The UK Financial Regulator on Fintech Innovation

In the The Top Payments News Stories in February, 2016 post i highlighted a speech by Christopher Woolard – the UK Financial Regulator (FCA: Financial Conduct Authority) director of Strategy and Competition. The speech was delivered at the FCA event on FinTech in the UK. Given that the UK is home to some of the hottest ...

An Analysis of Fintech Startups and Banks by McKinsey 1

Are fintech startups going to eat the banks breakfast? There is unprecedented coverage around fintech (financial-technology) startups and the gauntlet they have thrown down to the banks. Sometimes it is hard to make sense of it all. The fintech startups clearly offer something unique and banks recognise that the world around us is changing and ...

10 Most Popular Payments Tweets from February, 2016

Having summarised The Top Payments News Stories in February, 2016 i noticed that some stories were hugely popular on twitter. Some payments news stories received a huge number of likes and retweets, and for me that in itself provides a fascinating insight into what stories and themes are engaging people the most in the industry. I ...

The Top Payments News Stories in February, 2016 2

The payments news stories in February 2016 were all about mobile payments and blockchain. From a mobile payments perspective contactless payments data for 2015 became available in the UK and grew three-fold, we passed the billion (transactional – Mastercard) and trillion (value – Citi) marks, which is a trend which we will undoubtedly see across the ...

What Is Blockchain in 6 Awesome Infographics 14

If the blockchain frenzy and the hype surrounding it is anything to go by, blockchain is set to revolutionise everything from the way in which we make payments to the way in which we drink beer. I may have made that last bit up – but you get the idea that in and amongst the ...

I Needed To Send Money To India – This Is What I Did… 4

I got a call over the weekend from my Father, who is currently visiting India asking me to do a money transfer to India. It should be the other way around, right? Wtf?!? Anyway, I had no idea where to start so started investigating the options to send money to India. Since it was Sunday ...

SEPA TARGET Closing Days 2017 and 2018

I received an email today asking for the SEPA TARGET closing dates for 2017. I’m guessing other people will also be interested in the SEPA TARGET holiday dates so will share the information in this post. Check out the post SEPA Holidays 2015 / 2016 – YOU Need to Know These Dates! for the holiday ...

The Future of Fintech According to Deutsche Bank 4

One of the Fintech reports doing the rounds right now is that by Deutsche Bank, titled “FinTech 2.0: Creating new opportunities through Strategic Alliance”. There has been quite a lot of noise about the Deutsche Bank Fintech 2.0 paper across the social media spectrum, so i thought i better check it out. In short, Deutsche ...

Simple Guide to the SWIFT MT101 Format 27

Two of the most popular posts on this blog are the Structure Of A SWIFT Message, Explained and the Difference between a SWIFT ACK and SWIFT NACK. Many of the readers of those posts have asked if i could do something similar detailing the SWIFT MT101 format. In this post, the idea is to give ...

4 CEOs and the IMF MD On The Transformation of Finance

In the post ’21 Most Popular Tweets from the World Economic Forum’ I highlight some of the most popular themes from the 2016 Davos conference. As i researched the post it revealed that one of those most talked about debates for people in the finance space was a panel discussion titled “The Transformation of Finance”. ...