The rise of ‘tap-to-pay’ payments made using smartphones is showing no signs of slowing down. It is estimated that mobile payments will amount to $14 trillion by 2022. To keep up with this trend, banks and issuers must be proactive in offering solutions that suit the evolving needs of their customers.

Onfido announced a partnership with b-sharpe, a leading Swiss company in online currency exchange, to provide a better sign up experience to its users when verifying  identities on their platform. Onfido’s AI-powered identity verification technology allows b-sharpe to drastically accelerate its customer onboarding while remaining financially compliant.

SEBA, an integrated bank focused on digital assets, launches its investment solutions and introduces a new index for cryptographic assets. The SEBA Crypto Asset Select Index (SEBAX) is a dynamic, risk-optimised index with a broad market exposure of the crypto asset market. The underlying proprietary methodology addresses the pitfalls of traditional market value-weighted indices and allows optimized diversification.

Equifax, the business and consumer insights expert, and the Open Data Institute (ODI), the international organisation dedicated to improving the use of data, have today launched an in-depth research report looking at the international consent framework for Open Banking.

CryptoCompare, the global leader in digital asset data, today announced the availability of a suite of digital asset data products in the BT Radianz Cloud, one of the world’s largest secure financial markets cloud communities. The comprehensive real-time and historical dataset will provide institutional clients with a granular, reliable view of the digital asset class.

Global fintech Avaloq has again been recognized as a Leader in the 2019 NelsonHall NEAT vendor evaluation for Wealth & Asset Management Services, one of the most comprehensive such assessments globally. This is the second major award given to Avaloq in the past few months for its wealth management capabilities. In September it was named Overall Winner in the 2019 XCelent European Wealth Management Technology Vendors report - Europe’s most influential market accolade and further testament to the market-leading capabilities of the Avaloq Banking Suite.

Finantix, the leading global provider of trusted technology to the wealth management, insurance and banking industries, is pleased to announce the opening of its new office in Australia  to further support its expansion in the Asia-Pacific region.

Copper, the London-based custodian for digital assets, has expanded its Walled Garden infrastructure and is now connected to the top 15 exchanges – including: Coinbase,  Deribit, OKEx, Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Huobi, Binance, Bitmex, Kraken, Bittrex and HitBTC. This gives Copper’s institutional customers access to a larger liquidity pool as the company’s trade and settlement volumes continue to increase 50% month-on-month.

JGOO, the next generation mobile payments platform, says many UK retailers are failing to break into the Chinese market because they don’t acknowledge its huge scale and localise their propositions accordingly. Further, it says that many companies don’t understand the country’s strict censorship arrangements or adapt to the unique shopping habits of Chinese consumers.