Hamish Monk - Community Author: Finextra Research

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to comply with ISO 20022

The deadline for ISO 20022 – the new standard for electronic data interchange between financial institutions – is November 2025. Once fully implemented, ISO 20022 will be a game-changer for the global payments space; instilling enhanced interoperability, streamlined processing times, richer data, increased accuracy, lower maintenance costs, and e...

31 December 2024 /regulation

Four festive payment frauds to watch this Christmas

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Four festive payment frauds to watch this Christmas

Payments in the UK are feeling the chill this Christmas – especially in the retail sector, which rose only 0.2% last month, despite the Black Friday flurry. This figure is part of a wider trend of sluggish economic recovery in the wake of the pandemic, slumped consumer sentiment, as well as a general lack of confidence following Labour’s divisive ...

24 December 2024 /crime

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to choose a core banking provider

In simple terms, core banking points to the technology platform a financial institution deploys to sustain its key processes. It can be thought of as a central nervous system, delivering – from the back end to the front – vital services, such as transactions, onboarding, account management, currency exchange, card issuance, financial accounting, ...

17 December 2024 /payments

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to pick a SaaS solution

Software-as-a-service, or SaaS, delivers software and applications over the internet, via a subscription model. It is one of the three constituents of cloud computing – along with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) – and has revolutionised business operations; mushrooming from its market valuation of $237 billion i...

10 December 2024 /cloud

How AI can be embraced by financial services

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How AI can be embraced by financial services

While artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new concept, having been first explored by a research group in the 1950s, its widespread industrial application has only just begun. This is an excerpt from The Future of AI in Financial Services 2025 report, which was a special edition for the inaugural Finextra event, NextGen AI. Click here to read th...

10 December 2024 /ai

How to establish a correspondent banking relationship

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to establish a correspondent banking relationship

Correspondent banking lays the groundwork for a healthy international ecosystem of financial services. According to SWIFT data, however, the number of correspondent banking relationships has been in decline globally for the last decade. Compounding the issue has been a simultaneous rise in the volume and value of cross-border payments – suggestin...

03 December 2024 /payments

Redressing the ageing market data workforce

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Redressing the ageing market data workforce

The talent pool in the market data industry is contracting, as the challenge of recruiting into the sector builds. At a fundamental level, this trend is being felt across the financial services sector, with news outlets lamenting a ‘brain drain’ issue for some time. More specific to the market data industry, however, is that its talent pool is ag...

28 November 2024 /people

What is customer onboarding in financial services?

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

What is customer onboarding in financial services?

Onboarding is the process by which a prospective customer’s information is collected, assessed and verified by a financial institution – before services are extended. The aim is not just to ensure all relevant legal and regulatory requirements are satisfied; it is to avoid customer abandonment along the way. This is both a business and a compli...

26 November 2024 /retail

What is automation in financial services?

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

What is automation in financial services?

In the context of financial services, automation is achieved by the deployment of numerous technologies, in various contexts, by all kinds of entities. Whether it's smart automation by start-ups for artificial intelligence (AI)-powered enterprise resource planning (ERP) tagging systems, generative AI automation for risk detection by large banks,...

12 November 2024 /ai

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Understanding AI for personalisation

The term ‘artificial intelligence’ was coined in an August 1955 study proposal, by a group of academics and technology developers. The workshop on the subject took place one year later. In December 1955, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell developed ‘Logic Theorist’, which is today considered the first ever artificial intelligence (AI) program. Since t...

29 October 2024 /ai

Tools for banks’ continued digitalisation journeys

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Tools for banks’ continued digitalisation journeys

This is an excerpt from the Future of Payments 2025 report. Financial institutions need to transform their entire business and operating model to achieve bespoke, modular digital solutions and improve profitability. So, how can open banking and embedded finance help with this goal? And which hurdles remain? Annalisa Ludwinski, head of corresponden...

24 October 2024 /Sibos

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to build a mobile banking app

Mobile banking’s fledging iteration in the 1990’s was conducted via handsets’ Short Message Service (SMS). The offering was limited and inflexible – customers could check their balance or request to be warned if they were about to become overdrawn. By 1999, the world’s first Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled mobile banking services in No...

14 October 2024 /payments

Long reads