Alibaba Group, the behemoth of electronic trading in China, set up Alipay in 2004 as a payment system for its Taobao site.

LoopPay usually presents itself as "the world's most accepted mobile wallet". Its technology works with 90% of the point-of-sale terminals deployed in the United States, thanks to the fact that it mimics the magnetic stripes of the cards wirelessly.

The financial sector has a number of highly profitable services such as payment channels. Traditionally, financial institutions have sought to maintain these within their power, and that's why many customer offers take the form of integrated packages with credit and debit cards, and direct debit payments. In addition to the profitability it generates for the sector, it also connects the user to the bank and supplies abundant knowledge of the customers, although this last aspect is generally relatively underutilized throughout the sector.

The mobile aspect is the current fashion trend in banking 2.0: the apps already available in the iOS and Android stores allow us to perform all kinds of procedures and transactions from our smartphones, but the push by technology companies for such services is outstripping the boundary of smartphones and tablets, bringing banking to the next step: wearable devices.

BBVA and Google seek to promote a spirit of innovation in business application development with the InnovaApps+ competition. This international contest aims to promote the emergence of new solutions that can benefit companies, and particularly SMEs and entrepreneurs in Spain and Latin America. This new challenge will enable BBVA to stay in touch with the ecosystem of developers and attract talent and new ideas, and also to remain at the cutting edge of technology 

Last year in 2014, we had the opportunity to witness some of the most devastating cyber attacks in the short history of Internet; this has now pushed cyber security to the top of the list of priorities for states and corporations in 2015.

In 2012, IBM's resource portal for developers, DeveloperWorks, covered in one of its articles the discovery by the companies of the financial sector of the fact that mobile technologies were an "opportunity to extend their reach to the customer and improve their differentiation".

Two of the business models most talked about in recent months because of their disruptive nature with respect to the other actors in their sector have been Uber and Airbnb. In contrast, it doesn't seem that this will happen in short term with a bank brand or platform. And this is precisely why they should attract the attention of the members of that industry: both companies represent several growing trends in the world of 2.0 services: customer focus, social, in the cloud, mobile, etc.

The transformation of banking is a fact, so the relationship between traditional financial institutions and fintech startups was discussed in The API Hour focused on fintech companies. Regulation, customer trust, collaboration and competition have been the themes of this financial debate.

As with all financial products, investments in P2P platforms include certain risks linked to liquidity, credit, the market itself... As an additional risk, "intermediary" platforms may not correctly assist in the selection of projects, management of information, and even in aspects of payment management. These are the six financial risks linked to crowdfunding operations..