The first blog in our Accelerating Payments series looks at how the Covid-19 pandemic has propelled payments digitisation, opening the door to a realm of future possibilities. With a vaccine now firmly on the horizon, will payments revert, or will the trend continue?

Vito Cinesi, Head of Correspondent Banking and Foreign Financial Institutions at Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena - the world’s oldest bank - discusses how Bankers Almanac KYC has helped the institution to thrive.

The real estate industry is frequently used as a conduit for money laundering activities. Every year, around $1.6 trillion of dirty money moves through this market – equivalent to 3% of the world’s GDP. In this article, we explore an important element within this topic – escrow (or trust) accounts.

By providing more detailed information about all parties involved in a payment, the ISO 20022 message format will not only speed up payments, but increase transparency, improve sanctions screening and help organisations better detect and prevent financial crime.

ISO 20022 will impact a wide number of bank functions, from payments processing systems to foreign exchange, treasury, billing, screening, trade finance, and other operational areas. Before a ‘payments nirvana’ can be achieved, organisations should be prepared for what is likely to be a troublesome transitional period.

As barriers continue to fall and international trade increases, the need for fast, accurate and efficient cross-border payments will continue to escalate. Meeting this need can only be accomplished with initiatives like ISO 20022.

As barriers continue to fall and international trade increases, the need for fast, accurate and efficient cross-border payments will continue to escalate. Meeting this need can only be accomplished with initiatives like ISO 20022.

Artificial intelligence is already transforming financial services and has the potential to bring about even greater change, but we should always remember its limitations.

Diversity drives our business forward. We’ve been speaking to people from different backgrounds in different offices across our organisation to find out exactly what diversity means to them and how it impacts our customers. In the following blog, Patrick McConville discusses his experiences and the power of a supportive community.

Know Your Customer (KYC) due diligence still involves sifting through realms of unstructured data, using manual and repetitive methods; and this is something we are helping the industry overcome. By offering our unrivalled intelligence on global financial institutions via our new Bankers Almanac: KYC API, we aim to help financial institutions with large-scale KYC operations to be more effective, drive efficiency, and make the KYC process more sustainable.

Banks desperately need to meet compliance requirements without slowing down transactions or damaging customer relationships, but KYC screening still involves sorting through huge amounts of unstructured data, using manual and repetitive processes.

These are exciting times in the RegTech space, with so many new innovations to explore and much more on the horizon. We asked Franck Lanher, EMEA Director at Accuity, about his experience of improving financial crime compliance processes with many of the world’s leading financial institutions.