Five exciting new payment start-ups have reached the final for the 2015 Dragons' Den contest at PayExpo. The highly anticipated competition, which received record entries this year, is the ideal platform for emerging companies looking to present their innovative ideas and game-changing payments technologies to a global market.

The 2015 Payments Dragons' Den finalists are:

xWare42 - a software developer whose core product, xPay, allows banks to give customers additional information about their purchases.

Today Wolters Kluwer announces that Claire Carter has joined as UK Managing Director for its Tax and Accounting software business.

Claire joins from Sage Software where she was formerly Managing Director of its Accountants Division for the UK and Ireland delivering Cloud and on premise solutions to accountants. Before that, Claire worked for Morgan Stanley and Alliance & Leicester in senior commercial roles.

BasisCode Compliance, provider of the industry’s broadest integrated compliance software for asset managers, advisors and other financial services firms, has been named a finalist in the compliance technology category of WealthManagement.com's 2015 Industry Awards, the first program to honor outstanding achievements by companies that help advisors better manage their businesses through innovation, enhanced service quality or an enriched advisor/client experience.

The increasingly mobile-centric lifestyle of many Europeans can largely be attributed to the increase and success of mobile channel initiatives focused on providing cheaper, more convenient services. Although still playing catch up to Western Europe, mobile subscribers in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region are increasingly reliant on their mobile devices and smartphone adoption is increasing.

NanoSpeed, the provider of ultra-fast FPGA solutions to the trading community, has announced today the world’s fastest FPGA for trading with the launch of Nano-Gateway, a trading gateway. The new FPGA halves the latency of NanoSpeed’s first trading gateway, Nano-TG (launched in 2013) which was already the fastest on the market by a significant margin.

Denmark is leading the way to a cashless society by planning to scrap obligatory cash payments – and now two out of three smartphone users will be able to enjoy an entirely new way to shop as Danske Bank’s market leading MobilePay app introduces the transformative “buy anywhere” capabilities of acclaimed mobile commerce platform PowaTag.

Fresh from the launch of Visa Europe Collab in London earlier this month, the card scheme has exported the idea to Israel with the opening of an innovation hub in Tel Aviv.

eFront, a leading software provider of financial solutions for managing alternative investments, has announced that responsAbility Investments AG, a global leader in development investments, has chosen eFront’s FrontPM portfolio monitoring solution. FrontPM streamlines and automates the collecting of portfolio company data. For responsAbility, the eFront solution will allow the firm to grow efficiently while providing exceptional management for businesses and other assets in developing economies.

Almost two-thirds of senior treasury and finance professionals in the US and Latin America region said they feel more confident about their own business’s prospects in the next year. 62% answered 'yes' to the question 'Compared to last year, do you feel more confident about your business’s prospects in the next year?' A similar percentage – 61% – also said they feel more confident about the US's prospects in the year ahead.