Future Finance

Finextra and Oracle have gathered together some of the industry's top thought leaders to discuss, debate and analyse the key trends and issues within transaction banking, regulations and retail banking. This group will focus on upcoming regulations, new service offerings and industry debate shaping the new financial services landscape with regular blog posts, video interviews, webcasts debates and surveys.

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Will regulation strangle or enable 'quasi-banks'?

The answer seems to depend on where in the world you are, and who's backing these new entrants. News today out of Australia and China highlights two possible approaches. In Australia, one of the promises brought into government by the conservatives who took power last year was a "root and branch" inquiry into the state of the country's fi...

26 March 2014 /regulation

Dan Barnes Writer at Information Corporation

New Bitcoin ATMs trouble regulators

Regulators in Boston, USA, have issued warnings about the risks involved in Bitcoin purchase, after a second ATM device was set up in the state on 17 March 2014, offering Bitcoins for sale in exchange for US dollars. The ATMs or kiosks are produced by Liberty Teller, a small, Boston-based firm. They issue paper ‘wallets’, that look a little like a ...

20 March 2014 /payments /regulation

Tushar Chitra Vice President, Product Strategy and Marketing at Oracle Financial Services Software

The Mobile Payment Wars: Will HCE be a game-changer for NFC

Over the last two years or so, the mobile payments landscape has been abuzz with the supposedly disruptive potential of near field communications (NFC) technology. Predictions have been made about the imminent obsolescence of plastic cards and controversies have erupted over Apple’s refusal to acknowledge NFC and rumors about Verizon blocking Goog...

19 March 2014 /payments

Retired Member 

Of Orchestras and Global Transaction Banking

The role of a chief executive at a global transaction bank, I’m inclined to believe, is more complex than that of a conductor of an orchestra, even one with a considerable heritage of musical excellence. In an orchestra, all instruments are tuned to a common pitch. And, a certain competence with the score to be rendered—the single source of truth...

15 March 2014 /payments

Tushar Chitra Vice President, Product Strategy and Marketing at Oracle Financial Services Software

Mobile Payment Wars: The Importance of BLE And NFC

In two of my earlier posts on mobile payments, I talked about disruptive innovations in the mobile payments landscape and how the impending EMV deadlines could impact NFC adoption. In this post, I will continue to dwell on the disruptive innovations in mobile payments technologies, focusing on the raging iBeacon versus NFC debate. Around an year b...

04 March 2014

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Good at maths? Ask your bank for a better mortgage rate

I came across an interesting blog post recently about how the untrained human brain is disadvantaged when it comes to recognising or thinking about big numbers. These limitations, and reliance on gut feel and framing analysis via proportionality not only play into the hands of car dealers looking to upsize customers to the next model up with ext...

03 March 2014 /regulation /retail

Dan Barnes Writer at Information Corporation

Switching sides on banking secrecy

I recall my parents explaining the secret model of Swiss bank accounts when I was a child in the mid-1980s. The purpose of the accounts, I was informed, was so that people who had stolen money could hide it. It seemed reasonable, to a young boy, that there would be a service to cater for criminals. Pirates had islands, highwaymen had crossroads, t...

27 February 2014 /security /regulation

Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia

Do frictionless payments make you spend more?

With PayPal and others pushing the "it's time for wearable payments line", more handset payment developments and Visa and MasterCard trumpeting the increasing penetration of their respective contactless payment schemes for low-value purchases at retail points of sale, I decided to spend some time looking at two things: - the actual curr...

26 February 2014 /payments

Retired Member 

Enterprise Modeling Platforms and R Usage in Banking

The growth of Data Science as a discipline is attributable to the availability of new sources of data and to the increased focus on incorporating analytical outputs into every day decision-making within enterprises. Data Science brings together the hitherto disparate worlds of programming, statistical learning and data management. In my team, we h...

25 February 2014

Dan Barnes Writer at Information Corporation

Rebuilding the Chartered Institute of Bankers?

In an excellent article in the Financial Times, John Gapper notes that “Banks banged together in a 20-year spree of mergers and leveraged risk-taking, while old skills were replaced by computers, have little culture left from which to rebuild.” One cultural centre would have been the Chartered Institute of Bankers (CIB), an erstwhile employer of m...

17 February 2014 /regulation