5 Things You Need To Know About PSD2 – Payment Services Directive 75

Speculation over the much anticipated PSD2 – revised Payment Services Directive – has been gathering for quite a while now. Last week the European Parliament adopted the revised Directive on Payment Services (or PSD2), and with it the PSD2 reality got a little bit closer. PSD2 has been attracting quite a lot of attention, and ...

10 Insights by Nick Leeson on Risk, Failure and Success 1

Today I attended a AccessPay event at the Barbican Centre in the heart of the City of London. There were some interesting presentations from SWIFT, Barclays and Faster Payments. The highlight was the keynote speaker Nick Leeson, the infamous rouge trader who brought down Britain’s oldest merchant bank in 1995. Admittedly, I don’t know too ...

Help…I Need A Digital Strategy! 2

Mention the words “digital strategy” and people will immediately start nodding! Everyone loves the idea of a digital strategy. After all, the world around is increasingly becoming digitalised – from payments, banking, getting a taxi to ordering a coffee. There is an expectation that if you’re not digital you’re going to be eaten up by ...

The Top Payments News Stories in September, 2015

Payments news in September was dominated by three themes – cyber-security, mobile payments and fintech (of course!). Reports of cyber security breaches and the increasing adoption of fingerprint verification were recurring cyber security related stories. Mobile payments meanwhile continued to go from strength to strength, with initiatives from among others Samsung, Google and MasterCard. And ...

7 Insights Into The Causes of Payments Disruption

I spent more time than I should have over the weekend reading the Deloitte report Payments Disrupted – The emerging challenge for European retail banks. Payments disruption is a hot topic and this report provides an insightful overview of how regulation and technology are leveling the payments industry playing field. The Deloitte study has a ...

The Evolution of Payments In the UK by Consult Hyperion

Ok, you may have noticed that I have been into cybersecurity and SWIFT quite a bit recently. But now I am going to head back to PAYMENTS!  In August 2015, Consult Hyperion released a report The Future of Payments which describes current developments and outlines how the payments landscape will change in the UK over the next ...

CEO Fraud or Business Email Compromise EXPLAINED! 3

CEO Fraud or Business Email Compromise (BEC) has been widely reported with several recent high profile incidents. It is a global threat to corporates, large and small, and is on the face of it a simple and highly effective way of ‘attacking’ an ill prepared and uninformed company. Before you say, that can never happen at my ...

Cyber Security Risks WITHIN Your Company 3

Cyber security is one of the BIGGEST concerns keeping many leaders awake at night. As I was reading around about the topic I came across the Harvard Business Review article The Danger From Within – it is a great read and highlights, obviously, the often overlooked and ever present cyber security risks within your own ...

Is the SWIFT 2020 Strategy Good Enough? 3

The other week SWIFT published a release titled Transforming the business of banking. The article gets views from some of the top SWIFT for corporate representatives and outlines how SWIFT aims to sign up more corporate customers and further develop its solutions for existing customers. These objectives are part of SWIFT’s overall SWIFT 2020 Strategy. Check out ...

Payment Reason Codes, R-Transactions, R-Messages 21

Most corporates focus on getting their payments to the banks in a controlled, secure and efficient manner. Once at the bank, corporates want to ensure that their payments STP – Straight Through Process. The objective is firmly on the connectivity from the corporate to the bank, and then ensuring that the payments data and format ...