Business
Top 5 Payment Apps for Travelling Abroad

Source: Finance Derivative
Florian Winkler, COO and Co-founder at VitraCash
There’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to pay for products and services when you’re abroad, second only to losing your luggage. No stranger to being unable to make payments whilst adventuring across the world, Florian Winkler, COO and Co-founder of VitraCash, provides a comprehensive list of the top five payment apps that’ll make spending while you’re travelling easier.
After a bad experience whilst travelling abroad and having the frustration of retailers not accepting my payment method, I wanted to know if there were ways for me to access my money whilst outside my home country. I quickly found that my experience wasn’t a one-off and that this was a common occurrence when travelling outside Europe.
1. Revolut
With over 18 million users globally, over 35 supporting countries and more than 30 in-app currencies, Revolut has well revolutionised the way consumers can pay for goods worldwide. Launched in the UK in 2015, Revolut is a pre-paid debit card that allows cash machine withdrawals in 120 countries and users to convert currencies into Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash or XRP.
Using what Revolut has coined it’s ‘Super App’, users have access to a hub that enables them to transfer money in 30 different currencies and set up vaults for budgeting and saving. Additionally, for those who subscribe, there is access to both a free UK current account and a free Euro IBAN account.
2. Wise
Formerly known as Transferwise, Wise has evolved from currency exchange to a global all-in-one financial service. Wise users can spend abroad without hidden fees in more than 200 countries, supports 54 currencies and the use of technology like Apple and Google pay. Like Revolut, Wise also provides its users with their own UK account number, Euro IBAN, US routing number and more.
Its app and website offer comprehensive services to its users. It has become the go-to company for people looking to relocate across borders as it allows them to receive salaries and pensions without the need for multiple bank accounts. Additionally, Wise users can send money to 80 countries with low, transparent fees and have the ability to issue Direct Debits in the UK, Europe, US and Canada.
3. N26
Europe’s first entirely mobile bank, N26 has built a customer base of over 7 million users worldwide. Available with or without a physical bank card, N26 gives users the ability to spend globally whilst also being a mechanism for smart saving. With its ‘Spaces’ features, users can manage their money wisely and even make use of Shared Spaces where they can team up with others to save together.
N26 is relatively new to the market and has quickly grown a cult following. As with many financial start-ups, signing up is currently based on a waitlist – though those interested can join the waitlist with updates on when full signup is available. Based on current customer feedback, it’s worth the wait.
4. Monese
Launched in 2015, Monese’s goal is ‘making global local’. With its physical card and user-friendly app, consumers can open UK, EU and RON bank accounts, obtain excellent exchange rates and have built-in purchase protection in minutes.
Monese provides users with the ability to set weekly and monthly budgets, track money spending visually and receive salary payments directly into a digital money account. Ideal for people moving, working or travelling abroad, Monese makes spending in foreign currencies easier by allowing users to withdraw money anywhere in the world without fear of fees or unreasonable exchange rates.
The world is going digital and when travelling having the right payment options to meet your needs is critical. My experience of frustration at not being able to pay for purchases when travelling abroad because my card wasn’t an accepted payment method will soon be a thing of the past, thanks to innovation within the FinTech industry. These payment and banking and others like them ensure consumers have access to their funds no matter where they are in the world – opening the door to new, hassle-free adventures.
5. VitraCash
Like Curve, VitraCash offers consumers the ability to have all their bank and debit cards in one place, providing easy payment methods worldwide. VitraCash provides a physical bank card linked to all payment methods added to its app and when purchasing at a retailer. At the point of payment, its AI instantly evaluates the purchase and chooses the best payment type for each situation based on its algorithm.
Additionally, the VitraCash app provides multi-card analytics to help users monitor their spending across multiple cards in one place. It automatically categorises spending to allow users to budget their money effectively. Like N26, this solution is currently open to a waitlist and is worth checking out in the future.
You may like
Business
Embedded Finance: The Opportunity Ahead

Unlocking Growth with Corporate Embedded Finance
By Eduardo Martinez Garcia, CEO & Co-founder of Toqio
The current financial landscape is undergoing a significant transformation, disrupting the long-established dominion of major banks and other large financial institutions. Embedded finance, a concept that has thrived in the realm of digital consumer products, is now steadily infiltrating the corporate domain, poised to revolutionize the financial sector further.
This paradigm shift is manifesting in a multitude of ways, with digital embedded finance increasingly becoming an integral part of corporate digital offerings. Distributor payment processing, lending services for suppliers, and supply chain financing are all becoming commonplace – the versatility of corporate embedded finance knows no bounds. Despite the diverse applications the core objectives remain consistent, including enhancing B2B processes, mitigating risks, and fortifying business relationships.
Corporate embedded finance promises to deliver substantial value over the course of the next decade. A burgeoning opportunity beckons, estimated to be worth an astonishing USD 3.7 trillion over the next five years alone. Remarkably, more than 50% of businesses have expressed a preference for cash flow financing through platforms rather than traditional banks, as per a report by McKinsey. The shift observed in consumer embedded finance adoption is creeping into the B2B landscape, and moving more quickly all the time. Consequently, if the high level of adoption of consumer embedded finance carries over into the B2B space, and it’s certainly expected to, we’re genuinely looking at the next big thing.
Customer experience takes the helm
Customers are no longer passive passengers in their financial journeys; they have emerged as the navigators, steering the industry’s course while financial institutions focus on risk management. Banks and non-banking financial institutions (NBFIs) remain pivotal, but their control of products is waning. Companies, intimately acquainted with their customers and partners, possess a deeper understanding of their collaborative ecosystem. Consequently, they are better equipped to tailor their financial offerings to meet the needs of their business relationships.
Take Amazon, for instance, which has been offering loans to small businesses operating on its platform for years. Amazon evaluates risk based on a merchant’s payment history, sales volume, projected revenue, and other critical data points. This approach enables Amazon to provide additional value to its sellers while securing a foothold in the financing market. The close rapport Amazon shares with its small business partners positions it with substantially less risk compared to conventional banks.
Shopify has also ingeniously woven embedded finance into the very fabric of its offering. While its core service revolves around delivering an efficient, subscription-based e-commerce platform, it also provides payment processing and lending services, among a myriad of other financial solutions. Shopify boasts an extensive reservoir of data, allowing it to make informed decisions about the financial products it can offer to merchants, all while keeping risk to a minimum.
Decentralizing financial services
Historically, financial products have fallen within the purview of major corporations either through partnerships with third parties or in-house service creation. Nevertheless, the rise of digital channels has expedited the decentralization of financial services, and it’s snowballing. Companies spanning various industries, from automakers to retail giants, are recognizing the immense untapped potential in taking control of many functions traditionally handled by financial institutions. While financial institutions will endure, their role is evolving. Their strengths are assessment, management, and specialized services. They must pivot towards analyzing data from a multitude of sources, diving into data lakes to provide genuinely useful risk assessments.
Incumbents aren’t going to disappear
Incumbent banks have demonstrated their staying power and adaptability time and time again, mostly due to being able to leverage their size and relative dependability. They’ve capitalized on their vast customer bases, regulatory compliance expertise, and extensive branch networks to maintain a competitive edge. Additionally, incumbent banks have finally begun to recognize the need to adapt to changing customer expectations and digital transformation.
The future of core banking is likely to strike a balance between fintech disruptors and established incumbents. Collaboration and partnerships between incumbents and fintech startups tend to drive innovation, offering customers cutting-edge digital experiences. Big banks are probably going to find their place in the market modified, and not necessarily in a bad way.
Navigating the path ahead
Incumbents and financial behemoths have long been oriented toward long-term financial products, such as 30-year mortgages. But what about short-term business loans? Consider the restaurateur seeking a swift three-month loan to renovate a kitchen or the farmer unable to repay a loan until the crops are harvested and sold, a process spanning six months or more. For traditional banks, these scenarios represent short-term debts, a situation they tend to avoid. This presents a prime opportunity for companies to tailor products that cater to these specific needs, allowing them to define the space.
The evolution of embedded finance is commencing with payments, as it represents one of the least regulated segments in finance, offering ample room for innovation. Credit, closely trailing payments in significance, holds paramount importance. What’s really exciting is that as corporate giants blaze the trail, they pave the way for others to follow suit. This means that small and medium-sized enterprises will also be able to get involved, making embedded finance more inclusive within a given business ecosystem.
Eduardo Martinez Garcia is the CEO & Co-Founder of Toqio. He is an avid entrepreneur who has set up and run successful global ventures in the UK, Spain, and South Africa over the course of the last 20 years.
Business
Hype, Hysteria & Hope: AI’s Evolutionary Journey and What it Means for Financial Services

Source: Finance Derivative
Written by Gabriel Hopkins, Chief Product Officer at Ripjar
Almost a year to the day since ChatGPT launched, the hype, hysteria, and hope around the technology shows little signs of abating. In recent weeks OpenAI chief Sam Altman was removed from his position, only to return some days later. Rishi Sunak hosted world leaders at the UK’s AI Safety Summit, interviewing the likes of Elon Musk in front of an assembly of world leaders and tech entrepreneurs. While behind the scenes, AI researchers are rumoured to be close to even more breakthroughs within weeks.
What does it all mean for those industries that want to benefit from AI but are unsure of the risks?
It’s possible that some forms of machine learning – what we used to call AI – have been around for a century. Since the early 1990s, those tools have been a key operational element of some banking, government, and corporate processes, while being notably absent from others.
So why the uneven adoption? Generally, that has been related to risk. For instance, AI tools are great for tasks like fraud detection. It’s a well-established that an algorithm can do things that analysts simply can’t by reviewing vast swathes of data in milliseconds. And that has become the norm, particularly because it is not essential to understand each and every decision in detail.
Other processes have been more resistant to change. Usually, that’s not because an algorithm couldn’t do better, but rather because – in areas such as credit scoring or money laundering detection – the potential for unexpected biases to creep in is unacceptable. That is particularly acute in credit scoring when a loan or mortgage can be declined due to non-financial characteristics.
While the adoption of older AI techniques has been progressing year after year, the arrival of Generative AI, characterised by ChatGPT, has changed everything. The potential for the new models – both good and bad – is huge, and commentary has divided accordingly. What is clear is that no organisation wants to miss out on the upside. Despite the talk about Generative and Frontier models, 2023 has been brimming with excitement about the revolution ahead.
Two Objectives
A primary use case for AI in the financial crime space is to detect and prevent fraudulent and criminal activity. Efforts are generally concentrated around two similar but different objectives. These are thwarting fraudulent activity – stopping you or your relative from getting defrauded – and adhering to existing regulatory guidelines to support anti-money laundering (AML), and combatting the financing of terrorism (CFT).
Historically, AI deployment in the AML and CFT areas has faced concerns about potentially overlooking critical instances compared to traditional rule-based methods. Within the past decade, and other regulators initiated a shift by encouraging innovation to help with AML and CFT cases. Despite the use of machine learning models in fraud prevention over the past decades, adoption in AML/CFT has been much slower with a prevalence for headlines and predications over actual action. The advent of Generative AI looks likely to change that equation dramatically.
One bright spot for AI in compliance over the last 5 years, has been in customer and counterparty screening, particularly when it comes to the vast quantities of data involved in high-quality Adverse Media (aka Negative News) screening where organisations look for the early signs of risk in the news media to protect themselves from potential issues.
The nature of high-volume screening against billions of unstructured documents has meant that the advantages of machine learning and artificial intelligence far outweigh the risks and enable organisations to undertake checks which would simply not be possible otherwise.
Now banks and other organisations want to go a stage further. As Generation AI models start to approach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) where they can routinely outperform human analysts, the question is when, and not if, they can use the technology to better support decisions and potentially even make the decisions unilaterally.
AI Safety in Compliance
The 2023 AI Safety Summit was a significant milestone in acknowledging the importance of AI. The Summit resulted in 28 countries signing a declaration to continue meetings to address AI risks. The event led to the inauguration of the AI Safety Institute, which will contribute to future research and collaboration to ensure its safety.
Though there are advantages to having an international focus on the AI conversation, the GPT transformer models were the primary focus areas during the Summit. This poses a risk of oversimplifying or confusing the broader AI spectrum for unaccustomed individuals. There is a broad range of AI technologies with hugely varying characteristics. Regulators and others need to understand that complexity. Banks, government agencies, and global companies must exert a thoughtful approach to AI utilisation. They must emphasise its safe, careful, and explainable use when leveraged inside and outside of compliance frameworks.
The Road Ahead
The compliance landscape demands a review of standards for responsible AI use. It is essential to establish best practices and clear objectives to help steer organisations away from hastily assembled AI solutions that compromise accuracy. Accuracy, reliability, and innovation are equally important to mitigate fabrication or potential misinformation.
Within the banking sector, AI is being used to support compliance analysts already struggling with time constraints and growing regulatory responsibilities. AI can significantly aid teams by automating mundane tasks, augmenting decision-making processes, and enhancing fraud detection.
The UK can benefit from the latest opportunity. We should cultivate an innovation ecosystem with is receptive to AI innovation across fintech, regtech, and beyond. Clarity from government and thought leaders on AI tailored to practical implementations in the industry is key. We must also be open to welcoming new graduates from the growing global talent pool for AI to fortify the country’s position in pioneering AI-driven solutions and integrating them seamlessly. Amid industry change, prioritising and backing responsible AI deployment is crucial for the successful ongoing battle against all aspects of financial crime.
Business
Using AI to support positive outcomes in alternative provision

By Fleur Sexton
Fleur Sexton, Deputy Lieutenant West Midlands and CEO of dynamic training provider, PET-Xi, with a reputation for success with the hardest to reach,
discusses using AI to support excluded pupils in alternative provision (AP)
Exclusion from school is often life-changing for the majority of vulnerable and disadvantaged young people who enter alternative provision (AP). Many face a bleak future, with just 4% of excluded pupils achieving a pass in English and maths GCSEs, and 50% becoming ‘not in education, employment or training’ (NEET) post-16.
Often labelled ‘the pipeline to prison’, statistics gathered from prison inmates are undeniably convincing: 42% of prisoners were expelled or permanently excluded from school; 59% truanted; 47% of those entering prison have no school qualifications. With a prison service already in crisis, providing children with the ‘right support, right place, right time’, is not just an ethical response, it makes sound financial sense. Let’s invest in education, rather than incarceration.
‘Persistent disruptive behaviour’ – the most commonly cited reason for temporary or permanent exclusion from mainstream education – often results from unmet or undiagnosed special educational needs (SEN) or social, emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs. These pupils find themselves unable to cope in a mainstream environment, which impacts their mental health and personal wellbeing, and their abilities to engage in a positive way with the curriculum and the challenges of school routine. A multitude of factors all adding to their feelings of frustration and failure.
Between 2021/22 and 2022/23, councils across the country recorded a 61% rise in school exclusions, with overall exclusion figures rising by 50% compared to 2018/19. The latest statistics from the Department for Education (DfE), show pupils with autism in England are nearly three times as likely to be suspended than their neurotypical peers. With 82% of young people in state-funded alternative provision (AP) with identified special educational needs (SEN) and social emotional and mental health (SEMH) needs, for many it is their last chance of gaining an education that is every child’s right.
The Department for Education’s (DfE) SEND and AP Improvement Plan (March 2023).reported, ‘82% of children and young people in state-place funded alternative provision have identified special educational needs (SEN) 2, and it (AP) is increasingly being used to supplement local SEND systems…’
Some pupils on waiting lists for AP placements have access to online lessons or tutors, others are simply at home, and not receiving an education. In oversubscribed AP settings, class sizes have had to be increased to accommodate demand, raising the pupil:teacher ratio, and decreasing the levels of support individuals receive. Other unregulated settings provide questionable educational advantage to attendees.
AI can help redress the balance and help provide effective AP. The first challenge for teachers in AP is to engage these young people back into learning. If the content of the curriculum used holds no relevance for a child already struggling to learn, the task becomes even more difficult. As adults we rarely engage with subjects that do not hold our interest – but often expect children to do so.
Using context that pupils recognise and relate to – making learning integral to the real world and more specifically, to their reality, provides a way in. A persuasive essay about school uniforms, may fire the debate for a successful learner, but it is probably not going to be a hot topic for a child struggling with a chaotic or dysfunctional home life. If that child is dealing with high levels of adversity – being a carer for a relative, keeping the household going, dealing with pressure to join local gangs, being coerced into couriering drugs and weapons around the neighbourhood – school uniform does not hold sway. It has little connection to their life.
Asking the group about the subjects they feel strongly about, or responding to local news stories from their neighbourhoods, and using these to create tasks, will provide a more enticing hook to pique their interest. After all, in many situations, the subject of a task is just the ‘hanger’ for the skills they need to learn – in this case, the elements of creating a persuasive piece, communicating perspectives and points of view.
Using AI, teachers have the capacity to provide this individualised content and personalised instruction and feedback, supporting learners by addressing their needs and ‘scaffolding’ their learning through adaptive teaching.
If the learner is having difficulty grasping a concept – especially an abstract one – AI can quickly produce several relevant analogies to help illustrate and explain. It can also be used to develop interactive learning modules, so the learner has more control and ownership over their learning. When engaged with their learning, pupils begin to build skills, increasing their confidence and commitment.
Identifying and discussing these skills and attitudes towards learning, with the pupil reflecting on how they learn and the ways they learn best, also gives them more agency and autonomy, thinking metacognitively.
Gaps in learning are often the cause of confusion, misunderstandings and misconceptions. If a child has been absent from school they may miss crucial concepts that form the building blocks to more complex ideas later in their school career. Without providing the foundations by filling in these gaps and unravelling the misconceptions, new learning may literally be impossible for them to understand, increasing frustration and feelings of failure. AI can help identify those gaps, scaffold learning and build understanding.
AI is by no means a replacement for teachers or teaching assistants, it is purely additional support. Coupled with approaches that promote engagement with learning, AI can enable these disadvantaged young people to access an education previously denied them.
According to the DfE, ‘All children are entitled to receive a world-class education that allows them to reach their potential and live a fulfilled life, regardless of their background.’ AI can help support the most disadvantaged young people towards gaining the education they deserve, and creating a pathway towards educational and social equity.

Embedded Finance: The Opportunity Ahead

Hype, Hysteria & Hope: AI’s Evolutionary Journey and What it Means for Financial Services

Using AI to support positive outcomes in alternative provision

The Sustainability Carrot Could be More Powerful Than the Stick!

Hybrid cloud adoption: why vendors are making the switch in 2022 and why you should too
