SOFIAH NICHOLE SALIVIO

News Editor

Ecommpay has been named a finalist in the 2026 eCommerce Awards for Best eCommerce Payment Solution. The shortlist recognises its Currency Choice and Try Again payment features.

The two features were selected in a category highlighting payment tools used in online retail. Launched in 2007, the awards programme focuses on initiatives and products in eCommerce.

Currency Choice allows merchants using Ecommpay’s platform to show customers a choice of currencies on the payment page. Shoppers can then complete purchases in their preferred currency rather than a merchant’s default base currency.

Try Again is designed for transactions where an initial payment attempt fails. It allows customers to retry the payment or choose another payment method within the same transaction instead of restarting the checkout process.

The shortlisting reflects a continued focus among payment providers on reducing friction at checkout, particularly for merchants selling across borders. Failed transactions and currency mismatch remain common causes of basket abandonment in online retail, especially when consumers are presented with unfamiliar payment options or unexpected conversion choices.

Ecommpay says its platform offers more than 100 alternative payment methods through a single integration. It positions that model as a way for merchants to support international expansion without adding multiple payment partners.

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in London, the payments company provides acquiring, payment processing and orchestration services. It also offers open banking, recurring billing and direct debits through the same platform.

Checkout focus

For merchants operating in several markets, the payment page has become an increasingly important point of conversion. Providers have added tools to address local preferences, repeat failed authorisations and create a clearer path through checkout in an effort to reduce lost sales.

Currency display is one of those areas. Consumers are often more likely to complete a purchase when they can see the amount they will be charged in a familiar denomination, while merchants seek to avoid confusion when settlement currency and display currency differ.

Retry tools have also grown in importance as online businesses try to recover sales that might otherwise be lost after a declined attempt. In practice, that can mean allowing a shopper to switch from one payment method to another without leaving the transaction flow.

Max Ryzhov, Chief Product Officer at Ecommpay, commented on the recognition and the role of the shortlisted tools. “These seemingly simple changes to the payment journey have helped reduce declines and prevented customers from abandoning checkout. We are delighted these innovations have been recognised in the eCommerce Awards programme. The shortlisting is testament to the expertise and dedication of our entire team, and confirms the importance of these developments in the journey to make payments inclusive and frictionless for every customer,” Ryzhov said.

Platform reach

Ecommpay describes itself as a global payments platform that aims to support merchants needing both local and cross-border payment acceptance. Its offering combines local and global acquiring with a range of payment methods accessed through a single application programming interface.

That approach reflects a broader trend in the payments sector, where merchants have sought to consolidate services previously handled by separate providers. Bringing payment processing, orchestration and additional payment options into one setup can reduce operational complexity for retailers, particularly those entering new markets.

Ecommpay also holds regulatory authorisation in the UK for payment services and is a principal member of both Mastercard and Visa. Its platform is certified to PCI DSS Level 1, a standard commonly used in the payments industry for card data security.

The Best eCommerce Payment Solution category places Ecommpay among providers competing on the customer checkout experience rather than back-end processing alone. In online retail, where small changes to payment flow can affect conversion rates, features that address failed payments and local currency choice have become central to how providers differentiate their services.

Ryzhov said the shortlisted developments had “helped reduce declines and prevented customers from abandoning checkout.”

The Wellcome Genome Campus has created a Science & Technology Advisory Group to help guide the scientific and technological direction of its expanding site.

Chaired by Dr Nicole Mather of IBM Consulting, the group includes representatives from Novartis, Genentech, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, EMBL-EBI, the Health Data Research Service and Wellcome, alongside campus leadership.

It has been asked to develop a strategy for what the campus describes as an AI-native district focused on omics, biodata and the use of AI in health and care translation. The group will advise on scientific priorities, emerging opportunities, infrastructure needs and the offer to incoming occupiers.

The move comes as the Wellcome Genome Campus undertakes a major expansion near Cambridge. The site is due to grow from 125 acres to 440 acres, with plans to support a community of 9,000 people or more and attract about 250 companies involved in research, translational development and other commercial activity.

Existing institutions on the campus include the Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute, while the Health Data Research Service is also joining the site. Together, they give the campus an unusual concentration of genomics, biodata and health data organisations within the UK life sciences sector.

Members of the new group include Dr Andy Richards, Dr Avi Spier of Novartis, Professor Ewan Birney of EMBL-EBI, Dr John Marioni of Genentech Research and Early Development, Professor Matt Hurles of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Dr Melanie Ivarsson of the Health Data Research Service, Neelam Patel and Professor Rachel McKendry of Wellcome.

They are joined by Robert Evans, Chief Executive Officer of Wellcome Genome Campus, Phil Clark, Chair of Wellcome Genome Campus, and Robert Holl of the Wellcome Trust’s investment division.

Expansion plans

The expansion forms part of what the campus describes as one of the UK’s largest recent investments in life sciences and technology infrastructure. The first phase is under way and is expected to be completed by 2028.

Plans for the wider site include new research and translation laboratories, commercial space, incubator and accelerator facilities, homes and community amenities. The project also includes additional data centre computing capacity, energy infrastructure and public realm works.

The expansion reflects a broader push across the Cambridge cluster to add laboratory space and specialised facilities as demand grows from biotechnology, data science and healthcare companies. By bringing research institutes, commercial tenants and national data infrastructure together on one site, the campus is seeking to strengthen its role in that ecosystem.

The arrival of the Health Data Research Service adds another element to that model. It is intended to provide national health data infrastructure, linking the campus’s existing strength in genomics and biological data with clinical and patient outcome information.

Advisory role

The Science & Technology Advisory Group will meet regularly in an advisory capacity. Members will also act as ambassadors for the campus in the UK and overseas.

Its creation signals an effort to shape the scientific identity of the enlarged site before much of the physical build-out is complete. It also brings in senior figures from pharmaceutical companies, research organisations and health data bodies at a time when AI and data-led approaches are becoming more central to biomedical research and clinical development.

Robert Evans outlined the rationale for the new body in a statement on the expansion strategy.

“Our expansion is about creating the right conditions for our science and technology community to thrive. The Science & Technology Advisory Group is helping us to set a clear direction for our future, foster collaboration, commerciality, talent attraction and retention and ensure we continue to grow as a world-class destination,” said Evans.

Dr Mather said the campus had an opportunity to define how biological data and AI are brought together in health research and application.

“The Wellcome Genome Campus is uniquely positioned to shape the future of a key frontier field: how we combine omics, data and AI to transform health and care for people globally. The Science & Technology Advisory Group will create a strategy that builds on the Campus’ pedigree and strengths to grasp the many opportunities now emerging,” said Mather.

e2e-assure has launched Cumulo, a sovereign AI-driven security operations centre platform for IT and operational technology environments. It describes the product as the UK’s only sovereign zero-day SOC platform.

The launch is aimed at organisations that want to keep cyber defence data and AI models within UK-controlled infrastructure, particularly operators of critical national infrastructure and businesses in regulated sectors. Cumulo combines threat detection, incident analysis and environment modelling in a system designed to reduce reliance on external cloud AI services.

The platform is built around a digital twin of each customer environment, maintained continuously through passive discovery across IT and OT systems. That replica is used for attack simulation and to identify risks before they are exploited, an approach e2e-assure says is particularly relevant in operational environments where live testing can disrupt services.

Another element is what e2e-assure calls a zero-day SOC model. In practice, this means live threat intelligence can be turned into detection rules immediately rather than waiting for slower update cycles, with the aim of narrowing the gap between a threat emerging and an organisation being able to detect it.

The system keeps artificial intelligence alongside a security information and event management platform rather than replacing it. In this structure, the SIEM acts as the evidential record of events, while AI analyses data, builds context and supports investigations.

Customer-dedicated local large language models are deployed within sovereign environments and trained on each organisation’s own estate. This is intended to improve accuracy by grounding analysis in local operating conditions while limiting the movement of sensitive security data outside customer-controlled infrastructure.

The launch comes as UK cyber policy places greater emphasis on early threat identification and stronger domestic control over defensive tools. e2e-assure linked the product to GCHQ’s AI Cyber Shield initiative and to broader concerns about dependence on foreign technology providers for security operations.

“Cumulo represents a shift away from traditional SOC and SIEM environments that are largely human-centric and reactive because they rely on sequential alert triage and retrospective investigation. Instead, Cumulo uses an AI-first security operating system,” said Rob Demain, chief executive officer of e2e-assure.

“Threats are now moving faster than human-led workflows can keep pace with, leaving security teams struggling. At the same time, many AI approaches in security are still constrained by legacy architectures that force them to rebuild context after the fact. We built Cumulo to change that by continuously building understanding as data is generated, while keeping expert analysts at the centre of decision-making,” Demain said.

The service retains a human review model, with SC-cleared security staff involved in decisions rather than allowing the platform to operate autonomously. Customer security and operations teams also remain involved throughout investigations, particularly where risk appetite and operational constraints differ between organisations.

Behind that model is a layered AI structure that separates environment-specific reasoning from broader research and intelligence tasks. A local model layer handles detection and analysis tied to the customer estate, while a separate intelligence layer correlates wider threat data. A further model layer is used for non-sensitive enrichment work.

The platform also uses several AI models to review investigations from different perspectives, creating what e2e-assure calls an auditable view of each alert through its Cumulo Analyst Helper. Findings are then checked against threat intelligence and deterministic detection engines before reaching an analyst, in an effort to reduce false or misleading outputs.

Product tiers

Cumulo is being offered through a tiered model aimed at different levels of security maturity. The standard version includes AI-led investigation, autonomous threat hunting, threat intelligence, centralised reporting and compliance dashboards.

The higher tier adds unified monitoring across IT and OT systems, digital twin functions, live compliance dashboards and cross-environment correlation for organisations with more complex operational estates. e2e-assure says the model is intended to help users identify and rank vulnerabilities across interconnected environments before they are exploited.

The company has provided managed security operations services to government and critical infrastructure customers for more than a decade. Its security operations centre is staffed by UK-based cleared cyber professionals, and the Cumulo platform is fully owned by the business rather than tied to a single third-party technology stack.

“For organisations responsible for critical national infrastructure and essential services such as energy, water, transport, telecommunications and government operations, resilience isn’t just about identifying threats faster; it’s about ensuring your ability to defend remains intact during a crisis,” Demain said.

“As more security capabilities move into the cloud, questions around sovereignty, dependency and operational continuity continue to mount. For organisations operating in regulated or high-dependence environments, reliance on external AI infrastructure can introduce risks around data residency, transparency and continued access to critical defensive capabilities. Cumulo addresses these challenges by keeping sensitive operational knowledge within customer-controlled environments, reducing exposure to external disruption and helping organisations maintain visibility and cyber defence capability even during major incidents, connectivity outages or wider infrastructure disruption,” he said.