Open letter to SWIFT

Dear SWIFT,

As a bank customer, I congratulate you on decades of smooth, high quality service. However, as a global body whose mission is to deliver funds between banks safely, the last few months have been, with respect, challenging.

Recent incidents in Bangladesh and elsewhere have damaged your credentials immensely. Your initial defence, that the breaches were largely the banks’ responsibilities, was quite remarkable. We’ve all thoroughly understood that the strength of the network is no greater than the strength of the weakest link. We just wish you had understood that before the rest of us.

Bank Heists for the Digital Age

As the line between the virtual and real criminal world grows ever murkier, it’s not surprising online bank robbers are using the anonymity afforded by cyberspace to infiltrate the real world and get their hands on physical cash.

At the same time, within the online world, criminals are diversifying, borrowing each other’s methods and innovating on a new level to fulfil their demands.

Payments Knowledge Forum: the inside track

@TFL

This year's Payments Knowledge Forum (PKF) in London kicked off with the theme that we are moving towards an ever more virtual world. David Smith, Wincor Nixdorf, opened the event with the statement that people are constantly on the move and expect their services to move effortlessly with them.

So how can the payments industry live up to this expectation?

Are banks slow in taking on the cloud?

© Neuro, Commons Wikimedia

Of late, there has been a lot of hype around why banks remain sluggish in adopting the cloud. As we all know, the banking services industry as a whole is often accused of being slow to implement innovative technology, with around 75 per cent of banks in Europe, for instance, using outdated core banking systems.

In part, concerns over security have created a barrier to the deployment of cloud technologies. These include the lack of visibility into the service provider security measures, the potential for unauthorised third party access to data, plus the lack of control over where data is stored.

KYC: too many cooks?

At the best of times banks are reluctant to share ideas and information with each other, but it is clear that in some cases there is no discernable advantage to differentiate. KYC, for instance, is one of them, as I discussed during this piece in the IBS Journal in May. Today’s news that Swift has added six major banks to its KYC service, launched earlier this year, raises the question once again: Why does the industry have so many KYC utilities?