Payment services specialist allpay is now collecting £1.59 billion per annum in Direct Debit payments, from 12.1 million transactions. With the total BACS Direct Debit transaction volume reaching 3.6 billion each year in the UK, allpay today represents a growing market share of the UK’s total Direct Debit market.

 Cross-border shopping is the fastest growing branch of international e-commerce with unprecedented global demand for the latest products on the market. The U.S. retail market is the go-to place for the newest tech products, but there are still many barriers for international consumers.

 Alpha Insight, a UK fintech company with a three-year track-record of exceptional delivery, is looking to shake up the global financial sector through its real-time process monitoring and measurement solutions.

Combining deep financial experience and technical monitoring skills, Alpha Insight successfully makes sense of millions of metrics, creating unrivalled end-to-end insight into financial organisations’ business flows without the requirement for major investment in new IT.

Few can have missed the carnage roiling Chinese stock markets recently. What’s interesting though is the emerging hubris from Western media that this is due to the intersection of communism and capitalism. The problem, they say, is that the purpose of markets is to allow free and open price discovery. However, they argue, a command economy like China can afford to tamper with this process and compel participants (like its state pension fund) to intervene in markets.

Worldline, European market leader in payment and transactional services, has been selected by the Luxembourg banking community to provide its Access Control Server solution for 3D-Secure, in cooperation with LuxTrust, a Luxembourg-based certification authority.

Checkout.com is diversifying its online banking payment method mix by offering Sofort, an important European payment method, to its e-commerce merchants.

Offering tax incentives to savers who commit to providing long-term finance for medium-sized businesses (MSBs) would help growing firms realise their full potential, according to a new CBI/BDO report.

Stepping up: fixing the funding ladder for MSBs recommends ways the Government can encourage long-term debt and equity investment in these firms. The ‘forgotten army’ of Britain’s businesses, MSBs represent just 1.8% of companies, but generate nearly a quarter of private sector revenue and make up 16% of total employment.

A new study from international payments engine Currency Cloud, reveals the majority of US businesses continue to battle major innovation hurdles when moving money across borders.

Through a survey of US and UK finance professionals, Currency Cloud found the US has a lot to learn from its UK counterparts when it comes to international payments, with nearly half (47 percent) of US businesses still relying on old-fashioned paper checks. In contrast, the majority of UK businesses (70 percent) make international payments electronically.

A recent survey released by SimCorp, a leading provider of investment management solutions and services for the global financial services industry, has revealed that 44% of buy-side asset managers are relying on mostly or completely manual processes for managing complex swaps across the investment lifecycle. And more than 50% claim they still require some amount of manual intervention in a semi-automated process.

EagleEye Analytics, provider of the most advanced machine learning predictive analytics technology for insurance, has been selected by Zurich Insurance Company Ltd. to conduct a 14 month trial of EagleEye's Talon Predictive Analytics System for its global advanced analytics initiative.

In an earlier Proof of Concept project, EagleEye worked with Zurich modelers in Brazil and Italy to prove the superiority of EagleEye's machine learning algorithms and analytics methodologies, as well as the usability of the Talon Predictive Analytics System.