With Black Friday ready to jump-start, merchants are preparing to give out the best deals to their customers.

In the midst of all the shopping rage, Kaspersky has geared up for the big day with its brand new interactive device to enable consumers to spot the differences between actual bargains and duplicate sites.

The equipment will inform consumers of the discrepancies that are found between a genuine website and a forged website and ingeniously staged cyber threats while doing online shopping.

The device is introduced in the light of increasing cybercrimes linked to deceptive selling and fooling customers online. The Kaspersky researchers disclosed that the e-commerce cyber crimes had risen dramatically in the past year, and with Black Friday and Cyber Monday around the corner, the likelihood of these attacks increases manifold.

Consumers can employ this tool to inform themselves regarding the warning signs to spot in case of an attack. Here are some general tips that all of us can keep in mind to ensure safe online shopping:

• Don’t hesitate to spend on a strong cybersecurity device to safeguard your private data and money.
• Only use unique and hardest passwords to create shopping accounts and internet banking. If you have trouble remembering all passwords, try out a password manager that you can refer to every time you shop.
• Be extra cautious while shopping online on your smartphones. The short URLs are generally used as tending to be more phone-friendly, but some of them can be utterly risky. While making a transaction, switch off the public wifis and use a secure private connection.
• Avoid websites that look suspicious or inferior regardless of the deals they are offering. Avoid clicking on unusual links.
• Beware of emails and social media attachments and links unless you’re sure of the content.
• Don’t keep massive amounts of money in your bank accounts and use a credit card for shopping.
• Reduce the attempts for transactions over your debit or credit card. Make sure you use 2-factor authentication that is entrusted with secure codes of Visa or MasterCard.

Hence, with a little caution and these simple considerations, we can ensure a safe and happy sale shopping spree!

The market of green investments has emerged as a bright area for money managers and banks over the past few years in the times of slow-moving growth. A treasure trove of 30 trillion dollars has managed to remain unregulated so far, but things are soon going to change with recent developments.

Green investments, considered one rapidly growing financial area, may come under regulation as Brussels officials are contemplating the idea. Interestingly, the United States’ federal watchdogs are mostly out of this debate. Hence, the efforts of the European Union could turn out to be the benchmark for green finance across the world.

As Ilan Jacobs, Citigroup Inc’s co-head of European Government Affairs, puts it; the EU here believes it’s a global leader and will help establish a standard.

It has to be noted that though Europe has taken some regulatory missteps, it has also been a front runner on problems on which a hands-off approach was taken by the US.

At the same time, any regulations made and agreed on green finance in Brussels will apply only in Europe. However, they could end up being adopted globally – a thing which has happened in the past, too. For instance, in 2018, Microsoft and Facebook stated they would largely apply the new rules for data protection of Europe even outside the continent.

Forming a “green investment” definition

One of the prime aims is also to commonly define green investments and curb all the malpractices that go on in the form of green investments. The market often experiences greenwashing wherein, the products are called sustainable even when they’ve zero elements for fighting climate change. That hampers market development significantly.

As a result, establishing a catalog, termed as taxonomy, is at the core of the plan. It would outline what makes up sustainable practices that can be eligible for green funds, bonds, and other product offerings.

A group of experts is scrutinizing what would be a consistent level of energy emission and consumption with the Paris Climate Agreement. So far, criteria for nearly 70 economic affairs have been developed, right from manufacturing and agriculture to electricity and transport.

According to the reports, the taxonomy of the group could lay the foundation for the new directives by 2022 end. However, some of the investors are utilizing the draft criteria already to check whether their holdings can be construed as green, as per Nathan Fabian, tech expert group’s member.

Once in place officially, the investment funds wanting to claim their contribution to environmental objectives will have to reveal their extent of compliance with the European standards.

Fabian also said that this disclosure would apply to all the investment fund products that are issued in Europe. That includes investment product offerings from companies based outside the continent.

Thus, such development will have a huge effect on the entire green investment arena, worth about 30+ trillion dollars.

In addition to that, the taxonomy will also act as the basis for the standard of EU green bonds as well as possibly other products. For those who came in late, green bonds are the most established and simplest sustainable finance form. These bonds are specifically issued for funding environment-friendly projects.

Europe’s aim behind green finance regulation is to direct additional private funds in such products.

As far as money managers are concerned, they’re not opposing the common green finance standards. They just don’t want to be forced to report their green metric immediately for their holdings or told how they could run their funds, shared Steffen Hoerter, ESG head at Allianz Global Investors.

Two prize-winning fintech firms have taken upon themselves to assist ethical finance firms to compete more efficiently with conventional providers. Soar and Acquired.com are assimilating their respective technology platforms to assist credit unions and ethical organizations in providing simplified, efficient and transparent services.

Founder and CEO of Soar, Andrew Duncan, explained the importance of this partnership,

“This is an important partnership for us and a statement about how we intend to improve business processes for our ethical clients. It will also allow their customers to view, manage and pay for a variety of services through one mobile and desktop application….Our clients will not be playing catch up with mainstream players as they are now enjoying the latest cutting-edge tech, which is a match for any organization in the financial services sector.”

The banking platform of Soar is currently being used by ten credit unions across the UK, which can now get access to Acquired.com’s complete range of payment products. The payment products will enable the hosting of new facilities, such as automated reconciliation, which will ensure total transparency during the whole transaction cycle.

In the past couple of months, Soar has been rewarded with around half a million pounds as a grant for R&D. This tie-up is being seen as an added encouragement in the company’s effort to expand further in the United Kingdom and also spread its reach into international markets.

In a big setback for the automobile industry, car sales all across the globe are likely to register their sharpest year-over-year fall in the current year 2019 as consumer demand from the US and Chinese economy has fallen.

According to reports, the car sales all over the world are likely to decline by approximately 3.1 million in the current financial year.

According to the Fitch economics team, this is going to be a much bigger fall in comparison to 2008. Fitch also highlighted data obtained from the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers while making this prediction.

The recession in the auto sales will cause a fall in global manufacturing, claimed Fitch.

The slowdown is in auto sales has just not begun overnight. Earlier in the month of January 2019, the US light-vehicle sales also reported a fall of 1% with higher fleet shipments counterbalancing lower retail volume. At that time government shutdown and harsh weather conditions affected consumer demand. And the car sales fell by 4% in December 2018.

According to Brain Coulton, chief economist at Fitch Ratings said,

“The downturn in the global car market since the middle of 2018 has been a key force behind the slump in global manufacturing and the car sales picture is turning out a lot worse than we expected back in May.”

According to data obtained earlier this year in April, sales at FCA US registered a decline of 7.3%. Toyota Motor Corp. continued its monthly losing streak to 5%. General Motors witnessed a fall of 8.3% and still looking for its first gain of the current financial year. Sales declined 5.2% at Ford Motor Co. Meanwhile, Nissan Motor Co. recorded a decline of 7.2%, and Mazda registered a fall of 19%.

The global passenger car sales also dipped to a whopping 80.6 million in the year 2018 from 81.8 million in 2017. Fitch said it emerged as the first annual fall since 2009. Reports suggest that global car sales are likely to dip by another 4% in the year 2019 to approximately 77.5 million new vehicle sales.