Compass Plus, an international provider of retail banking and electronic payments software to processors and financial institutions, has revealed the results of their recent research shows industry professionals believe mobile payments, NFC and contactless technology will reach mass adoption within five years despite previous results indicating they should already be mainstream.

Compass Plus has been undertaking research into the industry’s expectations of the payments market since 2011, and this year’s results, which took in the views of more than 190 payments and banking experts from across the globe, found that nearly a third of the respondents think that mobile payments will go mainstream in their region in the next five years (31.3%). When compared to previous survey results, these findings stood out as previous expectations have consistently stated that mobile payments should be mainstream within 1-3 years. By looking at the results from the 2011 and 2012 research, whose results stated mainstream penetration would occur within 2-3 years and 1-2 years consecutively, we should already have reached a state of mass adoption. However, in the most recent set of results industry expectations have been pushed back further to 2020. 

This trend has also been reflected in respondents’ answers to when NFC and contactless will become mainstream. Back in 2011, the majority vote was that mass adoption would have been reached within two years (29%), however this year’s result show that this was overambitious as respondents now believe mass adoption will occur within five years (41.5%) – seven years behind the original estimate.

“It is easy to get excited when new payments technology is introduced. However, experience has shown that no one payment channel becomes mainstream immediately. In the industry we tend to align our expectations with the potential of the technology rather than the consumer expectations,” said Maria Nottingham, Executive Vice President at Compass Plus. “To truly reach a state of mass adoption, consumers need to be on board. It is clear that current approaches to mobile payments are lacking in the versatility that the other methods offer, and this is something that needs to be addressed.”

 Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:BR) has completed its acquisition of the Fiduciary Services and Competitive Intelligence unit from Thomson Reuters’ (NYSE: TRI) Lipper division. The acquisition expands Broadridge’s leading enterprise data and analytics solutions for mutual fund manufacturers, ETF issuers, and fund administrators, adding new global data and research capabilities. Broadridge announced its agreement to acquire the business on May 21, 2015. Terms were not disclosed.

As previously announced, Broadridge and Thomson Reuters Lipper also entered into a long term content and brand licensing services agreement under which Thomson Reuters Lipper will provide Broadridge with data on investment product classifications, pricing, performance, benchmarking, product asset positions, and product flows, ensuring continuity of underlying content and methodology.

“Adding these solutions to our well established mutual fund and retirement business provides our clients and the industry with a comprehensive suite of compliance oversight, fee benchmarking and competitive intelligence solutions,” said Gerard F. Scavelli, president of Broadridge’s Mutual Funds and Retirement Solutions Group. “Broadridge remains committed to delivering quality service to help clients mitigate risks, meet their fiduciary responsibilities and enhance sales productivity. We welcome Thomson Reuters’ clients and associates to the Broadridge organization.”

All Thomson Reuters Fiduciary Services and Competitive Intelligence unit associates in Denver, Colorado; London, England; and Gdynia, Poland will join the Broadridge organization. The acquired capabilities will be integrated within Broadridge’s Mutual Fund and Retirement Solutions Group, expanding its existing Access Data suite of market intelligence solutions.

Surecomp^®, the leading global provider of trade finance solutions for banks and corporations, announced today that COR-TF^®, its multi-bank corporate trade finance solution, has been awarded the “SWIFT Certified Application – Trade and Supply Chain Finance for Corporates” label for the fourth consecutive year.

The SWIFT Certified Application program certifies selected third-party applications to ensure that they meet well-defined requirements related to SWIFT standards, messaging and connectivity. Reevaluated each year to ensure alignment with evolving customer needs, certification requirements validate the ability of a product or application to provide automation in a SWIFT environment. SWIFT is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a member-owned cooperative through which the financial world conducts its business operations with speed, certainty and confidence.

“We are pleased that SWIFT has certified – for the fourth year running – our COR-TF solution, which is ideal for large corporations working with numerous international banks,” said Joel Koschitzky, Surecomp Chairman. “Since the beginning of the year, COR-TF has been licensed by a number of savvy corporations interested in bringing their global trade operations to the next level. These contract wins, coupled with renewed SWIFT accreditation, confirm that we are on the right path, and that CORT-TF provides real value to corporations engaged in trade finance.”

Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, has today announced a number of key enhancements to its bank-to-customer e-commerce platform, Electronic Trading, to enrich liquidity, reduce latency and improve customer experience.

The new enhancements see liquidity from Thomson Reuters multi-bank platform FXall integrated into Electronic Trading for the first time.  By including all Thomson Reuters relationship and anonymous liquidity for both pricing and risk management, Electronic Trading now helps banks offer more competitive prices to their customers while optimizing the risk management of their transactions. While full automation is possible, banks retain complete control over both pricing and hedging, enabling them to smoothly integrate their e-commerce activities with their other trading desks.

Thomson Reuters has also made key improvements to the performance of Electronic Trading’s core pricing engine that reduce latency on the platform. Extra auto execution and smart order routing methods have been added to the platform, improving both pricing accuracy and enabling trade execution with minimal market impact.

In addition, Thomson Reuters has significantly redesigned the user interface to enhance customer experience and support increased brand flexibility.  Sophisticated business intelligence tools have been added to help banks intuitively analyse and understand customer behavior, trends and profitability using innovative visualizations of transaction data.

“Against a backdrop of market scrutiny, the need for increasing transparency and trade reporting will only see an increased adoption of electronic FX trading around the world,” said Neill Penney, head of workflow management at Thomson Reuters. “Our bank customers need flexible trading platforms to continue to forge direct connections with their customers electronically. They need tools that provide control over electronic pricing, distribution and hedging to meet the growing demands of their client base and improve internal efficiency through automation. This is why we are committed to continuous innovation on our Electronic Trading platform.” 

Part of Thomson Reuters premium desktop trading service, Electronic Trading offers a suite of e-commerce products that enable banks to shape, configure and automate FX prices to customers while streamlining risk management. Over 100 banks across 56 countries already use Thomson Reuters Electronic Trading to connect directly with their clients globally.

Overwhelmingly rapid change has become the new normal in regulatory compliance worldwide, including India. Form, content, format and calculation are being constantly changed by regulators to drive a stable financial ecosystem. Post the 2008 global crisis, regulators across the world have begun switching to Risk-based Supervision (RBS) to ensure banks do not take undue risks to maximise profits and boost performance. Meanwhile the RBI is phasing out its CAMELS-based inspection and is ushering in a new Risk-based Supervision environment to manage the banking system more closely. While the RBI has already communicated its RBS mandate to banks, the big question is - are banks really ready for the RBS regime?

Scheduled to be held at the Four Seasons Hotel on 11 June, Fintellix’s ‘by invitation only’ briefing will have banking leaders sharing insights on how banks can leverage innovation to lay the foundation for future-proofing compliance with RBI. The briefing will demonstrate how existing investments in Automated Data Flow (ADF) can be easily leveraged to address upcoming local and global regulations such as RBS, LCR, FATCA, etc. Sessions will cover topics such as - staying ahead of the compliance curve in a demanding regulatory environment; RBI’s new RBS regime: trials and tribulations of constant compliance; building a future-ready compliance infrastructure and ideas around building a ‘compliance-proof’ bank.

40% of Top 20 Private and Foreign Banks are now using Fintellix for RBI Regulatory Compliance initiatives. With RBI’s ADF mission now having concluded, most banks who have implemented ADF correctly have inherited a CDR (Centralized Data Repository) that should serve multiple MIS and Compliance initiatives. With its investments in CDR and a Metadata-based Platform, Fintellix has been able to deliver the compelling benefits of reuse for meeting newer Compliance requirements, such as NPA / EWS, Risk-based Supervision (RBS) and Liquidity Credit Ratio (LCR) without further investments, by leveraging the same CDR.

Incidentally Fintellix is the only banking regulations specialist providing solutions for all of RBI’s requirements such as NPA, RBS and LCR, as per RBI’s ADF vision, on a single platform and CDR. Fintellix provides banks with the assurance of reliable and comprehensive Compliance with current and future regulator demands. Also, owing to the pioneering vision of RBI’s Automated Data Flow, banks by virtue of implementing ADF are now automatically compliant with the new BCBS 239 regulation.

The Fintellix Compliance Suite is powered by Fintellix’s next generation Data platform that is a singular, integrated and scalable Banking Data Management infrastructure which plugs into the Bank's internal and external data sources via pre-built ‘adapters’ and provisions raw Banking data for a variety of downstream uses such as Regulatory Reporting, Risk Management and Business Analytics. Fintellix also provides a Cloud option for banks as a SaaS-based utility model for advanced Banking Compliance, Risk and Analytics. Fintellix on Cloud is a secure and comprehensive option for scalability, responsiveness and cost-efficiencies. Fintellix's Compliance solutions are available for on-premises implementations as well as provisioning from a Regional Cloud Infrastructure.

Move enables banks to grasp the US$2 trillion Islamic banking market opportunity through new lower cost cloud access to Temenos’ long-established T24 Islamic banking solution.

Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the market leading provider of mission-critical solutions to the financial services industry, today announces that its specialist T24 Islamic core-banking solution is now available as a cloud-based service, ‘T24 Cloud Islamic’, delivering access to enterprise-level IT at an affordable price, while no compromise is made with regard to compliance with Islamic law.

Operating expenses are generally 50% higher for Islamic Banks as their products are Shari’ah compliant, making the Islamic market expensive and difficult to crack.  With T24 Cloud Islamic this is set to change, as banks can take advantage of the lower operating costs and subscription-based pricing offered by cloud, while accessing quality, Shari’ah compliant products.

Fadi Yazbeck, Product Manager for Islamic Banking at Temenos, said: “Key industry bodies believe that the growth of Islamic trade finance will reach up to US$800 billion by the end of this year. There is a huge opportunity in leveraging this growth.   T24 Cloud Islamic enables progressive African banks to grasp this opportunity for growth easily and cost effectively, while addressing their compliance needs.

Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE: BR) has received the Inside Reference Data award for "Best Managed Service for Reference Data" for the third consecutive year. The awards, which are judged by end-users in financial firms, recognize industry excellence within market data, reference data and enterprise data management. 

"This award highlights Broadridge's commitment to reducing the operational burden on our clients and we are proud to receive this recognition from Inside Reference Data for the third year in a row," said Bennett Egeth, president, Investment Management Solutions, Broadridge. "Our global reference data solutions help buy-side and sell-side firms of all sizes and various levels of complexity realize significant cost savings and reduce operational risk by consolidating and delivering the highest quality reference data."  

Broadridge's reference data capabilities provide solutions to manage securities terms and conditions, price acquisition and valuation, and corporate actions, which are offered on a licensed, hosted and managed service basis. They are designed to help clients meet ongoing demands for data consistency, transparency and accuracy, while avoiding the high costs and potential risks associated with gathering, cleansing and distributing the data on their own.

The solutions suite includes a global repository of reference data that enables firms to centralize and manage security terms and conditions across an entire enterprise; a repository of global pricing and market data developed to support complex pricing and valuation requirements for investment managers and global financial institutions; and a managed corporate action service. Broadridge services more than 250 clients globally across its reference data solution set.

The Best Managed Service for Reference Data award was presented at the 13^th annual Inside Market Data and Inside Reference Data Awards ceremony on May 20, 2015 in New York City.

SunGard, one of the world’s leading financial software companies, today announced the opening of its East African office in Nairobi, Kenya. By investing in and establishing a physical presence in Kenya, widely regarded as the financial services hub for East Africa, SunGard will reinforce its commitment to the region and is well positioned to execute on its strategy of achieving accelerated growth in these markets.

SunGard’s Nairobi office will provide its existing customers in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda with professional services, training and project support, and function as a sales and account management base to expand and service new customers in the broader East African region. With existing offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Tunis, Nairobi will mark SunGard’s fourth regional operating office in Africa. SunGard currently supports over 140 customers in Africa, which include banks, securities firms, hedge funds, pension funds, asset managers, energy and commodity trading firms, insurance companies, corporations and government entities in 15 African countries.

Fred Manthe, managing director East Africa for SunGard, said: “With East Africa’s sizeable and strong developing financial services market, there is an increasing need for sound market regulation and compliance. As we focus on the region’s positive economic growth and expanding client network, we are very excited about our strategic investment in East Africa and look forward to offering our customers a more efficient, competitive and industry aligned solutions and service delivery.”

Alberto Fasana, managing director Africa for SunGard, said: “Countries in East and Central Africa have undergone a considerable and positive transformation in recent years. The sub-Saharan mobile money revolution alone has enabled Kenya to claim a leading position in the financial services arena, with banks offering a diverse range of new products such as loans, savings accounts, mortgages and insurance. We are supporting the local financial industry with the underlying technology and services which enable clients to bring new products to market quickly, automate their business processes, implement tighter risk management practices, and meet required regulatory demands.”

SunGard’s East African office will be located at Eaton Place, 2nd floor, United Nations Crescent, Gigiri, Nairobi, Kenya.

Thomson Reuters has today announced that it is extending the services it provides within CME Group’s co-location facility located in Aurora, Illinois to include managed real-time data feeds and its low-latency news service, providing customers with high-performance, high-quality content while lowering the cost of ownership.

The customers located in CME’s Aurora facility need access to cross-asset data and news to identify new opportunities and make the most informed trading decisions.  Maintaining access to a broad universe of high-updating data, however, can be costly and require significant investment in infrastructure.  Thomson Reuters can provide these services through Elektron Managed Services within the Aurora facility as part of the flexible range of market data delivery options it offers customers.

Through the service announced today, customers who have their trading applications in CME Group’s Aurora facility will be able to access Thomson Reuters Elektron Real Time consolidated market data feed and the low-latency News Feed Direct service via a simple cross-connect.  This lowers the requirements for costly infrastructure and provides high-quality, cross-asset news and market data to help power customer applications and inform their trading strategies.

“Elektron Managed Services gives customers the ability to scale their businesses rapidly and access low-latency data and services while lowering the typical costs of deploying and managing equivalent solutions in-house,” said Paras Sidapara, global head of managed services, Financial & Risk, at Thomson Reuters.  “By offering low-latency, real-time market data and machine readable news feeds direct to customers inside CME Group’s Aurora facility, we are helping customers access the breadth of content they need to make informed trading decisions in a cost-effective and highly flexible way.”

In addition to the Aurora facility, Thomson Reuters offers Elektron Managed Services through a network of its own data centers located in established and developing financial markets, including Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Mexico City, Mumbai, New York, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto.

In response to the need for health insurance plans in the US to drive down the overall cost of care while improving quality and transparency, SunGard has launched new capabilities for health plans, including outsourcing options for end-to-end claims processing support and business intelligence (BI) dashboards for improved workflow.

With multiple competing priorities, insurance executives are seeking new ways to improve quality and transparency, reduce operating expenses, and free up valuable human and capital resources to focus on more strategic business initiatives. Delivering a complete end-to-end ­Business-Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) solution for claims processing, SunGard provides mail house, scanning, data entry and secure document destruction. In addition, SunGard has launched business intelligence dashboards for its Macess workflow solution, which integrates, automates and streamlines complex processes. These dashboards help executives make more informed business decisions and act quickly on the data they have by analyzing trends in claims, enrollment and other areas.

“Insurers will win customers and reach the next level of claims-handling proficiency by making better use of their only natural resource—data. Insurers have the potential to change the key processes that determine most policyholders' views of their carriers and achieve the next level of performance for claims professionals, by turning routinely overlooked data into actionable information.” – Jamie Bisker, senior analyst, Aite Group

“Cloud computing has such potential and great interest by insurers. The move to a more affordable, variable cost model is a big win. The vendors are listening and we are seeing them pick up the pace.” – Tom Scales, research director, Celent’s Life, Health and Annuity Insurance practice

“We’ve offered BPO for claims processing for many years, but we’ve recently launched a full process service that not only helps to reduce costs overall, but also improves related downstream processes. Our latest innovations in solutions and services help health plans improve efficiency, ease regulatory reporting and drive down costs in many areas. It is part of our broader initiative to provide insurers with tools to help transform massive amounts of raw data into actionable insights. We are working closely with insurers to apply innovations which improve business process management by extending back-office productivity to mobile and cloud capabilities which meet the needs of insurers globally across life, health and property/casualty.” – Roy Massie, vice president, product management, SunGard’s insurance business

SunGard also recently launched a Health Information Exchange (HIE) Connectivity solution to help insurers improve care management, providing near real-time alerts of hospital discharges and transfers among high risk patients. In 2014, SunGard released its CMS Audit Support service to help insurers avoid and/or respond to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) inquiries.