Orange Bank, branch closures, Coop Bank, and GAFA in Banking
- HSBC, Barclays and the Government Digital Service have partnered with Orange, OT-Morpho and the Open Identity Exchange to test a system through which French citizens can open a bank account in the UK under eIDAS
- Orange has indicated that it is close to launching its online banking service. The mobile operator originally planned to launch Orange Bank in early July 2017, but revised the target after encountering problems during testing
- Bank of England Term Funding Scheme has helped increase net interest margins at both Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays, according to research by The Times. Lloyds Banking Group, which has used £13.5bn in funding from the scheme, reported that its net interest margin increased from 2.74% in June 2016 to 2.82% in June 2017. The rate at Barclays increased from 3.59% to 3.69% over the same period, which the bank attributed to higher margins on personal banking deposits
- Co-operative Group shareholders have approved a £700m rescue package for Co-operative Bank, which will result in the Group’s shareholding falling from 20% to 1%. A consortium of US hedge funds have agreed to write off £440m of debts and inject £250m in new funds into the bank
- Which? and Daily Mail study has found that high street banks are closing an average of more than ten branches a week. Royal Bank and Scotland and NatWest combined were found to have closed the most branches out of the big banks since 2011, having shut down 695. Lloyds Bank and Halifax combined have lost 950 since 2011, however 631 of these were transferred to TSB Bank
- Cifas has reported that identity fraud has reached ‘epidemic levels’ with nearly 500 new scams reported each day
- Security Research Labs has found that fingerprint verification can be ‘cracked’ by using households items bought for £45 to produce a clone of a user’s fingerprint
- World Economic Forum has said that large technology firms like Facebook, Amazon and Google are a bigger threat to banks than fintech start-ups, which are increasingly reliant on partnerships with banks to achieve scale. The report highlights cloud computing, customer-facing artificial intelligence and Big Data customer analytics as three capabilities that are becoming critical to the competitive differentiation of financial institutions, areas in which technology giants have far deeper experience than banks
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