Everyone in England can have two free lateral flow tests (LFTs) a week from tomorrow (Friday 9 April) as the Government drives towards ending the COVID-19 lockdown.

The inexpensive tests can now be delivered to the home, in addition to existing LFT supply to the workplace, schools or designated sites and to people at risk, including frontline NHS workers, care home staff and residents.

Self-administered and able to deliver highly accurate results in as little as 30 minutes, LFTs are being offered for use whether people have COVID symptoms or not.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said: “Around 1 in 3 people who have COVID-19 show no symptoms, and as we re-open society and resume parts of life we have all dearly missed, regular rapid testing is going to be fundamental in helping us quickly spot positive cases and squash any outbreaks.

“The vaccine programme has been a shot in the arm for the whole country, but reclaiming our lost freedoms and getting back to normal hinges on us all getting tested regularly.”

While vaccine development took centre stage, the Government identified a key role for frequent mass testing by partnering with US firm Innova Medical Group – the world’s No1 LFT supplier – and using the codename ‘Operation Moonshot’.

The tests use cutting edge nanotechnology and their emergence into the national limelight drew comment from the co-founder of the not-for-profit World Nano Foundation (WNF) which promotes innovation in the field:

“It’s good to see the UK Government expanding Operation Moonshot because it will underpin the end of lockdown and allow self-regulated day passes to enable sports and leisure venues to fully re-open,” said WNF co-founder Paul Sheedy.

Ultimately, it will also show that frequent rapid mass testing can be the additional ‘insurance policy’ to end lockdowns everywhere and protect against future pandemics. 

“Epidemiological experts know early detection and response is vital against new diseases. Mass and frequent testing enables this and suppresses transmission by breaking the chains of infection. 

“Countries across Europe and elsewhere are seeing recent surges in infection because they are not using this approach, which we have demonstrated to governments all over the world using our Test2Suppress™ (www.test2suppress.com/research) model to show how frequent rapid mass testing alongside an international vaccination strategy will squash the virus.

“Test2Suppress™ works even when a small minority refuse to take the test or those testing positive refuse to isolate, because the vast and responsible majority will still drive infection rates downwards and leave the virus nowhere to go. 

“We understand that self-testing accuracy starts at 60-70% for the first test, but rises to more than 85% next time and 95+% after that – these are simple tests and results are clearer as people become familiar with them.

“A twice-weekly testing ‘insurance policy’ is a small price to pay for an end to the constant uncertainty and crushing impact on mental health and economic cost of a lockdown.” 

“As we have seen in France recently with the Breton Variant, where the PCR tests weren’t detecting it, you must have various forms of community testing constantly so new variants do not get a chance to accelerate transmissions with asymptomatic carriers.”

Getting a test (for more information, go to: gov.uk/coronavirus)

• home ordering
• workplace testing programmes, on-site or at home for companies with more than 10 workers
• community testing, offered by all local authorities
• collection at a local PCR test site during specific test collection time windows
• testing onsite at schools and colleges

A new ‘Pharmacy Collect’ service is also launching for anyone aged over 18 without symptoms.

If testing at home, individuals need to register their results online or call 119. They should self-isolate if positive and order a confirmatory PCR test. Anyone with symptoms of COVID-19 should book a test online or by calling 119.

Recent NHS Test and Trace analysis shows that for every 1,000 LFTs carried out, there is less than one false positive result; the tests detect high levels of virus and are very effective in finding people without symptoms yet highly likely to transmit the disease.

Dr Susan Hopkins, COVID-19 Stategic Response Director at Public Health England and Chief Medical Adviser to NHS Test and Trace, said:

“Rapid testing helps us find COVID-19 cases that we wouldn’t otherwise know about, helping to break chains of transmission. These tests are effective in detecting people that are infectious and therefore most likely to transmit infection to others. They are another tool we now have to help maintain lower infection rates.

“I encourage everyone to take up the offer of these free rapid tests – they are quick and easy to carry out in your own home.”

EBANX, a global fintech that provides payment solutions in Latin America, has announced a partnership with MACH, the largest digital bank in Chile. Global companies and international websites will now be able to offer MACH's digital wallet as an additional payment option to its customers in the country, expanding their total addressable market with one single integration.

With that, EBANX now integrates with six digital wallets as a payment method in Latin America, being one of the pioneers in this payment solution for international e-commerce.

"We are very happy to offer MACH Pay as one more important payment option in Chile, the most digitized market in Latin America and where e-commerce is expected to grow by 23% in 2021. Digital payment methods are booming throughout the region, and this partnership between MACH and EBANX will surely expand access to global products and services and allow global companies to reach new customers in Chile," says Juliana Etcheverry, director of Expansion LatAm and Strategic Partnerships at EBANX.

Created as a spinoff of Banco Bci, MACH is a digital bank that offers a prepaid, free digital account. It allows customers to pay for physical or digital purchases through their smartphones, working as a digital wallet. MACH Pay is MACH's payment solution, which allows customers to pay in physical and digital stores using their MACH accounts. 

“This partnership with EBANX will help us move forward in our path to improve our customers' financial life, giving them, among others, safe, fast, and simple payment methods to ease their daily needs. MACH Pay is a clear example of it, and our customers will now have the chance to experience this solution in many international merchants through EBANX,” says Ignacio Larrain, CEO at MACH.

Digital payments momentum

After gaining traction during the pandemic, digital payments are now rapidly growing in Latin America. In Chile alone, digital wallets, for instance, grew by 32% in 2020 and represented USD 400 million in online purchases during the year, according to Beyond Borders, EBANX's annual study on e-commerce in LatAm.

Digital wallets allow customers to pay for purchases through their smartphones, usually offering multiple payment options (such as cash, debit cards, domestic credit cards, bank transfer, and installments) with just one click and almost instant confirmation. Due to their flexibility and convenience, they are one of the most used payment methods in the region.

In Latin America overall, digital wallets represent around 11% of the e-commerce market, amounting to approximately USD 20 billion in transactions, according to data from consultancy firm AMI (Americas Market Intelligence). Brazil, for instance, is already the world's fourth-largest market for mobile wallets, and 61% of smartphone users have at least one of them.

Worldline [Euronext: WLN], the European leader in the payments and transactional services industry, will explore the influences that COVID-19 has had on merchants during a live session at ePay Summit, ‘What does it take to be the leading merchant payment provider in an era of “new normal”?’ Taking place on Thursday 15^thApril at 15:00pm BST, the session will explore how merchants and payment providers can collaborate to provide personalised, unique and regulatory compliant services.

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit and forced offline merchants to either close for good or switch to eCommerce trade, they had to adopt strategies in order to maintain their customers. Merchants that are new to eCommerce trade are not used to shoppers emptying their baskets with one click if they encounter any friction and therefore it is crucial that merchants adapt and adopt new approaches to operating online.

During the hour-long live session, speakers will discuss the benefits of a merchant and provider collaboration and how payment service providers can build a strategy which nurtures the launches of added values offerings for corporates, SMEs and consumers. Guests will also highlight ways in which merchants are able to tackle big data security breaches.

Lee Jones, Managing Director (GSV) of Northern Europe at Worldline Global will join the panel, including Houssem Assadi, CEO and co-founder of Deja Mobile, Andrea Dunlop, Managing Director at The Access Group, Christos Ttiniozou, Director of i-Spiral and Neil Smith, Head of Partnerships – EMEA at Forter. The discussion will be moderated by Rogier Rouppe van der Voort, COO at PCN.

For more information or to register to attend, visit: https://www.epaysummit.com/registration

Synechron, Inc., in partnership with Squirro and Standard Chartered Bank, have been named winners in the 2021 BIG Innovation AI Excellence Awards in the “Natural Language Processing” category and for “Best Digital Collaboration Project” at The Asset Triple A Awards.

 State Street Corporation today announced that it has been appointed by M&G Corporate Services Limited, part of M&G plc, (M&G) to provide outsourced middle office services. The agreement builds on a 10-year strategic partnership with M&G that will see State Street extend its current fund accounting and custody services for the wholesale fund ranges to provide middle office services, including portfolio services, reference data, cash reporting, transaction management, asset servicing and recordkeeping. State Street will perform these services largely relying upon BlackRock’s Aladdin^® platform licensed by M&G.

State Street was one of the founding partners of Aladdin Provider and is a leader in the adoption of Aladdin data exchange (PDX) and the Aladdin middle office model. By leveraging the Aladdin experience and knowledge from M&G, State Street will administer middle office services on Aladdin, exemplifying how State Street offers clients the benefit of choice regarding their front and middle-office systems. The service model incorporates the use of Aladdin Accounting and Aladdin PDX messaging.

“We are delighted to expand our strong relationship with M&G,” said Joerg Ambrosius, chief executive officer, Europe, Middle East and Africa at State Street. “We are committed to providing solutions for a wide range of our clients’ needs including our State Street Alpha^SM clients who can utilize both Aladdin and State Street product and services. This marks another important step in helping asset managers to stay focused on their investment process, lower their costs, improve efficiency and deliver desired investment outcomes.”

“This agreement is part of our five-year transformation programme to position M&G for sustainable long-term growth,” said Roddy Thomson, M&G’s chief operating officer. “It will enable us to focus on what we do best as investment managers, while developing a truly global and scalable investment operation in partnership with State Street.”

As part of the agreement, it is proposed that a number of M&G employees will transfer to State Street in London under a TUPE arrangement by 1 July 2021.

PractiTest, the leader in testing management solutions, is releasing its eighth annual State of Testing© report containing insights from testing professionals from around the world working in small, medium, and large enterprises.

Organizations are turning to experienced specialists to handle their testing, as 80% of all testing is being done by test engineers, test leads, testers, and automation testers.  Nearly 70% of all testers have at least 5 years of experience. In addition, Agile is growing in dominance, with 92% of organizations reporting to be working with Agile or DevOps methodologies.

“It is no surprise that organizations want to be Agile and implement DevOps practices that allow them to deliver products faster to the field. This is not a technical need, but a business requirement from within organizations that wish to have faster product releases, but without any major quality or performance issues,” said Yaniv Iny, CEO at PractiTest. “This report highlights the emphasis that organizations are placing on testing and provides a look into the future of testing.”

Key Findings

Testing is becoming more technical, with close to 90% of organizations implementing automation as part of their integrated QA approach. Test automation, however, is not limited to the testing team, with development organizations adopting CI/CD practices in close to 85% of their projects. Furthermore, the responsibility of testers is also expanding outside their traditional functions, with 59% of testing teams adopting “Shifting Left” practices, while around 40% of organizations are “Shifting Right” by implementing operations such as Testing in Production and Chaos Engineering.

Still, and somewhat surprisingly, traditional, dedicated testing teams are growing. The number of organizations with 16 or more testers increased by 10% over 2020, to 34%. This growth is indicative of the increased reliance organizations are placing on their testing teams.

COVID-19 did not impact testing professionals’ income over the last year. In fact, 71% of respondents reported that their income was not affected by the pandemic. Testers with 5-10 years of experience earned an average of $89K in North America, and $76K in Australia/New Zealand. However, 54% reported that they were concerned about job stability, an increase of over 30% since last year.

COVID-19 has had a direct influence on a number of aspects. It changed the way testers learned new skills, with the number of testers reporting that they attended online conferences, meetups, and seminars increasing from 40.5% in 2019 to 49.5%. The use of online communities and forums grew by 35%, from 32.5% to 44%. Meanwhile, formal training dropped by 16%, with only one in three testers saying they participated in that type of training.

New Trends Around Automated and Manual Testing

The 2021 survey showed that behavior-driven development (BDD) has continued to gain momentum. The use of BDD as a testing development model has increased by nearly 59% since 2018, with 27% of respondents reporting that their organization uses it. BDD, together with TDD and ATDD, represents 28% of the tasks testers performed in 2020, an increase of 13% over the previous year’s survey. Results also showed a 17% rise in the use of BDD in scripting and test automation. These responses indicate that the use of BDD is on the rise and is a trend we may see into the future.

Automation is another trend that is changing the testing environment. Automation skills featured prominently in the open-ended question that asked which technologies and subjects would be important to the testing world in 3-5 years. Additionally, an overwhelming 97% of respondents said that functional testing automation was either important or very important for testers to succeed, while 96% felt that Test automation patterns, principles, practices were critical as well. These responses indicate that automation will continue to be a key component of the testing world for years to come.   

EQUOS, the institutional-grade cryptocurrency exchange owned by Nasdaq-listed Diginex [EQOS], today announced that EQUOS Origin (EQO) officially starts trading, with traders receiving a share of over one million EQO tokens that have been issued to price-taker traders on the platform.

This comes as trading volumes on EQUOS have reached record levels in recent weeks in anticipation of the EQO launch. 

With the full launch of EQO now complete, the EQO/USDC trading pair is now live on EQUOS, providing immediate liquidity for traders looking to buy or sell.

Holders of EQO receive a number of benefits that are unique to EQUOS.

This includes reduced trading fees, access to future airdrops, staking rewards, collateral against derivatives transactions, and enhanced interest for crypto lending. There will also be a buy back and burn mechanism implemented once the token has been fully distributed.

In accordance with the EQO whitepaper, EQO will be distributed every day in the form of trading and staking rewards over a two-year period. Every 90 daily Reward Blocks the rewards halve, increasing the similar to Bitcoin, and highlighting its increasing scarcity. The whitepaper is available in English, Chinese, and Korean.

Richard Byworth, CEO of Diginex, said: “It’s extremely encouraging to see record-breaking volume on EQUOS, as traders realize the benefits of owning EQO. The EQUOS Origin token offers a great range of utilities and incentives for traders using the EQUOS platform, and we’re very excited about how this will continue to spur the explosive growth we have been seeing.”

TrueLayer, the London startup that offers a developer-friendly platform for companies, including other fintechs, to utilise open banking, is disclosing $70 million in new funding.

The Series D round is led by new investor Addition. Existing investors, including Anthemis Group, Connect Ventures, Mouro Capital, Northzone and Temasek, also participated. New investors include Visionaries Club, Zack Kanter (CEO Stedi), Daniel Graf (ex-Uber, Google, Twitter) and David Avgi (ex-CEO SafeCharge, CEO UniPaaS).

TrueLayer says the Series D brings the total investment to date to $142 million. The injection of capital will be used to continue scaling its open banking network, which brings together payments, financial data and identity to enable companies to build new products that improve “how we spend, save, and transact online”.

This will include further development of premium open banking-based services that go beyond simply accessing open banking APIs and will enable more innovation across financial services, including embedded finance and payments more generally.

To do this, and to support what it says is growing demand, TrueLayer is expanding its engineering, product and commercial teams. In the past 12 months, the fintech has expanded its services across 12 European markets.

Over the years, TrueLayer CEO and co-founder Francesco Simoneschi and I have often pontificated on what open banking’s killer use case or use cases may turn out to be. We may finally have our answer: payments.

That’s because one aspect of open banking is payment initiation, which lets an authorised third party initiate the transfer of money out of your bank account on your behalf as an alternative to card payments, which were never built with online payments in mind.

“We believe open banking payments will become the default way to pay online, replacing other payment methods in the next five years,” says Simoneschi. “Open banking is digitally native and mobile-first, moving money at a fraction of the cost, securely and conveniently, while also delivering a vastly better consumer experience.”

The past year has also exposed some of the problems with existing payments methods, as people have turned to digital channels to manage every aspect of their lives. “The problem is cards,” says the TrueLayer CEO, “which weren’t designed for online and have been retrofitted into current online payment flows. Newer digital approaches such as Google Pay or Apple Pay paper over those cracks but don’t change the fundamentals."

Simoneschi says the company has seen the use of its payments API grow rapidly as more consumers embrace instant bank payments. Volumes grew by 600x over the last year, driven by more and more companies adopting open banking payments, including the likes of Revolut, Trading 212, Freetrade and Nutmeg.

“We typically see that 1 in 3 customers choose the open banking payment option after trying it once,” he notes, revealing that for some clients, closer to 70% of their customers are using open banking as the primary payment method.

“There are a number of reasons why it makes sense for customers. For one, they don’t need to remember card details. Instead, they authenticate with their face or fingerprint on their mobile device, instantly and securely. Plus, they’ll never need to update stored details if their card is lost, stolen or expires.”

Open banking payments as a checkout option benefits merchants too, argues Simoneschi. “These payments typically convert 20% better than cards (and up to 40% with our flows) and have success rates higher than 95%, equating to millions or hundreds of millions in recovered revenue at the end of the year,” adds the TrueLayer co-founder.

Puremarkets Ltd, with trading name Pure Digital, have entered into an agreement with State Street’s Currenex, a market-leading technology provider offering high-performance trading technology, to provide the trading infrastructure as technology provider for Pure Digital’s new and unique wholesale digital currency trading platform. Additionally, Pure Digital and State Street intend to further explore the digital currency trading space.

Pure Digital will be a fully automated, high throughput OTC market for digital assets and cryptocurrencies with physical delivery and bank custody. Institutional participants will trade on the platform utilising bilateral credit enabling efficient capital utilisation and control for all trading participants. This will establish a robust market for price discovery and exchange of risk. Trading is expected to commence middle of 2021.

Pure Digital will be multi-custodial. Trading participants will be free to leverage their preferred digital asset custody solutions and manage risk through a smart custody routing mechanism.

The buy side will be able to participate in the Pure Digital platform through their existing Prime Bank / Custodial relationships and infrastructure. The platform will adopt FX-industry standard APIs and best execution to minimize technology cost for participants.

“Pure Digital is pleased to explore the digital asset space with State Street as we share the same vision for the future of the digital currency market”, says Campbell Adams, Founder of Pure Digital.

“We are excited to partner with Currenex, an industry leader in FX, on this initiative; as we work to transpose FX infrastructure to the crypto space via a bank-led consortium.” Says Lauren Kiley, CEO of Pure Digital.

“Currenex is thrilled to leverage our experience and expertise in the FX and digital asset trading marketplace to provide Pure Digital with robust technology and infrastructure for this exciting digital currency trading initiative.” According to David Newns, Global Head of Execution Services for GlobalLink, State Street Global Markets.

Further announcements will be made in due course.

Europe’s leading open banking platform, today announced it has secured a $70m Series D investment round led by new investor Addition. The latest raise reflects the growing demand for its open banking-based services and marks another significant milestone for TrueLayer on its mission to open up finance, building an open banking network that brings together payments, financial data, and identity to redefine how people spend, save, and transact online.

Existing investors, including Anthemis Group, Connect Ventures, Mouro Capital, Northzone, and Temasek, also participated, with a significant increase to the company’s valuation. Additional investors in the round include Visionaries Club, Surojit Chatterjee (CPO Coinbase), Zack Kanter (CEO Stedi), Daniel Graf (ex-Uber, Google, Twitter) and David Avgi (ex-CEO SafeCharge, CEO UniPaaS). It brings the total investment to date in TrueLayer to $142m.

The new funding will be used to fuel global expansion and accelerate the development of premium open banking-based services that will continue to drive innovation and revenue growth for clients. It will also be used to expand TrueLayer’s engineering, product and commercial teams to meet the increasing global demand for its open banking platform.

TrueLayer’s API-first platform accounts for more than half of all open banking traffic in the UK, Ireland and Spain, processing billions of pounds in payments. It powers services for some of Europe's fastest-growing brands, including Revolut, Trading 212 and Payoneer.

TrueLayer has a market-leading payment conversion rate that is 22% higher than other providers, according to OpenBanking UK and other bank sources, and up to 40% higher than cards. Merchants offering TrueLayer as a payment method in their checkout have found that on average, 1 in 3 consumers chose to pay via TrueLayer. As a result, open banking is displacing other payment methods, such as cards, as the default payment option online.

Over the past 12 months, TrueLayer has expanded its services across 12 European markets, growing payment volumes by 600x, and adding hundreds of new customers across digital banking, eCommerce, trading and investment, wealth management, crypto and iGaming. It has continued to innovate, for example, with the recent launch of PayDirect, combining instant pay-in capabilities with instant pay-outs, to deliver a higher converting, lower fraud method for online payments.

“When Luca and I started TrueLayer in 2016, we imagined open banking becoming a new digital channel for solving cost and complexities around payments, digital identity, credit data and much more. We wanted to open up this newly built infrastructure to many businesses and consumers. It is such a joy to see our vision coming alive and open banking based payments quickly becoming the new normal,” commented Francesco Simoneschi, CEO and Co-Founder at TrueLayer.

TrueLayer is rapidly expanding as demand for its open banking platform increases, largely driven by consumer demand for digital financial services that work better for them, and give them more control over their financial lives.

“We have achieved this milestone thanks to the hard work of our stellar team. Bringing radical new products into the hands of consumers and businesses is incredibly exciting,” explained Luca Martinetti, Co-Founder and CTO at TrueLayer. “This new financial network we are building on top of open architectures has massive long term implications for the whole fintech ecosystem and we won’t compromise our vision in any way.”

“That is why it is so important to select investors that can help you to plan for the next 15 years, not the next 15 months,” added Simoneschi. “The Addition team thinks very long term and it has been such a pleasure working together. They complement the incredibly strong group of experienced backers who align with our vision of how financial services are evolving.”

Lee Fixel, Founder of Addition, commented: “TrueLayer is ideally positioned to benefit from the trends shaping the future of financial services as more and more companies embed digitally native payments into their platforms. We look forward to supporting the TrueLayer team as they scale their offering and drive continued innovation.”