Cryptocurrency trading had its largest year ever in 2019. Its entire market capitalisation has risen by 44.1%, gaining $60 billion throughout the year, and closing 2019 at $180 billion, according to cryptocurrency data platform CoinGecko. Bitcoin’s trading volume increased by 600% in 2019.

The Centrale Bank van Curaçao en Sint Maarten (CBCS) has contracted equensWorldline SE, a subsidiary of Worldline [Euronext: WLN], the European leader in the payments and transactional services industry, to introduce an Instant Payments (IP) CSM on top of their current clearing & settlement system. This means that all interbank payments in Curaçao, Sint Maarten and Bonaire will soon be processed within ten seconds - 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. The Instant Payment transactions will be handled in Antillean Guilders and US Dollars.

Ascent, an AI-driven solution that helps customers automate regulatory compliance, today announced that it has won the 2020 FinTech Breakthrough Award for Best RegTech Startup.

FinTech Breakthrough is an independent organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global FinTech market through its annual FinTech Breakthrough Awards program. This year’s awards, now in their fourth year, drew over 3,700 nominations. 

BMLL Technologies has won the “Best Data Visualization Service" award at the 2020 FinTech Breakthrough Awards. The mission of the FinTech Breakthrough Awards is to honour excellence and recognize the creativity, hard work and success of FinTech companies, technologies, and products around the world.

Independent not-for-profit standards association, The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN), today officially welcomes a host of new members to its organisation. This includes a range of banks, consultancies and technology businesses such as, U.S. Bank, Banco de Credito del Peru, Bank Leumi, SPD Bank, UOB, CC&C Solutions, Knowis AG, Deloitte Consulting, SunTec Business Solutions, Technisys, Wipro and ServiceNow.

It’s great to see RBS leading the charge in putting customers first during a crisis – with Lloyds and TSB quickly following suit. People are talking about these policies because banks have communicated them very clearly; if you put the leg work in but miss the all-important last mile – the communication – you lose the opportunity to reassure customers that they are safe, especially when faced with difficult and unprecedented circumstances.

In response to new regulations on ‘Open Banking’, Edinburgh-based iDelta has launched an app to help bricks-and-mortar banks combat the rapid rise of online challengers such as Revolut and Monzo.

Open Banking, which is the UK’s implementation of the European Directive PSD2, requires the UK’s 300 banks and 45 building societies to release customer data to authorised third parties on the say-so of customers. As a result, customers can access their bank accounts using third party products, making it easier to view and manage their finances across multiple accounts in one place.

Standard Chartered Bank has joined TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled digital container logistics platform, jointly developed by A.P.

Edinburgh-based Zortrex, a disruptive data security start-up, has launched Zortrex Token Vault. Designed to help organisations reduce the cost and complexity of protecting against data breaches, ensure customer privacy and compliance with ever-changing regulatory requirements, Zortrex Token Vault is a scalable and secure platform that tokenises messages in-line, removing and storing sensitive data such as credit/debit card information at the boundaries of an organisation.