A digital pound consultation is expected to be published in “weeks not months.” The comments were made by city minister Andrew Griffith during a Treasury Select Committee hearing on the crypto industry earlier this month. Asked by the committee chair, Harriett Baldwin, whether the government...
Airtel Africa has acquired 5G spectrum capacity in Nigeria, one of the region’s largest economies. The news, announced by the company this week, means that Airtel will become just the third network operator that has been issued a 5G license by the Nigerian Communications Commission...
Recent Big Tech moves highlight advancements in the design of augmented reality (AR) glasses. While the concept has been around for a while — it’s been about a decade since Google Glass first gave AR glasses mainstream attention — Meta’s move to snap up the...
Beyond convenience, there are major safety advantages to a cashless society. Proponents of cashless transactions and electronic money have often pointed to the risk of violent crime associated with storing and transporting large volumes of cash as an argument for reducing its presence in the...
Pending U.K. legislation could boost small businesses’ access to the government’s massive pool of procurement money. The Procurement Bill is designed to make it easier for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to capture more of the country’s $366 billion the government spends on goods and...
The U.K. is upgrading its instant payment system to incorporate a modern ISO 20022-compliant architecture. Known as the New Payment Architecture (NPA), the initial plan is to upgrade the existing Faster Payments real-time rails, with an option to include the older Bacs system in the...
The U.K. pensions dashboard program has been delayed by technical setbacks. The nation’s Money and Pensions Service (MAPS) has fallen behind schedule with its pre-launch testing, according to a Tuesday (Dec. 3) report from The Times. Although there has been no official announcement on the...
Trade finance firm Afreximbank has allocated $1.5 billion to help Caribbean countries access its services. The Cairo-based company announced the arrangement Monday (Dec. 26), saying it followed the addition of nine Caribbean countries to its Afreximbank Partnership Agreement at the first Africa-Caribbean Trade and Investment...
The African Development Bank Group is supporting the trade finance efforts of Bank One Limited. The Group will provide a $40 million trade finance package that is meant to help Bank One of Mauritius increase its capacity to provide trade finance to small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), local...
