Middle and Back Office Solutions Insights

This is not a regular time - and, as Robert Frost said, "the best way out is always through”. Even now, insurers are following the path of technological progress, trying to keep up with the market. Many actions have already been taken, key trends are being implemented by the industry, so will 2021 bring about significant changes? Or can... read more

It is set to be a transformative year for payments say those in the industry. The pandemic will continue to have a huge impact, particularly in digital payments and open banking. While digital payments have grown over the past few years, they became an essential, as merchants and consumers reacted to the crisis. According to Visa, 77... read more

Starling Bank’s latest partnership is a “completely different vertical for us”, says Gareth Towler the bank’s marketplace product analyst. The challenger bank recently added PayPal’s iZettle to its Business Marketplace as part of its new strategy for deeper integrations. “From a marketplace perspective,... read more

The success of Open Banking depends critically on a mutually beneficial cooperation between traditional institutions and fintech to the benefit of clients, predicts an in-depth paper from Commerzbank, Germany’s market leader in corporate banking. Citing several examples of productive partnerships between banks and fintech, the study... read more

The year 2020 has proved unusually testing for the financial services industry. Yet, in the face of added pressures created by the pandemic, efforts to migrate to the new global standard for payments messaging – aka ISO 20022 – have continued, albeit with a few added changes. Recognising concerns that many banks would struggle to... read more

The ISO 20022 messaging standard will see banks sending and receiving payment messages with far richer data than before. Many are – understandably – preoccupied with the practical challenges that this will bring, such as how they can translate between MT and MX message formats. However, what should not be forgotten is that the new... read more

The UK is a leader in the field of open banking. 2019 was a mammoth year for the country’s open banking ecosystem, when UK open banking hit one million users, regulated providers grew to 204 and there were 1.25 billion API calls. There is no doubt open banking has helped lift London into a position of global leadership in the fintech... read more

In September the UK’s Open Banking implementation body (OBIE) announced a significant uptake in the number of Open Banking service uses in the UK, with over two million people now benefiting from Open Banking products. This represents a 100 percent increase in users in just over six months since the start of the global pandemic. Both... read more

A vaccine to the coronavirus will not bring much change in consumer confidence in the next quarter, according to a panel of finance directors at  this year’s CFO Virtual Agenda. “At the moment, we are working on a scenario that the first half of next year most closely looks like the second half of this year,” said Will... read more