General News

February 1, 2021 @ 10:12 am By Omar Faridi  |  

Crypto Broker AG, which is the Crypto Finance Group‘s brokerage, has reportedly been issued a license to serve as a securities house along with a bilateral trading facility by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA). After this license has gone into effect or become… Read More

February 1, 2021 @ 8:20 am By Samantha Hurst  |  

Mastercard announced over the weekend that it has teamed up with Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC) to launch new enhanced regional cybersecurity efforts through the “Cyber Forward” program. According to Mastercard, Cyber Forward is to build secure digital ecosystems through public-private partnerships. “The Global Cyber Forward program… Read More

January 31, 2021 @ 2:22 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

Alchemy Pay has introduced a $500,000 Payment Ecosystem Incentive Fund in order to accelerate development in the blockchain-focused payments sector. Alchemy Pay, which claims to be a pioneer of the world’s first hybrid fiat and crypto payment system, notes that the digital currency space has… Read More

January 31, 2021 @ 2:15 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

Digital asset exchange Kraken has confirmed that it has added support for Flow (FLOW) trading which was introduced on Wednesday (January 27, 2021) at around 15:30 UTC. At the time of the launch, only FLOW tokens that had been earned via staking rewards were tradable…. Read More

January 30, 2021 @ 10:12 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) has revealed that their organization and the University of Cambridge Judge Business School are teaming up with the Inter-American Development Bank, which works to improve lives of people in the Latin America (LatAm) and the Caribbean region. We… Read More

January 30, 2021 @ 5:25 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

The European venture capital markets managed to perform reasonably well last year, even though there was a significant slowdown in funding or financing following the COVID-19 outbreak (during Q1 2020 and also leading into Q2 2020), Crunchbase data confirms. Funding provided to European startups during… Read More

January 30, 2021 @ 3:02 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

Divvy, a modern payment and expense management platform for businesses, which notably secured $165 million through its Series D funding round, making it one of only 14 Fintechs this month to raise a mega-round ($100M+ or more) in January 2021, notes that during the last… Read More

January 29, 2021 @ 2:20 pm By Samantha Hurst  |  

  UK banking group NatWest announced on Thursday an additional £1 billion in funding to help support female-led businesses in the UK recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. NatWest reported that the goal is to ultimately help female entrepreneurs to scale and grow and builds on the… Read More

January 29, 2021 @ 1:14 pm By JD Alois  |  

On January 26th, S3 Partners reported that GameStop (NYSE:GME) short-sellers were down around $5 billion. In just a few days, that amount may have grown a bit larger. According to the blog post by S3: “GME short interest is $5.51 billion; 71.79 million shares shorted;… Read More

January 29, 2021 @ 11:25 am By Samantha Hurst  |  

  Barclays announced on Thursday the New York Class of 2021 for the Barclays Accelerator, powered by Techstars. According to Barclays, the 13-week program is designed to fast-track the next generation of fintechs. “Participating companies will collaborate with a team of Barclays executives, the Techstars… Read More

January 29, 2021 @ 9:18 am By JD Alois  |  

Robinhood CEO and founder Vlad Tenev visited with CNBC last night professing that actions taken to mitigate trading in GameStop (NYSE:GME) was to protect Robinhood as well as its users. Tenev’s decision to shut down purchases of GME was joined by outrage, not just by… Read More

January 29, 2021 @ 8:20 am By Omar Faridi  |  

Cordelia Kafetz, who was responsible for helping to launch Bank of England’s (BoE) Fintech hub in 2018 and has also served in key roles as part of the Payments Policy Team, has reportedly decided to join UK’s digital bank Starling. Starling Bank has confirmed that… Read More

January 29, 2021 @ 8:15 am By Omar Faridi  |  

Germany-based lending company Commerzbank has announced that it will be cutting around 10,000 jobs and will permanently shut down 340 branches by 2024. The company confirmed that it plans to focus more on its digital transformation strategy so that it can lower operational costs and… Read More

January 28, 2021 @ 10:46 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

The Regtech Working Group, formed by the Steering Committee of Australia’s National Blockchain Roadmap, is currently undertaking a consultation in order to gain a better understanding of the wide-ranging views and perspectives regarding the use and adoption of distributed ledger technologies (DLT). The consultation is… Read More

January 28, 2021 @ 9:47 am By JD Alois  |  

Robinhood, a top investment platform for the next generation, has restricted trading certain shares of firms that have been targeted by trading forums on Reddit. Members of certain forums like Wallstreetbets, with 4.5 million members, have targeted listed firms that are highly shorted by hedge… Read More

January 27, 2021 @ 11:30 pm By Omar Faridi  |  

BNP Paribas (EPA: BNP), a French international banking group that’s ranked as the 8th largest bank in the world in terms of total assets (appr. €2 trillion), will be providing its Visa Premier cardholders the opportunity to update to a contactless fingerprint option for a… Read More

January 27, 2021 @ 2:47 pm By Samantha Hurst  |  

U.S. fintech Galileo announced on  Wednesday it has appointed Archana (Archie) Puri as its new Chief Product Officer. According to Galileo, Puri has more than 20 years of experience in technology products with a “strong domain” context in payments.  Prior to joining Galileo, Puri spent… Read More

January 27, 2021 @ 11:30 am By Samantha Hurst  |  

  Vlad Tenev, the CEO of modern trading platform Robinhood, sat down with Andrew Ross Sorkin to discuss how he thinks markets will be affected post the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion notably happened amid retail investors piling into equities at a rapid rate in the… Read More

January 27, 2021 @ 10:53 am By JD Alois  |  

A week ago, GameStop (NYSE:GME) was trading at around $37/share. Today, GameStop is trading at around $277  $334 a share – jumping by over 80%  120% today alone. If you thought the ICO rave was crazy, think again. More mundane traditionally regulated markets may be… Read More

January 27, 2021 @ 8:51 am By JD Alois  |  

Squeezed somewhere between “cancel culture” and “gig worker” the term crowdfunding has been added to the august Merriam-Webster dictionary. Although crowdfunding has been in use for more than a decade (unlike cancel culture which is more recent), it appears that the etymologists at Merriam-Webster have… Read More