Technology companies such as Alibaba, Amazon, Facebook, Google (or more precisely its mother company, Alphabet) and Tencent started providing financial services. That generates potential economies of scale.
One of China’s largest state-owned banks, the Bank of China, opened a new branch in the Romanian capital of Bucharest. The new European branch is expected to help financing China-EU connectivity projects.
In the middle of October 2019, Velvon Bank, the sister company of the Czech online bank Air Bank, announced that it had been granted a German banking license. Velvon chose Munich as the seat for its German operations.
Sberbank, Russian largest bank, made a pilot blockchain transaction. Under the leadership of the former economy minister Herman Gref, Sberbank has been focusing on blockchain technology for nearly two years.
The activity of the financial technology companies has become a permanent feature of the global financial system, and an average of 64 per cent of consumers have used their services this year.
Over the past five years, Ukraine has undergone a genuine revolution in the electronic payments market – the number of such payments has increased several-fold. At the same time, there has been an increase in the number of...
The percentage of Poles that own a bank account has increased from 70 to 87 per cent since 2011, but only 52 per cent actively manage their accounts using mobile devices and the internet.
The number of newly formed companies is growing at a slower rate and they have to compete with the banks, which are gradually catching up in terms of technological advancement.
Recent celebration of ten years of the Vienna Initiative was another reason for the deeper financial integration of the emerging European countries. Vienna Initiative is a framework for safeguarding the financial stability of...
On March 2019, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) revealed a vast offshore network that was used to channel billions of Euros out of Russia, relying on support of a major Russian bank.