The Europol Encryption, Privacy and Cyber Crime Tightrope

Security is paramount, or is it? There has been a lot in the press recently about the delicate balance that technology companies need to strike between ensuring legitimate user privacy on the one hand and the use of this same security technology by terrorists to communicate privately on the other. The debate has been further ...

The Top 10 IT Trends According To McKinsey 2

Given the recent focus on disruptive innovation, I’m currently on a mission to understand more about future IT Trends and how they might impact the payments space. So with that in mind the purpose of this article is to share with you what I have found. Once we know what the IT trends are, we ...

10 Things I learnt from Ajay Banga about Financial Inclusion 6

Over the weekend I spent a bit of time reading about the recent Mobile World Congress 2015 event in Barcelona. There were some pretty high profile figures there from Mark Zuckerburg to John Cleese! But it was an ‘Innovating for Inclusion‘ keynote speech from Ajay Banga – MasterCard Chief Exec – on financial inclusion that particularly caught ...

Facebook Payments – 10 Things I Learnt 2

There has been an absolute avalanche of information about the recent Facebook press release confirming that in the coming months Facebook Messenger will enable users, in the US, to send / receive money. In this post I don’t intend to reiterate what’s already been said, but rather to share 10 things about Facebook and with it the ...

FinTech in the UK: Becoming A World Leader in 10 Steps 6

Today has been a busy day in the UK, we have had the last Budget (2015) before the upcoming May 2015 General Election and a couple of key government reports. The first report published by HM Treasury – Bank for the 21st Century: driving competition and choice, sets out the UK governments plans to increase competition ...

5 Reasons Why SWIFT Must Not Exclude Russian Banks 2

I have reading up on SWIFT quite a bit recently, to understand more about how corporates can benefit from the various available SWIFT corporate solutions. The benefits of SWIFT include a single connectivity channel to all of your banks, greater transaction visibility and reporting, combined with increased security and reliability – all of which enable comparatively lower transaction costs. ...

Real Time Payments Systems Around the World 8

Real time payments continue to hit the headlines. Just last week at the SWIFT Business Forum in New York Chris Church emphasised the continued demand from both businesses and consumers for real time payments. I have also been posting on the European journey in Immediate Payments not available anytime soon and Instant Payments in Europe. There ...

Fun Facts About 10 European Brands

Over the weekend I was reading about European brands and came across some really interesting articles such as the Top 10 Most Powerful European Brands, The Best Brands in Europe and What are the top 20 retail brands in Europe?. They’re really interesting articles and well worth a read. The compiled lists of European brands vary according ...

SWIFT Nordics Conference 2015 – Summary

For those of us unable to attend, Finextra has provided in their Live Blog Day 1 and Live Blog Day 2 an excellent insight into the SWIFT Nordics Conference. As I read through the blog posts I thought it would be useful to summarise key quotes and items of discussion from the two day SWIFT conference in ...

The Top 10 Payments News Stories in February, 2015 1

Payments news stories remained firmly in the spotlight in February. There were various payments news reports highlighting record investments in the fintech sector, coupled with continued developments with contactless payments. The European stage is clearly being primed for Apple Pay, and hot on the heels of this is the Samsung offering, LoopPay. Interestingly there were ...