The prominent German payments processing firm Wirecard collapsed after $2 billion in its accounts were found missing or non-existent. The company is well-established as a global provider of payment services across online and mobile platforms. The scandal as we know it has just been uncovered , however, there were money laundering allegations dating back to a decade-long times.

The scandal started to develop due to the activity of the Financial Times which watched Wirecard closely especially its headquarters in Singapore due to the alert about its plan to fraudulently send money to India via third parties. Back in 2019 the Singapore police raided the Wirecard offices, but Wirecard continued functioning dismissing all the allegations.

In late 2019 the Financial Times finally published documents indicating that profits at Wirecard’s units in Dublin and Dubai were fraudulently inflated. Despite denying this, Wirecard appointed KPMG to carry out a special audit, that in April 2020 resulted in a report they could not verify that arrangements responsible for the ‘lion’s share’ of profits reported from 2016 to 2018 were genuine. At this point questions about Wirecards auditors, EY, started to appear since they used to sign off on Wirecard’s accounts for more than a decade. European Investors VEB have called for a “thorough investigation” of EY’s work to be led by the German financial watchdog. Last week Wirecard’s board has decided to file an application for insolvency in the district court of Munich. It remains unknown whether insolvency applications for Wirecard group subsidiaries are likely to follow.

Naturally, the company’s financial scandal has had due impact on its share price which plunged over 75% following the insolvency announcement. The scandal has led to the arrest of the firm’s former chief executive Markus Braun who is now accused of inflating Wirecard’s market position and financial health to appeal to investors. The ex-CEO has been released on a €5 million bail.

It goes without saying the scandal damages trust in auditors. Experts claim EY might have uncovered the fraud sooner if they’d been more diligent about a process called bank balance “confirmation.” Currently Wirecard intends to continue operating despite its insolvency application. Naturally there will be questions asked about how they managed to fraud investors, and EY, for so long. Bloomberg quotes Felix Hufeld, head of the German financial regulator Bafin, who said Monday on a panel discussion: “It’s a shame that something like that happened.” “It starts with looking at complete failure of a senior management, despite many, many hints to discover the facts,” he said. “It goes on to the scores of auditors who couldn’t dig up the truth and it goes on with a whole range of private and public entities including my own who have not been effective enough to prevent something like that happening.”

Cash will not always rule the world. Applications and cards are gaining popularity and central banks are considering whether their countries actually need a digital currency, and if yes, how to create one.

The usual way to pay for purchases is rapidly changing. Visa and MasterCard strengthen their positions in many parts of the world. At the same time, companies such as Apple, Chinese Ant Financial, Swedish Swish and Kenyan M-pesa are conquering the market through mobile applications. Facebook also had some ambitious plans, but faced governmental restrictions.

Technical innovations are pushing out cash payments, and the governments start to wonder how to replace obsolete banknotes and coins. According to the data provided by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), dozens of countries are studying, testing or implementing digital currencies in central banks.

But the issue persists: there is a significant difference between physical money and electronic wallets. Banknotes and coins are issued by the central bank, the basis of the country’s financial system, while digital money depends on the stability of commercial structures and as a result is more vulnerable.

Government agencies and health services around the world are working together to find ways to counteract the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus in order to protect people and help society return to its normal life.

Software developers also contribute by creating technical tools to contain the virus and save lives.

Following the spirit of worldwide collaboration, Google and Apple have begun to jointly develop technology that will help governments and health services use Bluetooth to combat the spread of the virus. The basic principles of the new technology are the security and privacy of users.

As long as COVID 19 coronavirus can be transmitted from infected people to those near them, health authorities have come to the conclusion that contact tracing is one of the most effective ways to contain the pandemic. The world’s leading healthcare services, universities and nonprofit organizations from around the world are already developing technologies for voluntary contact tracing. To support these efforts, Apple and Google will soon launch a comprehensive solution that will include application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technologies to help launch contact tracing. Given the urgency of this issue, this solution is planned to be implemented in two stages.

Video conferencing has never been popular until the pandemic broke out. In the 2010s it was the exception rather than the rule and businessmen all over the world were more likely to go on a business trip rather than to meet at a virtual event on a regular basis.

Already today there are numerous applications and platforms for video conferencing and collaboration. Some, such as Cisco WebEx, are industry standards but can be expensive. Others are growing in popularity and may even be offered free of charge or at a low cost, such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, etc.

Video conferencing is used here and then for various purposes, including webinars, product demos, team meetings, and even job interviews.

We suddenly realized that a virtual conference is indispensable to interact and to do business and it requires high-quality audio and visuals.

Furthermore, the vendors creating these solutions will be hearing more and more complaints about interoperation, the inability to have side conversations, and security of conferences.

Thus, video conferencing still remains problematic and the developers are forced to look at it from all perspectives. But we assume that they should be able to field several potential solutions to tackle all known issues by the end of this year and sure virtual conferencing will play a major role as means of communication in the post-pandemic world.

We would like to address to you in this hard time of the worldwide pandemic, self-quarantine, and isolation to inform you that we fully share the same feelings of surreal and uneasiness. Most of us are being asked to work from home. Social media are full of disturbing posts. But despite all this, we must not forget that after the storm comes nice weather. So what we suggest doing right now is to lie low, try to stay calm and we will be informing you about interesting trends in the world of information technology that always appear.

Hopefully, you’ll have plenty of time to check out what we keep offering to you. Thanks for your understanding and patience, keep washing your hands and — events or no events in the digital world — we’ll see you very soon.