The Emerging Payments Association (EPA), which celebrates collaboration and innovation within new and existing finance companies, has published its first report to address the issues from the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2).

Global technology solutions provider Wolters Kluwer has been quietly expanding its Minnesotan HQ for its award winning Compliance Solutions business and other businesses that sit within its Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) Division, growing staff numbers by 25% compared with 2017. Wolters Kluwer now has 717 staff working in Minnesota, nearly a 25 percent increase from 575 full time employees in 2017, a figure confirmed by the GRC Division’s Global Director of Corporate Communications.

Paysafe, a leading specialised payments platform, has today announced an expanded strategic partnership with Mastercard. The new agreement is designed to support Paysafe’s growth and card acceptance in the European Economic Area (EEA) with a particular focus on Paysafe’s card issuing solutions, including its Skrill Prepaid Mastercard® and NETELLER Net+ Prepaid Mastercard®.

Wirecard, the global innovation leader for digital financial technology, and Klarna, a leading global payments and shopping provider, announced today the launch of a new enhanced joint payment solution. All three Klarna shopping methods, Pay Now, Pay Later and Klarna Financing, can now be embedded into merchants’ checkout via a single integration through the Wirecard digital financial commerce platform to boost average order value, conversions and hence fuel growth for merchants.

AI insurance pricing solution Akur8 has raised €8m in its Series A round from BlackFin Capital Partners and MTech Capital, bringing Akur8’s total funding to €10 million following initial investment and incubation from Kamet Ventures in 2018.

Starling Bank founder and chief executive Anne Boden said the business will to make its first monthly profit in “in January or February” of next year.

This year is perhaps the most crucial in the well-regarded bank’s short history. Boden has to manage expansion into Germany, France and the Netherlands, maintain the bank’s quality, and produce a profit.

Finastra has crowned Team ‘WonderTech’ the grand prize winner of its largest ever global fintech hackathon on its open development platform, FusionFabric.cloud. The Manila-based team was selected for the top honor for its ‘Agree Farm App’ from among five category winners at Finastra Universe New York.

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.