Eu Financial News

European Commission on Tuesday set out a plan in a bid to take the lead in the metaverse — shared virtual worlds accessible through the internet — and to prevent Big Tech dominating a nascent sphere that could boost economic growth. The EU initiative comes as Facebook owner Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Apple work on metaverse products or services, prompting fears that the companies may get an unfair advantage over smaller rivals.

When MiFID II was introduced across the EU in 2018, UK asset managers were forced to overhaul their approach to the investment research they obtained from brokers and investment banks.

By Stephen Nellis

Meta Platforms's Instagram is planning to bring its branded content tools to Threads, Axios reported on Tuesday. The Threads app launched by Instagram as a rival to Twitter has signed up more than 100 million users in less than five days, smashing the record of AI tool ChatGPT for fastest-growing consumer app.

The European Union has signed off on a new agreement over the privacy of people’s personal information that gets pinged across the Atlantic, aiming to ease concerns about electronic spying by American intelligence agencies

BERLIN (Reuters) — German inflation rose in June, interrupting a steady decline since the start of the year.

Sweden's membership of NATO took a big step forward on Monday after Turkey agreed to remove one of the last major roadblocks in return for help in reviving Turkey's own chances of joining the European Union. At talks in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, where U.S. President Joe Biden and his NATO counterparts are meeting for a two-day summit starting Tuesday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan committed to put the Nordic country's accession protocol before Parliament «as soon as possible,» the head of NATO said.

2023 to become hottest year ever? Global temperature rises by 1.5 degrees Alarm bells had started ringing last week as sweltering heat blanketed much of the planet. On Thursday, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Thursday that June 2023 had smashed all previous records by a substantial margin.

Bigger, faster, stronger. The next-generation Boxer armoured vehicles being made in Australia by German defence giant Rheinmetall are in high demand in armies around the world.

The German government is considering whether it can make former Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer foot at least part of the quarter-billion euro compensation it has to pay a private company over a failed plan to introduce highway tolls

Albanian special prosecutors have demanded that a lawmaker and former deputy prime minister be arrested on corruption charges, accusing him of failing to declare his assets and other criminal offenses

The European Union has signed a free trade agreement with New Zealand that the two sides expect will increase bilateral trade by up to 30% within a decade

European Commission announced on Monday a data transfer agreement with the United States after Europe's top court annulled two previous pacts that underpinned how thousands of companies transfer Europeans' personal data across the Atlantic. However, the move was immediately criticised by privacy activist Max Schrems' noyb group, which said it will challenge the agreement. The EU executive said measures taken by the United States ensured an adequate level of protection for Europeans' personal data transferred across the Atlantic for commercial use.

The European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) legislation, enacted on May 31, has generated praise and concerns within the crypto industry. 

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta recently launched Threads, the social media app via Instagram, to take on Elon Musk’s Twitter. While Twitter is filing a suit against Meta for the similar app, Threads has caught on with users. Within a week of launch, more than 100 million users have signed up to Threads via the Android and iOS apps. Threads was launched on July 5, 2023, in 100 countries, including the UK, US, India, and others. The has now beaten the record of fast sign-ups by Open AI's ChatGPT app.

The influential City lawyer who spearheaded a review of the UK’s investment research rules says her reforms won't be “a silver bullet”, and will need to work alongside other initiatives to bolster London's capital markets.

The EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework has an adequate level of protection for personal data, the EU's executive commission said. That means it's comparable to the 27-nation's own stringent data protection standards, so companies can use it to move information from Europe to the United States without adding extra security.

In an interview with Cryptonews, Nikolay Denisenko, the co-founder and CTO of mobile digital finance Brighty app and former Lead Backend Engineer at neobank Revolut, spoke of the major challenges crypto companies face when moving into neobanking.

The Bank of International Settlement (BIS) has said that there could be up to 15 retail Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and eight wholesale CBDCs before the end of the decade. 

Spain just marked the largest operational market in Europe for Sam Altman’s Worldcoin, following the project’s expansion in the country. 

The 175-member International Maritime Organization (IMO) notified its strategy on July 7 to decarbonise the global shipping sector and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, the Global Trade Research Institute (GTRI) said. It added that IMO has also set interim targets for reducing emissions by 20-30 per cent by 2030 and 70-80 per cent by 2040, compared to 2008. It added that IMO has also suggested the shipping industry should switch to cleaner fuel. «By 2030 cleaner fuel must account for a minimum 5 per cent of total fuel use. IMO will notify detailed measures next year. While IMO recommendations are not legally binding, countries are expected to achieve the targets set. This year, few countries pushed for a flat tax of USD 100 per tonne of carbon emission by ships, yet IMO ignored the recommendation and set broad targets due to opposition from China and many developing countries,» GTRI co-founder Ajay Srivastava said.