European challenger bank bunq today joins forces with global charities to aid its mission to make the world a better place. Following a public beta programme, which saw bunq ask its users to share their insights and to test its new app before rolling out to the masses, bunq is now unveiling ‘Common Goals’.

Lipreading-friendly face masks, digital medical services and contact-free ATM buttons among winning business entries to The AdamStart COVID-19 Innovation Challenge, as British entrepreneur Adam Bradford has revealled the five winners of the AdamStart global entrepreneurial challenge to tackle COVID-19.

The number of people on UK payrolls dropped by 612,000 between March and May, according to early data from the Office for National Statistics and HM Revenue and Customs that is starting to show the depth of the hit to the economy from the pandemic. The UK unemployment rate for the three months to April 2020 was estimated at 3.9%, 0.1 percentage points higher than a year earlier but largely unchanged on the previous quarter.

Lone Design Club is leading the charge for independent designers in the evolution of the high street, as well as the reaction to the challenges now facing small businesses brought about by COVID-19, by going 'phygital'.

Personalised health management platform, Span, has announced the launch of its new subscription-based business offering to help employees prevent and reduce symptoms of lifestyle-induced conditions - Diabetes, Hypertension, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, Obesity and IBS. The platform offers personalised, continuous nutrition and mental wellbeing plans and on-demand consultations with clinicians.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire can now benefit from fully-funded University of Nottingham expertise through a programme which has been re-purposed to help businesses prepare for economic recovery following COVID-19.

The Tech to Connect Challenge was launched in the summer of 2019, in order to develop early-stage ideas for technology that enable more or better interactions between people. The challenge looked for the most innovative ideas, helping them turn these ideas into prototypes that have the potential for real change.

Over half (55%) of SMEs believe that their competitors have a better digital presence than they do, according to new research by leading creative agency, Sparkloop. 

Quickly responding to the impact COVID-19 and lockdowns are having on tech startups, Capital Enterprise has collaborated with OneTech and Mindful Team, with support from J.P. Morgan, to launch the Startup Resilience programme. Over six months, startup founders will be provided everything from webinars and community slack channels, to mastermind sessions and accountability groups, to be helped through this period of uncertainty. 

Figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) recently published have showed that the number of people claiming unemployment benefit went up from 856,000 to 2.1 million in April, with almost 1.5 million officially unemployed.

Technology charity, Jangala, has deployed a new product ‘Get Box’ to bring WiFi access to vulnerable individuals in the UK during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Data Tech startups are wanted for Lloyd's Lab Cohort number 5! Lloyd’s are looking for looking for early and late stage companies who can help tap into alternative data sets to paint a more accurate picture of risk and help the market underwrite more profitably. 

Placing marketing over product, dismissing potential partnerships and overstaying in a single market are key mistakes entrepreneurs should be on the lookout for when building a challenger bank.

UK SMEs are moving to accept card and contactless payments at an increasingly rapid rate as a result of the coronavirus crisis, according to findings published today by NatWest.

Ontruck, Europe's leading digital road freight platform, has secured an investment round of €17 million euros led by OGCI Climate Investments (OGCI CI). Existing Ontruck investors, Cathay Innovation, Atomico, Idinvest Partners and Total Carbon Neutrality Ventures, participated in the round, with Endeavor Catalyst joining as a new investor.

Introducing the Renegade Academy - the programme for new founders brought to you by Huckletree.  

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the technological landscape of the future. US-based technology company, is developing a consented and privacy preserving public dataset of human interactions for AI research. This video content will help researchers to advance the possibilities of machine learning within their applications. The contributors to the project are remote workers in the gig economy, also known as the ‘human cloud’. They are being crowdsourced by freelance hiring platform, Twine, through their extensive community of 350,000 freelancers.  

OurCrowd, the large venture investment platform, will host the OurCrowd Pandemic Innovation Conference on 22nd June to explore the latest technological solutions to the coronavirus crisis, including vaccination, treatment, diagnostics and prevention of the disease.

The team at Quotezone.co.uk, an insurance comparison site, surveyed 600 UK businesses about how they are dealing with the lockdown. The research revealed that two fifths of UK businesses (39%) have had to pivot their offerings since the beginning of lockdown, with 76% of these providing a brand-new service.

GrowthStep, a one-stop partnership service for startups, has launched in the UK to provide startups in today’s challenging economy with the support they need to focus on carving out market potential and growing their business with often limited resources and budgets.