Today Nordea brings Apple Pay to customers in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Apple Pay is transforming mobile payments with an easy and secure way to pay that’s fast and convenient. With 1.7 billion card transactions per year and high mobile usage in the Nordics, delivering the benefits of digitalisation to customers is a cornerstone in Nordea’s strategy. Over the last few years, Nordea has systematically built up its mobile payment services portfolio. Continue reading…

The European Union published a report about the financial status of the banking sector in the European Union. While the credit institutions declined, the financial sector expanded in 2016, reflecting growth in both banks’ and non-banks’ assets. And there are more interesting outcomes from this report. You can read it on our website, just click on read more.
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Three former senior employees of the F.H Bertling group were today sentenced at Southwark Crown Court. This follows an SFO investigation into corrupt payments made to an agent of the Angolan state oil company, Sonangol, in relation to F.H Bertling’s freight forwarding business in Angola and a contract worth approximately $20 million. Continue reading…

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision today published assessment reports on the implementation of the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) in Australia, Brazil, Canada and Switzerland. The assessments, which were conducted as part of the Committee’s Regulatory Consistency Assessment Programme (RCAP), indicate that the LCR regulations in each of these jurisdictions were found to be “Compliant” with the global Basel standards, the highest of the four possible grades.
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Yesterday we published the speech of Linda Woodall, Director of Life Insurance and Financial Advice, where she spook about the paper ‘Ageing Population and Financial Services Occasional Paper’. In the mean time the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) reveiled their findings from its first Financial Lives Survey. You can read the summary here on our website. We hope you enjoy reading it.
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The Financial Condusct Authority (FCA) published a paper on the aging popualtion. In her speech, Linda Woodall, Director of Life Insurance and Financial Advice, talks about the findings from the paper, like the risk that older consumers’ needs aren’t being fully met. And that there opportunities for firms to apply the findings as part of their own business strategies and models going forward.

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by Bob Vanstraelen
One of the hottest topics at every industry event I’ve attended recently is the threat of FinTech disruptors. As more and more of these small, specialist firms launch – think Revolut, N26 and Seamless (SEQR) – many retail bankers seem concerned that their size and portfolio is hindering them in the battle for customers. Actually, I think it’s quite the opposite, and it’s the wide breadth of services that traditional banks offer consumers, in contrast to FinTechs’ largely single-service offerings, that will prove to be their golden ticket to customer retention and loyalty. By offering a range of services, retail banks ultimately create more opportunities to understand their customers and therefore engage and grow with them – opportunities that single service firms don’t have. 
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At national discretion, the required stable funding (RSF) treatment for derivative liabilities can be reduced from 20% to no lower than 5%. We will continue to work on this issue and will consult if a change to this treatment is proposed. But the existing proposal should facilitate the implementation of the NSFR, which is due to begin on 1 January 2018, given that most jurisdictions have already published their final or draft rules.
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The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has banned Mrs Colette Chiesa and Mr John Chiesa from working in financial services for integrity failings. Additionally, Mrs Chiesa has been fined £50,000 for attempting to mislead the FCA during an FCA interview. Mr and Mrs Chiesa were founding partners of Westwood Independent Financial Planners (Westwood), a firm authorised by the FCA to provide personal investment advice. Continue reading…