Bankloch

Financial institutions face increasing challenges in combating financial crime. While technology has significantly advanced (e.g. thanks to AI), the methods employed by criminals have also evolved, becoming more sophisticated and harder to detect. One of the crucial challenges in this battle is the siloed approach to detecting and combating financial crime. Financial crime information is rarely shared between banks and even within various departments of a single bank, such as cybersecurity, risk, compliance, fraud, operations, and customer support. Despite these departments common goal of reducing financial crime, each department focuses on different aspects. For example, cybersecurity teams focus on protecting the bank’s digital infrastructure, compliance ensures regulatory adherence, and fraud teams detect and prevent fraudulent activities. Consequently, these departments often do not share information, leading to missed opportunities to identify and mitigate risks. A centralized dat...

As a regular consumer, you might not realize that a simple wire transfer to a company or a friend launches a complex and lengthy payment flow. This process involves multiple financial institutions and diverse IT systems. In this blog, we explore a typical payment flow at a financial institution. The complexity of the payment flow stems from increasingly strict regulatory requirements designed to mitigate risks to the financial system and reduce financial crime. Additionally, the high non-functional requirements for payments — such as reliability and security — are critical for maintaining customer trust in the financial system. This necessitates intricate architectures with numerous optimizations and redundancies to meet these stringent requirements. Large Tier 1 banks process millions of payments daily, where even a failure rate of 0.001% results in hundreds of failed payments per day. With the rise of digital payments, instant payments and regulatory complexities, the payment flow ha...

With an audience of fintech enthusiasts, I am probably preaching to the choir, but investing your excess savings remains critical to preserving and hopefully increasing the buying power of your hard-earned money. Unfortunately in practice, this is easier said than done. After years of great enthusiasm, investments in robo-advisors seem to be returning, despite the hype of AI and its clear link with this technology. At the same time specialized digital trading platforms like Robinhood, Webull, E-Trade or eToro offer an excellent user experience, but often remain a bridge too far for the average investor, who occasionally invests relatively small amounts via their regular bank. And good advisory services still target mainly the happy few, as the costs are too high to offer to the masses. As a result, the occasional, amateur investor, who doesn’t want to spend too much time on his investments, often ends up buying the "Fund of the Month" offered by their bank or invests a large ...