For small businesses, Black Friday can loom in the calendar. It’s the ultimate international peak sales day that many merchants want to get in on, yet many feel too small to compete. While eCommerce giants like Amazon can make extreme reductions to their prices, smaller rivals simply cannot offer the same discounts, and keeping up with increased transaction volumes poses a real issue.

European webshop owners may soon bid their payment concerns farewell. A new partnership between two of the most innovative players in the European payment industry will ensure a smooth and streamlined payment process when selling goods online.

Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the banking software company, today announced it has extended its CSR initiative, Adopt iT, to deliver a scholarship program for students at Anna University in Chennai, India. Temenos will award need- and merit-based scholarships to qualifying 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th year students for the next three years and provide employment opportunities to outstanding scheme graduates.

Guy Mettrick, Industry Lead- Financial Services at Appian Corporation at MoneyLive Summit 2019

The financial services industry is starting to wake up to the idea of ecosystems and partnerships between challengers and traditional banks. In the coming year we will see the discussion evolve from old vs new and see real-world examples of financial services organisations of all shapes and sizes working together.

Like most other industries, finance has seen significant transformation thanks to technological advancements, and will no doubt continue to evolve along the same path in the future.

And according to Indo Rama Group CFO Jayanta Chatterjee, predictive technology is the future for finance.

Here and now

In several nations across the globe, the regulatory expectations and legal frameworks of the mobile payments environment have not yet been sharply defined. Many mobile payment service providers are not abiding by any well-defined regulatory requirements, end-users are lacking confidence in the security of mobile payment transactions and the development of mobile payment services in a number of countries is being halted.

The influence of China on global card acceptance is shown by the fact that Discover is accepted at more outlets than Visa and Mastercard as a result of agreements with UnionPay and other schemes

Reciprocal agreements boost acceptance for Discover, UnionPay and JCB

Paysend, the UK-based fintech business, has expanded its global reach by launching its money transfers service to Japan and South Korea.  Users are now able to send money to Japan and South Korea using card-to-card or account transfers.

Asia is an important growth market for global money transfers.  Global money transfers to the East Asia and Pacific region grew almost 7 percent to $143 billion in 2018, faster than the 5 percent growth in 2017, according to the World Bank.