With their savvy interfaces, smart features and oodles of VC money, digital banks have become the poster-child for fintech. There are now almost 300 so-called "neobanks" live worldwide, with nearly half concentrated in Europe. From a report: Meanwhile, new players are continuing to join the ranks, particularly in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. This boom is being fuelled by ongoing investor enthusiasm for the sector, with neobanks raising over $2bn in venture capital globally this year alone. Customers are also riding the neobank wave. PitchBook estimates that by 2024, 145m of us will be using these apps across North America and Europe alone. To help keep track of the global neobank landscape, we have broken down the key data and trends. For clarity, 'neobank' is defined here as an app that i) offers its own retail banking services (i.e. prepaid, debit, credit cards), ii) launched after 2010, and iii) is mobile-centric. This definition does not distinguish between regulatory status, but it's worth noting that only a handful have official bank licences.

Here is the story of the world's neobanks, as told in numbers. The neobank boom: At its peak? The number of neobanks worldwide has tripled since 2017, climbing from 100 to nearly 300 worldwide. That means, over the last three years, a neobank launched every five days somewhere in the world (!), according to Exton, a consultancy firm which manages a global database of consumer banking apps. In 2019 alone, more than 70 neobanks went live globally. But Cristoph Stegmeier, a partner at Exton, says we may finally have reached a peak, with 2020 seeing a slowdown. "I expect we will see less from now," he told Sifted. He explained this year's launch decline went beyond simply the 'Covid effect' and stems from the growing saturation of neobanks. Indeed, 30 neobanks have been wound down since 2015, according to Stegmeier. Still, the neobank boom hasn't totally stalled. Over 30 neobanks launched in the face of the pandemic, including Zelf, Daylight (a US bank for LGBT+ members) and Tenpo in Chile. Meanwhile, dozens of new players are still planning to go live in 2021 -- including Greece's Woli and France's Vybe.

Pfizer and BioNTech SE's Covid-19 vaccine won the backing of a key European review panel, clearing the way for inoculations to start before the end of the year as the continent struggles with rising death rates and tighter lockdowns. From a report: The endorsement was announced in a news briefing by the European Medicines Agency on Monday. The final step in approval is a sign-off from the European Commission. European Union leaders pushed the regulator to speed up its review amid complaints that residents across the continent were still waiting to get a vaccine -- pioneered in Germany -- that is already being used in the U.K. and U.S. The goal is to start a European immunization campaign on Dec. 27, commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last week. Monday's recommendation puts the EU in position to meet that timeline. The commission last week signaled it would give the official go-ahead for distribution to start no later than two days after the agency's sign-off.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers from IBM Trusteer say they've uncovered a massive fraud operation that used a network of mobile device emulators to drain millions of dollars from online bank accounts in a matter of days. The scale of the operation was unlike anything the researchers have seen before. In one case, crooks used about 20 emulators to mimic more than 16,000 phones belonging to customers whose mobile bank accounts had been compromised. In a separate case, a single emulator was able to spoof more than 8,100 devices.

The thieves then entered usernames and passwords into banking apps running on the emulators and initiated fraudulent money orders that siphoned funds out of the compromised accounts. Emulators are used by legitimate developers and researchers to test how apps run on a variety of different mobile devices. To bypass protections banks use to block such attacks, the crooks used device identifiers corresponding to each compromised account holder and spoofed GPS locations the device was known to use. The device IDs were likely obtained from the holders' hacked devices, although in some cases, the fraudsters gave the appearance they were customers who were accessing their accounts from new phones. The attackers were also able to bypass multi-factor authentication by accessing SMS messages.

Google won European Union approval for its $2.1 billion takeover of health tracker Fitbit, days after regulators proposed tougher rules to curb powerful technology firms' push into new services. From a report: The European Commission said Google's pledge to maintain access for rival health and fitness apps and device makers for 10 years removed its concerns about the U.S. tech giant's move into health data and devices. Smaller rivals previously complained that the company's promises might not go far enough to stop Google shutting off access in future to rival products or services.

"The commitments will determine how Google can use the data collected for ad purposes, how interoperability between competing wearables and Android will be safeguarded and how users can continue to share health and fitness data, if they choose to," Margrethe Vestager, the EU's antitrust chief, said in a statement Thursday. Approval comes in a harsh climate when Google and others are facing mounting scrutiny of acquisitions that help them push into new areas. Google announced its plans to buy Fitbit in November 2019, describing the bid for the smartwatch maker as a boost to its lagging hardware business.

Facebook will shift all its users in the United Kingdom into user agreements with the corporate headquarters in California, moving them out of their current relationship with Facebook's Irish unit and out of reach of Europe's privacy laws. From a report: The change takes effect next year and follows a similar move announced in February by Google here. Those companies and others have European head offices in Dublin, and the UK's exit from the EU will change its legal relationship with Ireland, which remains in the Union. Initially, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters about the move. Facebook later confirmed it. "Like other companies, Facebook has had to make changes to respond to Brexit and will be transferring legal responsibilities and obligations for UK users from Facebook Ireland to Facebook. There will be no change to the privacy controls or the services Facebook offers to people in the UK," the company's UK arm said.

The European Union Tuesday unveiled sweeping new proposals to control tech industry giants as "gatekeepers" who could be fined up to 10% of their revenue for breaking EU rules on competition. From a report: In the EU, "proposals," once introduced, are likely to become law in some form, even if details change dramatically through a slow feedback process. The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) would set standards for treating large online platforms as "gatekeepers," based chiefly on how many users they have. Gatekeepers would be barred from favoring their own products over those of rivals -- think Google steering users to its own restaurant reviews over Yelp's, for instance -- or from using data in an exclusionary way that they've collected to develop their own products. They'd either have to avoid using such data or make it available to competitors to tap as well.

Gatekeepers that break the rules could be subject to fines as high as 10% of annual global revenue. The Digital Services Act (DSA) is aimed at making big platforms more accountable for user posts that break EU member nations' laws around illicit materials, such as Germany's prohibition on speech that glorifies Nazism. Large platforms that don't remove illegal posts following a government order could face fines of up to 6% of annual revenue.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: [O]ver the past decade, much of Europe's night train network has been cut. 2013 and 2014 saw the culling of lines from Paris to Madrid, Rome and Barcelona; Amsterdam to Prague and Warsaw; and Berlin to Paris and Kiev. For many, it seemed the end of the line was nigh. But recently there has been a resurgence of night trains across Europe. And on December 8, four national rail providers teamed up to announce new routes between 13 European cities. Spearheaded by Austria's OBB, in conjunction with Germany's Deutsche Bahn, France's SNCF and Swiss Federal Railways, the collaboration will see four new "Nightjet" routes over the next four years. By December 2021, Vienna-Munich-Paris and Zurich-Cologne-Amsterdam will be up and running. Two years later, a Vienna/Berlin to Brussels/Paris will launch. And in December 2024, sleeper trains will start running between Zurich and Barcelona.

While countries like Germany and France quietly phased out their routes, OBB saw a future, and swept in to pick up many of the abandoned Deutsche Bahn routes, including Munich to Rome, and Berlin to Hamburg. Both [Nicolas Forien, part of Back On Track, a European network arguing for cross-border sleeper trains] and [Mark Smith of train website The Man in Seat 61] put the resurgence of the services down to the Austrian rail network. "There are high costs, but a lot is down to attitude, willingness and management focus," says Smith, who praises OBB CEO Andreas Mattha, who took over in 2016, for "making night trains wash their faces commercially." On Austrian railways, "Nightjet" sleeper trains now make up almost 20% of long-distance rail traffic, he says -- a far cry from the 5% in Germany, before Deutsche Bahn let them slide. "Finding passengers isn't a problem -- and it's becoming easier as people become fed up with the airline experience, and want to cut their carbon footprint," he says.

Tech giants deemed to be gatekeepers could face fines as high as 10% of annual revenue if they don't comply with new European Union rules on data usage to be unveiled Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported Monday, citing a draft. From the report: Companies that could include Google, Amazon, and Apple will be banned from using any data from business users to compete with them or from treating their own services more favorably in rankings, among other obligations. Nasdaq futures pared gains. A company that "systemically infringes" the obligations could face orders by the European Commission to make behavioral and structural changes, such as divesting businesses. Companies will be considered to be in systematic non-compliance if the EU has issued at least three fines within a period of five years. The new Digital Markets Act will target "gatekeeper" firms, defined by the European Commission by a number of criteria, including the number of users in the millions and overall revenue in the billions of dollars, as well as their significant impact on the single market, the document said. The designations will be updated by the commission every two years, according to the document.

Long-time Slashdot reader zoobab shares this update about the long-standing Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, a Munich-based non-profit opposing ratification of a "Unified Patent Court" by Germany: The FFII is crowdfunding a constitutional complaint in Germany against the third attempt to impose software patents in Europe, calling on all software companies, independent software developers and FLOSS authors to donate.

The Unitary Patent and its Court will promote patent trolls, without any appeal possible to the European Court of Justice, which won't be able to rule on patent law, and software patents in particular. The FFII also says that the proposed court system will be more expensive for small companies then the current national court system.
The stakes are high — so the FFII writes that they're anticipating some tricky counter-maneuvering: Stopping the UPC in Germany will be enough to kill the UPC for the whole Europe... German government believe that they can ratify before the end of the year, as they consider the UK still a member of the EU till 31st December. The agenda of next votes have been designed on purpose to ratify the UPC before the end of the year. FFII expects dirty agenda and political hacks to declare the treaty "into force", dismiss "constitutional complaints", while the presence of UK is still problematic.

Big tech firms such as Google and Facebook will face fines of up to 6% of turnover if they do not do more to tackle illegal content and reveal more about advertising on their platforms under draft European Union rules. Reuters reports: The EU's tough line, which is due to be announced next week, comes amid growing regulatory scrutiny worldwide of tech giants and their control of data and access to their platforms. EU digital chief Thierry Breton, who has stressed that large companies should bear more responsibility, will present the draft rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) on Dec. 15.

The Commission document on the DSA seen by Reuters defines very large online platforms as those with more than 45 million users, equivalent to 10% of the EU population. Additional obligations imposed on very large platforms are necessary to address public policy concerns and the systemic risks posed by their services, the document said. The tech giants will have to do more to tackle illegal content such as hate speech and child sexual abuse material, misuse of their platforms that impinges on fundamental rights and intentional manipulation of platforms, such as using bots to influence elections and public health. The companies will be required to publish details of their online advertisers and show the parameters used by their algorithms to suggest and rank information. Independent auditors will monitor compliance, with EU countries enforcing the rules.

EU member states have agreed to strengthen their target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade, in line with their long-term goal of net zero carbon by 2050. From a report: The EU made a commitment on Friday to cut carbon by 55% in the EU by 2030, compared with 1990 levels, after member states wrangled into the early morning as Poland held out for concessions. "Today's agreement puts us on a clear path to climate neutrality in 2050," said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European commission. While member states rejected the stiffer carbon cuts of 60% that the EU parliament had called for, the plan puts the EU ahead of most of the world's major economies on tackling the climate crisis. Campaigners said the EU could have gone further. Sebastian Mang, Greenpeace's EU policy adviser, said: "Governments will no doubt call it historic, but the evidence shows this deal is only a small improvement on the emissions cuts the EU is already expected to achieve. It shows that political convenience takes precedence over climate science, and that most politicians are still afraid to take on big polluters."

Britain's medicine regulator warned people with significant allergies not to get Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine after two people suffered adverse reactions, but was set to give more detailed guidance on Wednesday based on reviews of those cases. Reuters reports: Starting with the elderly and frontline workers, Britain began mass vaccinating its population on Tuesday, part of a global drive that poses one of the biggest logistical challenges in peacetime history. National Health Service medical director Stephen Powis said the advice had been changed as a precaution after two NHS workers reported anaphylactoid reactions from the vaccine. "Two people with a history of significant allergic reactions responded adversely yesterday," Powis said. "Both are recovering well."

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) initially advised anyone with "a history of a significant allergic reaction to a vaccine, medicine or food" to avoid taking the vaccine. However, by the end of Wednesday that guidance was set to be refined after discussions with experts on the nature of the reactions. "We're tweaking advice to make it very clear that if you've got a food allergy, you're not more at risk," Imperial College London's Paul Turner, an expert in allergy and immunology who has been advising the MHRA on their revised guidance, told Reuters. Pfizer and BioNTech said they were supporting the MHRA's investigation. In other vaccine-related news, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the EU regulatory body in charge of approving COVID-19 vaccines, said today it was the victim of a cyberattack.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA), the EU regulatory body in charge of approving COVID-19 vaccines, said today it was the victim of a cyber-attack. From a report: In a short two-paragraph statement posted on its website today, the agency discloses the security breach but said it couldn't disclose any details about the intrusion due to an ongoing investigation. EMA is currently in the process of reviewing applications for two COVID-19 vaccines, one from US pharma giant Moderna, and a second developed in a collaboration between BioNTech and Pfizer. An EMA spokesperson did not return a request for comment seeking information if the attack targeted its vaccine approval process or if it was a financially-motivated attack like ransomware. Nonetheless, in a follow-up statement released on its own website, BioNTech said that "some documents relating to the regulatory submission for Pfizer and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine candidate, BNT162b2, which has been stored on an EMA server, had been unlawfully accessed" during the attack, confirming that COVID-19 research was most likely the target of the attack.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Germany, France, Spain and ten other EU countries have joined forces to invest in processors and semiconductor technologies, key to internet-connected devices and data processing, in a push to catch up with the United States and Asia. Europe's share of the 440-billion-euro ($533 billion) global semiconductor market is around 10%, with the EU currently relying on chips made abroad. The 13 countries said they would work together to bolster Europe's electronics and embedded systems value chain. The group will reach out to companies to form industrial alliances for research and investment into designing and making processors and look into funding for such projects. It will also come up with a European-wide scheme known as an Important Project of Common European Interest which allows for funding under looser EU state aid rules. The group will seek to set up common standards and certification for electronics. The signatories include Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovenia.

Internet firms such as Google, Amazon.com and travel websites should explain how they rank search results on their platforms, according to European Union guidelines published Monday that could help businesses to increase their online visibility. From a report: The guidelines "set the standard for algorithmic ranking transparency," Margrethe Vestager, the EU's digital chief, said in a statement on the European Commission website. Online platforms should identify what factors their algorithms use when they decide to prioritize some results and declare when a prominent listing is paid for, according to the guidelines.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The coronavirus pandemic has not only upended social life across Europe but dramatically changed the way people work. With ever more people working from home -- roughly a third of all employees within the bloc according to the Associated Press (AP) -- and needing to be constantly reachable, the boundaries between work and private life have become increasingly hazy. On Wednesday, EU lawmakers passed a non-binding resolution arguing that individuals have a fundamental "right to disconnect." The European Parliament Employment Committee voted 31-to-6, with 18 abstentions, in favor of allowing people to take time off and urged the European Commission to create rules that "catch up with the new reality" of work, according to Alex Agius Saliba, the Maltese Socialist politician who spearheaded the resolution.

"After months of teleworking, many workers are now suffering from negative side effects such as isolation, fatigue, depression, burnout, muscular or eye illnesses," said Saliba, adding: "The pressure to always be reachable, always available, is mounting, resulting in unpaid overtime and burnout." The committee measure must now be approved by the full chamber before it can be submitted to the Commission and EU member state governments for a vote. Lawmakers in favor of the resolution say the need for employees to be available via smartphone or e-mail around the clock is detrimental to mental health and well-being and that workers should be allowed to be offline without suffering employer retribution as a result.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Privacy concerns in Europe have led to some of the world's toughest restrictions on companies like Facebook and Google and the ways they monitor people online. The crackdown has been widely popular, but the regulatory push is now entangled in the global fight against child exploitation, setting off a fierce debate about how far internet companies should be allowed to go when collecting evidence on their platforms of possible crimes against minors. A rule scheduled to take effect on Dec. 20 would inhibit the monitoring of email, messaging apps and other digital services in the European Union. It would also restrict the use of software that scans for child sexual abuse imagery and so-called grooming by online predators. The practice would be banned without a court order. European officials have spent the past several weeks trying to negotiate a deal allowing the detection to continue. But some privacy groups and lawmakers argue that while the criminal activity is abhorrent, scanning for it in personal communications risks violating the privacy rights of Europeans.

"Every time things like these unbelievable crimes are happening, or there is a terrorist attack, it's very easy to say we have to be strong and we have to restrict rights," said Birgit Sippel, a German member of the European Parliament. "We have to be very careful." Of the more than 52 million photos, videos and other materials related to online child sexual abuse reported between January and September this year, over 2.3 million came from the European Union, according to the U.S. federal clearinghouse for the imagery. If the regulation took effect, the rate of reports from Europe would drop precipitously, because automated scanning is responsible for nearly all of them. Photo- and video-scanning software uses algorithms to compare users' content with previously identified abuse imagery. Other software targeted at grooming searches for key words and phrases known to be used by predators. Facebook, the most prolific reporter of child sexual abuse imagery worldwide, said it would stop proactive scanning entirely in the E.U. if the regulation took effect. In an email, Antigone Davis, Facebook's global head of safety, said the company was "concerned that the new rules as written today would limit our ability to prevent, detect and respond to harm," but said it was "committed to complying with the updated privacy laws."

According to Bloomberg, Google is set to win conditional European Union approval for its $2.1 billion takeover of Fitbit this month. From the report: The deal could be approved as soon as next week after national competition authorities give their opinion, said the people who asked not to be named because the procedure isn't public. The EU usually consults the so-called advisory committee on mergers days before it issues approval. Google announced its plans to buy Fitbit in November 2019, noting that it would use the smartwatch maker to improve its lagging hardware business. Clearing regulatory obstacles for the deal come in a tough climate when the company is facing mounting global scrutiny of big technology companies and potentially restrictive regulation in the EU and other regions. While Google has agreed to concessions to allay EU antitrust concerns about its move into wearable fitness devices, its final pledge to European authorities hasn't been disclosed.

Greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union have been reduced by 24% compared to 1990 levels, according to the bloc's annual climate report, but the EU said Monday it still needs to intensify efforts to keep to its target of making Europe the first climate-neutral continent by mid-century. The Associated Press reports: The EU's executive arm said Monday that emissions in the 27-nation bloc have decreased by 3.7% in 2019 compared to the previous year, while gross domestic product rose 1.5% over the same period. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the commission expects "an unprecedented fall in emissions" in 2020, along the lines of 8%. "However, as experienced in the past, a swift economic recovery may lead to a strong and rapid rebound in emissions, unless policy gears its stimulus measures toward the green transition," the commission wrote in the report.

In its report, the commission said emissions covered by the Emissions Trading System -- a cap-and-trade scheme for industries to buy carbon credits covering about 40% of the EU's greenhouse gas emissions -- saw the biggest drop in 2019, falling by 9.1%, or about 152 million tons carbon dioxide equivalent. [...] To accelerate the transition, the commission has also proposed that member states raise their climate ambitions above the existing target of a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030, proposing to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% compared to 1990 levels. Leaders discussed the offer last month but could not immediately agree on an updated goal as reducing emissions by another 30% within the next decade poses a big challenge to many EU countries. They will try to find a consensus during a December summit ahead of the adoption of the first-ever European climate law.

European Union lawmakers are considering whether current rules aimed at limiting the practice of geoblocking across the bloc should be extended to cover access to streaming audio-visual content. From a report: Access to services like Netflix tends to be gated to individual EU Member States, meaning Europeans can be barred from accessing libraries of content offered elsewhere in the region. So if you're trying to use your Netflix subscription to access the service after moving to another Member State, or want to access inventory offered by Netflix elsewhere in Europe, the answer is typically a big fat no, as we've reported before. This undermines the core concept of the EU's Single Market (and the Digital Single Market -- aka the frictionless ecommerce end-goal which rules such as those limiting geoblocking aim to deliver). The Commission is alive to ongoing issues around online access to audio-visual content. In a review of the two-year-old Geo-blocking Regulation published today, it says it will kick off discussions with the audiovisual sector on ways to improve consumer access to this type of copyrighted content across the bloc.