Three reports have been at the front of my mind this week. The first report being BCBS 239, which essentially requires organisations to implement a robust data integrity framework. I won’t bore you with the entirety of BCBS 239, but to pull out a couple of principles:

Principle 2 requires a bank to design, build and maintain a data architecture, and if the same data is held in more than one model then “there should be robust automated reconciliation procedures where multiple models are in use.”

blur Group plc (AIM:BLUR), the world's first enterprise services platform and marketplace, is pleased to announce that Tim Allen has been appointed to the blur Group Board as Chief Financial Officer with immediate effect.  Tim Allen joined blur Group on 20 July 2015 from Cambium Networks where he held the roles of Chief Financial Officer and VP Finance.

In addition, Barbara Spurrier will step down from her role as Director of Financial Reporting on 31 December 2015. Barbara Spurrier will continue as Company Secretary.

Commenting, Philip Letts, blur Group CEO, said:

Pendo Systems (Pendo) provider of international world-class financial products saw skyrocketing growth in 2015. The Company was widely recognized by industry leaders and publications including ACQ5 Global Awards which named it Capital Markets Technology Provider of the Year and SWIFT’s InnoTribe Showcase, which awarded Pendo the title of Top Innovator.

With the holidays upon us, shoppers are looking to conveniently check off their gifting lists. MasterCard cardholders from New York to California and everywhere in between now have the opportunity to leverage a simple and secure mobile payment option this holiday season as several new banks and credit unions are now live with Samsung Pay.

Beginning today, M&T Bank customers can add their M&T Bank debit or credit card to Android Pay, the convenient way to pay with an Android phone. The free new service from Google allows customers to use their Android phone (running 4.4 or higher) to pay for purchases at more than one million stores across the U.S.

 Last week, 68 UK fintech leaders shared their 2016 predictions at a fintech event hosted by Anthemis and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the bank of the world’s most innovative businesses and their investors. Six fintech experts from Stripe, Anthemis, GoCardless, Passion Capital, Funding Circle and SVB sat on a panel at the event.

An increasingly diverse mix of hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds and entrepreneurs are behind a wave of new innovative business models targeting a share of the fast growing multi-billion dollar intellectual property (IP) industry, according to IAM, the world’s leading IP data provider.

Revenue just from the licensing and royalties from intellectual property such as patents or trademarks has ballooned from US$27billion in 1990 to break through US$180billion in 2009 (source: WIPO).

Banks and insurance companies lose billions every year to fraud. The surprising magnitude of these losses is likely the result of two factors. The first is that first-party fraud is very difficult to detect. Fraudsters behave very similarly to legitimate customers, until the moment they do their Bust-Out, i.e. cleaning out all their accounts and promptly disappearing. A second factor is the exponential nature of the relationship between the number of participants in the fraud ring and the overall monetary value controlled by the operation, a feature often exploited by organised crime.

 Metamako, the leading specialist in deterministic network devices for the world’s financial institutions, was confirmed today as one of KPMG and H2 Ventures’ top 50 Emerging Stars in their list of global finance technology innovators.