It’s shaping up to be one heck of a holiday shopping season. Mastercard SpendingPulse™, which provides insights into overall retail spending trends, is forecasting a banner year for online and in-store commerce across all payment types.

Total retail sales (excluding automotive) are expected to grow 5 percent and e-commerce at 20 percent over last year.

Framework, a specialist global solutions vendor for Private Equity (PE) and Real Estate (RE) investments, has made a senior hire to its leadership team amid increasing demand for its enterprise investment accounting data management solutions. The role will strengthen the focus on innovation and delivering the best service to Framework’s customers.

Pandle, the UK’s No1 cloud accountancy software company, has smashed the 20,000 users milestone just three years after its launch.

Created by accountant and tech entrepreneur, Lee Murphy, Pandle is a free online software package. It’s popularity stems from its simplicity: it is the perfect tool for beginners with limited accounting experience. The intuitive design provides a valuable support to small businesses and freelancers helping them to keep on top of their finances.

New disruptive app offers a free, centralised feed of regulatory notices from global regulators for the financial services industry

Responsibility for information security is not falling to any one senior executive function, according to the 2018 Risk:Value report from NTT Security, the specialised security company of NTT Group, which surveyed 1,800 senior decision makers from non-IT functions in global organisations.

GlobalPlatform, the standard for secure digital services and devices, has released version 2.3.1 of its Card / Secure Element (SE) Specification. The release supports the latest extensions of GlobalPlatform technology following widespread deployments in consumer and machine-to-machine (M2M) devices. 100% of the 1 billion SEs embedded in smartphones in the last three years are GlobalPlatform-certified and more than 5.5 billion GlobalPlatform-certified SEs were produced in 2017. 

Enhanced SE & App Management

Citi has today announced the launch of its Multi-Currency Notional Pooling Capabilities in the Netherlands. 

Citi has existing Multi-Currency Notional Pooling capabilities in London for its multi-national clients. By setting up capabilities in Amsterdam, Citi is now giving its clients choice and flexibility to enable them to better manage their working capital and liquidity according to their treasury models and needs.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is triggering a major inflection point across all industries, and none will escape the influence of this tidal wave of change. While not yet deeply ingrained into the fabric of society, PwC predicts“AI to drive GDP gains of $15.7 trillion,” derived by productivity gains and new product and service offerings.

 Signicat, a leader in verified digital identity and electronic signature solutions, has been granted the status of Qualified Trust Service Provider (QTSP) by the Norwegian communications authority, NKOM.

Wolters Kluwer’s Finance, Risk & Reporting (FRR) business will be sharing its integrated regulatory compliance and reporting expertise at this week’s Singapore FinTech Festival – the world’s largest FinTech event.