Chubb today announced that it is strengthening the cyber risk team serving its London wholesale and UK and Ireland retail clients, with the appointment of two dedicated underwriters. With cyber risk insurance demand expected to increase 150% by 2020¹, the appointments reflect the company's focus on further building its technical expertise and leadership position in this emerging risk class, to help meet client needs.

MGT Capital Investments, Inc  disclosed the details of the initial phase of a large scale Bitcoin mining operation designed to position the Company as a leader in Blockchain technologies. 

Nasdaq Stockholm-listed Seamless mobile payment solution SEQR is launching contactless payments in Sweden using NFC technology (Near Field Communication). Contactless makes it possible to pay with SEQR at point of sale (POS) terminals that support NFC which is featured on almost all modern terminals, Consequently it is now possible to pay with SEQR in any store that supports the functionality in Sweden or abroad,  even if a retailer has no private agreement with SEQR.

IBM plans to establish the first IBM Center for Blockchain Innovation in Singapore.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) and the African Securities Exchanges Association (ASEA) signed a 5-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to amplify the impact of their strategically aligned joint efforts to promote resources mobilization to fund Africa’s economic growth. This MoU will provide a collaborative framework for harmonizing and coordinating the efforts of AfDB, the premier international development financial institution for Africa, and ASEA, the premier body of African stock exchanges, towards deepening and connecting African financial markets.

With the payment method, Amazon Payments, over 300 million Amazon customers worldwide can make an order online with just a few clicks, without having to complete the registration process on the online store. Customers simply login using their Amazon account during checkout, select a delivery address and payment method stored in their Amazon user account and click the purchase button.

 Fiserv announced the appointment of John Kim to its board of directors.

EMVCo, the global payment specification body, and the FIDO Alliance, an industry consortium developing open, interoperable authentication standards, have announced they will collaborate and review how FIDO authentication standards can support EMV® payment use cases. A key aim of the initiative is to investigate providing simpler and stronger authentication for cardholders making mobile payments using on-device authenticators, such as biometrics, thereby reducing consumer fraud globally while maintaining a good consumer experience. 

 ABBYY, a leading provider of recognition, data capture and language-based text analytics technologies today announced the availability of a new Business Monitoring add-on for solutions built using the ABBYY FlexiCapture platform. Providing service level metrics, real-time processing information, and historical process data, the Business Monitoring module adds transparency to business processes so that an organisation can more effectively monitor operational performance and gain insights which they can use to drive greater efficiency.