Nothing says the holidays like… delivery trucks? As the primary e-Commerce shopping period comes to a close due to shipping deadlines, Mastercard SpendingPulse reports that online shopping will play a bigger role in what’s under the tree than ever before. A new report out today finds that in 2017 e-Commerce saw the largest share of holiday sales ever (tracking at more than 11 percent) and growth of 16.3 percent compared to last year.

The SpendingPulse e-Commerce report looks at all online holiday shopping since November 1 and covers retail sales across all payment types.

Danal, Inc., a global leader in mobile identity and authentication solutions, today announced a partnership with one of the UK's leading digital communications companies, O2. Danal and O2 have joined forces to address the growing demand for mobile identity services in the UK, providing services for digital eKYC and identity proofing for regulated online services.

1. Payment Services Directive (PSD2) Finally Goes Live “It has has been a long road to PSD2, given that it was approved in November 2015 by the Council of the European Union. However, it will finally be coming into force in January 2018 and that means that banks must open up their customer data to third parties on request - whether these third parties are their direct competitors, challenger banks or nascent fintech startups.”

Derivatives market participants have been rightfully concerned about the potentially adverse impact of MiFID II on global trading. However, the US and EU authorities have taken significant steps in recent weeks to mitigate some of those concerns. The CFTC has issued an interpretative letter regarding the unbundling of research, something that is mandatory in the EU under MiFID II but partly restricted in the US.

Invoice2go, the simplest way for business owners and freelancers to track work and get paid, is today launching a mobile point of sale (mPOS) payments feature with PayPal Here, enabling the smallest businesses to be paid in person, nearly anywhere they are.

While the market has been focused on the bitcoin frenzy and commercial banks continue their migration onto enterprise-grade platforms, such as RippleNet, another revolution has quietly bubbled up around Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

New research from Sainsbury’s Bank reveals that almost eight million UK adults have sent an average of £5,236 abroad in the last two years. 

 3W Infra, a fast growing Infrastructure-as-a-Service hosting provider from Amsterdam with global operations and more than 4,000 dedicated servers under management, announces the launch of a startup accelerator program for innovative, Internet-savvy companies around the world with scalable IaaS hosting needs.

In banking and fintech, the most important commodity is "trust." Ali Sadr, Chairman of Pilatus Bank, believes that it is important to recognize where the banking industry stands relative to other industries on the trust scale.

1. Payment Services Directive (PSD2) Finally Goes Live

“It has has been a long road to PSD2, given that it was approved in November 2015 by the Council of the European Union. However, it will finally be coming into force in January 2018 and that means that banks must open up their customer data to third parties on request - whether these third parties are their direct competitors, challenger banks or nascent fintech startups.”