Data presented by Conindustria reports that 58 % of SME owners in Venezuela face a lack of foreign currency as the main obstacle to production.

The currency auction in the national banking system is considered insufficient and discretionary, and is designed to exclusively benefit “large food and health corporations, leaving medium-sized manufacturers of chemicals, plastics, and technology empty-handed.”

The industrial sector points to a “drought of official dollars” that has led companies to take refuge in cryptocurrencies to cope with this lack of foreign currency and inflation in order to maintain production.

Digital currencies are an alternative given the difficulty in obtaining funds through traditional means. In this regard, analysts warn that as long as auctions remain limited — registering a 13% drop compared to the previous year — the economic recovery will be fragile.

The president of Conindustria, Tito López, recently pointed out that the paralysis of SMEs, due to the lack of foreign currency, “puts the entire supply chain at risk” as a consequence of insufficient financial support.

M.Pino

Source: alnavio

(Reference image source: engin akyurt on Unsplash)

Follow our news on Google! For current, interesting, and accurate information, click here to see all the content on Bitfinance.news. You can also find us on X/Twitter and Instagram

La entrada Venezuelan companies turn to cryptocurrencies amid dollar shortage apareció primero en Bitfinance.

Cybercrimes in the Venezuelan financial system continue to increase, as warned by the country’s Banking Association, highlighting identity theft and phishing as the most common methods.

Digital fraud cases are being carried out against corporations, SMEs, and individuals in increasingly sophisticated ways. In this regard, the ABV emphasizes “the need to strengthen a culture of prevention among users and companies.” The warning is based on a study conducted in October 2025 among private banks in the country, which concludes that phishing and identity theft remain the most frequent criminal activities.

On the other hand, the association details that banking institutions remain the primary target of cybercriminals, who “send fake links via email, social media, or search engines, mimicking the official websites of financial institutions.”

The ABV calls for the implementation of strong security measures leading up to 2026, when, according to its estimates, AI will be the main tool hackers use to commit their digital crimes.

M.Pino

With information from finanzasdigital.com

(Reference image: Shamin Haky on Unsplash)

Visit our news channel on Google News and follow us to get accurate, interesting information and stay up to date with everything. You can also see our daily content on X/Twitter and Instagram

La entrada Venezuelan Banking Association warns of increased digital fraud apareció primero en Bitfinance.

The Venezuela Productiva 2030 Business Expofair, organized by UNDP, CAF, and Cavidea, will be held at the Renaissance Hotel, in Caracas, from October 22 to 24, according to a recent announcement by Cavecom-e President Richard Ujueta.

The event aims to “highlight the importance of sustainable value chains, aligning with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” at a global level, with which the South American country seeks to align itself.

 

Ver esta publicación en Instagram

 

Una publicación compartida por Cavecom-e (@cavecom_e)

It will be a meeting of representatives from the public and private sectors, SMEs, business associations, universities, and other productive sectors in Venezuela to showcase their innovative initiatives, as well as promote networking and strategic alliances, as well as productivity and competitiveness.

Ujueta will be one of the panelists at this event, which will offer business roundtables to create real alliances, a brand and innovation fair with transformative proposals, inspiring conferences with voices that drive change, and new ways to connect, collaborate, and inspire one another. It will also be the occasion for the presentation of the Venezuela Productiva 2030 National Award, which recognizes initiatives that are making a difference in the country.

M.Pino

With information from venezuelaproductiva2030.com, national media, and social media

(Reference image: Headway on Unsplash)

Visit our news channel on Google News and follow us to get accurate, interesting information and stay up to date with everything. You can also see our daily content on X/Twitter and Instagram

La entrada Venezuela Productiva 2030 will highlight the country’s alignment with the sustainable development goal apareció primero en Bitfinance.

Digital payments have increased considerably in Colombia. It is estimated that a high percentage of SMEs already have this system and have seen benefits in their administrative processes and the simplification of accounting.

Business owners base their activities on the digital payment system. SMEs that have not integrated them are often forced to reject transactions, which is not good for business.

According to the study “Panorama of the Adoption of Digital Payments in Latin America and the Caribbean,” led by MasterCard, SMEs represent the core of commerce in Colombia, and digital payments are a fundamental pillar of their development.

Data from this document reveals that in Colombia, “90 % of SMEs that accept digital payments report experiencing significant business growth, while 94 % highlight that it has saved them time and money.”

Currently, MasterCard is supporting more than 80,000 SMEs in their digital transformation process. They are a technological and operational ally.

M.Pino

Source: elnuevosiglo

(Reference image source: Nathana Rebouças on Unsplash)

Visit our news channel on Google News and follow us to get accurate, interesting information and stay up to date with everything. You can also see our daily content on X/Twitter and Instagram

La entrada Digital payments are a fundamental pillar for SMEs in Colombia apareció primero en Bitfinance.

The survival of small and medium-sized businesses in the digital age is a major challenge. Spain estimates that 89 % of its SMEs are prioritizing their online presence, according to data from a YouGov study for IONOS.

This same assessment shows that 58 % of companies have their own website, “while 55 % use corporate email with their own domain, and another 55 % use social media in their digital strategy.”

These percentages place the European country above France (79 %), Germany (84 %), and the United Kingdom (82 %) in online presence. A decision that will be strengthened this year as it is considered key by 51 % of companies, in addition to related aspects such as cybersecurity and data protection.

Another area SMEs want to strengthen is the digitalization of their business model by storing data in the cloud.

Investment in digitalization for 2025 also considers growth and competitiveness. “The main priority will be to strengthen the company’s website, chosen by 4.6 % of respondents as their main area of ​​investment in 2025. IT security and data protection is the second most voted option, with 38% of companies allocating budgets to this area, which represents a 5 % increase compared to 2024.”

Social Media and Artificial Intelligence

Presence on social media is crucial for 38 % of the companies surveyed, which are allocating funds to strengthen their presence on these platforms.

On the other hand, “investment in artificial intelligence solutions has grown to 22 %, which represents a 5 % increase compared to the 2024 study.”

This means that more and more companies are recognizing the potential of AI to improve their processes and efficiency.

Barriers hindering digitalization

The study does not ignore the obstacles faced by Spanish SMEs in the transition to digitalization. One of the main barriers, identified by 69 % of SMEs, is costs. Added to this are bureaucracy, lack of time, “security and data protection in an increasingly complex digital environment,” not to mention the financial and administrative obstacles that slow the progress of digitalization.

M.Pino

Source: ituser

(Main reference image source: Campaign Creators on Unsplash)

Visit our news channel on Google News and follow us to get accurate, interesting information and stay up to date with everything. You can also see our daily content on X/Twitter and Instagram

La entrada Spanish SMEs consider digitalization a key for success apareció primero en Bitfinance.

Today, IT infrastructure, platforms and software are more likely to be offered as a service in a traditional on-premises setup. This is very attractive to small and medium-sized companies (SMEs), when compared to the majority, since it allows them to compete on equal terms with larger rivals, with more business agility and rapid scalability, without excessive investment. Thus, ESET, a leading company in proactive threat detection, warns that digital transformation also entails risks regardless of the size of the company and shares key security tips to take into account to avoid errors.

“53 % of SMBs surveyed in a recent report say they spend more than $1.2 million annually on the cloud, up from 38 % last year. Furthermore, security (72 %) and regulatory compliance (71 %) are the second and third most cited challenges by the SMEs surveyed. The first step in addressing these challenges is to understand the top mistakes smaller businesses make with their cloud deployments. In any case, these are not just mistakes that SMEs make in the cloud, larger companies with more resources are sometimes guilty of forgetting the essential ones. By eliminating these blind spots, your organization can take great steps towards optimizing its use of the cloud, without exposing itself to potentially serious financial or reputational risks”, comments Camilo Gutiérrez Amaya, head of the ESET Latin America Research Laboratory.

The 7 main cloud security mistakes that SMEs (and not so SMEs) make, according to ESET

1. No multifactor authentication (MFA): Static passwords are inherently insecure, and not all companies follow a strong password creation policy. Passwords can be stolen in several ways, such as phishing, brute force methods, or simply guessing. That is why it is necessary to add another layer of authentication (two-key or two-factor). MFA will make it much more difficult for attackers to access applications in your users’ SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS accounts, mitigating the risk of ransomware, data theft, and other potential outcomes. Another option is to switch to alternative authentication methods, such as authentication without password, whenever possible.
2. Placing too much trust in the cloud provider: Many IT managers believe that investing in the cloud effectively means outsourcing everything to a trusted third party. This is only partly true: there is a shared responsibility model between the provider and the customer, for securing the cloud. The type of service – SaaS, IaaS or PaaS – will determine what should be taken into account. While most of the responsibility falls on the provider, it is worth investing in additional third-party controls.
3. Not making backups: Never assume that the cloud service provider (for example, for file storage/sharing services) has your back. You should think about the worst case scenario: a system failure or a cyberattack on your provider. It’s not just data loss what will impact your organization, but also the downtime and hit to productivity that could follow an incident.
4. Not patching regularly: If you don’t patch, you expose your cloud systems to vulnerability exploitation. This, in turn, could lead to malware infections, data leaks, and much more. Patch management is a security best practice that is as important in the cloud as it is in other systems.
5. Cloud disruption: Cloud service providers are an innovative bunch, but the sheer volume of new features and capabilities they release in response to customer feedback can end up creating an incredibly complex cloud environment for many SMEs. This makes it more difficult to know which configuration is the most secure. The most common mistakes are configuring cloud storage so that any third party can access it and not blocking open ports.
6. Failing to monitor cloud traffic: Rapid detection and response are critical if signals are to be detected early, to contain an attack before it has a chance to impact the organization. This makes continuous supervision essential. It is worth thinking that it is not a question of “whether” the cloud environment will be breached, but “when”.
7. Don’t encrypt your company’s crown jewels: No environment is 100 % breach-proof. So what happens if a bad actor manages to access your most sensitive internal data or highly regulated employee/customer personal information? Encrypting them at rest and in transit will ensure that they cannot be used even if they are obtained.

Experts advise

From ESET, they assure that the first step to address these security risks in the cloud is to understand what the responsibilities are and what areas the provider will be in charge of. It’s a matter of deciding whether to rely on cloud-native security controls or to enhance them with additional third-party products. Therefore, they advise the following:

• Invest in third-party security solutions to improve cloud security and protection of email, storage and collaboration applications. In addition to the security features built into cloud services offered by leading service providers in the world cloud
• Add extended or managed detection and response (XDR/MDR) tools to drive rapid incident response and breach containment/remediation
• Develop and implement an ongoing risk-based patching program based on strong asset management (i.e. knowing what cloud assets you have and ensuring they are always up-to-date)
• Encrypt data at rest (at the database level) and in transit to ensure its protection. This will also require effective and continuous data detection and classification
• Define a clear access control policy; require strong passwords, MFA, principles of the least privilege, and IP-based restrictions/allow access lists for specific IPs
• Consider adopting a zero trust approach, which will incorporate many of the above elements (MFA, XDR, encryption) along with network segmentation and other controls

“Many of the measures above are the same best practices that one would expect to deploy in on-premise systems as well, with some details that will be different. The most important thing is to remember that cloud security is not only the responsibility of the provider and that control must be taken to prevent cyber risks” concludes Gutiérrez Amaya from ESET.

For more details on computer security, you can visit the ESET portal: https://www.welivesecurity.com/es/

Bitfinance.News

With information and reference image provided by ESET and Comstat Rowland

Visit our news channel on Google News and follow us to get accurate, interesting information and stay up to date with everything. You can also see our daily content on Twitter and Instagram

La entrada SMEs: 7 common mistakes when using cloud services apareció primero en Bitfinance.

The Bogotá Chamber of Commerce (CCB), together with the World Federation of Chambers of Commerce (WCF) will hold the event “Business opportunities with the regions of the world” between February 27 and March 1st, in which it will seek to give a boost to the internationalization of small and medium-sized companies.

This summit will have representatives of the private sector from 27 countries in the Americas, Europe, Africa or the Middle East, through their Chambers of Commerce, as well as some business delegations, as in the case of Romania. For the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce, it is an “opportunity” to put Colombia on the investment radar of countries that, at first glance, are very far from Latin America, such as Iran, Uganda, Cameroon or Nigeria, being all of them participants in the meeting.

“Latin America has for the first time the opportunity to lead the World Federation of Chambers of Commerce and our goal is to serve as a transmission belt for businessmen in their internationalization and development strategy”, said Nicolás Uribe during a meeting with journalists.

For her part, the Vice President of International Relations and Cooperation of the Chamber, María Mónica Conde, focused on those sectors in which they seek to serve as a link to Colombian companies for their internationalization, such as pharmaceuticals or agriculture. In addition, in this meeting they will look for the “niche markets” that have a lot of demand and little production, which will be “priority” during these days.

K. Tovar

Source: Forbes

(Reference image source: Maxim Ilyahov, Unsplash)

Visit our news channel on Google News and follow us to get accurate, interesting information and stay up to date with everything. You can also see our daily content on Twitter and Instagram

La entrada From Bogotá, the internationalization of SMEs will be promoted apareció primero en Bitfinance.

76% of Spanish companies plan to increase their investments in Latin America in 2023, which leads to 79% being confident that their turnover in the region will increase in the next three years, reaching a higher weight than Spain for 51% of large companies and 42% of small and medium-sized ones.

These are some of the conclusions of the fifteenth ‘Report on Spanish Investment in Latin America’ developed by IE University, Auxadi, LLYC and Iberia, with the collaboration of Casa de América.

“Ibero-American countries reinforce their attractiveness as a destination for Spanish investments in 2023. If we focus on SMEs, the percentage will be higher than 76 %, reaching 81 %. Most of these investments will be carried out through organic growth (52 %), while 45 % will do so by combining organic growth with acquisitions of other companies”, explained the director of the report and professor at IE University, Juan Carlos Martinez Lázaro.

For LLYC’s partner and director of Global Operations, Luisa García, 2023 will be a “very relevant” year for investment in Latin America, taking into account prominent events such as the XXVIII Summit of Heads of State and Government or the Presidency of the Spanish Council of the European Union. “They represent great value opportunities to put Latin America in the spotlight and promote business activity in the region,” he stated.

For his part, the director of Alliances and Strategic Agreements of Iberia, Víctor Moneo, has assured that since the beginning of the airline’s operations in the region, it has always occupied “a central space” in its strategy and in 2023 it is renewing this bet, strengthening its presence to continue consolidating its “leadership” in the connectivity between Latin America and Europe.

Good economic situation in Latin America

Around 70 % of Spanish companies believe that the economic situation in Latin America will be similar to that of 2022, even 20 % rate it as good or very good, according to the report’s conclusions.

All in all, while Panama, Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Colombia reach the best valuation, expectations for the economic performance of Chile and Peru for 2023 fall slightly compared to the previous year. Regarding the preferred destinations, Mexico is once again the country in which the most Spanish companies are thinking of increasing their investments during 2023, followed by Colombia, Chile and Brazil.

Among the risks faced by companies in the region, inflation stands out. In fact, 44 % say that it is affecting their level of sales. To a lesser extent, 20 % of Spanish companies consider the competition from Chinese companies, increasingly relevant in those markets.

The report concludes that at a time of geopolitical tensions and an increase in protectionist practices in some countries and regions, Spanish companies value the opportunities offered by the region (79 %) over the European Union (67 %), the United States and Canada. (67 %) or Asia (32 %).

In this sense, the CEO of Auxadi, Víctor Salamanca, pointed out that Latin America is “an attractive market” for Spanish companies. “At Auxadi we have been supporting Spanish companies in their global expansion for more than 40 years, especially in Latin America, a huge and interconnected market that offers great opportunities. To distribute, to produce and to create”, he has reviewed.

Source: dpa

(Reference image source: IE University, Europa Press)

Visit our news channel on Google News and follow us to get accurate, interesting information and stay up to date with everything. You can also see our daily content on Twitter and Instagram

La entrada 76% of Spanish companies will increase their investments in Latin America in 2023 apareció primero en Bitfinance.

Ant Group, the Chinese fintech giant, launched a digital bank in Singapore called ANEXT Bank, which together with the Proxter platform, has the mission to satisfy the needs of small local and regional companies that carry out cross-border operations.

The alliance of the technological giant, hand in hand with the platform responsible for managing an online market for SMEs, expands “outside its local market“, once obtained, by the Central Bank and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the licenses and authorizations as a “digital wholesaler” financial institution.

In order to obtain authorizations from the Chinese government, concerned about the possible financial risks implicit in the business model of the millionaire entity Alibaba, the financial institution had to carry out “an extensive restructuring of its services and operations to make them more transparent.”

Within the restructuring and expansion of the company, it bought the majority of the shares of the 2C2P payment platform in Singapore.

For the launch of its digital banking, ANEXT-Bank, the company “previewed its ANEXT business account, a dual-currency deposit account with three-factor authentication verification, remote onboarding, and daily interest.” According to the information provided to the media through an official statement.

The statement also highlighted that from the third quarter, the bank’s commercial account will be available to the SME community.

M. Rodríguez

Click the link to subscribe to our news and media group on Telegram: https://t.me/G_ELSUMARIO_Noticias

Source: actualidad.rt.com

La entrada Ant Group launches digital banking service in Singapore apareció primero en Bitfinance.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software systems “are no longer a tool reserved for large companies, but have become the key to digital transformation in small and medium-sized companies” thanks to pay-per-view models, according to a new guide prepared by the Zucchetti company.

Under the title “ERP as a service. Benefits of SaaS or pay-per-use solutions for digital transformation”, the company’s experts analyze the advantages of the ‘SaaS’ (Software as a Service) model for companies of all sizes that want to face the digital transformation in the current context, marked by the consequences of the pandemic and the growth of working from home.

“Today there are new models of access and use of ERP, as well as new solutions in the cloud, which allow us to have an advanced tool that is compatible with new technologies without assuming the technical costs of installing, maintaining and updating the hardware”, details the document.

In this way, an SME can hire this software based on their needs and access technologies such as the integration of eCommerce, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence for data analysis, robotics, Virtual and Augmented Reality and IoT for Industry 4.0, among other solutions.

The guide, available on the Zucchetti website, analyzes the different existing ERP payment models and focuses on SaaS, its benefits for Industry 4.0, its functionalities and the advantages of working with an ERP SaaS in the cloud. In addition, it sets the guidelines for a correct implementation, based on its extensive experience in the sector.

Source: dpa

La entrada Payment methods are a must for digitization apareció primero en Bitfinance.