EMVCo has published EMV® Level 1 Specifications for Payment Systems – EMV Contactless Interface Specification v3.0.

The enhanced specification, available on a royalty-free basis to all industry participants, addresses the interoperability needs between EMV acceptance devices and diverse EMV contactless payment form factors, including emerging technologies such as mobile handsets and wearables.

An objective of the enhanced specification is to increase alignment with ISO standards, in addition to industry bodies such as NFC Forum, to streamline the deployment and acceptance of contactless payment technologies across the world.

The supporting testing infrastructure has also been advanced with the introduction of new test equipment to better identify and reduce the risks of interoperability issues before EMV contactless products are deployed in the field.

The EMV Specifications and related testing processes continue to evolve to support global interoperability and enhance security. To stay informed of the latest EMVCo developments and receive advanced access to EMV Specifications and related documents, join the EMVCo Associates Programme or become a Subscriber.

For further information, read the Q&A available to download from the EMVCo website.

ONPEX, a leading provider for multi-currency IBAN accounts, has partnered with international UK-based wholesale fintech, Supercapital, in an alliance set to make international payments seamless and secure.

Supercapital provides money transfers to bank accounts across 200 countries and in 25 different currencies. To support its ongoing business activity in local and cross-border bank transfers for personal and corporate customers – including FX brokers, Supercapital required a partner. With the business undergoing strong growth, there was a need to replace existing systems with a solution which offered automatic settlement reconciliation.

This new partnership will supply Supercapital with the solution it needs for ensuring funds to be uniquely identified. ONPEX’s Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and IBAN accounts provide the means for this solution. Supercapital has integrated BaaS via ONPEX’s flexible API technology, and as a result is able to assign unique IBANs to each customer.

With ONPEX’s solution, Supercapital is now delivering real-time, automated processing at a lower cost and risk – guaranteeing a seamless experience for its customers by eliminating the need for unique references, which can be time-consuming and prone to human error.

What’s more, as a CSSF regulated payment institution, ONPEX allows Supercapital to operate in an environment compliant with their own regulatory requirements by the FCA. All necessary regulation requirements are covered by ONPEX’s BaaS, ensuring customer peace of mind and security.

Speaking about the new alliance, Christoph Tutsch, CEO at ONPEX, explained: “With the pain points still associated with cross-border payments, companies need a universal solution. Before our partnership, Supercapital’s system caused friction for its users, with an obligatory reference number required for each payment. As this could not be automated, the entire transaction process did not meet the expectations of modern-day customers. With our support, and product offering, we enable Supercapital to eliminate the strains which previously caused them to underperform.”

Joel Smalley, Managing Director at Supercapital, continues: “We chose to partner with ONPEX because of the business’ ability to solve our ongoing reconciliation problem. To continue to compete on an international level it was essential for us to resolve these issues for our customers. ONPEX has allowed us to automate our process which in turn, has increased speed, security and customer satisfaction. It was key for us to partner with a company that understood our business and that shares the same forward-thinking financial solutions. Both businesses recognise the challenges and opportunities in the transaction banking marketplace, the benefits of process automation and API integration - that’s why we chose to work with ONPEX.”

To find out more about ONPEX’s revolutionary multi-currency IBAN accounts, visit www.onpex.com.

Corvil today announced that Flow Traders, a leading global technology-enabled liquidity provider specialized in Exchange Traded Products (ETPs), has deployed Corvil’s Intelligence Hub to streamline compliance with Order to Transaction Ratio (OTR) requirements.

Until now, meeting MiFID II RTS-9 requirements to monitor and, where appropriate, limit the ratio of unexecuted orders to transactions, has been an onerous, retrospective and costly burden for compliance teams.  With many market participants traditionally dependent on end-of-day or similar reporting to assess their overall activity relative to OTR limits, they require new information and processes to effectively manage regulatory risk before finding that they have exceeded thresholds.

Flow Traders, already maintaining a high standard for proactivity and transparency, sought to fortify its OTR compliance, selecting Corvil to assist.  To ensure valuable resources remained focused on development efforts for its core trading business, Flow Traders chose to buy a solution rather than build this capability in-house.  Through its predictive analytics and live insights, Corvil Intelligence Hub facilitates an entirely new business process that empowers Flow Traders to be more proactive in identifying, triaging, and actioning areas of potential risk. It also simplifies responses to regulatory queries by providing a complete forensic record of all order lifecycle messages.

“Ensuring ongoing compliance with applicable rules and regulations is sustained by being agile and focused on continuous improvement and implementing the latest technology to increase overall effectiveness,” said Thomas Wolff, Chief Technology Officer and member of the management board of Flow Traders.  “Corvil is helping Flow Traders to navigate OTR requirements with a simplified and consistent process for continuous oversight.  Enhanced transparency into desk and trade strategy impacts and predicting conditions, assures us of a leaner, faster and optimized compliance function.”

Intelligence Hub complements Flow Traders’ existing deployment of Corvil Analytics.  It leverages live trading order lifecycle data and applies machine learning to analyze firmwide, per-instrument and per desk OTR metrics, at scale.  By continuously anticipating end-of-day ratios, it proactively identifies and alerts to compliance risks that require action.  Diverse teams can explore, visualize and perform multi-dimensional analysis of data across venue, market, instrument, and desk to improve decision-making and track the impact of corrective actions.

With deployment complete for a number of venues already and more planned, Flow Traders is also beginning to look beyond OTR at other risk and compliance use cases Corvil Intelligence Hub can satisfy.

“Regulatory risk management and compliance carry increasing overhead, complexity, and costs for organizations.  Corvil Intelligence Hub offers advanced analytics powered by machine learning to provide faster time to market and lower cost to customers in meeting these requirements,” said David Murray, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Corvil.  “We are delighted to extend our partnership with Flow Traders and assist in delivering resilience to evolving compliance demands.”

SIA launches a new “Open Banking” digital platform allowing Italian and European banks, fintechs, corporates, SMEs and public sector organizations to promote and accelerate the creation of innovative payment services, deriving from the introduction of Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), to seize new business opportunities in addition to guaranteeing compliance with the regulation.

The “Open Banking Platform” is one of SIA’s main strategic initiatives and aims to create an ecosystem to facilitate collaboration between banks and new market players (so-called TPPs, “Third Party Payment Service Providers”), thereby encouraging the creation of advanced services for consumers and corporates.

SIA supports banks and TPPs in developing new services to respond to specific use cases, thanks to a series of functions that the digital platform already makes available on cloud, minimizing development costs, technological investments and organizational impacts, and accelerating time-to-market.

The “Open Banking Platform” for example permits access to information pertaining to several bank accounts, optimization in the onboarding of new customers, cash-pooling and liquidity management, as well as multibank payment orders, made more secure thanks to real-time checks on ownership and availability of funds.

PSD2 aims to facilitate the development of an efficient, secure and competitive electronic payments market with new rules and new players, supporting innovation and reinforcing protection of payment service users. The Directive has launched the Open Banking Era, a new way to be a bank, open and accessible also to non-bank players, and destined to revolutionize the user experience of consumers and corporates.

“PSD2 and Open Banking represent an extraordinary opportunity for digital transformation in the payments industry. SIA’s expertise and technology enable banks and TPPs to support the innovation of business processes, improving the user experience and further raising security levels and speed of payments” commented Cristina Astore, Director of SIA’s International Division.

The Open Banking platform is part of the “SIA EasyWay” solution that enables banks and other Payment Service Providers (PSP) to manage instant payments at European level and all the other SEPA payment and collection instruments.

CyberHive, a leading British cyber-security vendor, has received substantial funding from Innovate UK to fuel further development of its revolutionary Trusted Cloud server security solution.

With the aim of extending the uniquely effective protection of Trusted Cloud to Microsoft Azure customers, the cash injection from Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will enable CyberHive to continue its ground-breaking collaboration with Professor David Wallom and his team at the University’s Oxford e-Research Centre (Department of Engineering Science).

“We are very gratified that Innovate UK has awarded us this funding for a three-year development project that will enable us to enhance our cutting-edge security that protects servers like no other solution,” said David Blundell, Managing Director at CyberHive. “Working closely with our colleagues at Oxford, our aim is for the many thousands of Microsoft Azure customers to benefit from the best security on the planet.”

CyberHive protects data on-premises or in the cloud, using a unique combination of hardware-based cryptography and advances in whitelisting technology, setting a new industry standard that conventional solutions cannot match.

The Innovate UK funding was awarded after a competitive bidding process and follows the publicly-funded organisation’s previous two-year funding for CyberHive’s collaboration with Professor Wallom.

“Innovate UK’s further funding for our advanced research with CyberHive gives us the opportunity to build on our previous highly successful research and innovation support, creating economic impact from academic research” said Professor Wallom. “We will expand our team and develop even more effective security measures that will bring a unique level of security to thousands of new cloud-users.”

Trusted Cloud, provides super-fast detection of any intrusion on servers through automatic verification every five seconds, which allows organisations to take remedial action more rapidly and effectively than is possible with other solutions.

Trusted Cloud is the world’s only solution to deploy the hacker-proof technology of the Intel Trusted Platform Module chip together with advanced use of distributed whitelisting technology. Co-developed with the University of Oxford, this unique approach ensures that no person or organisation can tamper with servers, falsify verification data or bypass server security, eliminating the devastating effects of security lapses.

Eagle Investment Systems LLC, a BNY Mellon company and leading provider of financial services technology, announced today that Newton Investment Management (“Newton”) has selected Eagle Accounting to replace its legacy investment accounting platform.

Newton, a London-based global investment management subsidiary of BNY Mellon, provides investment products and services to a broad range of clients, including retail and institutional investors, with assets under management of £50.8bn ($67.1bn) as at 30 June 2018. Newton is Eagle’s longest standing UK-based client, having utilised Eagle’s enterprise data management capabilities since 2001. Earlier this year Newton completed its migration onto Eagle ACCESS^SM, Eagle’s secure private cloud to support its business growth and improve agility.

Eagle Accounting was selected for its ability to meet Newton’s evolving business requirements and to perform specific accounting functions not supported by its legacy accounting technology, including enhanced derivatives coverage as well as providing a 360-degree view of positions and related underlying activity. The new platform will be deployed over Eagle ACCESS^SM.

“We are excited about extending our use of Eagle to enhance our investment accounting capabilities,” said John Snow, Chief Technology Officer for Newton. “The Eagle team took the time to understand our complex business requirements and help us understand how we would use the platform on a day-to-day basis to support our needs. We look forward to using Eagle Accounting as we continue to evolve and grow our assets under management.”

“Newton’s selection of Eagle Accounting, following an extensive evaluation process, is testament to the quality of our investment accounting capabilities as well as that of our team,” said Mal Cullen, CEO for Eagle. “Key to our selection was our ability to demonstrate continued investment in the platform and a wider technology strategy that satisfied Newton’s key business requirement for a solution that will support their business needs now and well into the future.”

Embracing the benefits from instant payments and open banking initiatives, Tieto is currently launching the next generation Virtual Account Management (VAM) platform. This enhanced VAM solution enables banks to deliver a real-time liquidity overview to corporate customers, with the associated benefits of accelerated settlement and immediate availability of funds.

Innovative customer propositions based on virtual account management capabilities have become increasingly popular for both large and mid-size corporate segments. Not only resulting from self-servicing flexibility, but also in terms of liquidity visibility and control and associated reporting. The new Tieto VAM platform has been designed to simplify the needs of corporate treasurers, by offering 24/7 monitoring and automated management of liquidity and transactions. It is also aligned with evolving regulatory requirements, including Basel III and PSD2.

“Simplification and automation are key priorities for both banks and corporates." says Ilkka Korkiakoski, Vice President, Head of Transaction Banking at Tieto. "For banks, VAM simplifies account structures, enabling operational efficiencies and new improved services which in turn lead to enhanced customer relationships, while corporate businesses can enhance automation and improve financial reporting and control. This, in turn, can facilitate faster decision making and create better long-term business results.”

Tieto VAM includes a fully-customisable dashboard with supporting self-service capabilities. Virtual accounts can be opened, closed and structured to reflect business operations. An unlimited number of virtual accounts and sub-accounts can be mapped to a single physical account. The funds paid to each virtual account are collected into the physical account and identified for reconciliation purposes using virtual account numbers. Account hierarchies can be single or multi-currency, and itemised reporting is possible at any level of the account structure. Corporates can also benefit from multi-bank features to reflect real-time information from physical bank accounts across different banks, countries and currencies.

Tieto VAM platform is positioned between customer channels and a bank’s core system architecture, acting as configurable “virtual overlay” that can be implemented with minimal impact to existing core banking systems. For a bank, this ensures a significantly faster time to market and minimal implementation costs. With a single VAM platform, banks can easily scale their offering over time and create various virtual account propositions addressing different customer segments.

You can meet our experts and learn more about our next generation Tieto VAM platform at EuroFinance 2018 in Geneva, Sept. 26-28. https://campaigns.tieto.com/eurofinance2018

Tinkoff Bank announces the launch of Tinkoff Investments Premium offering access to over 10,000 global securities (the most extensive catalogue in the Russian market) and providing personal manager services directly in the mobile app.

What makes Tinkoff Investments Premium different from its peers is that all transactions and investment decisions can be made right in the mobile app in just a few clicks, without personal meetings or phone calls to consultants. Each user of Tinkoff Investments Premium will have a team of personal managers and analysts providing 24/7 chat support.

The product range of Tinkoff Investments Premium has been expanded to offer access to more than 10,000 securities of issuers from 30 countries (hundreds of foreign ETFs, Eurobonds, including from the high-yielding emerging markets, foreign stocks and bonds, etc.).

One of the service’s key features is that there is no minimum entry threshold linked to the account balance. In this way, Tinkoff Bank becomes one of the first in the Russian market to offer premium services to as many investors as possible.

To start using Tinkoff Investments Premium, you need to be a customer of Tinkoff Investments brokerage platform and get a personal invitation from the bank, or apply for access to the premium service via Tinkoff.ru.

A monthly subscription (RUB 3,000) is all that is needed to access the basic catalogue of securities within Tinkoff’s premium service. No fee is charged for the first month. The full catalogue is only available to qualified investors. After obtaining that status via the mobile app’s chat, a Tinkoff Investments Premium customer is presented with unlimited investment opportunities. For example, one can invest in bonds of issuers such as Alibaba, Ford and IBM. Stock investors will enjoy access to such companies as Sony, Samsung, Siemens, Airbus, Adidas, Domino’s Pizza, Volkswagen and Unilever. It is even possible to put one’s money into robot vacuum cleaners, the development team behind GTA V, or Tinder.

Transactions with securities from Tinkoff Investments’ basic catalogue are subject to a 0.03% fee, while trading in stocks, unit investment funds, ETFs or depository receipts included in the extended list comes with a 0.3% fee. A fee of 1–2% applies to trades involving bonds, Eurononds, structured notes or other financial instruments on that list.

«Tinkoff’s ecosystem continues to ramp up its premium capabilities. In April, we launched Tinkoff Black Edition and Tinkoff ALL Airlines Black Edition debit and credit cards for affluent customers and today we are happy to present Tinkoff Investments Premium, a brand new product for investors. The premium service is now available to a much wider audience, with all communications carried out through the mobile app. The premium customers no longer need to waste their time on phone calls or meetings with consultants as even the most sophisticated investment products — such as a note or a portfolio of 20 securities — can be purchased with a single click through the mobile app. We are positive about the prospects of our premium investment tool and expect it to win up to 5% of Tinkoff Investments customers in 2019," said Alexander Emeshev, Vice President, New Products Development at Tinkoff Bank.

To open a broker account in Tinkoff Investments, you need to become a Tinkoff Black card holder and download the mobile app for iOS or Android.

Avaloq, the international fintech and leader in integrated banking solutions, has been named as the Overall Winner of the 2018 IDC FinTech Rankings Real Results Awards. Avaloq was also the winner in the specific category of Omni-Experience Transformation for one of their client cases.

Now in its 4th year, the IDC FinTech Rankings Real Results Awards recognizes IT providers that have enabled a genuine, measurable, and future-enabling change at a client financial institution in the worldwide financial services industry. The IDC FinTech Rankings Real Results programme is part of the broader IDC FinTech Rankings programme that categorizes and evaluates the top global providers of financial technology based on calendar year revenues from financial institutions for hardware, software and/or services.

“Winning an IDC FinTech Rankings Real Results award is a significant accomplishment, demonstrating a provider’s commitment to the success of its financial institution clients,” states Karen Massey, Research Manager at IDC Financial Insights. “The IDC FinTech Rankings, now in its 15th year, is the global industry standard register of financial services tech providers, and we congratulate the 2018 winners.”

Juerg Hunziker, Avaloq’s Group CEO, said: “We are truly delighted to be named the Overall Winner in this year’s IDC awards, a fantastic reflection of the momentum Avaloq has globally and the great work done by our staff every day. Avaloq is increasingly seen as a partner of choice for financial institutions looking to reduce operational risks, address regulatory changes more effectively and offer a better service to clients by outsourcing of non-differentiating activities in order to focus on core competencies. We will continue to work towards driving further transformation within the industry while delivering a first-class level of service.”