Over the last few years, the biggest trend in the corporate banking market is undoubted that banking and accounting are merging. Cicero has written a new report titled “The battle of SME is continuing” where they believe the accounting system will be the preferred surface where SMEs will collect and manage their finances.

The accounting giant Visma is going into financing by establishing a Financing company, Visma Finance, which will offer invoice sales and probably loans gradually. 

DNB and Sparebank 1 went into accounting last year when they bought into the accounting provider Uni Micro, preparing for creating “Vipps for accounting”.

Read more about the movements here:

EU will probably order Apple to let third-party apps (Like Vipps and Square ) make payments with their NFC chip. According to them, Apple Pay is anticompetitive. Interestingly, Apple recently announced that it would open up this API in the other direction by allowing apps to take payment using NFC without needing a dongle.

Moniker has created a new brand identity for Coinbase. As a starting point, they turned to typical financial documents for typographic inspiration and started building a bespoke typeface: Coinbase Sans. To test the typography, they started with some of the toughest UI, which were dense with information.

Coinbase is known for its blue. Moniker increased the saturation and brightness for that core blue and introduced a secondary palette to be more flexible as Coinbase introduced sub-brands. You can see the complete case study here.

Speaking of typefaces: A large new study of the best fonts for online reading is ultimately disappointing because it doesn’t answer the most burning question: “what font should you use for your website?” Some of the key findings that stood out to me:

You’ve probably heard that some golf tournaments promise big cash prizes for holes-in-one if you are into golf. You probably didn’t know that they turn to niche insurers to protect against a stroke of luck. 

The hole-in-one insurance business dates back nearly 100 years — but it was originally intended for a different purpose: In many golf circles, it was (and still is) customary for the lucky golfer to buy drinks for everyone in the clubhouse after landing a hole-in-one. This could naturally get quite expensive. 

By the 1990s, the hole-in-one insurance industry had a total market value of $220m. An estimated 30% of all Japanese golfers shelled out $50-$70/year to insure against up to $3.5k in expenses. Around the same time, golf tournaments began offering increasingly large prizes for holes-in-one to drive up publicity.

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Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X