Today American Express announced that American Express® Business Gold Cardmembers in the UK can now earn up to 50% more Membership Rewards® points when they spend £20,000 per quarter.

The increased rewards come alongside flexible benefits, new savings and discounts, and enhanced employee card controls designed to help businesses drive more value from their spend as they once again refocus on growth.

Business Gold Cardmembers can now earn an additional 10,000 Membership Rewards points in any calendar quarter with spending of £20,000 or more on business purchases. Whether it’s office goods, raw materials, digital ad spend or other business purchasing, Cardmembers can now get even more back from their routine business spending.

The Card will also work harder for Cardmembers, with more than £600 in potential savings and discounts available each year with leading brands, including £100 in credits at Dell. Recent offers have included brands such as Dropbox, Indeed and B&Q.

Other benefits that UK American Express® Business Gold Cardmembers can enjoy include:

• Rewards that give back to the business: Earn 1 Membership Rewards® point for every full £1 spent on the Card, with a welcome bonus of 20,000 bonus Membership Rewards® points when Cardmembers spend £3,000 in their first three months. Additionally, the Card is fee-free in the first year for new customers.
• Up to 54 days payment terms on purchases and no pre-set spending limits, helping businesses better manage cash flow and access more flexibility, seizing opportunities and purchasing items when they need them.
• Up to 99 complimentary supplementary cards for employees, supported by new and enhanced controls that give business owners the ability to easily amend, freeze or set spend limits on employee cards via the American Express website or app.

Evan Lubeck, VP Commercial Products at American Express, said: “We know that UK business owners are passionate about their businesses. We want our products to work just as hard for them, so we’ve evolved the Business Gold Card to offer more rewards than ever. The new Card unlocks more rewards as customers consolidate spending on all kinds of business purchases, and offers them the power to easily manage employee spending at their fingertips. Our new benefits aim to help businesses thrive, as people are once again feeling more confident about the economic outlook.”

A recent business survey from American Express – the Global Business Spend Indicator by American Express* – found that after a bumpy 2020, business spending levels are set to grow in the UK. When the survey responses are applied to broader macroeconomic data B2B spend in Q2 2021 could be estimated to increase by nearly £5 billion in the UK alone, compared to the same time last year. 

More confident spending plans are also bolstered by a return to optimism, with 70% of UK businesses surveyed saying they feel positive about their prospects over the coming 12 months.

The Business Gold Card also offers business owners additional ease and simplicity. Integration with platforms like Xero and Intuit means they can manage accounts in real time, benefiting from easier reconciliation and administration. All this also comes with the powerful backing of American Express’ world-renowned service.

The American Express® Business Gold Card comes with an annual fee of £175, waived in the first year for new Cardmembers. It’s backed by American Express’ advanced safety and security systems, 24/7 day or night help with Global Assist®, emergency card replacements and 90 day purchase and refund protection. All of which means business users can spend with confidence.

Membership Rewards points can be reinvested back in the business in a number of ways, from rewarding staff, redeemed towards essential purchases or for when business travel starts to return. Cardmembers can also redeem points for a statement credit, to help boost their bottom line.

To find out more about the enhanced Business Gold Card and to explore the full range of benefits search Amex Business Gold.

The Atlas VPN research team compiled the most significant 2021 H1 cybercrime statistics to provide a precise view of the current cyber-threat landscape.

Based on the statistics, it is evident that both the volume and the sophistication of attacks grew substantially during the period under review.

The shift to remote work is largely to blame, as it provided a considerably larger attack surface for hackers to exploit. Also, unpatched personal devices, unprotected home networks, and reduced visibility for the in-house security team are some of the leading security issues.

Methodology: 

The statistics are based on data from strictly reputable sources, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Trade Commission, Kaspersky, Malwarebytes, and many others. You can click on the source of each statistic to explore the full report that includes extended analysis, references, and additional data. 

Some of the main highlights include:

• Blockchain hackers netted over $100 million in Q1 2021.
• Ransomware accounted for 81% of all financially driven intrusions in 2020. The average cost of a ransomware breach was $4.44 million.
• Phishing assaults affected 83%t of UK firms in the last year. 
• Google discovered a record-high number of phishing websites last year, with over 2.11 million, representing a 25% increase over 2019.
• Over 5 billion records have already been leaked in 2021.
• RDP attacks skyrocketed 241% in 2020. In 2019, the number of RDP attacks was 969 million, but in 2020, threat actors carried out an incredible 3.3 billion attacks.
• macOS malware development surged by over 1,000% in 2020.

To see the full report, head over to:

https://atlasvpn.com/blog/2021-h1-cybercrime-statistics

Trackwise Designs' FY20 results show a resilient response to the pandemic while management expanded IHT capacity to meet the requirements of a multi-million order from an undisclosed UK electric vehicle (EV) OEM. This OEM has recently extended its supply and manufacture agreement with Trackwise from three years to four, increasing the total value by £16m to up to £54m. We note that the volume ramp-up under this agreement has been delayed by a quarter to H122, so we have revised our FY21 estimates, taking EPS from 4.9p profit to 1.0p loss.

While our peer multiples-based analysis shows Trackwise trading at a premium to its peers on all metrics, this approach fails to recognize the potential of the IHT business so we have augmented it with a scenario analysis, which is presented in our September initiation note. This explores how each of the three key segments in which Trackwise has developed prototype IHT products for customers (EVs, medical devices and aerospace) has the potential to generate revenues of at least £100m at even relatively modest levels of market penetration. 

Click here to view the full report or here to sign up to receive research as it is published.

All reports published by Edison are available to download free of charge from its website

www.edisongroup.com

ACI Worldwide, a leading global provider of real-time payments and digital payments software solutions, today announced that its submission Making Tax Less Taxing was voted overall winner of the ‘most creative solution’ category during the Request to Pay (R2P) Ideation contest at EBAday 2021.

Paying taxes is taxing for citizens, and collecting taxes is unpredictable in terms of both work- and cash-flow for governments. With digital payments already overtaking cash usage in Europe, the ACI submission Making Tax Less Taxing presents a highly innovative bill payments use case enabling R2P for government tax collections, which can be integrated into the proposed EU Digital Wallet.

Solving these issues is one of the driving forces behind the European Commission’s recently proposed digital identity and wallet framework. It aims to make it easier for citizens to use a national digital identity to access public sector or commercial services—and make the associated payments, regardless of where they are in the bloc.

“We are delighted about this win and the industry recognition for our highly creative and innovative R2P use case,” commented Amelia Ruiz Heras, manager, solution consulting, ACI Worldwide. “R2P services have revolutionized payments in many other parts of the world, notably India, while in Europe, R2P use cases are still lacking. This win shows ACI’s leading the charge in payments innovation, demonstrating how the EU digital wallet and R2P could work in action.”

Cardlay, a leading Danish commercial banking as a service payment FinTech, today announced it is collaborating with SAP^® Concur^®, the world’s leading brand of travel, expense and invoice management solutions, on an integration that is designed to allow banks to issue and manage virtual payment cards for their corporate card holders. 

Through this partnership and planned integration, Cardlay will offer a cloud solution that helps a bank’s corporate card holders to easily capture, verify, and reconcile card spend. Corporate card holders will be able to benefit from a closed loop of optimized automated processes to save time, avoid errors, reduce fraud, and secure data enrichment. 

Cardlay’s solution is planned to enable employees to operate their card through digital wallets on a mobile app and web portal, integrated with Concur Expense, and managers will be able to issue and control virtual cards for employees.

Employees will be capable of quickly requesting a payment card via the app before any company spend occurs. Managers can then approve/deny new cards, set spend limits and review settings. Virtual cards would be added easily to digital wallets, and as the card is used, the transaction data would be available in the SAP Concur service to be reconciled. 

Jørgen Christian Juul, CEO at Cardlay, said: “Through our SAP Concur partnership we can simplify and streamline corporate card management for companies globally. The collaboration brings banks enormous value, leveraging the distribution of corporate payment cards for all employees by securing the transition from out-of-pocket payments. This is planned to enable immediate benefits such as streamlined processes, improved data, minimized fraud, reduction in errors, and increased control. Commercial payment is going through a massive development and we see a great opportunity for Cardlay to create powerful integrated solutions with numerous benefits for global companies.”

Currently, companies need to plan, predict future needs and issue cards accordingly. Cardlay’s integrated solution with Concur Expense is planned to enable banks to deliver a sophisticated and integrated card management capability to their corporate card holders to issue a payment card and simultaneously approve a budget.

 Brave New Coin , a leading data analytics and research company backed by Techemy Ltd., today announced a partnership with QuantHouse, the global provider of end-to-end systematic trading solutions including innovative market data services, an algo trading platform, and infrastructure products and part of Iress (IRE.ASX), to offer Brave New Coin’s data feeds, Indices and Analytics to QuantHouse customers. Upon launch, QuantHouse will feature Brave New Coin’s high-speed single asset indices for top ten crypto assets, plus the Brave New Coin DeFi Index.

Trusted by leading financial institutions, Brave New Coin’s enterprise-grade cryptocurrency market data solutions deliver actionable insights around trading, valuations, portfolio construction, performance attribution and risk management.

The partnership enables QuantHouse customers to leverage Brave New Coin’s high-frequency data feeds that the organization has been building out over the past 12 months, and underscores the importance of high-quality crypto indices and the role they play in successful trading. Brave New Coin’s indices have been launched to become the industry standard for price discovery and for pricing/ settling derivatives and other instruments, while its basket indices offer sector and asset diversification while mitigating market volatility.

For QuantHouse traders who have an established source for quotes, the availability of Brave New Coin’s data provides for an additional reference on settlement price and an understanding of real-time market conditions. This is particularly significant in the absence of formal standards in crypto trading.

“QuantHouse and its parent company, Iress, have a deep history of assisting hedge funds, market makers, investment banks, brokers and other trading venues to achieve optimal trading performance, and gain access to rich datasets, together with ultra low latency built on a global infrastructure footprint” said Fran Strajnar, CEO of Brave New Coin. “We’re proud that our new partnership with QuantHouse will enable their customers to make smarter trades courtesy of our industry-leading datasets.”

Stephane Leroy, Co-Founder QuantHouse, commented “Since its launch in early 2020, Brave New Coin’s cryptocurrency index infrastructure has been in high demand by companies including BTSE, the Toronto Futures Options and Swaps Exchange (tFOSE) and LedgerX. QuantHouse is pleased to be a part of developing standards in this space, enabling better trading by mirroring market structures similar to existing indices for equities and futures.”

BIAN, the independent not-for-profit standards association, today announces three new appointments to its executive board. Charaka Kithulegoda, Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President, Retail Banking at PNC; Shanker Ramamurthy, Global Managing Partner - Banking at IBM; and Balaji Kumar, Managing Director, Head of Engineering and Architecture Practice for Citi’s Global Consumer Bank all joined the board effective 6 May 2021. These three experts come armed with a wealth of knowledge on financial and banking technology and are well-known for forging meaningful change across the sector.  

As banks and fintechs navigate the evolving landscape, the financial services industry is being shaped by new consumer trends - from the rise of a cashless society to the pandemic-driven shift towards online banking and mobile payments. The pandemic spurred banks to make years’ worth of technology and business model changes in only a matter of months and, according to research from the IBM Institute for Business Value, COVID-19 spurred shoppers to explore different tools and services, like mobile contactless payments, with many saying they will continue to use them in the future.  

To support these changes, there will be a continued focus on technological development this year and beyond. BIAN’s recent board appointments will provide expert counsel and help the organisation navigate this period of immense disruption.  

Commenting on the appointments, Hans Tesselaar, Executive Director of BIAN, says: “I am extremely pleased to welcome Charaka, Shanker, and Balaji to our Executive Board. They each bring a tremendous amount of industry knowledge and passion for technological innovation. They will provide our board with unique insight as we step into the unknown. BIAN has a significant role to play in helping organisations transform and innovate as they build the financial services industry of the future. We look forward to working with these companies throughout this transition.” 

With over 20 years of technology and transformation experience, in his role at PNC Bank, Charaka Kithulegoda is responsible for all technical aspects of PNC’s Retail Banking business, including the transformation of its existing Core Banking platform and applications aimed at delivering a differentiated and superior customer experience. Speaking about his appointment to the BIAN Executive Board, Charaka says, “BIAN enables transformation and innovation at scale by providing standards, frameworks and tools for the financial services industry. I am proud to appointed to BIAN’s Executive Board and looking forward to working with the members to define the platform for the next level of innovation in Financial Services.” 

With more than 25 years of global financial services experience, Shanker Ramamurthy is the worldwide leader of IBM’s banking consulting practice in IBM Global Business Services, focused on banks’ digital transformation, core banking, and payments. He is also the President of the IBM Industry Academy. Shanker comments, “The winners of tomorrow will be the banks who have a technology and business strategy to support the bank of the future and are prioritizing innovation powered by hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence. BIAN has a significant role in helping banks do just this. I am proud to be joining BIAN’s Executive Board and to be part of this journey.” 

Balaji Kumar has over 20 years of experience working across the technology sector. In his current role at Citi, he is responsible for defining architecture standards, creating a culture of engineering excellence, and implementing technology frameworks that enable rapid development and deployment of software products at scale across the bank. On his appointment, Balaji shares, “Technology is a real differentiator in every industry, and it’s forcing organisations to consider how they adapt to survive. I’m excited to join BIAN’s Executive Board during this time of accelerated disruption and to support BIAN’s efforts towards cross-industry collaboration.”  

David Vander, Regional Vice President of Business Value Services at Salesforce, was also re-appointed as BIAN’s treasurer and advisory board member.