FinTech Weekly - Fintech News Issue #321

Bradley Riss, chief commercial officer at Checkout.com, joins us on this latest episode of the What the Fintech? podcast. This week for our news in numbers we talk about Visa’s €1.8 billion acquisition of Tink, and the rising number of UK adults owning cryptocurrency. For our discussion segment we chat payments data, and how it can form the basis for wholesale change in both sides of the industry.

In this panel with Ian Miell, Mark Schwartz, Kyle Brown, Barbara Eder and Jonathan Haines, looking bureaucracy in the face and talk about cloud-native, security challenges, automation (and issues with MBAs in todays enterprise world.

Incorporating AI requires commitment and follow-through, McSherry said. Visa consistently sees a 20% to 30% lift for advanced AI methods over “more garden-variety technologies,” but this requires heavy investment.

Ethereum’s upcoming London hard fork could provide a perfect entry point for bullish ETH options traders.

Last year we covered BestDoctor’s series A round when the Russian insurtech startup raised $4.5 million for its online medical insurance platform for corporates, which also offers telemedicine services to employees.

What a first half of the year in the European insurtech scene: over €1.7B was invested across 52 deals. That’s basically more than 2019 and 2020 (read more) combined!

Six of China’s top banks have tasked their employees with promoting digital yuan wallets to 200 to 300 people a year.

Nordic mobile wallets MobilePay, Pivo and Vipps are joining forces to create a single payments app with a combined user base of 11 million consumers across Finland, Denmark and Norway. Glenn Söderholm, head of personal & business customers in Danske Bank, says: "It is very expensive to compete with global competitors in this space and in order to continue to develop the most attractive solutions for our customers, MobilePay must be part of something bigger to gain scale and pool investments for further innovation."

The credit card giant initially rolled out the Digital Receipts feature in February, giving all card holders in the US more information about the things they bought from certain merchants, including store name, logo, order number, date of order, items purchased, details of cost and merchant description. Now, American Express will do the same for Amazon purchases, providing order numbers and delivery details. The company said the feature is part of a larger partnership with Verifi.

The need for greater operational efficiency has taken on new urgency

The proposed rules would close a gap that let the ride-hailing company Didi go public on Wall Street before assuring Beijing that its data was safe.

Apple Inc. is working on a new service that will let consumers pay for any Apple Pay purchase in installments over time, rivaling the “buy now, pay later” offerings popularized by services from Affirm Holdings Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc. The upcoming service, known internally as Apple Pay Later, will use Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Tiger Global Management has launched a new hedge fund.The Tiger Cub founded by Chase Coleman earlier this month raised about $1.1 billion for Tiger Global Crossover and an equivalent offshore version.The new fund is designed to devote a much bigger portion of its assets to private investments than its long-short

CBI, hub for technological innovation and digitalisation of the financial industry has partnered up with CRIF, global company specialised in credit bureau & business information, advanced digital solution for business development and open banking.

GitHub Copilot is an OpenAI-powered Visual Studio Code extension that can suggest lines of code or entire functions as you type. GitHub cautioned that Copilot does not always write “perfect” code, and that sometimes the suggested code will not work.

Women made up a third (33%) of researchers in 2018 and have achieved parity when it comes to numbers in life sciences in many countries, the report says. But women make up just 28% of graduates in engineering and 40% of those in computer sciences – skills vital for the jobs of the future, it added. Female workers also account for just 22% of people working in artificial intelligence (AI) worldwide, although there are regional differences, according to UNESCO.