Fintech, Finance, Technology, Banking Highlights – 23 November 2018

Credit card fraud index: £4.1 billion stolen as a result of credit card fraud in the UK in past year

One in five (22%) people have been defrauded via their credit card in the last year, according to a survey of 2,000 UK adults commissioned by comparethemarket.com.

This equates to 11.4 million people nationwide, highlighting the rising levels of credit card cyber risk in the UK.

comparethemarket.com’s Credit Card Fraud Index found that many people who had their credit cards compromised, also lost significant sums of money. In nearly half (45%) of fraud cases, customers found themselves out of pocket, with hackers stealing an average of £801 per person. Based on these figures, comparethemarket.com estimates that £4.1billion has been stolen from the UK population in the last year*.

Latest figures show that online sales now represent 17%** of total UK retail sales. Cyber Monday this year falls on Monday 26 November, when millions of people take to the internet to find Christmas discounts from online retailers – presenting a major opportunity for hackers. However, it seems that customers are not taking steps to protect themselves; nearly a fifth (19%) of people who had been hacked admitted they didn’t have a backup credit card, in case something should happen which meant they could not access their account.

Despite high levels of credit card fraud, consumer awareness of the problem remains low. In over a third of cases (34%), people who had their accounts compromised did not know or couldn’t remember how the hack occurred. Similarly, in nearly a third of cases (31%), banks did not alert people to the fact they had been hacked, suggesting that in some cases, levels of security may be somewhat lax.

Yoyo Wallet signs up easyCoffee

easyCoffee, the coffee chain launched by CEO and entertainment entrepreneur Nathan Lowry and easyJet tycoon Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, has forged an alliance with London based Yoyo, Europe’s fastest growing mobile payments and loyalty marketing platform, to provide a new app-based payments and loyalty solution for its customers, as both companies rapidly expand across the UK.

Yoyo will build and roll out an easyCoffee payments and loyalty app experience, which will provide customers with:

  • Secure, straight-through mobile payment
  • Automated easyCoffee loyalty accumulation
  • Instant easyCoffee rewards redemption and voucher sharing
  • Digital receipt collection
  • All of this delivered to customers in a single moment at the point-of-sale

Through Yoyo’s unique commerce API, easyCoffee will also capture fully anonymised customer basket data at the point-of-sale, enabling the new coffee chain to analyse and segment purchasing behaviour to deliver the most personalised rewards, offers and in-store experiences.

In 2016 easyCoffee opened its first shops in central London and has since expanded to Edinburgh, Hastings, Orpington and Dartford.

The coffee chain now plans to open 200 new shops by 2021, with its new Yoyo-powered app playing a major part of easyCoffee’s ambitious growth strategy. On day one of the app launch, 20 new easyCoffee shops will already have opened.

easyCoffee founder Nathan Lowry said: “We are so chuffed at our link up with an experienced innovator such as Yoyo and look forward to launching in shops and vending UK wide.”

BearingPoint and IBM forge RegTech partnership

Management and technology consultancy BearingPoint, which ranks among the leading providers of Regulatory and Risk Technology (RegTech/RiskTech), announced today that its RegTech product unit has formed a partnership with IBM Services for regulatory reporting.

With their joint offering, the companies will help small and medium-sized financial institutions, which are struggling with the steadily increasing regulatory requirements. New regulations such as AnaCredit and MREL, new data models, and challenging timelines for new regulatory requirements threaten to exceed the capacities of smaller institutions. The joint offering allows financial institutions to outsource their regulatory reporting processes and covers both the business processes and technical operation as well as software maintenance and further development.

Jean-Henrik Zitterbart, Industry Leader Banking & Financial Markets DACH, IBM, says:
“We see growing demand for business process outsourcing services in the market as smaller institutions find it increasingly difficult to keep pace with regulatory requirements in terms of workload, financial and risk aspects. This is one of the reasons why we strengthened our team a year ago with an operational reporting specialist team and have already taken over the technical reporting for several clients. Our joint offering with BearingPoint is based on a standardized solution and processes that enable economies of scale.”