I was reflecting on a friend of mine who runs a FinTech start-up.  Their company was on a funding round, and struggling.  They struggled so much that they ended up having to lay off a load of staff, cut budgets and defer income.  In fact, they reached the point where they would only survive another week or two if the funding round didn’t drop.  Then it did.  Everything is well and good.  But it gives you an insight into how hard starting a new firm is, FinTech or Tech or any really.  This was brought home to me by a Medium blog from August last year, about a young lady who joined a Silicon

Verifi, Inc. is the leader in providing payment and risk management solutions for card-not-present merchants. Today the giant has announced that recently launched operations in the UK have exhibited significant growth. Within the first quarter of launching in the UK, the Company has already rapidly increased their service footprint among its issuing bank partners as their award-winning Cardholder Dispute Resolution Network (CDRN) is adopted beyond their US base.

Volante Technologies Inc., a global leader in the provision of software for the integration, processing and orchestration of financial messages and payments, today announced support for the technology underpinning Microservices Architecture, as well as SWIFT Standards Release 2017.

Dock9, an award-winning financial experience design agency, today unveils the findings of its annual Insurance User Experience (UX) report.

After researching the major UK insurers and aggregators, it found out that more than 1 in 4 are neglecting mobile and tablet users (28%) by failing to design websites for these devices. Those that do, nearly two-thirds, are not touch-optimized (57%). This means customers have a longer quote-to-buy journey than necessary – typically websites that are touch-optimized save users nearly a quarter of the time. 

The European Banking Authority (EBA) has today released its final draft Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) for implementing Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), mandated under the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2). At the heart of these changes to RTS is the fact that, through PSD2, European lawmakers have decided to allow non-bank competitors to access the payment accounts of banks’ customers, for the purpose of retrieving account information and/or to initiate a payment transaction. Key Changes to the Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) that will implement SCA:

Coupa Software is a major provider of cloud-based spend management solutions, today announced it has been recognized by Gartner, Inc. as a Vendor to Watch in a report titled “Market Opportunity Map: Enterprise Resource Planning, Worldwide.” Coupa was one of only five vendors named as a mega-vendor and emerging Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) provider.

For some time now, the growing importance of digital services has been touted within the institutional asset management industry. My concern has been that asset managers and vendors are creating the lion’s share of this ‘noise’, with a limited amount of detail concerning tangible business needs emerging from the client side.

ClearScore is the UK leading credit-checking service, today welcomed The Rt Hon Matt Hancock MP, Minister of State for Digital and Culture, to officially open its new London headquarters.

The new 8,500 sq ft facility in Vauxhall, has opened to accommodate ClearScore’s rapid growth. Around 4 million people in Britain now use ClearScore to stay on top of their money and thousands of people are joining the free service every day. ClearScore plans to create 200 new jobs over the next three years at the site, adding to the 100 people the company already employ.

HMRC’s ‘Making Tax Digital’ (MTD) moves closer gaining its momentum. In light of this issue, IRIS warns accountants they must act now to close the digital gap pestering UK small businesses.

The initial deadline for MTD compliance remains April 2018 and there is work to be done throughout the industry to ensure businesses are prepared, regardless of their attitudes towards digital transformation. 

This comes on the day IRIS Software announces the launch of two new digital products to support accountants on their MTD journey; KashFlow for Accountants and IRIS WebPortal.

SETL is the London based financial blockchain specialist. Today it has announced the opening of their Paris branch to develop its Eurozone activities. Pierre Davoust, formerly Deputy Head of the Financial Markets Unit at the French Treasury, who is appointed CEO France at SETL, will lead the new office.