On April 23-24 more than 3000 attendees from 70 countries gathered in the world’s blockchain capital — Singapore. Top crypto companies (Binance, Huobi, Listing.Help, crypto messenger ELVN and others), world famous experts (Tim Draper, Roger Ver, Alex Reinhardt and others), mining giants (Bitmain, Btc.com), representatives of key cryptocurrencies (Litecoin, Dash, Cardano, Neo and others) gave talks about the present and future of blockchain and cryptocurrencies at the 3rd Global forum in Asia.

Sysnet Global Solutions, the leading provider of cyber security and compliance solutions, was unveiled as this year’s Florin Awards ‘Excellence in RegTech’ winner in a glittering ceremony in the Louwman Museum in the Hague, the Netherlands, last night. The highly-competitive category is dedicated to championing RegTech providers whose product or service make a significant and tailored contribution to enhancing compliance in the payments industry.

FIME Savvi and FIME Savvi Test Host tools have been qualified by Brazilian payment network Elo to perform terminal validation testing to meet growing demand for card payments. Brazilian acquirers can now benefit from FIME’s test tools and local support.

Turnkey open banking platform provider, Token.io, today announces its selection by Sberbank Croatia to deliver PSD2 compliance and open banking capabilities. 

Sberbank Croatia is a subsidiary of Sberbank, a tier one European bank in terms of assets. The bank is now integrating TokenOS^TM into its banking infrastructure to establish PSD2 compliance and enable the systems flexibility required for it to develop new value-added open banking services, such as bank direct payments and account aggregation.

The Western Union Company’s global digital money-moving capabilities are making significant headway across the Middle East, with seven countries now offering online services, connecting customers to their famili

Esme Loans, the standalone digital lending platform for SMEs and scale up businesses has today announced that it has now lent over £50million to UK businesses.

The lender has seen a continued period of strong growth in the run up to today’s announcement, following an uplift in lending of 337% between 2017 and 2018.

Investment app, tickr, is today launching its crowdfunding campaign on leading investment platform Seedrs. Funds raised will be used to accelerate user acquisition, while building several new features including a visual newsfeed giving users an interactive overview of the companies in their portfolio and the work they are doing to make an impact on the world. 

tickr’s user statistics demonstrate the scale of appetite for disruption in the investment market; 40% of users are women, while 90% of users are between the ages of 25 and 39, and 65% are first-time investors entirely.

The journey from unbundling to rebundling and back has been a formidable one. Emerging technologies and the pace of innovation are driving changes throughout the banking industry at an unprecedented rate. From Asia to Europe, U.S. to Africa, and Australia to the Middle East, consumers are not only increasingly adopting digital – most are demanding it. While the movement toward our ability to bank anywhere is inevitable, the path towards transformation varies from one region to the next – and very different models have evolved within each geography.

The 2019 Islamic Finance Awards, presented by World Finance Magazine, has announced that Temenos (SIX: TEMN) has won the ‘Best Islamic Banking & Finance Technology Provider’, for its breakthrough digital front office product, Temenos Infinity, and next generation core banking system, Temenos T24 Transact. For the second consecutive year, Temenos was recognized after demonstrating remarkable contributions to Shari’ah-compliant banking, finance and investing across the region.

Klarna Bank AB (publ) has released its annual financial report for 2018 (link), revealing that Klarna’s alternative payment methods and checkout services continue to resonate strongly with consumers, merchants and partners across all 14 core markets. With an average of 1 million transactions a day on the platform, Klarna’s total global sales volumes rose by 36% YOY in 2018 to 29bn USD.