It’s no news that the retail industry has been flipped on its head by the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the lockdown, most in-store operations have been shut down, and nationwide furloughs, reduced pay and steady streams of income at risk have fuelled a change in consumer spending priorities and trends.

We need to band together to determine how retailers can strengthen current operations, support their loyal customer base, and continue to grow in the midst of the virus and unpredictable changes to purchasing behaviour.

Gauging the impact on the retail sector

In the latest development in the IBOR transition, on the weekend of July 25th, we saw the major CCPs perform the much-anticipated Euro discounting and price alignment transition from using EONIA to EuroSTR (a.k.a. €STR) for all Euro OTC interest rate products. We understand that all compensation payments have now settled.

The question market watchers have been asking is would the hereto anaemic trading activity in EuroSTR pick-up following the switchover of discounting and PAI/PAA at the major CCPs?

The current crisis has forced businesses and entire industries to rely on digital technology more than ever before.

CA Telon is a Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) application development environment that was originally designed by Chris McNeil and Don Christensen in the late 1970s. At the time, McNeil was a software engineer at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and Christensen was an IBM Systems Engineer contracting with Liberty Mutual. The pair was motivated to create the code generator, we now know as CA Telon, to ease the development of the presentation layer on the IBM 3790 minicomputer. As CA Telon’s functionality grew, so did its popularity within the insurance sector and beyond.

The pandemic has resulted in a huge increase in demand for contactless payments and frictionless, simple ways of paying. Software-based Point of Sale (SoftPOS) technology is perfectly suited to meet new customer demands, and frankly, is the future of payments. 

It is the only open, standardized and regulatory-endorsed system capable of establishing digitized trust between all legal entities, everywhere.

The current pandemic has forced rapid and wholesale changes to our lifestyles and opened the digital doorway for opportunistic fraudsters, escalating threat levels to new highs. This in turn has accelerated the pace of digital transformation for businesses and a pathway to securer online platforms. 

Last week, the troika of European Supervisory Authorities sent a letter to the European Commission. 

The Packaged retail investment and insurance products (PRIIPS) regulation is a piece of EU legislation with troubled origins.

Cash is in decline in every country around the world. That has only intensified since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, swiftly leading us towards a cashless society. Many retailers have stopped accepting cash altogether, instead encouraging customers to use contactless card payments or mobile apps to pay in a touch-free, and more hygienic way. Given concerns around the virus staying on bank notes for around 48 hours, and ATMs potentially being touched by hundreds of hands without a deep clean in between, many of us have instead embraced touch-free payments.

HeimdalTM Security chief executive Morten Kjaersgaard has stated that cybercrime is already a profession. In an exclusive interview with Finbold.com, Kjaersgaard stated that tracking developments in the cybercrime sector will be a major trend in the coming year.