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Can open APIs transform financial services?

6/23/2017

CMA (UK Competition and Markets Authority) says YES!

Open APIs can transform the financial services sector. There is already a very active and growing FinTech community which has been developing and introducing new products using existing digital technology.

Here are a couple of key points made by CMA in their paper "Making banks work harder for you."

31: Requiring the banks to adopt and maintain a common open standard will accelerate the pace of this change. Without our intervention, the process of developing open APIs cannot be guaranteed and could take a long time, with the effect of denying customers the early benefits of these new services. We are therefore also imposing a challenging, but realistic, timeframe on banks for this process.

32: The development and implementation of an open API standard for banking – our first foundation remedy – will permit authorised intermediaries to access information about bank services, prices and service quality and customer usage. This will enable new services to be delivered that are tailored to customers’ specific needs. The types of new and improved services that will result from this remedy include applications which:

Allow banking customers, through a single application, to manage accounts held with several providers.
Allow customers to authorise the movement of funds between current and deposit accounts to help avoid overdraft charges or to benefit from higher interest payments.
Let customers make simple, safe and reliable price and service quality comparisons tailored to their own usage patterns.
Monitor a current account and forecast a customer’s cash flow, helping to avoid overdraft charges.
Use a small business’s transaction history to allow a potential lender other than their bank to reliably assess the business’s creditworthiness and offer better lending deals than they would without this information.

Read the complete article by CMA:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/544942/overview-of-the-banking-retail-market.pdf

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Philippe Préval Lusis
CEO Lusis

Post your questions or comments below.

The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly is a book you must read.

6/20/2017

The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly is a book you must read. It forecasts the twelve technological forces that will shape the next thirty years. Whether these 12 forces are 12, 10 or 15, and whether or not they are the true ones, does not matter. What makes this book a “must read” is the approach and the enlightenment on our world trends that you get from its reading.

Here are the 12 forces:

Becoming: Moving from fixed products to always upgrading services and subscriptions.
Cognifying: Making everything much smarter using cheap powerful AI that we get from the cloud.
Flowing: Depending on unstoppable streams in real-time for everything.
Screening: Turning all surfaces into screens. 3.8 billion screens are sold each year.
Accessing: Shifting society from one where we own assets, to one where instead we will have access to services at all times.
Sharing: Collaboration at mass-scale. Kelly writes, “On my imaginary Sharing Meter Index we are still at 2 out of 10.”
Filtering: Harnessing intense personalization in order to anticipate our desires.
Remixing: Unbundling existing products into their most primitive parts and then recombine in all possible ways.
Interacting: Immersing ourselves inside our computers to maximize their engagement.
Tracking: Employing total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers.
Questioning: Promoting good questions are far more valuable than good answers.
Beginning: Constructing a planetary system connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix.

All of the chapters are not of the same importance and the same mettle, and some points can be hardly criticized (such as the fascination for the VR (virtual reality)) but the whole book deserves to be analyzed carefully.

The main points I get from this books are:

There was never a better time to create a company. Just do it!
All by AI, AI everywhere, AI for all. This is the most impressive part of the book (Cognifying): Think AI, AI is no more a zillions projects led by an MIT PHD, it is becoming a commodity as electricity was and you can re-think your common practice or software but adding some AI.
Economy trend is now more on accessing than on possessing. As Kelly says: the biggest taxi company (Uber) owns no taxi.
Dataflow is our universe (Flowing, Screening, accessing…). During 5 centuries we lived in the booking-age, we are now in the flowing-screening age with marvelous effects and spurious diseases (Wikipedia as the pedants’ empire, fake news…). Mastering this new world for knowledge and information is one of our challenges.

So read this, and Change!

Philippe Préval Lusis

CEO Lusis

A Guide to High Availability and an Approach to an Active/Active Environment in the OSS World

6/12/2017

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There’s no time for downtime, and it’s crucial that your Nonstop hardware platform is at the ready 24/7. Lusis Payments has years of experience with open systems and brought our experience to Nonstop and OSS a few years back. One of the key architecture features of an SOA Nonstop environment relates to reliability and high availability, with the agility and the scalability users need. A versatile design and architecture provides the same high availability Nonstop users are accustomed to for continuous online processing plus Active/ Active and Active/Passive environments. This allows payment applications to be streamlined across multiple servers without sacrificing speed or accuracy which creates a robust, reliable platform with guaranteed delivery each and every time.

Some elements of high availability are provided by the architecture of the hardware platform, such as fault tolerance, clustering, and remote backup. Lusis has experience with these different architectures and their respective pros and cons. We have integrated several functions to minimize any constraints introduced by these disparate architectures.

CLICK TO READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE AS FEATURED IN THE CONNECTION MAGAZINE.

Android Pay lands in Canada and Taiwan

6/2/2017

Source: https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/30645/android-pay-lands-in-canada?utm_medium=newsflash&utm_source=2017-5-31

A host of FS firms, including three of Canada's big five - BMO, CIBC and Scotiabank - will begin rolling out support for Visa and Mastercard cards in the next few days. TD Bank and RBC are not on the list. Support for Interac debit cards will arrive next week, with American Express and Tangerine following in the summer.

All of the big banks have already signed up to Apple Pay, although CIBC is the only one to have so far also added support for Samsung Pay.

The move means that customer will be able to link multiple cards to the Android Pay app and use their NFC-enabled devices to make contactless payments instore at hundreds of thousands of shops. It can also be used for in-app purchases.

Mark O'Connell, CEO, Interac, says: "As the payment landscape evolves, we strive to offer Canadians innovative and seamless payment experiences that are fast, secure and increasingly more digital. The launch of Android Pay in Canada will give Interac debit cardholders yet another way to pay using their own money."

Click to read the complete article from Finextra

Can open APIs transform financial services?

The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly is a book you must read.

A Guide to High Availability and an Approach to an Active/Active Environment in the OSS World

Android Pay lands in Canada and Taiwan

lUSIS nEWS

Archives

Categories

Can open APIs transform financial services?

​The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly is a book you must read.

A Guide to High Availability and an Approach to an Active/Active Environment in the OSS World

Android Pay lands in Canada and Taiwan

lUSIS nEWS

Archives

Categories

The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly is a book you must read.