Asia is a small word for a huge region. The largest and most-populated continent on the planet, its influence extends well beyond any geographical border - though as China grows in economic power, Asian companies are increasingly looking to deal with their near neighbour. It’s a complicated picture; OPEX has a role - but how does it fit in?

There are really three main questions:
How does the Asia region differ from the rest of the world?

What trends have had a big impact recently?

What are the threats to growth?

OneSpan™ (NASDAQ: OSPN), a global leader in software for trusted identities, e-signatures and secure transactions, today announced the release of The Future of Adaptive Authentication in the Financial Industry, a report prepared by the Information Security Media Group.

Paxful (www.Paxful.com), a peer-to-peer Bitcoin marketplace, announced on February 21, 2019 at 9am,  an integration onto BitMart, a premier global digital asset trading platform in the cryptocurrency market with over 600,000 users worldwide. This partnership comes at a pivotal time for the crypto community and serves as a step the two entities have taken together in the hopes of increasing liquidity and scalability.

It’s a challenging time to be an established insurance provider. As digital technology transforms the industry by increasing customer expectations, people want to quickly receive a quote, take out a policy and make a claim, while being able to access policy details and premiums at any time. Customers expect services and experiences tailored to their increasingly digital lives, leading the latest wave of ‘insurance technology’ disruptors to cater to these needs and ‘steal’ customers from established providers.

BNP Paribas today announced the launch of the BNP Paribas MGI Systematic Currency Alpha Index using artificial intelligence through machine learning. The index, created by BNP Paribas in partnership with Millennium Global Investments (MGI), went live in Q1 2019.

Digitisation is a major driving force for change in finance departments, transforming financial processing and altering the role of finance professionals. Companies are digitising their financial and administrative processes. Almost half of those surveyed in the Onguard FinTech Barometer are developing innovative financial software or seeking to partner with innovative FinTech businesses.

Energias de Portugal, which ranks among Europe’s major electricity operators, and is one of 

Barclaycard, which processes nearly half of the UK’s credit and debit card transactions, today announces a new card acceptance partnership with UnionPay International, a subsidiary of China UnionPay. The deal will enable its 110,000 UK merchants to accept UnionPay through a phased roll out that will begin this summer.

UnionPay has the world’s largest cardholder base, and is the preferred payment brand for many Chinese visiting the UK as well as increasing numbers of global cardholders. 

New research from cyber security provider F-Secure reports a significant increase in attack traffic in the latter half of 2018. But while attacks are increasing, it seems many companies are struggling with incident detection. 

Attack traffic observed by F-Secure’s network of decoy honeypots in 2018 increased by 32 percent over the previous year, and increased fourfold in the latter half of 2018 compared with the first half of the year.

Retail finance technology provider, Deko, has partnered with Featurespace, the leading machine learning Adaptive Behavioural Analytics fraud and risk management company, to bolster the security of its consumer finance lending platform.