“The news this morning that Amazon has been forced to accept cash at its 'cashless store' amid claims it discriminates against those without bank accounts, serves as a stark reminder of the struggles to come if banks and the Government don’t work closely enough to ensure the benefits of cashless society are available and accessible to all.

IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO), a world leader in critical information, and analytics, today announced the launch of Onboarding Accelerator, a new solution to help banks and other service providers open accounts with institutional clients more quickly. 

Onboarding new clients is complex in financial services because of the amount of information the bank or service provider must collect to satisfy know your customer, anti-money laundering, credit, legal and tax requirements.  On average, the process takes 40 days.

Countingup, the UK’s number one small business banking and accounting app, has signed a partnership agreement with fintech start-up and insurance solutions provider Hokodo, in a move designed to lessen the risk faced by SMEs from late payments and unpaid invoices. This partnership is the first between a small business-focused insurance firm and a banking and accounting company to give UK SMEs the option to protect their income on an invoice-by-invoice basis.

Raiha Buchanan, founder of Women in FinTech (WiFT), and Sarah Kok, the founding member of this initiative, have launched the first episode of their podcast. In this episode, titled “How Did You Get Into FinTech,” they share their ambitions for the podcast and the WiFT initiative as a whole. Raiha and Sarah also, share their own stories in this first episode of the podcast, intended to be a regular series.

World-leading biometrics company, Fingerprint Cards (Fingerprints™) has announced that it has now shipped 1 billion fingerprint sensors worldwide. The Swedish-based company has played a central role in bringing smartphone fingerprint sensors to the mass-market. Having led major advancements to the technology, Fingerprints was responsible for driving the first integration of fingerprint touch sensors into an Android handset in 2014, with its sensors now integrated into more than 330 smartphone models globally.

Wolters Kluwer’s Lien Solutions has launched Portfolio Sync, a first-of-its-kind lien management solution designed for lenders who use multiple methods of submitting Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) filings.

Following the Ordinary Shareholders’ Meeting held on 29^th April, SIA’s Board of Directors – meeting yesterday under the chairmanship of Giuliano Asperti – has appointed Massimo Sarmi as Deputy Chairman and has confirmed Nicola Cordone as Chief Executive Officer of the company.

Alternative lending is on the rise with the new players challenging the old-school banks in terms of speed and safety of credit products they provide. The only reason why they are able to match and outperform the traditional lenders is technology. Thanks to FinTech advancements, the lending space entry barriers are now incredibly low and smaller lenders have access to the level of automation previously accessible only to multi-billion corporations.

C-level executives – who have access to a company’s most sensitive information, are now the major focus for social engineering attacks, alerts the Verizon 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report. Senior executives are 12x more likely to be the target of social incidents, and 9x more likely to be the target of social breaches than in previous years – and financial motivation remains the key driver.