Customers in the UK are embracing the use of AI driven financial services (FS), with 63%  happy to use chatbots for everyday queries and over a third preferring an instant response from a chatbot over a delayed one from a human. Research carried out by Pinsent Masons and Innovate Finance demonstrates the opportunity for AI to underpin fundamental FS functions, while not losing sight that the role of the human is crucial to transform the industry and garner greater consumer trust.

Banking Circle, the ground-breaking financial utility, has been named as a finalist in four coveted Emerging Payments Awards categories: Best International Payments, Remittance or use of FX; Best B2B Payments Programme; Best Back Office Innovation and Best Technical Service Organisation supporting Emerging Payments.

Nets, a leading player in the European payments industry, and Swish, the number one payments app in Sweden, today announce their collaboration on an in-store payments pilot programme. 

Until now, Swish has mostly been used for account-to-account transactions and, more recently, ecommerce payments. Now, the popular payment app is working with Nets to expand into the retail and service sectors by piloting in-store mobile payment functionality.

High performance computing (HPC) is increasingly benefitting UK businesses. Today 86% of UK IT staff see HPC as vital for the enterprise, given its role supporting advanced analytics and simulated modelling applications now and in future, according to new research from open source pioneer SUSE.

Sepio Systems Partners with Distribution Giants Tech Data and SHI to Tackle Hardware-Based Cyber-Attacks.The partnership will allow Tech Data’s and SHI’s customers to benefit from easy deployment of Sepio Prime and Sepio Agents for managing the security risk coming from uncontrolled peripheral devices and accessories in their network.

An interview with Ian Currie, VP EMEA of Cloud Elements

Financial IT: Can you tell us more about your background and role at Cloud Elements?

Ian Currie (IC):  Cloud Elements is a leading cloud API integration service. We enable software companies to integrate their customers into the application ecosystem and connect seamlessly with the growing number of cloud services.

Today, trading strategies and algorithmic models have become a crucial differentiator to buy-side customers. With the unbundling of research and execution coupled with low-latency connectivity becoming the standard, ensuring algos are working as efficiently as possible is a primary concern for traders.

But what’s stopping them from producing near 100% efficient algos? We asked a number of senior executives at banks to identify the key issues they face in achieving – and beating - the benchmarks.

The priority? Getting more order flow

Today, Klarna, a leading global payments provider and licensed bank, and BigCommerce, a leading SaaS ecommerce platform for fast-growing and established brands, announced the expansion of their current partnership in the US, initiated in 2016, to also include Klarna’s European core markets.

Brand-new international market report “The E-Invoicing Journey 2019-2025” has been published and is available for free download.

The global market is forecast to encompass 550 billion invoices annually. It is expected to quadruple in size by 2035. In 2019, only around 55 billion invoices are exchanged on a paperless basis. According to this report, it is estimated that the size of the global E-Invoicing / E-Billing and enablement market in 2019 amounts to EUR 4.3 billion, and that it will reach approximately EUR 18 billion in 2025.