Hamish Monk - Community Author: Finextra Research

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Generative AI: A new age of banking

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just a buzzword – it is essential to financial services’ development. The keys to unlocking this nascent technology’s full potential are relevant applications and concrete use cases. To identify what these use cases are, we must look beyond the hype. To find out more, Finextra spoke with Temenos’ chief pro...

11 February 2025 /ai

How to establish a hybrid cloud strategy

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to establish a hybrid cloud strategy

Hybrid cloud is a computer programming architecture used by IT teams to reap the benefits of both the private and public hosting environments. These work in tandem to run an organisation’s workload. The benefits of such a strategy are well-established. Dual architecture allows both sensitive data and customer activity to remain on premise (in the ...

11 February 2025 /cloud

How to establish an embedded finance strategy

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to establish an embedded finance strategy

Embedded finance is the digital provision of financial products within a non-financial context, such as the purchase of an Uber journey within the Uber application. This relatively recent innovation – accelerated by the wave of digitisation following COVID-19 – enables the entities that deploy it, in both the digital business-to-business (B2B) and...

04 February 2025 /payments

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How can banks automate effectively?

Automation in financial services encapsulates a range of tools and techniques which have the effect of reducing human intervention in business and information technology (IT) processes. On the business side are repetitive tasks that hobble workflows. It is estimated that companies lose 20-30% of their revenue to such inefficiencies every year. Au...

28 January 2025 /ai

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

$Trump: The new presidential meme coin

Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20th January was followed by a salad of executive orders, including the ejection of the USA from the Paris climate accord, the termination of birthright citizenship, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, withdrawal from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the enforcement of a two-sex gender poli...

22 January 2025 /crypto

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to use APIs

According to a global survey on application programming interfaces (APIs) by McKinsey, 81% of respondents said APIs are a priority for business and IT functions. “Large banks are launching API programs and allocating about 14% of their IT budget to APIs, on average,” claims the survey. So what exactly are APIs, and how should institutions be using...

21 January 2025 /payments

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

How to comply with PSD3

In June 2023, the European Commission (EC) announced plans to update its Payment Services Directive, which was originally designed to drive integration across the payments market, level the playing field for payment service providers (PSPs) and enhance security across the value chain. The latest proposed changes will swap the existing second Paym...

14 January 2025 /regulation

Consumer Duty: How to go beyond compliance

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Consumer Duty: How to go beyond compliance

In force since 31 July 2023, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)’s Consumer Duty regulation was designed to improve financial services protections for consumers. Since the go-live date, firms have made numerous improvements, and better, fairer outcomes are being delivered to customers. Yet, there remains room for firms to improve, and to build...

06 January 2025 /regulation

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

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