UK SMEs are now using £76 billion of alternative finance*, up 43% from £53 billion a year ago as banks continue to pull back from lending to smaller businesses, says Funding Options, the online business finance supermarket.

Funding Options says that alternative lending to SMEs is now equivalent to 46% of the value of traditional term loans and overdrafts, which have fallen to £163 billion**. That represents a fall of 5% from £172 billion a year ago, and 17% from £197 billion four years ago.

Wondershare, the Chinese software industry’s largest exporter by volume, has chosen global payments leader, Worldpay, for its complete payments infrastructure. The move will help Wondershare to improve payment acceptance in its priority markets, underpinning its ambitious global expansion plans.

AsiaPay, the premier ePayment service and technology player in Asia and Hong Kong Airlines, the internationally-acclaimed Skytrax 4-star airline, have today announced a collaboration with FEXCO, the leading independent global provider of Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC) and Multi-Currency Pricing (MCP) technologies which will see FEXCO's world class MCP solution offered to passengers of Hong Kong Airlines.

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.