Banks’ offerings have been saturated with traditional products, and duplicative and tactical responses to regulatory mandates add extra burdens to fragmented business operations and administrative overheads.

Two underlying themes of MiFID – forcing systematic internalisers to become transparent and defining liquid shares for all EU member states – will result in the role of national exchanges and market data providers being called into question. By Chris Skinner.

Banks’ change of focus from product orientation to customer orientation is bringing benefits, not least in being able to understand a customer’s value and market the right products. And that is where new technology can help, Dan Barnes reports.

Citigroup’s EMEA consumer businesses share best practices to great effect. Recent UK head Nandan Mer talks to Michael Imeson.

Increasing corporate access to Swift was a key theme at Sibos 2006, where a new model for connectivity was announced, but it was clear that challenges remain. Dan Barnes reports.

IT is transforming trading and pushing up processing speeds and volumes. The winners will be those who keep up, says Dan Barnes.

Keeping trading speeds at the required levels challenges current data centre technology – where there is a failure, continuity must be assured. Tim Furmidge looks at solutions.

Now speed is king on the trading floor, banks must optimise their systems’ engineering – or find themselves left behind. Dan Barnes reports.

It is often said that the Single Euro Payments Area (Sepa) is a question of debit, not credit. But TowerGroup estimates that no more than 5% of all EU debit card payments in 2005 will be outside the country of issue.

Banks have taken automation to the extreme in their bid to cut costs. Now when their customers’ problems don’t correlate to the prescribed formulae, the system breaks down – as Chris Skinner discovered recently.