Fintech, Finance, Technology, Banking Highlights – 16 November 2017
KPMG joins Wall Street Blockchain Alliance
The Wall Street Blockchain Alliance (WSBA), an industry leading non-profit trade association, is proud to announce that KPMG LLP has joined as a corporate member.
Along with this membership, KPMG will also assume a seat on the board of directors.
“Blockchain is maturing toward the production phase and it is clear that it has the potential to dramatically impact financial services by improving outcomes critical to the industry such as cost of operations, capital consumption, customer experience and in some cases new business models and revenues,” said Eamonn Maguire, global leader for KPMG’s Digital Ledger Services.
Open Vector partners up with Volante for open banking
Volante Technologies Inc., a global provider of software for the integration, processing and orchestration of payments and financial messages on premise or as a cloud service, today announced its partnership with Open Vector, an advisory firm specialising in providing open banking consultancy services.
The partnership between Open Vector and Volante Technologies creates an end-to-end service for the global banking industry looking to adopt open banking policies and structures.
Open Vector provides direction and strategy to clients, while Volante’s open banking API enabling technology ensures firms can easily adopt new API-based technologies regardless of their current banking systems infrastructure. This ensures firms can not only take advantage of the opportunities that open banking presents on an ongoing basis, but also ensures compliance with key regulations coming into effect such as PSD2 and GDPR.
Modulr breaks 90 second barrier for business payments
Modulr is today announcing an industry-first real-time inbound and outbound payments SLA that allows businesses to automate high volumes of complex payments any time, even out-of-hours and on weekends, through its API-driven payments platform.
Working alongside a major high street bank, Modulr has removed layers of legacy technology to tightly integrate with the Faster Payments scheme, bringing transaction times down to less than 90 seconds with unmatched reliability, including out-of-hours and on weekends.
Myles Stephenson, CEO of Modulr, commented: “We want to end the idea of business hours payments once and for all; they have no place in today’s digital business world. Businesses need automated, real-time, ultra-reliable payment flows 24/7 in order to meet rising customer expectations. Unlike currently available bank offerings, Modulr is developer-friendly and, most importantly, not affected by the all-too-frequent out-of-hours outages of legacy systems that are simply not designed to be ‘always-on’.”
Money management chatbot Mespo teams up with My Community Bank
Mespo, the London based impartial money manager, and My Community Bank, a credit union with nationwide reach, have entered a partnership to improve the financial wellbeing of UK consumers.
The partnership is the first of its kind in the United Kingdom.
Mespo offers UK consumers a new innovative way to manage their money across all their bank accounts and save money on their recurring utility bills through innovative technology. The company is the first to offer not only a wholeof- market comparison of energy suppliers but additionally the possibility for their customers to switch to all suppliersvon the market. Research has shown that this leads to up to £100 of additional savings on energy bills alone for UK households, when compared to using traditional price comparison websites for switching suppliers.
