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bne August 2020 Companies & Markets I 21
ING Bank launches fashion marketplace in Romania
Tamas Szilagyi in Budapest
ING Bank, the fourth-largest bank by assets in Romania, has launched the online shopping platform DealWise, thus entering the fashion trade, ING said in a press release.
Through this platform, ING Bank competes directly with online fashion retailers such as Fashion Days (owned by eMAG) and answear.ro.
According to ING, the DealWise is initially available in Romania but, it says, “other countries will gradually be brought into the fold. Of these, Germany and Belgium are expected to be included in 2020.”
The products sold on the marketplace platform include sports
equipment, clothing, personal care items and toys. Some offers are available directly in the application, while others link to the website of large retailers such as Zara or Mango.
"We are an innovation of ING Bank NV. This means that we have behind us the strength and stability of a bank, but the flexibility and speed of a start-up,” reads a presentation on the DealWise website.
We are the first such ING Bank NV business in Romania, and this is twice a good thing: once because your money and data benefit from the security of a bank. Then, because we have local insights.”
Kazakhstan launches mobile app to combat counterfeit and illegal alcohol sales
bne IntelliNews
Kazakhstan has launched a mobile app to help the government crack down on the trade in counterfeit and illegal alcohol.
The new app, called e-Sapa, can be used to check the legality of alcoholic products by scanning a barcode on tax stamps bearing 2D datamatrix or PDF-417-stacked linear barcodes, or entering the data manually. The app then returns information on the name of the product and its manufacturer or delivers a warning if the code is invalid.
Around 5,384 excisable alcoholic products sold in Kazakhstan were verified via the app.
The app was developed by the Kazakh National Information Technologies Agency (NITEC) in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance’s State Revenue Committee.
The KazAlcoTabak industry association estimates that around 40% of alcohol sold in Kazakhstan is counterfeit or illegal, according to the National Chamber of Entrepreneurs of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
The e-Sapa platform for alcohol was developed after Kazakhstan began using a similar method in 2018 to monitor the fossil fuel sector, covering all stages from oil refineries to petrol stations. This approach helps track the volume of oil products entered into the supply chain.
“Around 5,384 excisable alcoholic products sold in Kazakhstan were verified via the app”
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