innovation in financial services.” 

Duffaut’s career in the technology space spans more than 20 years across the spectrum of large enterprises and small and medium size businesses. These include positions at SAP, Oracle and Unisys. Most recently he was Chief Customer Officer and member of the Management Board at Software AG, responsible for global sales, consulting services, customer support and marketing. 

“Finastra has a great vision and a bold strategy to match,” said Duffaut. “I’m thrilled to join a world-class team and to partner with leading financial services institutions around the world to enable their digital transformation. I relish the opportunity to bring Finastra’s business to new heights as it moves to a subscription-based model, and to make FusionFabric.cloud the leading open platform for innovation and collaboration.”   

Just two years on from launch in January 2017, RegTek.Solutions, the provider of global regulatory reporting solutions, confirms its market-leading position with an extended client footprint, new and enhanced products and the addition of key hires.

“We’re really pleased to have seen our message and our solutions gain momentum in 2018. As firms deal with the aftermath of MiFID II and other regulatory headaches, the implementation of independent controls to ensure the quality, accuracy and completeness of data has been endorsed by global regulators as best practice and adoption on an industry-level has ramped up significantly,” commented Brian Lynch, CEO and Co-Founder of RegTek.Solutions. “It’s been another complex year for market participants with concerns varying from the delayed implementation of SFTR to the uncertainty around Brexit plus the effort involved in increased regulatory investigations. Our commitment to helping the market achieve sustainable compliance has not wavered and we look forward to doing more in 2019.”

Key to a successful 2018 was a strong team, with key hires in a number of roles. Rob Bernstein joined in February, taking on the CFO position. In March, Tom Morris and Rob McGowan were appointed to drive Sales for Europe and North America respectively. Other additions to the team include Shruti Solanki as Client Experience Manager and Aniruddh Mishra as Onboarding Lead, both new functions designed to support growth and expansion.

In January 2018 RegTek.Solutions led the market in SFTR preparations with the extension of the rule coverage of its leading validation engine Validate. Trade. The offering subsequently received industry acknowledgement at the A-Team’s RegTech Awards being named “Best Solutions for SFTR”.

In what has been the year of industry recognition, RegTek’s reporting assurance solutions also won ‘Best Compliance & Regulatory Solution’ at the Funds Services Awards. The firm’s turn-key and fully maintained reconciliation tool Reconcile. Trade hasn’t been left out, being awarded ‘Best New Product-Reporting’ at the FOW and Global Investor Asia Awards 2018 and ‘Best RegTech Solution’ at the FTF News Awards.

“Our strong operating performance in 2018 has been underpinned by continued investment in our solutions, ensuring we stay ahead of the regulatory challenge with products that increasingly fit with the workflows of our users” said Rob Bernstein, CFO of RegTek.Solutions.

Significant product enhancements have been rolled out due to client demands, such as Edit/Reload, a new feature of the firm’s intelligent reporting portal, Load. Trade, that allows users to edit, clone, and load or back-report trade reports directly from the UI with full security and audit trail. The team has also been hard at work to meet their service-level agreement obligations to clients, with deliveries including GTR 2.0, DTCC’s re-architecture for ASIC and MAS and JFSA support for Reportable. Trade, the firm’s independent reporting completeness control.

Strategic partnerships have been crucial to RegTek.Solutions footprint expansion, with two important new partnerships announced in October.

• The Deutsche Börse will deliver certified testing and pre-validation services to the 2,300 executing entities using Deutsche Börses’s ARM service via its Regulatory Reporting Hub to address ongoing challenges with the quality and transparency of transaction reporting under MiFIR.
• With the DTCC, where RegTek.Solutions is linking its SFTR solution to the DTCC’s GTR, leveraging the DTCC’s open architecture and allowing market participants to benefit from straight-through reporting workflows and a reduction in the cost of SFTR implementation. 

“2019 will bring additional challenges as the UK navigates Brexit, as SFTR planning gets underway, and as global regulators continue to demand best practice for trade and transaction reporting, but we are optimistic as banks and the buy-side increasingly recognise the importance of proactively targeting quality, completeness and accuracy through independent, continuous controls and oversight,” concludes Brian Lynch.

MYPINPAD, the global leader in payment acceptance and customer authentication solutions, is delighted that Mastercard and eService have announced a pilot implementation of the LitePOS solution enabling smartphones, featuring MYPINPAD technology,  to fulfil the functions that have been so far reserved for payment terminals. LitePOS operates based on the innovative “PIN on Mobile” technology. The combination of a smartphone and a Secure Card Reader makes it possible to safely accept card payments in the amounts exceeding PLN 50, which requires entering the PIN code. This is the first such implementation on the Polish market, and one of the first three in Europe. Several hundred eService customers can participate in the pilot, which will last until June 2019.

The technology tested in the pilot includes equipping Android smartphones or tablets (starting from 7.0 Nougat version) with eService LitePOS app and an attached Secure card Reader, This set makes it possible to create an affordable and fully mobile solution supporting transactions made using contactless and chip payment cards. One of the most important features of the new solution is maintaining highest security standards. As a result, it becomes possible to accept card transactions with a smartphone, and their value does not have to be limited to PLN 50, i.e. the maximum amount that does not require entering the PIN. Mastercard is responsible for the certification of the solution ensuring the security of all transactions.

The commencing pilot is aimed at testing the new solution in market conditions. Further improvements to the solution will be introduced during the pilot, based on the feedback from participating entrepreneurs. The end result will be developing the LitePOS’s final design and conduct final tests during the last phase of the pilot.

David Poole, Global Head of Mobile Solutions, MYPINPAD said: “We are delighted that MYPINPAD’s PIN on Mobile technology is being deployed as part of eService’s new mobile payment solution. We commend eService’s industry leadership for bringing this transformational technology to the Polish market. PIN on Mobile is set to revolutionise in-store payments in 2019.”

The planned market tests were preceded by qualitative opinion research conducted among around a dozen of entrepreneurs. They assessed the new technology, the way of installing the application and the ease of use of the set. The innovation proposed by Mastercard and eService has been positively received. Participants of the research expressed their willingness to use this type of device for their businesses. The advantages of the new technology have been mostly appreciated by entrepreneurs who provide services “on the go”, in a mobile way, such as couriers and taxi drivers. They also attracted the interest of entrepreneurs who accept card payments relatively rarely — beauty parlours, plumbers, photographers or construction industry professionals.

According to the latest survey carried out by Mastercard entitled “Entrepreneur in a cashless world”, one of the most frequent reasons for not accepting card payments are the associated costs. It is indicated by 10% of the surveyed representatives of the SME sector. The LitePOS technology is a response to the expectations and capabilities of small businesses. It enables companies to minimize the necessary infrastructure and costs. In addition, an increasing number of customers using payment cards means that the investment associated with card acceptance pays off faster. Almost half (49%) of entrepreneurs in the Mastercard survey says that the number of card transactions made by their customers has increased over the last year. The same percentage believes that having a payment terminal positively influenced the development of their business.

Global fintech leader Avaloq today announces the launch of dedicated solutions to help financial institutions become fully compliant with ꟷ and capitalise on ꟷ the Payment Services Directive II (PSD2). Financial services firms operating in Europe have until September 2019 to become fully compliant with the regulation, which requires banks and wealth managers to adapt their digital infrastructure and capabilities to allow third-party businesses to access permitted customer data, offer personalised services and become part of the customer’s financial ‘ecosystem’.

PSD2, which came into force in January 2018, regulates payment services and payment service providers throughout the Europe. For the first time it will allow third parties to access customer data (if the customer approves) to provide value-added payments and banking services. Under the implementation process, institutions will have to offer their open Application Programming Interface (APIs) to third-party providers for testing and integration six months before the final implementation date of September 2019. This means that their APIs must be ready from March next year.

In response to high demand from its banking and wealth management clients, Avaloq has formally launched PSD2 software and PSD2 as a service solutions, with an unparalleled range of deployment options tailored to different configurations. Its PSD2 as a service solution comes already integrated into Avaloq’s core banking software and digital banking technology. It can be delivered as a turn-key, secured solution, to banks and wealth managers using software as a service (SaaS) or business process as a service (BPaaS) models as well as banks running Avaloq on their premises.

Paco Hauser, Regional Manager EMEA at Avaloq, said: “Banks operating in the European Economic Area have to comply with PSD2 but will also face competitive risks if they do not stay in control of their clients’ user journeys and data as they integrate with third-party services. This raises significant considerations around seamless performance, authentication and security, GDPR and costs, to name a few. Our new solutions have been developed to address these challenges and let banks and wealth managers benefit by giving their clients access to new functionalities while retaining ownership of the primary client relationship.”

A study¹ by Accenture estimated that by 2020, EUR61 billion of the total banking revenue pool in Europe (equivalent of 7 percent) will be associated with open banking-enabled activities. A separate survey² of 90 European banks by Deloitte found that about half are planning to use PSD2 to become an Account Information Service Provider, which lets customers see all of their account information from different bank accounts in one place online or in a mobile app. In addition, around half intend to launch new products and services.

Thomas Beck, CTO at Avaloq, said: “PSD2 is also a positive catalyst for true innovation and market change. Avaloq firmly believes that institutions that provide greater access and engage openly with third parties will be in a better competitive position and will be able to turn PSD2 regulation into an opportunity to better connect to their clients’ needs and generate additional revenues. Our solutions have been built with this very much in mind: once banks and wealth managers implement Avaloq’s PSD2 solution, they have the foundation for future API business cases via our market-leading, open API offering.”