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The UK government is exploring a similar under-16 social media ban, citing concerns about harmful content and mental health impacts. Social media’s minor reckoning: Social media firms earned $11 billion in 2023 from ads targeting minors, driven by advertisers’ demand for young audiences, per a Harvard study.

UK. Time Spent With Media. In the UK, the average daily time spent with mobile devices (3:00) trailed the average daily time spent with desktop/laptop/tablet by 13 minutes. But time spent with mobile devices in the country grew by 7 minutes YoY. In almost every other region, mobile time spent already far exceeds time spent with desktop/laptop/tablet.

Next year, 20.2% of all US retail ecommerce sales will be returned, per our forecasts, a share that is likely similar in the UK. But lengthy return processes can be a major pain point. Ä¢¹½AV 40% of consumers expect a refund to hit their account within 24 hours when making a return, per Worldpay, but they often take multiple days.

However, France is still some way behind the UK. Click here to view our forecasts for average time spent with media in Germany and average time spent with media in the UK. Traditional media’s stronghold was only broken in 2022. Traditional media had long been dominant in France, sitting ahead of digital media time as recently as three years ago.

The news: UK regulator Ofcom is opening an inquiry into how the streaming landscape will evolve over the next 15 years after research from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) found that 5% of UK consumers (1.5 million people) will be left out of the streaming ecosystem by 2040 and will still rely on linear TV.

Visa proactively blocked 410% more suspected fraudulent transactions in the UK on Black Friday than it did the year prior. And across all of Cyber 5 weekend in the UK, Visa blocked 117% more transactions than it did in 2023. The payments network didn’t disclose the number of US transactions it stopped.

National Bank plans to expand its offerings by leveraging Canadian Western’s sizable presence in Ontario and British Columbia as well as its focus on and relationships with small- to medium-size corporations, per a press release.

The news: HSBC is shutting down key parts of its investment banking operations in the UK, US, and Europe as part of CEO Georges Elhedery’s broader restructuring plan, per The Financial Times. The exact timeline for the closure of these units has not been specified, but the process is expected to unfold over the coming months.

The news: Klarna is available as a payment option on eBay across Europe, rolling out in the UK, France, Spain, Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands after a pilot in Germany, per a press release. eBay shoppers will be able to pay using Klarna’s Pay in 3, Pay in 30, or big-ticket Financing option.

The cost-of-living crisis is forcing UK consumers to change where they shop to save money. To attract and keep customers, retailers and brands across all sectors need to invest in loyalty programs—and understand what shoppers want from them.

Methodology: Data is from the November 2024 Bazaarvoice report titled "Shopper Experience Index Vol 18." 8,000+ shoppers worldwide in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, the UK, and the US were surveyed online by Savanta during September 2024.

The EU and UK have both passed sweeping laws like the Digital Markets Act that redefine the rules around data collection and come with their own: Companies in violation of the DMA can lose up to 10% of their global annual revenues. Those laws also limit how platforms can gather and use data from minors, causing major signal loss for in-demand advertising data.

Retail media ad spending in Germany sits between France and the UK in terms of dollar value. But it’s far ahead in terms of digital advertising market share. The channel’s spend will approach $3 billion in Germany in 2024, accounting for more than a fifth of total digital advertising.

Affirm launched in the UK last month. The company previously only operated in the US and Canada. The provider scored a partnership with Apple Pay, widely expanding its availability in stores as well as online. Affirm also added new BNPL options like Pay in 2 and Pay in 30, offering customers more payment flexibility.

The survey was conducted in China, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the UK, and the US.

Australia-based travel insurer World Nomads collaborated with UK-based specialist insurance, loyalty, and travel services provider Collinson Group to roll out a parametric travel insurance product to customers in the UK and Ireland.

The UK, Germany, Russia, and France remain the core European markets for ecommerce. The top 10 countries for retail ecommerce sales in Europe largely correlate to population size, with the notable exceptions of Russia underindexing and the UK heavily overindexing. Norway also overperforms, although on a much smaller scale.

Half (50%) of US and UK creators said they want to attend creator-centric events. Fewer (39%) said they want a physical location to meet like-minded creators and host meetings, per Billion Dollar Boy data from early 2024. Catch up quick: YouTube shut down its permanent creator campuses, called YouTube Spaces, in 2021, pivoting to a hybrid model with virtual programming and pop-up events.

A lack of relevant training data was the most cited (30.3%) roadblock to genAI adoption among US and UK banks and insurers, per an August 2023 FintechOS survey. Without rich and varied data sets, genAI systems cannot learn or deliver value. Banks have vast troves of customer and operational data, so this concern points to an issue of data storage and access rather than prevalence.