(August 3) Finastra announced The Co-operative Bank has selected Finastra Kondor Cloud, available via Microsoft Azure, to upgrade its treasury infrastructure, and automate manual reporting and processes. The solution will provide the bank with a modern, scalable, and cost-efficient ownership model, as well as access to ongoing upgrades and innovation.
(17 August) A cross-industry consortium has been launched in the UK to run a retail CBDC pilot which will feature a live digital sterling (dSterling) stablecoin asset. Called the Digital Financial Market Infrastructure (DFMI) consortium, members include IBM, Finastra, FinClusive, and paywith.glass.
(18 August) Lloyds Bank has completed the UK’s first transaction utilising a digital promissory note purchase. The bank says the landmark transaction dramatically increases the speed of payment and paves the way for a significant increase in the use of promissory notes for a broad range of transactions. This will potentially help millions of small businesses to improve their management of working capital and cashflow of their suppliers.
(19 August) Enterprise blockchain and crypto solutions provider Ripple is partnering with Brazil’s Travelex Bank to take its on-demand liquidity (ODL) offering to Latin America. ODL leverages Ripple’s XRP digital asset to enable customers to send money cross-border instantly, with very low-cost settlement and without the need to hold pre-funded capital in the destination market.
(August 23, 2022) Working capital platform C2FO has joined forces with Vic.ai, a provider of AI for autonomous accounting and financial management. The partnership aims to arm their enterprise customers with a flexible, AI-driven invoice acceleration solution that helps increase gross margins, reduces the payment cycle for their supply chains, and improves the ROI for accounting and finance teams.