Global Business Network
Every day we leave behind a trail of personal data. Google Maps tracks our movements, Netflix records our entertainment preferences, Amazon watches over our shopping habits and Alexa keeps tabs on our questions. And every time we click on ‘accept all’ in that privacy box, we’re agreeing to have our personal data stored somewhere in … Read more
US bank mergers and acquisitions (M&A) had a buoyant April, which saw 16 deals with a combined value of $14.9bn during the month to April 27, according to Refinitiv data. Total deal value for 2021 to April 27 has already reached $26.3bn, compared with $7.1bn during the same four-month period in 2020. Among the deals … Read more
Financial services was one of the worst-affected industries by sophisticated bot traffic last year, according to US cyber security software company Imperva, which released its annual bad-bot report in April. Bad bots — software applications running automated tasks with malicious intent over the internet — accounted for 25.6% of all website traffic in 2020, according to … Read more
It is often said that if the EU gave UK banks equivalence, life would be much easier for UK plc and its banking community. But that is not really true. There are more than 40 areas of potential equivalence. But they are very narrow, and sector and activity specific. So narrow and specific, in fact, … Read more
Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced a huge $500bn budget on February 1, focused on healthcare and infrastructure and aimed at boosting the country’s Covid-19 ravaged economy. During her speech, she also committed the Indian government to forming a ‘bad bank’, in an attempt to tidy up the country’s struggling banking sector. India’s banks entered … Read more
“Being president is like running a cemetery,” joked president Bill Clinton in a 1995 Illinois speech. “You’ve got a lot of people under you and nobody’s listening.” The US electoral soap opera has long polarised the country’s citizens. But the unprecedented events of January 6, 2021, the Christian festival of Epiphany, led to a great … Read more
It has been almost six months since Belarus’s autocratic president Alexander Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory in a rigged presidential election in August last year, which led to widespread protests across the country involving hundreds of thousands people. The protests have continued to take place even during the freezing Belarusian winter, and the unrest represents … Read more
Financial services investment into India has soared over the past five years, with foreign investors particularly attracted to fintech opportunities in the country despite a slowdown in projects in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The number of financial services foreign direct investment (FDI) projects reached 36 last year (January to November data) from 14 … Read more
The world over has seen a marked increase in fraud and money laundering during the Covid-19 pandemic. At a recent roundtable, industry experts discussed how the financial industry is coming together to collaborate and deploy innovative, network-level solutions to trace and prevent financial crime across the digital economy. Panellists: Mark Courtney, chief product officer, Cifas … Read more
The US government defence spending bill passed by Congress at the end of December included a new anti-money laundering (AML) whistleblower reward programme that has been heralded as a game-changer in efforts to clamp down on illicit money flows. The release of the FinCEN files last year highlighting how fraudsters have been able to move … Read more