Neil Ainger

Neil Ainger, research manager for IDC Financial Insights, is responsible for the corporate banking sector. His core research covers the treasury, transaction banking, payments, and lending fields. He is particularly interested in the various uses of fintech in these fields and collaboration, regulatory, economic, and competitive trends driven by open banking and API initiatives, interest rate and funding policies, real-time and risk drivers, plus financial crime obligations, onboarding, and compliance issues. Digital transformation projects, AI, and the impact of distributed ledger technology (DLT) on trade finance, verification, and payment applications are also of interest, alongside the future of the correspondent banking model. Virtual accounts, cash management, crowdfunding, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and treasury management and risk systems (TMS), reconciliation, accounts receivable and payable, capital adequacy and optimization, and so on are also of interest. An ex-journalist, Mr Ainger was a freelancer for four-and-a-half years from 2014 to 2018, writing for CNBC.com on fintech, cybersecurity, lending, and emerging tech. He also wrote for Global Finance, Computer Weekly, Dow Jones' Financial News, ACT's The Treasurer, AFP, IBS, SWIFT's Sibos Issues, GTNews, Insurance Day, Finextra, Informa's Banking Technology (now FinTech Futures), Daily News @ Sibos, Automated Trader, FX-MM, InstaPay, and many other titles, as well as undertaking copywriting work for Bloomberg, AWS, Standard Chartered, SmartStream, VocaLink, Thomson Reuters, Deutsche Bank, and others. Prior to freelancing, he was an on-staff journalist for almost 20 years. He was editor-in-chief of the GTNews and bobsguide online titles, covering treasury and fintech respectively for the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) and was deputy editor at Banking Technology, as well as editing Financial Sector Technology (FSTech) magazine for five years.