Two prize-winning fintech firms have taken upon themselves to assist ethical finance firms to compete more efficiently with conventional providers. Soar and Acquired.com are assimilating their respective technology platforms to assist credit unions and ethical organizations in providing simplified, efficient and transparent services.

Founder and CEO of Soar, Andrew Duncan, explained the importance of this partnership,

“This is an important partnership for us and a statement about how we intend to improve business processes for our ethical clients. It will also allow their customers to view, manage and pay for a variety of services through one mobile and desktop application….Our clients will not be playing catch up with mainstream players as they are now enjoying the latest cutting-edge tech, which is a match for any organization in the financial services sector.”

The banking platform of Soar is currently being used by ten credit unions across the UK, which can now get access to Acquired.com’s complete range of payment products. The payment products will enable the hosting of new facilities, such as automated reconciliation, which will ensure total transparency during the whole transaction cycle.

In the past couple of months, Soar has been rewarded with around half a million pounds as a grant for R&D. This tie-up is being seen as an added encouragement in the company’s effort to expand further in the United Kingdom and also spread its reach into international markets.

In a big setback for the automobile industry, car sales all across the globe are likely to register their sharpest year-over-year fall in the current year 2019 as consumer demand from the US and Chinese economy has fallen.

According to reports, the car sales all over the world are likely to decline by approximately 3.1 million in the current financial year.

According to the Fitch economics team, this is going to be a much bigger fall in comparison to 2008. Fitch also highlighted data obtained from the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers while making this prediction.

The recession in the auto sales will cause a fall in global manufacturing, claimed Fitch.

The slowdown is in auto sales has just not begun overnight. Earlier in the month of January 2019, the US light-vehicle sales also reported a fall of 1% with higher fleet shipments counterbalancing lower retail volume. At that time government shutdown and harsh weather conditions affected consumer demand. And the car sales fell by 4% in December 2018.

According to Brain Coulton, chief economist at Fitch Ratings said,

“The downturn in the global car market since the middle of 2018 has been a key force behind the slump in global manufacturing and the car sales picture is turning out a lot worse than we expected back in May.”

According to data obtained earlier this year in April, sales at FCA US registered a decline of 7.3%. Toyota Motor Corp. continued its monthly losing streak to 5%. General Motors witnessed a fall of 8.3% and still looking for its first gain of the current financial year. Sales declined 5.2% at Ford Motor Co. Meanwhile, Nissan Motor Co. recorded a decline of 7.2%, and Mazda registered a fall of 19%.

The global passenger car sales also dipped to a whopping 80.6 million in the year 2018 from 81.8 million in 2017. Fitch said it emerged as the first annual fall since 2009. Reports suggest that global car sales are likely to dip by another 4% in the year 2019 to approximately 77.5 million new vehicle sales.

Leading real estate tech platform Entera, announced that it has managed to secure $7.5 million in a funding round that was led by Craft Ventures and Bullpen Capital. Chris Heller and ValueStream Ventures are other major participants in funding. The Entera platform provides its customers with data-based intelligence so that they can make informed decisions with regards to buying residential real estate.

The company has stated that it is going to use the fresh capital to expand its service to professional investors. Eric Wiesen, General Partner at Bullpen Capital, said,

As more professional capital moves into residential real estate, companies like Entera who provide leading technology and tools and a highly experienced team will play a critical role.

He also stated that although the real estate market has moved online, there was no platform like Entera that consolidated professional investors. The company is going to use the fresh capital to make further advancements to its technology so that it can cater to the specific needs of professionals. The company claims that the platform has facilitated transactions worth $12 billion for its customers this far.

However, one can expect that figure to go up significantly when it is opened up to professionals. It will not only have to strengthen the tech but also have to build up a world-class team of professionals. At this point, there are plenty of investors who have been using the platform for their purposes.

Entera’s Founder & CEO, Martin Kay, explained the virtues of the Entera platform for investors. He said,

Similar to brokerages like E-Trade and Charles Schwab, Entera delivers 100% cloud-based enterprise level solutions that enable investors to make the best decisions and buy with ease.

Entera platform offers its services in 11 markets in the United States currently. It is a fair assumption that it is going to expand its footprint significantly in the years to come. Moreover, professional investors almost always look for a platform that offers a larger market.

South Korean drug firm SK Biopharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. may release its Initial Public Offering (IPO) earlier than declared in its filing to the Korea Exchange and may seek to raise 5 trillion won through it; with the release of its shares planned for early 2020.

SK Biopharmaceuticals makes medicines for Central Nervous System disorders. The enthusiasm around its IPO is because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved its XCOPRI (cenobamate tablets) as a treatment for partial-onset seizures in adults. It opens the doors for the sale of XCOPRI in the U.S.

The approval was granted after two global, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies with adult patients who suffered uncontrolled partial-onset seizures. In both the studies, XCOPRI successfully reduced the frequency of seizures compared to placebo for a range of doses.

With this approval, SK Biopharmaceuticals became the first Korean company to develop a compound from the discovery stage to U.S. FDA approval. The firm plans to begin selling XCOPRI in the US in the second half of 2020 after completing a scheduling review by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which usually takes 90 days after FDA approval.

SK Biopharmaceuticals is an arm of SK Group. In a research note, SK Securities Co. has said that the corporate value of SK Biopharmaceuticals would reach 6.2 trillion won. Korea Investment and Securities Co. said in a report that market capitalization of SK Pharmaceuticals ranges from 5-10 trillion won.

SK Biopharmaceuticals IPO is expected to be the biggest IPO ever in South Korea.

Waves Enterprise is in the wake of announcing a major upgrade in its network.

The new Version 1.0 is about to undergo a complete evolution with improvements to the platform. The version is particularly designed for use by enterprises and the public sector. The release will inhabit smart containerized contracts with better performance, advanced tools along with an enhanced API.

By 2021, 90% of current enterprise blockchain platform implementations will require replacement within 18 months to remain competitive, secure and avoid obsolescence, according to Gartner. Our solution will be relevant for many years to come. The release features containerized smart contracts improved performance, new tools, and an upgraded API. Besides, we have focused on security for the existing protocol. In speed, our solution now surpasses all available corporate solutions in the market,

– says Artem Kalikhov, CPO of Waves Enterprise.

The project, with its inception in 2019, was specialized in offering a global blockchain solution suitable for large firms, businesses as well as for the public sector.

The platform that was launched earlier was designed to cater to the needs of enterprise blockchain firms. It featured a high-end network that came with private as well as hybrid blockchains, several encryption modules, and smart contracts composed in any of the prominent programming languages.

New Features:

The new updates have some key features in the highlight with a significant functionality for the enterprise customers:

New Authorization Service

There is a new authorization service incorporated into the system to attain enterprise-grade security with version 2.0 specification. Earlier, the Waves Enterprise API had been publicly functional, but now the customers are required to sign in before making use of the API. This step is particularly taken to increase security.

The platform now has support for more than one account, for instance, different blockchain addresses with a single login password. The admin of the Node is now handed over the control keys included with the Keystore from the client app.

Feature to Update Containerized Contracts

The new update also enables seamless updation of the contracts, without inflicting unsolicited problems. It is ensured by maintaining the utmost security in the state.

The Versions are subjected to automatic updates, and hence eliminates any hope for the fraudulent activists.

It also has improved PoA and PoS stability consensus algorithms.

Enhanced Blockchain Speed

There is stability for 2 cores, 8 GB RAM nodes in the new update. There is a 2MB block created by the network within 12 seconds. It enables 10,000 transactions in a single block and micro blocks within 500 milliseconds.

The update also features a bandwidth of 8 Mbit/s or 1MB/s on an enterprise blockchain network. This Bandwidth is expandable to 2 MB/s.

Waves Enterprise enables you to enforce business processes like workflow, supply chain management, procurement systems, etc. over a trustworthy blockchain infrastructure. And that is what it intends to do with its brand new update. The update will supposedly draw significant attention from large as well as mid-scale companies.

CoinMarketCap, which records the highest traffic among sites giving information about cryptocurrency prices, has formed a strategic partnership with Yahoo Finance, the financial news website of Verizon Media.

Yahoo Finance’s cryptocurrency data page will source cryptocurrency pricing, indices as well as educational content from CoinMarketCap.

CoinMarketCap indices Crypto 200 and Crypto 200 ex will be displayed on Yahoo Finance. These indices incorporate pricing from over 200 cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide and list cryptocurrencies that together have more than 90% global cryptocurrency market capitalization. Crypto 200 includes Bitcoin, while Crypto 200 ex excludes it. These indices give users an indication of global trends in the cryptocurrency market.

CoinMarketCap’s newsletter and blogs will be displayed on Yahoo Finance’s cryptocurrency screener landing page, which displays information about pricing, the transaction volume of different cryptocurrencies, as well as on individual cryptocurrency pages. CoinMarketCap will post more educational videos related to cryptocurrency and make them available on Yahoo Finance. Educational videos can be very helpful as users are more like to watch a 10-minute video on cryptocurrency than read a 700-word article on it.

The educational content on cryptocurrency can attract people from fields other than finance. Yahoo Finance will expose a greater audience to cryptocurrency.

Joanna Lambert, General Manager of Finance, Tech, Autos, and Membership, Verizon Media, said,

“By partnering with CoinMarketCap, we can provide timely and reliable crypto information to meet our audience demand.”

Carylyne Chan, Chief Strategy Officer at CoinMarketCap, expressed optimism that their partnership with a trusted financial and business news and data site like Yahoo Finance will increase the adoption of cryptocurrency among the masses.

CoinMarketCap recently introduced liquidity-based metrics for ranking market-pairs to weed out any exchange gaming the system. It is also planning to release a new pricing algorithm soon.