SWIFT’s figures show an average of 31.31 million messages a day in 2018 as its annual traffic rose to an all-time high of over 7.8 billion. This marks an 11.3% increase on 2017 – and a 56% increase over the last five years.

Traffic growth was driven by the mass adoption of SWIFT gpi – which now accounts for over half (55%) of cross-border payment instructions carried on the network, only two years since its launch.

Signalling a vote of confidence in British fintech, business lending platform Growth Street has raised a £7.5m scale-up investment round led by the Merian Chrysalis Investment Company Limited (Merian Chrysalis). Asset manager Merian Global Investors has joined forces with leading individual investors including Rob Rankin, former co-Head of Corporate Banking & Securities at Deutsche Bank, and Peter Brodnicki, CEO of the Mortgage Advice Bureau, in backing Growth Street.

4Stop ("FourStop GmbH"), a leader in providing premium global KYC, compliance and anti-fraud technology, announces today they are live and operational within FlashFX's global payment t

NEXT Biometrics (Oslo Bors: NEXT), a global leader in fingerprint sensor technology, today announced that it will start sampling its dual interface smart card solution (One Touch Flex CL) early in the second quarter of 2019. The solution enables NEXT's unique technology to be used with contact and contactless smart cards, including payment cards.

Transaction Network Services (TNS) today announced the acquisition of Chicago-based market data, connectivity and hosting specialist R2G Services. 

Grasshopper, Singapore’s leading proprietary trading firm and liquidity provider, has expanded its deployment of the Solace PubSub+ advanced event broker to offer enhanced capabilities that use machine learning for predictive trading. 

Target, Taco Bell, Hy-Vee supermarkets in the Midwest, Speedway convenience stores and Jack in the Box are the latest merchants to support Apple Pay, the most popular mobile contactless payment system in the world that lets customers easily and securely pay in stores using their iPhone and Apple Watch. 

Today, Mastercard announced its contactless cards soon will be accepted at Target stores, giving shoppers the ability to simply tap to pay. Cardholders using a contactless Mastercard—ones with a contactless symbol on them—will tap their card on the reader screen to pay and head on their way.

New research amongst institutional investors from the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC) - the leading association for the blockchain ecosystem - reveals 63% believe senior executives at large established businesses have a poor understanding of blockchain.  Only 7% described their understanding as ‘good’, with the remainder describing it as ‘average’.

Tungsten Network, the global business transaction network, has released a new version of its Workflow product.

Tungsten Network Workflow automates accounts payable processes, enabling incoming invoices to be automatically routed, coded, matched, approved and posted into their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system via an integrated connection. It offers users a single reference point from which they are able to track invoices, monitor cash flow and respond to vendor inquiries relating to the status of their invoices.