Bhairav Trivedi, CEO Crown Agents Bank comments, "Global events over the last two weeks in Afghanistan and Haiti have been life-changing for many people. While very different situations, both countries are in crisis and the need for humanitarian aid is at a breaking point.

Crown Agents Bank is committed to delivering funds to those affected, moving money where it is needed most. It is more important than ever that aid providers, UN agencies and International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs), can deliver crucial relief swiftly to countries in crisis.

These events bring to the fore why the world needs to get better at transacting across borders. To truly deliver aid in an efficient manner, financial institutions need to join us in working with local on-the-ground experts to open up the channels we can use to deliver fast payments when they matter the most."

“The last 18 months have presented serious challenges for SMEs across the country, with many businesses simply struggling for survival, and so it’s very encouraging to see SME confidence on the rise, with over half now expecting to grow. With lockdown restrictions now lifted, SMEs are in a better place to plan for the future and are looking to external finance as a way to do this. 

“However, challenges still remain. As the economy opens up and businesses fully reopen, they will be facing difficult decisions, both practical and financial and will need somewhere to turn to. This is where government and industry have a vital role to play, in communicating the support available to SMEs and how it can help businesses thrive beyond the pandemic. The alternative finance industry will be paramount to SME recovery, in providing businesses with the finance they need at speed.”

Bitfinex, a state-of-the-art digital token trading platform, is now available in Turkish, providing greater accessibility for the exchange’s growing customer base.

Eligible Turkish-speaking customers can trade crypto and obtain access to margin funding on Bitfinex’s highly liquid markets. A Turkish version of Bitfinex will provide a more seamless and comfortable experience for customers who prefer using Turkish online.

“We are delighted to add Turkish to the suite of language services already available on the platform,” said Claudia Lagorio, COO at Bitfinex. “This forms part of our commitment to making our state-of-the-art platform accessible to our growing global customer base.”

Educational content is now available in Turkish on Bitfinex’s Knowledge Base, enabling Turkish speaking users to enhance their understanding and knowledge of crypto and blockchain technology.

Turkish is the sixth language to be supported on the Bitfinex platform, following English, Russian, traditional and simplified Chinese and Spanish. Supporting Turkish on Bitfinex further illustrates Bitfinex’s ongoing commitment to l enabling more customers to obtain access to Bitfinex in their preferred language.

Service available to hundreds of thousands of MuchBetter users 

MuchBetter, the award-winning payments company, today announced its availability via Google Pay™, meaning MuchBetter Android users can now make in-store contactless and online payments using Google Pay™. Android is the world’s most popular smartphone operating system and Google Pay™ is among the top payment platforms. The integration means that a significant proportion of MuchBetter’s one million customers will benefit from the simplicity and security of the Google Pay™ service. 

MuchBetter has chosen to make its Prepaid Debit Mastercard© available on Google Pay™ now due to the increasing popularity of contactless payments, with limits in the UK soon to be increased to £100. Likewise, the deal also further increases customer choice and gives users more opportunities to pay with MuchBetter for day-to-day payments. Google Pay™ will complement MuchBetter’s long list of payment options, which today includes P2P transfers, online, mobile and card payments. MuchBetter also powers popular contactless wearables like the Winwatch smartwatch, CashCuff smartshirt and Tovi Sorga’s new range of contactless accessories. 

To use Google Pay™, MuchBetter customers must download the Google Pay™ app from the Google Play Store and add their MuchBetter card details. They can then pay with Google Pay™ using their MuchBetter funds wherever they see a contactless logo in physical stores, or during the checkout process for online or in-app purchases.    

“There are so many ways to pay with MuchBetter now,” said MuchBetter co-founder and CEO, Israel Rosenthal. “We created the business with choice and flexibility in mind, ensuring that users could pay for whatever they want, however they want – always with a secure, seamless experience. It’s why MuchBetter is becoming the payment method of choice for our customers, whether that is for P2P transfers, card, contactless or online payments. We hope Google Pay™ will enhance our payment options even further.” 

Views from Mr. Dilip Modi – Founder, Spice Money:

 “It is heartening to see that, according to the recently launched Financial Inclusion Index by the RBI, the financial inclusion in India has increased to cross the halfway mark to 53.9 in the financial year ended March 2021, as compared to 43.4 for the year ended March 2017. We, at Spice Money, are happy to be a part of India’s financial inclusion journey and aim to work towards reaching the population that is still financially excluded. 

Spice Money has been encouraging more rural entrepreneurs to join the platform as Spice Money Adhikaris or banking correspondents with our zero-entry fee onboarding process that lowers the barrier of entry. Spice Money had been able to grow the network exponentially by almost 130% between FY19-20 and FY20-21. The number of Adhikaris working with Spice Money today stands at more than 7 lakh. 

These Adhikaris are making essential banking services accessible through AePS and providing an assisted model to further financial inclusion in India. AePS is being extensively used to withdraw cash and pay for goods in rural India. Enabling cash deposit through AePS will significantly increase the number operating bank accounts, making it a major step towards financial inclusion. Besides making this amount productive, it will also build banking transactions history that will lead to the collection of valuable data for extending credit. In FY20-21, Spice Money saw a growth of almost 124% in GTV of AePS transactions. 

Spice Money has also deployed 1 lakh micro-ATMs across India. An infrastructure of this magnitude will develop confidence among the rural citizens in banking infrastructure.

Spice Money’s network is present in 95% rural pincodes with a market share of over 17%, and we intend to keep expanding rapidly to accelerate financial inclusion and financially empower Bharat.”

Luke Massie, CEO of VibePay, comments on the latest online outage of UK banks Santander, HSBC, Halifax and Natwest:

“The disruption to the banking services of millions of people across the country today highlights a growing issue with legacy systems and unreliable technology. Cases of outages are regularly reported and the banking sector needs to resolve what is becoming a larger problem in terms of customer trust and satisfaction, as a result of the outdated technology.

“Open banking and PSD2 was legislation put forward for the UK to create consistency so products, like VibePay, could be built directly on top of. We have innovated and supported this process by building our ecosystem on open banking, but currently legacy banks are letting the sector down and making progress difficult with unreliable APIs.

“There needs to be revolution in the industry to drive an evolution in the way people manage their finances and transact. Currently the UK is lagging behind its peers in the US and Asia, who boast services such as CashApp or WeChat. Building a banking and payments system that offers empowerment in terms of actionable banking statements, simpler social transactions and a holistic overall experience will give UK consumers what they want and need. This is the future for the industry but it won’t become a reality until a shift away from traditional services to impactful, innovative new fintech solutions is implemented.”

Harmonize will coordinate existing vault and sub-custody solutions and provide a uniform policy management framework for Covario’s stable of technology solutions.

Most organizations working with Digital Assets find that, as they mature, they need to work with multiple vaults, sub-custodians, and liquidity providers, irrespective of whether their focus is trading, custody, or tokenization. This emerging situation creates institutional challenge in terms of security, and scalability, with a proliferation of access points weakening end-to-end processes.

This was the experience of Covario, an independent prime broker for digital asset managers based in Zug, which currently supports multiple vault providers and sub-custodians, and connects to more than 20 exchanges and liquidity providers, a list that is growing continually. 

As such, the firm was looking for a solution to manage this complexity and mitigate the risks in working with this growing ecosystem of partners and selected METACO Harmonize as its digital asset orchestration engine. Harmonize acts as the overarching policy layer to ensure tight management of Covario’s operations, coupled with a single point of integration to its various internal systems.

Mark Banner, Covario Co-Founder, commented: “Covario’s focus has always been on providing secure, reliable, fast and compliant services to the institutional crypto market. With the vast group of electronic exchanges, 3rd-party custodians, financing pools, and alternative trading venues that we connect to globally, we have been searching for a solution to help unify our policy management while enhancing security and scalability. The METACO Harmonize product impressed us with its flexibility and sophistication and is a perfect complement to our existing stable of leading institutional financial technology solutions.

Adrien Treccani, METACO CEO, added: “Over the past five years, in working closely with many of the largest and most sophisticated organizations in the field, we have seen first-hand how the provision of multiple vaults, as well as access to sub-custodians and liquidity venues, is essential to their operations, and how this has come at a cost in terms of loss of end-to-end control and increased systems integration overhead.  Consequently, we created METACO Harmonize, which allows customers such as Covario to continue to grow and manage their partner ecosystem flexibly, economically and securely.” 

METACO Harmonize is the orchestration layer for a range of subproducts that allow institutions to seamlessly integrate potential future use-cases into their infrastructure as they evolve. With flexible deployment options including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premise, METACO Harmonize ensures there are no trade-offs between security and agility for every firm, large or small, looking to build a digital asset use case. 

Commenting on a £0.5bn year-on-year increase in IHT receipts, Nick Ritchie, Director of Wealth Planning at RBC Wealth Management, said: “The £0.5bn year-on-year increase in IHT receipts comes as no surprise. Rising house prices and investment markets have increased the volume and value of estates caught in the IHT net, and with the Chancellor freezing the nil rate band until 2026, this trend looks set to continue.

“At the same time however, many individuals have brought forward their plans to gift to the next generation amid mortality fears fuelled by the pandemic, and concerns over how the Chancellor might target larger estates in the future.

“One thing is for certain, at just 0.6% of the 19/20 tax take and with an IHT rate of 40%, already among the highest of the OECD countries, targeting IHT won't be the silver bullet to recouping the swelling deficit. Increasing the rate of IHT seems unlikely, but enhancing receipts by removing or reducing reliefs, targeting lifetime gifts or removing the generous capital gain exemption on death, could have a part to play. 

“Individuals might wish to consider implementing their wealth transfer strategy sooner amid current, tried and tested rules, rather than risk being caught out by stricter rules in the future.”