Barclaycard, which processes nearly half of the UK’s credit and debit card transactions, today announces a new card acceptance partnership with UnionPay International, a subsidiary of China UnionPay. The deal will enable its 110,000 UK merchants to accept UnionPay through a phased roll out that will begin this summer.

UnionPay has the world’s largest cardholder base, and is the preferred payment brand for many Chinese visiting the UK as well as increasing numbers of global cardholders. 

New research from cyber security provider F-Secure reports a significant increase in attack traffic in the latter half of 2018. But while attacks are increasing, it seems many companies are struggling with incident detection. 

Attack traffic observed by F-Secure’s network of decoy honeypots in 2018 increased by 32 percent over the previous year, and increased fourfold in the latter half of 2018 compared with the first half of the year.

Retail finance technology provider, Deko, has partnered with Featurespace, the leading machine learning Adaptive Behavioural Analytics fraud and risk management company, to bolster the security of its consumer finance lending platform.

Al Taif Islamic Bank has chosen Fusion Islamic, Finastra’s core banking solution dedicated to the Islamic market, to kick start its retail business. The move will provide the new challenger bank’s customers with a consistent and user-friendly experience in branch and across all digital channels, whilst complying with Shari’ah requirements.

Esme Loans, the end to end digital lending platform that provides unsecured business loans between £10,000 - £150,000 has today announced that it has enlisted Microsoft to build a new cloud based data warehouse, enabling the lender to make faster and better targeted lending decisions and to provide automated service assisted by artificial intelligence (AI).

Trustly, whose online bank payments are growing in popularity across Europe, has launched a partnership with the Help to Help Foundation to make the administration of monthly payments more effective with Trustly Direct Debit. The service digitizes recurring payments and simplifies the management of donations from monthly donors, which saves both time and money — money that instead can go to those in need.

A report released today from venture capital firm MMC Ventures, in association with Barclays, shows that one in 12 new startups in Europe is an AI company – compared with just one in 50 in 2013.

NORTH West headquartered Quint Group, a leading international, highly innovative fintech group operating in the consumer finance market, has secured a £16.5m financing deal from Natwest Bank.

Founded in 2009, Quint is one of the fastest growing fintech businesses in Europe, with operations in the UK, US, Australia, Poland, China and South Africa. 

Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. (NRI), a leading provider of consulting services and system solutions, announced today the company’s I-STAR/CORE has been updated for international Financial Stability Board (FSB)’s Standards and Processes for Global Securities Financing Data Collection and Aggregation. The system updates have been completed and NRI began offering the service on January 4^th, 2019.

Since August 2018, the FCA has required banks to supply information about current account services to help consumers and small businesses make comparisons. This month, for the first time the data included the number of IT-related shutdowns, over the previous nine months.