IHS Markit, a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions, today announced a strategic alliance with Deloitte to address MiFID II regulatory challenges. This combined offering leverages IHS Markit’s Outreach360 solution and Deloitte’s regulatory business advisory expertise via a managed service.

IHS Markit and Deloitte will offer customers a total solution for navigating MiFID II data standardization, client outreach and counterparty terms of business repapering. Outreach360 provides a centralized tool to create, send and track status of regulatory client outreach communications while leveraging the existing network available on Counterparty Manager by IHS Markit. Deloitte brings a wealth of advisory consulting expertise including MiFID II knowledge along with a managed service capability to address large-scale remediation. 

“Financial institutions view MiFID II as a top priority and are investing in large, multi-stream programs to get ahead of changes,” said Hugo Morris, Partner for the Deloitte Managed Risk Services practice. “By working together, Deloitte and IHS Markit can immediately help firms prepare for the pending January 2018 deadline, establishing proven outreach strategies developed by industry participants.”

“As a technology provider, we understand the right mix of dedicated resources, quality data and advanced systems are essential for client outreach and repapering,” said Darren Thomas, managing director and head of Counterparty Manager at IHS Markit. “Through trusted resource planning support from Deloitte and a powerful digital platform like Outreach360, firms will be able to take a holistic approach to successfully meet the challenges associated with MiFID II compliance.”

As key players in the regulatory industry, IHS Markit and Deloitte both lead independent working groups with subject matter experts focused on MiFID II best practices. This collaboration is one of many industry partnerships and is not solely exclusive to IHS Markit and Deloitte.

Worldpay, the UK’s leading payment processor, has announced the launch of the first ever extended-trial of a software only card payment mPOS (mobile point of sale). 

My Business Mobile will allow businesses to download an app and accept face-to-face contactless card transactions on their smartphone without the need for any additional payments hardware. The app will also accept payments via Apple Pay and Android Pay.    Although some mobile device payment solutions do exist that allow card payments, they still need a piece of hardware to make the payment – usually for the shopper to enter their PIN. 

My Business Mobile is a proprietary application born from Worldpay’s Technology Innovation team, enabling merchants such as coffee carts and market traders to take simple card payments on-the-go using just their smartphone.  The application will allow merchants to make sales anywhere they are and switch between compatible devices.

The My Business Mobile app can be simply downloaded onto a smartphone to accept contactless card payments anywhere, any time of up to £30. The technology is expected to appeal particularly to a range of small businesses including coffee carts, barbers, festival vendors, pop-up shops and market traders to take swift, easy on-the-go payments.

Nick Telford-Reed, Director of Technology Innovation at Worldpay commented: “By taking hardware out of the equation, we are really bringing payments into the future. This revolutionary new technology app has the potential to enable micro-businesses to benefit from taking card payments without the need for dedicated hardware. We all carry a phone in our pocket, and now these sole traders and small businesses can use that same phone to take payments.  They need never miss a sale.”

City-based coffee cart business Feijoa Tree Coffee is the first to use the app as part of a six month long pilot which Worldpay will use to assess a possible larger scale roll-out at a later date and inform further development of the technology.

Nick Telford-Reed continued: “The pilot scheme we’re running in London will give cash only businesses the opportunity to catapult themselves into the 21^st Century by taking contactless card payments on the go. But this is really only the beginning. This kind of technology could also become particularly significant in the developing world, where the cost of renting a card machine can be a barrier for small businesses when it comes to accepting card payments.”

TechPreneur Africa, a social impact firm focused on harnessing innovation and entrepreneurship to achieve real economic impact across Africa has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), an international financial centre in Abu Dhabi, to foster and support the growth and activities of FinTech in the Middle East and African regions.

Ovum, the market-leading research and consulting firm, for the first time quantifies the detrimental effect Instant Payments and PSD2 will have on traditional credit and debit card payments. The research “Instant payments and the post-PSD2 landscape”, commissioned by Icon Solutions, publishes the only quantitative insights into how PSD2 will be the catalyst for both the decline in card transactions and the uptake in direct and frictionless payment methods such as Instant Payments in Europe. It also shows how Instant Payments under PSD2 will change the way consumers pay for goods and services, revolutionising e-commerce.

Icon Solutions initiated this research in response to feedback from their European banking clients who expressed a need to more fully understand the likely implications of PSD2 and instant payments on consumer behaviours, and the resulting change to their business model and revenue streams.

The research predicts that PSD2 will significantly disrupt the European retail payments landscape, unlocking new revenue opportunities for those nimble enough and adequately prepared. E-commerce card usage will stagnate at current levels of around €260bn annually and by 2025, boosted by increased consumer convenience and the lower charges that PSD2 facilitates, Instant Payments will overtake cards. Card volumes are expected to stagnate at €260bn post-PSD2, rather than reach the €411bn predicted without PSD2, representing a 37% decrease in expected volumes. 

The research indicates that the shift away from cards is likely to gather pace, and by 2027, single-transaction ecommerce card payments will drop from the top spot declining from 40% market share to just 11%. This will leave Instant Payments and digital wallets (such as PayPal) as the two dominant payment methods across Europe as early as 2024.

After the introduction of PSD2, Instant Payments are expected to absorb much of the rapid growth expected in European e-commerce over the next decade - which will gradually see a market share increase against established payment methods, to an average of 29% of expenditure across Europe. This figure is expected to range from 72% in the Netherlands, to just under 20% in Italy.

This shift of European commerce to digital channels will continue to apply pressure to merchants to increasingly take an omni-channel approach, bringing a focus on new payment methods to the forefront of merchants’ agendas. This, combined with potentially declining card revenues, is expected to place pressure on banks to provide the services that merchants need to become truly omni-channel.

“PSD2 and other open banking initiatives are a golden opportunity for retail banks to re-imagine their products and services, and ensure they are fit for purpose in tomorrow’s digital ecosystem” said Kieran Hines, Head of Industries, Ovum. “In particular, those banks that combine early adoption of Instant Payments infrastructure with a proactive approach to PSD2 compliance and a focus on the payment needs of both merchants and consumers will be the ones that enjoy the most rapid growth over the coming years”.

“PSD2 and Instant Payments together offer a better and safer customer experience than cards for online shopping. The whole idea of a “plastic card” is irrelevant in the digital world” stated Tom Hay, Head of Payments at Icon Solutions. “Instead of adding cost and complexity by digitising and tokenising it as the card schemes are doing, the right approach is to simplify things by eliminating it completely as Instant Payments does. A simpler, more secure buying experience drives cost savings for all participants. No wonder PSD2 and Instant Payments are set to dominate online payments in the coming decade”. 

The research, conducted by Ovum and commissioned by Icon Solutions, the independent payments and specialist technology provider, covers ten European markets and is built around a European payments database, populated from a variety of sources including; national banks, national statistics agencies, and payments associations. Combined with a minimum of three independent sets of economic forecasts, data from Ovum’s ICT Enterprise Insights surveys, and a range of secondary research inputs the model provides two outputs covering post-PSD2 and non-PSD2 scenarios of expected customer behaviour online and at the POS. It is being officially launched at EBAday. Please visit Icon at stand 48 for more information or a hard copy of the research.

Penguin Computing, a provider of high-performance computing, enterprise datacenter and cloud solutions, announced availability of its Tundra™ Extreme Scale (ES) server platforms based on Cavium, Inc., second generation ARMv8-based ThunderX2 processors. Tundra ES Valkre servers powered by ThunderX2 processors are now available for public order, and a standard 19" rack mount models will ship in 3rd Calendar Quarter 2017.

Penguin Computing provides customized build-to-order server solutions for customers with specialized hardware requirements in enterprise, financial, federal government, bioinformatics and Internet segments. Penguin Computing has successfully delivered thousands of datacenter deployments, from departmental HPC clusters to TOP500 class supercomputers and scale-out server farms powering some of the largest web properties. Extending its ARMv8-based server offering, the new ThunderX2-based platforms enables Penguin Computing to provide high performance ARMv8 compute platform with reduced TCO, using SOCs optimized for exascale computing, in platforms customized for financial, bioinformatics, Internet and federal government market segments.

Penguin Computing's second generation ARM based Tundra server platforms featuring Cavium ThunderX2 will focus on highly-scalable Hyperscale and HPC-type workloads including big data, large-scale graph analytics, molecular dynamics, and Ceph / Cloud storage. Performance will be driven by ThunderX2 ARMv8 SOCs optimized for these workloads, with high-performance custom cores, dual socket coherent connectivity and high memory bandwidth & capacity. Adding to these high-performance features are integrated scale-out IO supporting multiple x16 PCIe Gen3 ports enabling best-in-class performance. In addition, integration of IO interfaces and storage controllers reduces both power and cost, thereby driving outstanding reductions in TCO.

"Penguin Computing is the leading developer of open, Linux-based, HPC, cloud, and enterprise data center solutions," said Jussi Kukkonen, Vice President, Advanced Solutions, Penguin Computing. "By extending our product roadmap to Cavium's second generation 64-bit ARMv8 CPUs in our Tundra family of Open Compute servers we again step up our leadership position. Our customers get outstanding value from the efficiency and flexibility enabled by OCP infrastructure combined with best-in-class compute performance coming from Cavium's ThunderX2 offering." 

"The momentum for ARM-based servers is building and the new range of server products from Penguin Computing enhances choice for the end users seeking for high compute performance with the most energy and cost-efficient solutions," said Rishi Chugh, Director, Product Marketing, Cavium. "The new series of Tundra OCP compliant server family are well suited to address the high compute demands of next generation HPC and Cloud datacenter with outstanding performance and TCO."

Citizens Bank has announced that it will partner with Bottomline Technologies to deploy a market-leading online and mobile banking platform for its Commercial and Business Banking clients.