Barclaycard has become the country’s first financial services group to enable contactless payments for Android phones, with the introduction of a new payments feature to its smartphone app.

It’s been quite a week for Twitter’s FinTech ambitions. First the social network used Stripe’s Relay API that allowed it to offer buying capabilities within its own app, and now it has expanded its focus on another form of money transfer – digital donations.

Bank of America has made a series of upgrades to its mobile and online banking services, including the introduction of fingerprint scanning and Touch-ID sign in. It has also made the banking app compatible with the Apple Watch.

WorldRemit, a London-based money transfer company, has announced the appointment of Gabriella Poczo as its new Chief Technology Officer, as the firm looks to disrupt traditional methods of sending money across the globe.

To mark next month’s 30th annual Payments Knowledge Forum conference, PaymentEye caught up with three of the event’s speakers: Nick Telford Reed, the director of Technology Innovation at Worldpay; Brian Cunnington, Business Architect at World Class Payments Project, Payments UK and the futurologist Ian Pearson, Futurizon.

Just half of UK cash in circulation is used within the domestic economy for transactions, with some being ‘hoarded’. The rest is stored overseas for travel or stored for use in the ‘shadow economy’, says the Bank of England.