Almost a month has passed since we discussed Richard Longmore’s departure from Barclays Capital (FX people moves: Barclays Capital reshuffles as Longmore departs but where to?). He would be a high-profile capture for any bank, but both he and his new employers are being remarkably tight-lipped.

This week Deutsche bank announced that Ardalan Gharagozlou has been appointed as head of FX in Germany. Based in Frankfurt, Gharagozlou has been at Deutsche Bank since 2000. His new role will focus on strengthening Deutsche’s FX franchise in Germany. Gharagozlou is and will continue to be head of global finance, Continental Europe, alongside his new role.

Further news on the departure of Richard Usher from RBS, although neither the bank nor Usher would comment, we can now be certain that he is destined for JP Morgan Chase to trade EUR/USD. He’ll report to Antony Foster, head of FX spot EMEA, starting in August.

Frank Cahill has left Barclays Capital to join HSBC as a director on the G10 spot desk. Cahill will trade spot GBP/USD and will report to Stuart Scott, HSBC’s head of spot FX in London.

Well-placed sources say that James Gething, the EM options trader at Commerzbank, has resigned. Commerzbank declined to comment. Gething started his career at Dresdner and moved across after the take-over. The reckoning is that Gething is off to RBS’s EM options desk.

Market sources report that Steve Walker has resigned from his position on Société Générale’s spot desk. Talk is that he is headed for trading boutique Fixi. Before SocGen, Walker was a prop trader at MF global. Both SocGen and Fixi declined to comment.

FX people moves: Citi has a yen for hiring

CLS Group announced two senior appointments this week.

Includes Bonds, Equities, Loans, M&A, MTN, Project Finance

Market rumours abound that spot EUR/USD trader Richard Usher has left RBS. Initial speculation is that he will be joining JP Morgan Chase. Neither bank would comment.

Euromoney’s annual survey of the ICM services available in Europe covers 20 banks: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Bank, BBVA, BNP Paribas, Citi, Commerzbank, Danske, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ING Bank, J.P. Morgan, KBC Bank, Nordea, RBS, RZB, Santander, SEB, Société Générale, Standard Chartered Bank and UniCredit.

Over the next decade more outdated payment systems, particularly in SEPA, will be terminated, mobile phones will become increasingly important for initiating, authorizing and making payments, and will also be used by governments to deliver welfare benefits to the excluded and unbanked, and the new PSD infrastructure in Europe plus pressure from government and regulatory authorities will make it easier and more cost-effective for new payment services to be delivered by combinations of non-banks.

The dynamics of payment card fraud are clearly changing as VISA Europe’s analysis of the evolution of payment card fraud in Europe, described in Figure 1, shows. Payment card fraud has become a global business dominated by international crime rings. It is a major problem, with losses estimated at around $5 billion globally. But although this is a huge number it still represents only a very small percentage of the total amount spent on cards worldwide. Even in the worst-affected countries, such as the UK, the ratio of payment card fraud to sales stands at only 0.101% compared with VISA Europe’s average of 0.06%.

One solution to person-not-present fraud when making a payment is the use of digital identity certificates (DIs) and signatures to verify an individual really is who (s)he claims to be and is authorized to make the transaction. DIs are already successfully used in a number of applications, for example, by companies in the UK for the approval of file transmissions to the local ACH, by the pharmaceutical industry in the US, and by the Norwegian ACH for its internet banking customers. But their use is not yet widespread.

Although central banks around the world require all cash management banks to have anti-money laundering programmes in place and companies have traditionally relied on the banks to protect them from trading with potentially illegal counter-party organizations, some are now beginning to use specialist anti-money-laundering service suppliers direct.

One of the major benefits of the internet is that its content, for the most part, is free. But this can be a major problem for companies not generating enough revenue to continue to give away information, which include not only newspapers and publishers but also pharmaceutical and other companies needing to charge for the advice they offer on their websites if they are to continue to provide the service. A cost-effective way of collecting low value payments of $1 or less on the internet is urgently required.

Euromoney’s 2010 survey of the ICM services available in North America covers 13 banks: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Bank of New York Mellon, BNP Paribas, Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, PNC, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), RBS, Scotiabank, Standard Chartered Bank and WellsFargo.

Mobile operators and banks have long dreamed of providing payment and collection services on mobile phones. But there are huge problems in making applications generally available across regions and globally, including a vast range of different phone handsets with varying screen sizes, button layouts, settings, how to ensure secure end-to-end communications and standardize customer registration, and how to connect and integrate the many different phone operators, banks and other companies.

In 2009 corporate treasury departments continued in their attempts to improve the overall efficiency of company cash management. Steve Whalley, managing director of Citi Financials, explains, "Our corporate treasury clients are now taking a much more holistic view of their cash management and now include and manage many more of the real world elements of their businesses, such as energy costs and commodity forecasts relating to physical production."

Asia-Pacific was until recently relatively under-developed in terms of the cash management services available, despite some of the major international cash management banks having had a presence in the region for many years. It is now fast becoming one of the most competitive markets for cash management. Three of the largest Chinese banks, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of Communications and ICBC, are expanding their cash management services across the region and several of the world’s largest cash management banks are focusing their attention on the area, attracted by potential new business from some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.

Euromoney’s second survey of the ICM services available in the Middle East and Africa region covers eight banks: Barclays Bank, Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, RBS, Standard Bank and Standard Chartered Bank, which were covered in the first survey of the region, with the addition of BNP Paribas this year. The survey also covers three new countries this year: Morocco, Tanzania and Zambia.

Over the past 12 months companies have continued to centralize and automate their mass payments and collections, producing considerable cost savings and improvements in both efficiency and control. Banks have continued to bring their services together to provide more complete solutions for mass payments and collections. Lesley White, head of ICM EMEA at RBS, explains, "More than ever, corporates want visibility and control over their entire working capital cycle. We’re building innovative, integrated solutions – connecting e-invoicing, supply chain finance and payments processing, for example – that enhance end-to-end processing for our clients."

Many corporate treasury departments are channelling investment into improving the connectivity and integration of their cash and treasury management systems. A wide range of connectivity services are now available from the banks, SWIFT and a range of third-party suppliers, with the choice of bank-agnostic connectivity systems and services growing in popularity.

The 2010 survey of the banking clubs shows considerable variation in the number of member banks and country coverage, as shown in Table 7 (click here to see Table 7: Banking Clubs, January 2010) . Connector now reports all its member banks individually rather than collectively as bank groups, which explains why the number of Connector bank members has increased so significantly over the past 12 months, from 15 to 46. It has also added several new member banks, which has increased the number of countries covered by Connector from 34 to 43. Connector is working on a new product development in euro pooling. The number of IBOS member banks has increased from 28 to 31 and the country coverage from 25 to 28. The TES Banking Club continues to have the widest country coverage, slightly down from 78 to 74 this year, and the largest number of member banks, slightly up from 73 to 76. Over the past 12 months, TES members have been consolidating their extensive cash management networks and extending the quality and range of their cross-border services. In Europe TES member banks have also developed new cash management functionality to comply with Payment Services Directive (PSD) and SEPA requirements. The numbers of Unicash member banks and country coverage remain unchanged, at 34 and 32 respectively, for a second year. Future of ICM

These are tough times for global network banks, with most major companies now relying on regional or multi-regional rather than global solutions, though their overall revenues from cash management and trade still managed to grow in 2009, fairly spectacularly for some.

Euromoney’s annual survey of the ICM services available in Latin America covers 10 banks: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BBVA, Banco Bradesco, Banco Itaú, Citi, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JP Morgan, RBS and Santander.

Cheques have been in use in the UK for more than 100 years, but are now in terminal decline, so the UK Payment Council’s announcement of 31 October 2018 as the date for the closure of central cheque clearing came as no surprise, nor did the furore that followed it.

The development of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) continues to be of more importance to banks than to companies. For most companies, at this stage, SEPA is almost irrelevant, offering few benefits of any significance now or for some time.

Many corporate treasury departments have to use more than one cash management bank to provide all the services they require, which can make managing their banking relationships difficult. Combined with the growing use of digital identities, two other recent developments have begun to provide the framework for the automation of bank relationship management.

When purchasing a cash and treasury management system, corporate treasurers must decide whether to opt for an in-house installation, an application service provider (ASP) solution or a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. The in-house system is the traditional route, still taken by many, but the ASP solution is now becoming a viable alternative, even for very large multinational companies, and some suppliers only provide ASP or SaaS solutions.