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A tech leader and software company director has said that the setup of a national FinTech organization will push New Zealand’s economic growth. Mitchell Pham, tech leader and director of NZTech, said that New Zealanders should care about FinTech as electronic interactions will play an important role across the country’s economy, according to  Scoop News , a New Zealand news website. After gathering support from NZTech and the New Zealand government, FinTechNZ was launched last week. Pham is reported as saying that e-commerce as a subset of FinTech is important for the future of small to medium businesses, enabling them to export globally. He added that on March 24, FinTech experts from the U.K. and Australia, two of the biggest FinTech communities, will be connecting with FinTechNZ members when they visit New Zealand. He said: This will help expand connections for our fintech community to grow, which in turn will contribute to New Zealand’s economic growth. ...

Snap Inc’s initial public offering filing seemed to show a company with a basic math problem: the company's cost of revenue for 2016 - the amount it had to spend just to keep the messaging service running - was $47 million higher than its $405 million in sales. The high cost of revenue, which in Snap's case consists mainly of payments to Alphabet Inc's Google for hosting the service, means that, on an annual basis, Snap lost money on every one of its 158 million users in 2016, even before accounting for salaries, office rents or anything else. Snap revealed in its IPO prospectus, filed with securities regulators on Thursday, that it will pay Google at least $2 billion over the next five years. But the cost side of the problem may not be as serious as it seems. The company's hosting costs are broadly in line with other social media companies. Its cost of revenue per active daily user was 97 cents in the last quarter of 2016, not much higher than the 85 cents that Face...

The Bank of England is feeling the heat again after its new, more upbeat picture for Britain's economy put an uncomfortable focus back on its warning last year about a quick and sharp Brexit vote hit to growth. Governor Mark Carney woke up on Friday to headlines in anti-European Union newspapers that accused him of leading the Bank into a U-turn. "More humble pie for Bank as economy keeps growing," the Daily Express said. The BoE surprised investors on Thursday when it hiked its forecast for growth this year to 2.0 percent. That was up from a call of 1.4 percent made just three months ago and represented a leap from its first post-referendum forecast of 0.8 percent. The new prediction was higher than all but one of 50 forecasts by private economists in a Reuters poll in January, raising some eyebrows in the City of London. The BoE also edged up its growth forecasts for the following two years. At the same time, Carney and his fellow policymakers lowered their forecast...