IBS Intelligence Global FinTech Interviews

The iconic IBSI Sales League Table is back, and bigger than ever! In this interview, V Ramkumar, Senior Partner, Cedar Management Consulting International, explains the importance of the IBSI Sales League Table, how it is compiled and curated, the insights it provides on evolution and state of the banking technology industry, and the perspective it offers on activity levels in different global markets.

A Temenos survey has found that over three quarters of bankers believe that AI will be the technology to separate ‘winners’ from ‘losers’ over the next five years. Sunniva Kolostyak, reporter at IBS Intelligence, speaks to Mark Gunning, Global Business Solutions Director at Temenos, about the report ‘Forging new frontiers: advanced technologies will revolutionize banking’.

How do you create a bank for a group of people that constantly work and travel across borders, and how do you service them when mobility halts? Reporter Sunniva Kolostyak speaks to Guy Kashtan from Rewire, a digital banking service for migrants and international workers, about growth, serving a target audience, and social responsibility during COVID-19.

Is the neobank market overcrowded? How will the challenger banks cope in the era of Covid-19? What will be the focus of the next wave of neobanks coming to the banking market? Global Processing Services (GPS) is the payments technology provider powering several of the players in the first neobank cohort, including the likes of Revolut, Starling Bank and Curve. GPS CEO Joanne Dewar offers her perspective on challenging times for the challengers.

Cybersecurity specialist VMware Carbon Black has published its latest annual Modern Bank Heists. The report shows that 80% of surveyed financial institutions reported an increase in cyberattacks over the past 12 months, a 13% increase over 2019. How can financial institutions better protect themselves in the current cybersecurity landscape? And was it inevitable that during the Covid-19 pandemic, between February and April 2020, cyberattacks against the financial sector increased by 238%!

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has expressed concern that the current Covid-19 crisis will affect the financial strength of payment service providers (PSPs) and consumers’ ability to access cash and payment services. Given the FCA’s renewed focus on the payments sector, PSPs should proactively review and, where necessary, update their compliance policies and procedures, particularly in relation to financial crime. PSPs should also assess their governance and risk management arrangements and ensure these are appropriate for their business models in the current economic climate.

Capgemini and Efma’s latest World Insurance Report 2020 reveals that consumers of all ages are adopting a “millennial mindset”, and increasingly trusting their own research to source information and purchase insurance products themselves. The report recommends that to remain relevant to customers, insurers need to better connect with their policyholders by providing them with hyper-personalised and experience-led engagement. Simply put, insurers need to offer the right products, at the right time and via the right channels.

US FinTech Securrency successfully raised $17.65 million in its Series A round earlier this year, led by strategic investor WisdomTree investments. Securrency is a pioneer of blockchain-based financial markets infrastructure technology centred on its identity and compliance framework to support global digital securities transactions. Now, the FinTech has partnered with Saudi investment management and banking firm, Musharaka Capital, to develop a compliant platform for issuing digital securities in Saudi Arabia.

 Sunniva Kolostyak, reporter at IBS Intelligence, speaks to Signicat’s John Erik Setsaas about how Scandinavian countries are using verified digital identities in most aspects of their digital lives, about entering the Benelux market and its recent acquisition of Connectis, and how collaboration is an important element of fighting cybercrime, particularly in a COVID-19 environment. 

 In a single home today, it’s not uncommon to find more than a dozen devices connected to the internet. As people connect more, it is only a matter of time before we see a huge increase in unauthorised purchases being made via these technologies. The Internet of Things (IoT) has great potential but there are questions to be resolved over how payment systems interact with IoT, warns Steve Durney of Ethoca. Acquired by Mastercard in March 2019, Ethoca is a provider of collaboration-based technology solutions for merchants and card issuers.