Alipay, the world’s leading payment and lifestyle platform operated by Ant Financial, has connected more than 300,000 Japanese merchants as of early 2019 with tourists from Chinese mainland paying through the Alipay app.

This was an increase of about 500 percent compared with the beginning of 2018, when 50,000 merchants in Japan accepted Alipay, amid a push by the Japanese government to drive greater adoption of mobile payments.

Tech Nation, the leading scaleup-network for UK entrepreneurs, has today announced the release of its annual Tech Nation Report with data from partners includingCompanies House, PitchBook, GitHub, the OECD and Streetbees, and in association with the World Economic Forum.

The report provides a comprehensive look into the evolution of the UK’s tech ecosystem, exploring the drivers that underpin and power economic growth within the sector.

Finastra has signed three global banks on its Fusion LenderComm platform as part of a coordinated campaign, including BNP Paribas, Natixis and Societe Generale. With NatWest, which joined recently, the ramp up signals a move towards a new era of efficiency in this complex space.   

BASF has optimised one of the world’s largest supply chain networks using FICO^® Xpress Optimisation. BASF’s advanced business analytics team used the mathematical optimisation software to map all of the company’s supply chains at once to weigh the economic value of an investment, a massive computational challenge. For its achievement, BASF was awarded a 2018 FICO Decisions Award for AI, Machine Learning & Optimisation.

The Artesian Solutions Risk and Compliance Hub (ARCH), a SaaS solution enabling commercial teams and underwriters to carry out automated risk screening on prospective clients has been accepted onto PwC’s Scale | InsurTech Programme. The 11 week programme aims to support the world’s most exciting InsurTech scale-ups to expand and grow, bringing advanced innovation and disruption to a market that has been traditionally slow to keep ahead of emerging technological trends.

The global regtech market is exploding because there are big problems to solve. Banks and financial services firms are grappling with an overwhelming volume of complex regulatory change and 2,500+ compliance rule books globally. With the cost of compliance to the banking industry estimated to be $270 billion each year, firms need help to the root causes of regulatory risk as efficiently as possible.

Today’s consumers expect a frictionless customer journey, regardless of whether they are shopping online, applying for a mortgage or opening a new bank account. Delivering such a seamless customer experience will require banks to not only boost their digital capabilities but also to fully transform their business operations to adapt to the changing marketplace.

With the new stablecoin, over one million Paysend users will be able to send instant global payments without the traditional cross-border fees.

Paysend Group, a global London-based fintech company is launching a new global stablecoin on the Stellar network. The global stablecoin will provide a consistent store of value that users can hold, or seamlessly trade and transact with in real time. The Paysend stablecoin, will be available in June 2019.

Liquidnet, the global institutional investment network, today announced it has acquired RSRCHXchange, a leading marketplace and aggregator for institutional research. The acquisition supports Liquidnet’s evolution as a global investment network and enables it to embed a new level of research and analytics into the global investment process. Liquidnet will now be able to deliver relevant, actionable insights directly to investment teams through the Liquidnet platform.

With cybercriminals becoming ever-more sophisticated, and identity fraud reaching epidemic levels in the UK[1], the need for strict customer identification procedures has never been greater for banks and financial institutions.