Target, Taco Bell, Hy-Vee supermarkets in the Midwest, Speedway convenience stores and Jack in the Box are the latest merchants to support Apple Pay, the most popular mobile contactless payment system in the world that lets customers easily and securely pay in stores using their iPhone and Apple Watch. 

Today, Mastercard announced its contactless cards soon will be accepted at Target stores, giving shoppers the ability to simply tap to pay. Cardholders using a contactless Mastercard—ones with a contactless symbol on them—will tap their card on the reader screen to pay and head on their way.

New research amongst institutional investors from the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC) - the leading association for the blockchain ecosystem - reveals 63% believe senior executives at large established businesses have a poor understanding of blockchain.  Only 7% described their understanding as ‘good’, with the remainder describing it as ‘average’.

Tungsten Network, the global business transaction network, has released a new version of its Workflow product.

Tungsten Network Workflow automates accounts payable processes, enabling incoming invoices to be automatically routed, coded, matched, approved and posted into their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system via an integrated connection. It offers users a single reference point from which they are able to track invoices, monitor cash flow and respond to vendor inquiries relating to the status of their invoices.

Nets, a market leader in the European payments industry, and Bankart, a leading Slovenian company in the field of processing of modern payment instruments, are ready to go live with an instant payment solution in Slovenia after final approval from the Slovenian Central Bank. In February, Bankart will go live with Nets´ RealTime24/7, enabling transactions between Slovenian banks to be cleared in less than a second.

Financial scouts note that European stock markets now face many incoming cues that are really mixed. The biggest current news on both sides of the spectrum is the Brexit uncertainty and the meaningful progress towards resolving the U.S.-China trade war.

Millennial technologies such as the internet of things, artificial intelligence, cognitive process automation and public cloud are heralding what is commonly called Industry 4.0 – erasing the lines between the physical and the digital world. Industry 4.0 is disrupting everything from utilities to healthcare, and from media to mining. The financial services industry is no exception, as it finds itself being reshaped at the hands of technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA), blockchain and biometrics.

XPS Pensions Group, the largest purely pension consulting and administration firm in the UK, has signed an agreement with financial technology business RiskFirst to continue to deliver fast, high-quality and transparent reporting and modelling to clients through PFaroe’s comprehensive suite of analytics.

Israeli startup Hailo, developers of a proprietary processing architecture for deep learning on edge devices, has expanded its Series A funding round to $21 million. 

• Led by ICBC as the world’s most valuable banking brand (US$79.8 billion), China’s banks dominate top four spots of the ranking
• Chinese banks grow 28%, achieving US$407 billion in total brand value, over US$100 billion more than US banks
• All US banks, with the exception of Wells Fargo (-9%), Chase (-7%), and BankUnited (-6%), improve their brand value
• Growth of European banks is pedestrian, with German banks losing 24% of value