The Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) is a collection of 34 countries in Europe with over half a billion customers and 23 million businesses. As far as markets go, this one is one of the biggest and most lucrative for financial services firms of all sizes. European, American and Asian firms are all competing for a slice of the pie and winners are the ones who are willing to innovate.

2018 was the year when BigTech companies like Google, Apple and Amazon made deep inroads into traditional banking domains. Additionally, a lot of newer FinTech start-up companies also joined the fray and expanded heavily across Europe, Asia, Africa and North America.  It was also the year when blockchain tech began to be adopted by mainstream companies who realised its potential outside of its previous exclusive use in cryptocurrencies.

In December 2018, Google received an e-money license from the Central Bank of Lithuania. This will allow Google to process payments and issue e-money throughout the EU. Prior to this, Google Pay had limited authority and used to save customer card details in a digital wallet and use that for payments. Now, they can store and transfer funds directly.

Martynas Rajunčius describes the steps that helped the Bank of Lithuania to open up their infrastructure to payment services for banks and non-banks under PSD2 frame. What Rajunčius describes in clear technical words could become a game changer in the European financial market – increasing value proposition and strengthening the European Single Market. See how Rajunčius and his colleagues started a chain reaction and why service providers such as Google Pay are among the first adopters of CENTROlink.

Post-quantum cryptography has a strong impact on Entrust Datacard's main business areas: 
on SSL, PKI, as well as on the authentication business.

eIDAS has helped herald a new era of e-signing for businesses operating across Europe. E-signatures provide a fast, secure, efficient and cost-effective alternative to paper signing and the eIDAS regulation ensures legal certainty across the EU with its requirements for Basic, Advanced and Qualified e-signatures.

It has taken over two decades to establish and secure the current e-commerce applications. The security of most of these systems principally relies on cryptographic algorithms which have served the purpose till now. Since the initiation and evolution of quantum computing, some cryptographic algorithms have threats. To mitigate the security gap, numerous post-quantum algorithms have been proposed. This article enlightens the journey towards post-quantum algorithms and security parameters of the newly proposed post-quantum algorithms.

In this video blog, Madjid Nakhjiri, Senior Principal Security Architect at the Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center, describes his company’s strategy to develop products today which are prepared for the post quantum era.

With every passing day, the need for crypto agility becomes more important. Whether you believe quantum computing is 10 years, 20 years or more away, the inevitability is that it is approaching fast. This is why many leading technology organizations have begun to research the impact of new quantum-safe algorithms on their existing products or infrastructure. This research is facilitated by the use of , Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). It is within the secure parameter of an HSM that existing and quantum-safe algorithms should be executed - but not many HSMs are capable of doing this. This why the flexibility and functionality of HSMs play an important role in in crypto agility.