Personal Finance

Apple Pay is now available in Italy, and iPhone users in the country are able to add eligible credit and debit cards to the Wallet app for use with Apple’s payments service in stores and online.

In Italy, Apple Pay is launching with support for Carrefour bank and UniCredit, as well as Boon prepay. The site says support for additional banks will be added later this year.

Rumors of Apple Pay’s expansion to Italy have been circulating for several weeks as Apple worked to add support for its payments service in the country, and the service has been listed as "Coming Soon" on the Apple Pay Italy site since March.

The number of people living in relative poverty in Switzerland is on the increase, but it is still below the European average, according to the latest report on living conditions in the alpine country. The survey for 2015, released on Monday by the Swiss statistics office (BFS), revealed that 570,000, seven out of 100 people, were living in poverty.

The BFS defines poverty as being unable to pay for the “goods and services necessary for a socially integrated life” which in 2015 applied to those with a monthly income below 2,239 francs for a single person or 3,984 for two adults and two children.

Groups with higher than average rates of poverty included people living alone, one-parent families, those without further education and people living in a home where no one works, the BFS said in a statement.

If you want to go to Valais for shopping, now you can pay your purchases in farinets, the new ‘local currency’ of the canton.
The currency was launched on Saturday in the city of Sion; it comes in eight denominations: 1, 2, 5, 10, 13, 20, 50 and 100, and it has the same value as the Swiss franc. According to the organization, using the currency creates a spending power for the Lake Geneva region and boosts the local economy in a way that using francs and euros doesn’t always allow.

UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti considers the global banking sector has generated a degree of complexity such that it can only be managed by artificial intelligence (IA). In an interview on TeleTicino on Sunday, he underlined "we arrive at a human physical limit to manage all this complexity."

The phenomenon of digitization of the banking sector, which is imperative to maintain international competitiveness, should be viewed positively, Ermotti said, because it enables customers to provide more precise and faster services while banks can optimize the costs.

For Ermotti "These changes are also reflected in the elimination of certain activities,". However, he recalled that in Switzerland, one million people will retire in the next ten years, while at the same time job market will require only half million.

Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson has admitted Sweden has “major problems” as a result of the population growth brought on by mass immigration.
Earlier this week, the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKL) admitted, by 2020, municipalities face a funding deficit of 40 billion Swedish Krona (£3.5 billion) to finance services like hospitals and nursing homes.

“Demographic trends show that, with more children and more elderly people, the need for local government services is expected to grow significantly faster than the tax base,” says Annika Wallenskog, chief economist at SKL.

Bankers in junior positions in the City of London who work for British-headquartered banks picked up bonuses of just a quarter of what those working for American institutions in the UK earned, according to research by salary-benchmarking site Emolument.

Salary-benchmarking site Emolument surveyed 1,640 London bankers on this year’s bonus payouts and found the majority were either unhappy with, or unsure how to feel about, the amount they received.

Google has launched a new feature on Search and News which shows a "Fact Check" label for certain links, indicating whether a third-party fact-checking organization has found the story factual or not.

In October, the search giant introduced the fact check label for Google News in a few countries. But now the company is expanding use of the tag to search, as well as Google News in every other country where it’s available.

Foreign nationals temporarily admitted in Switzerland, F permit holders, will no longer receive social assistance in the Canton of Zurich in the next future, but will only have the aid in favour of asylum seekers. The Cantonal Parliament today adopted a revision of te law, fought by the Left parties. The City of Zurich assesses the possibility of a referendum.

With this decision, the Zurich parliament re-establishes the situation in force until 2011. In this way the people whose asylum application has been rejected but who are temporarily admitted to Switzerland because they can not come back home, due to the dangerous situation in their country or other reasons, will not be officially considered as recognized refugees.