This week’s tech news, filtered for financial services execs

August 1

Hello and welcome to Insights Distilled, a weekly email briefing that curates useful technology news for financial services execs. Every Tuesday morning, we send you the top five stories you need to know – and explain why they matter. Our tech news roundup helps you stay on top of the innovations driving business agility in your industry.

  1. BNP Paribas is the latest financial giant to announce that it’s working with infrastructure firm Metaco to develop digital asset custody.
  2. Message tracking tech takes off as unauthorized communication fines for the biggest banks could swell to $1 billion
  3. UK bank NatWest used Contentsquare’s customer analytics tools to optimize its mortgage calculator and drive an additional $700k in revenue per year
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BNP Paribas is the latest financial giant to announce that it’s working with infrastructure firm Metaco to develop digital asset custody.

BNP Paribas Securities Services wants to let its institutional clients issue, transfer, settle, and safekeep tokenized bonds and equities alongside their traditional assets – and partnering with fintechs will let it do so quickly and compliantly, at scale, as various regulations shake out and evolve.  

A race among the biggest banks and custodians to roll-out large-scale digital asset initiatives has been growing. Citi, BBVA, and DBS also work with Metaco, whose CEO, Adrien Treccani, cites a “momentum effect” as being in motion: “Now that some of the largest global custodians have gone public with their strategy, other banks in the market will feel the need to encroach on their turf and demonstrate their capabilities to the industry,” he told Insights Distilled.  BNP will integrate Metaco’s custody platform, Harmonize, into its current infrastructure to create a “multi-asset, multi-provider platform,” giving clients more transparency into all their assets – as well as operational efficiency and risk management – though it won’t deal with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

BNP is also working with Fireblocks as its hot wallet, tokenization, and connectivity layer.

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Message tracking tech takes off as unauthorized communication fines for the biggest banks could swell to $1 billion

As banks face a rash of fines (or firings) for unauthorized employee communication, they are choosing to shell out for tech tools to monitor popular chat apps like WhatsApp instead of stopping workers from using them.   

Q2 earnings brought a spate of new probe disclosures from big banks: Regulators are likely to extract a combined $1 billion in fines from Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America for failing to monitor all employee messaging.  

As a result, tech firms that provide comprehensive, compliant communications coverage across all the channels employees flock to are in higher demand than ever: SteelEye has seen a 255% increase in visits to its communications monitoring pages in the last six months and a 30% uptick in inbound requests, it told Insights Distilled, while Movius made news for signing on Deutsche Bank as regulators increase their levels of security.   

“Employees want to communicate in ways they are most comfortable—voice, text, WhatsApp, and Microsoft Teams. It’s about choices,” Movius CEO Ananth Siva told Insights Distilled. “Now employees no longer need to carry two phones.” 

SteelEye said that “a number of global banks” use its platform, as does Fidelity International, while Movius counts JPMorgan, UBS, Jefferies, and Shanghai Pudong Bank as customers (and the latter went from realizing its need to deploying the tool in just 15 days).

Meanwhile, a firm called Txtsmarter claims to be the only communications surveillance firm that can seamlessly monitor Apple’s iMessage.

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UK bank NatWest used Contentsquare’s customer analytics tools to optimize its mortgage calculator and drive an additional $700k in revenue per year

Monitoring and analyzing customers’ digital behavior can spur design tweaks and fresh strategies that drive new business: NatWest made a simple change based on Contentsquare insights that increased completions of its online mortgage agreement tool by 20%.  

Contentsquare’s monitoring and analysis tools can reveal how customers are engaging with digital products and highlight popular content, points of friction, and recommendations for change, like how it helped NatWest realize that it needed to emphasize the “Get an Agreement in Principle” button on its mortgage calculator.  

“Contentsquare is at the heart of our decision-making process,” a NatWest digital experience manager said in a case study. “It has more than paid its own way and I’m sure it will continue to do so.” The firm just raised a $600 million Series F round of funding

Sophisticated user analytics with AI-driven recommendations are a key way for FI’s to boost customer acquisition: BMO and Western Union both rely on Quantum Metric, an Insight Partner’s portfolio company, to understand their users and build better digital products, faster.