Wirecard, the global innovation leader for digital financial technology, and Klarna, a leading global payments and shopping provider, announced today the launch of a new enhanced joint payment solution. All three Klarna shopping methods, Pay Now, Pay Later and Klarna Financing, can now be embedded into merchants’ checkout via a single integration through the Wirecard digital financial commerce platform to boost average order value, conversions and hence fuel growth for merchants.

AI insurance pricing solution Akur8 has raised €8m in its Series A round from BlackFin Capital Partners and MTech Capital, bringing Akur8’s total funding to €10 million following initial investment and incubation from Kamet Ventures in 2018.

Starling Bank founder and chief executive Anne Boden said the business will to make its first monthly profit in “in January or February” of next year.

This year is perhaps the most crucial in the well-regarded bank’s short history. Boden has to manage expansion into Germany, France and the Netherlands, maintain the bank’s quality, and produce a profit.

Finastra has crowned Team ‘WonderTech’ the grand prize winner of its largest ever global fintech hackathon on its open development platform, FusionFabric.cloud. The Manila-based team was selected for the top honor for its ‘Agree Farm App’ from among five category winners at Finastra Universe New York.

Cryptocurrency trading had its largest year ever in 2019. Its entire market capitalisation has risen by 44.1%, gaining $60 billion throughout the year, and closing 2019 at $180 billion, according to cryptocurrency data platform CoinGecko. Bitcoin’s trading volume increased by 600% in 2019.

The Centrale Bank van Curaçao en Sint Maarten (CBCS) has contracted equensWorldline SE, a subsidiary of Worldline [Euronext: WLN], the European leader in the payments and transactional services industry, to introduce an Instant Payments (IP) CSM on top of their current clearing & settlement system. This means that all interbank payments in Curaçao, Sint Maarten and Bonaire will soon be processed within ten seconds - 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. The Instant Payment transactions will be handled in Antillean Guilders and US Dollars.

Ascent, an AI-driven solution that helps customers automate regulatory compliance, today announced that it has won the 2020 FinTech Breakthrough Award for Best RegTech Startup.

FinTech Breakthrough is an independent organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global FinTech market through its annual FinTech Breakthrough Awards program. This year’s awards, now in their fourth year, drew over 3,700 nominations. 

BMLL Technologies has won the “Best Data Visualization Service" award at the 2020 FinTech Breakthrough Awards. The mission of the FinTech Breakthrough Awards is to honour excellence and recognize the creativity, hard work and success of FinTech companies, technologies, and products around the world.

Independent not-for-profit standards association, The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN), today officially welcomes a host of new members to its organisation. This includes a range of banks, consultancies and technology businesses such as, U.S. Bank, Banco de Credito del Peru, Bank Leumi, SPD Bank, UOB, CC&C Solutions, Knowis AG, Deloitte Consulting, SunTec Business Solutions, Technisys, Wipro and ServiceNow.

It’s great to see RBS leading the charge in putting customers first during a crisis – with Lloyds and TSB quickly following suit. People are talking about these policies because banks have communicated them very clearly; if you put the leg work in but miss the all-important last mile – the communication – you lose the opportunity to reassure customers that they are safe, especially when faced with difficult and unprecedented circumstances.