BNP Paribas expands digital FX trading assistant 

BNP Paribas has announced that ALiX, its foreign exchange (FX) digital trading assistant first launched in September 2019, has expanded across the full FX product suite on the bank’s Cortex FX trading platform.

Originally only available on algo orders, ALiX can now assist clients across the full FX product suite, including spot, forwards, swaps, options, and orders, in addition to algos. The bank says ALiX is now a one-stop shop for clients to access live tradable price quickly and easily, helping them speed up daily tasks such as rolling FX positions or pricing complex options requests versus traditional methods.

Upskilled ALiX is engineered to pack all the power of Cortex FX into one small widget that fits neatly in the corner of a client’s screen, without having to open a separate window. Clients type in their FX request and, using the AI and natural language processing (NLP) technology, ALiX is able to understand and instantly price their request. Since its launch in 2019, ALiX has answered over 400,000 client queries.

"With ALiX having expanded its skillset across the entire FX suite it now offers a true one-stop shop for clients to trade effortlessly via Cortex FX," said Nick Hamilton, head of EMEA eFX Sales at BNP Paribas. "Our clients have had to adapt to new trading environments over the last year, and through listening to their needs, and leveraging cutting edge, innovative technology, ALiX continues to define the next generation of FX trading platforms."

 

Bolero launches white-labelled trade finance portal-as-a-service solution 

Bolero International, a cloud-based trade finance digitisation firm, has announced the launch of Galileo TPaaS for Banks, a white-labelled trade portal-as-a-service solution for financial institutions. Using the Bolero network, the solution’s multi-banking capabilities enable a bank’s trade clients to execute transactions to all their banking partners from Bolero’s all-in-one portal.

This solution aims to help financial institutions achieve an accelerated time to market in delivering digital trade services to their trade clients while reducing the total cost of ownership in comparison to an in-house build or traditional software. The firm says banks can benefit from a greater scope of innovation through easy integration of external services within the product, improving customer experience and engagement, reducing client administration overheads for high-volume trade activity and increased customer satisfaction across small businesses, SMEs, and multinationals.

The solution is designed to give corporate customers greater autonomy in the management of their letters of credit (LCs), guarantees, standby LCs and documentary collections transactions. It includes a range of connectivity options for banks and is available on-demand as a fully managed service on the cloud. 

“In the current backdrop of the pandemic, the demand for digital trade services is at its peak," commented Anchal Tiwari, head of Product at Bolero International. "Galileo TPaaS is designed to help banks deliver digital trade services to their clients without the need to take on a complex implementation project or make heavy technology investments towards digitisation. Our vision of Galileo TPaaS is to enable banks to offer an elevated customer experience to the end-user at a fraction of the cost that banks incur in traditional trade portal solutions."

 

SEB accelerates digitisation journey with Google Cloud partnership

SEB and Google Cloud have announced that they have entered into a strategic, long-term partnership to accelerate the bank’s digitisation journey. SEB will use Google Cloud’s cloud technologies, and collaborate to create new banking services for its customers.

SEB’s innovation studio and next-generation banking platform, SEBx, is already benefiting from Google’s Infrastructure and Data Cloud technologies, such as Kubernetes Engine and Cloud SQL, helping the bank achieve greater cost efficiency, flexibility, and network scalability. As part of the extended partnership, SEB will use Google Cloud more broadly throughout the banking group to speed up its digitisation efforts and provide new solutions to its customers.

The bank says it will use Google Cloud across the company to create services in retail and corporate banking for customers based on data, analytics, and processing technologies. It will refine risk analysis through Google Cloud’s computational scalability, and augment financial reporting capabilities by using Google Cloud’s data management tools.

"The financial services industry is rapidly changing to meet rising customer expectations," said Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud. "Together with SEB, we’ll collaborate on new products based on data, analytics, and AI that will create even better user experiences and will transform the industry as a whole."

 

Garanti BBVA unveils bank account aggregation service for businesses 

Garanti BBVA’s retail and business clients can now view their account balances and statements with other banks. Garanti BBVA Internet allows businesses of all sizes to check their accounts with other banks from a single screen, without any further login requirements.

The service allows them view the amounts debited and credited to their non-BBVA accounts. To set up the centralised account information service, clients are required to enter the pertinent account details in Garanti BBVA and place an order in the corresponding bank to authorise access to their information.

"We have upgraded our products and services with all the new features enabled by the latest technological improvements in the field of digital banking to make our customers’ lives easier," said Işıl Akdemir Evlioğlu, executive vice president of Garanti BBVA. "In this sense, we continue to support the digitisation of the businesses, SMEs and companies that work with us."