SOFIAH NICHOLE SALIVIO

News Editor

Ecommpay has agreed a marketing campaign with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, aimed at ICAEW communities that advise UK small businesses.

The campaign will give accountants and advisers access to guidance and insight on payments, banking and cash flow issues for smaller companies selling online.

ICAEW has more than 170,000 qualified members across 150 countries and runs both a Small and Micro Business Community and a Small Practitioners Community. Ecommpay wants to use the agreement to reach those groups directly.

The move centres on Ecommpay’s self-serve payments product for UK-registered small businesses. Built for online merchants, the service is intended to let users start taking payments quickly after onboarding.

According to Ecommpay, the product includes a hosted payment page and standard support for Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay and Google Pay. It also offers payment links for social commerce and bespoke business-to-business orders, alongside a basic recurring payments function.

Merchants can use direct plugins for WooCommerce, Magento 2 and Xero without developer involvement, the company said. All features operate through a single merchant account and unified dashboard, which Ecommpay said can reduce reconciliation problems linked to running several payment tools.

Adviser focus

The agreement reflects the role accountants often play in helping smaller companies choose systems for payments and cash management. For many small businesses, those advisers are the first point of contact on financial processes, as well as tax and reporting.

Rick Asiyani, Head of Commercial Partnerships, ICAEW, said the organisation’s member groups are closely involved in advising smaller firms.

“Our dedicated communities serve the accountants and advisers who guide UK small businesses on a variety of financial aspects including payments, banking and cash flow management,” said Asiyani.

“The sponsored content from Ecommpay will provide access to a wealth of payments knowledge for our members working with small businesses,” he added.

Platform detail

Ecommpay said its small business offer is designed to address limits many smaller merchants face when trying to broaden the payment methods available to customers. Lower sales volumes can make it harder for those businesses to secure the same payment set-up used by larger companies, it said.

Max Ryzhov, Chief Product Officer, Ecommpay, said the company has built a product specifically for that part of the market.

“Small businesses often face limitations in the payment options they are able to provide to their customers, as their smaller volumes mean they cannot access enterprise-quality payment infrastructure. At Ecommpay we are committed to inclusive payments for all businesses and individuals and have designed and built a dedicated small business self-serve payments platform to resolve this challenge.

“We aim to provide accountants and financial advisers working with small businesses with access to practical, easy-to-implement guidance on payments infrastructure that they can share with their clients,” said Ryzhov.

Ecommpay said the hosted payment page is brandable and has been accredited for accessibility by the Digital Accessibility Centre. The page is built in by default and can be launched from the merchant dashboard without technical support, it added.

Ecommpay, founded in 2012 and headquartered in London, operates in payments processing and acquiring. Its broader platform supports more than 100 payment methods and combines those services through a single application programming interface, according to the company.

Kim Hutchison, 60, and Harry Grieve, 57, were staying in a Travelodge in Dundee when the early morning incident happened last month.

Ms Hutchison said she was “petrified” before the man – wearing just shorts – left after about a minute of arguing over who was actually in the wrong room.

READ MORE: MP meets Travelodge bosses following room key assault case

Travelodge, which has headquarters in Thame, apologised to the couple and said room access security policies were not correctly followed.

Earlier this year, a man was jailed for sexually assaulting a woman in her hotel bed after Travelodge staff gave him a key card and her room number.

Kyran Smith had gone to the reception of the Maidenhead branch of the hotel chain in the early hours in December 2022 and said he was the woman’s boyfriend.

He was jailed for seven-and-a-half years following the assault.

The chain’s chief executive Jo Boydell apologised to the victim and said changes would ensure additional or replacement keys were only issued with permission from the person staying in the room.

In the latest incident, Ms Hutchison and Mr Grieve had been visiting relatives in Dundee and had gone to bed at the Strathmore Avenue branch of Travelodge, before they were disturbed at 2am on July 11.

“I just woke up, I had heard the door click, and sat up in bed,” Hutchison told the BBC.

“Here was a guy at the bottom of the bed, just standing with shorts on. He had something in his hand which I took to be the key card for the room.”

It is understood that the man had made a mistake regarding the room number, believing he was in room 316 not 313.

Mr Grieve, who works in Aberdeenshire, got dressed and went down to reception to try to find out what had happened and “get some answers” about why a stranger had been able to get into their room.

Following their complaint, the couple were given a room refund, as well as a £100 Travelodge voucher – which Mr Grieve said he doubted they would use.

The couple decided to publicise their case after becoming aware of the Maidenhead assault.

In April, Freddie van Mierlo, Liberal Democrat MP for Henley and Thame, met the senior leadership team at Travelodge’s headquarters in Thame to discuss guest and employee safety following serious concerns about hotel room security.

Henley and Thame MP Frieddie van Mierlo (Image: Contributed)

Travelodge said it was “very sorry” for what had happened, and that customer safety and security was a priority.

“Any case of an unauthorised person entering a guest’s room is a significant cause for concern and we want to be clear that this should not have happened,” a statement said.

“Our updated room access security policies were not correctly followed in this instance, which is not acceptable.

“We have retrained the team at our Dundee Strathmore Avenue hotel on our updated room security and check-in procedures, and would like to apologise again to Mr Grieve and Ms Hutchison for their experience with us.”

The previously-announced Travelodge safety review remains ongoing.

JOSEPH GABRIEL LAGONSIN

News Editor

Orbital Industries has signed an agreement with BASF Environmental Catalyst and Metal Solutions to license its CurieOS materials discovery platform, bringing the software into catalyst research for automotive emissions applications.

BASF’s Environmental Catalyst and Metal Solutions unit, known as ECMS, supplies aftertreatment systems and catalytic products to the automotive market. Under the agreement, the division will use CurieOS in its catalyst research and development work.

The deal expands Orbital Industries beyond its existing work in data centres, where it has used the same platform to develop a PFAS-free cooling material for its Orbital IT brand. CurieOS is designed to help researchers identify promising materials before producing laboratory samples.

Materials discovery in industrial settings often involves long testing cycles, as candidate substances must be synthesised, characterised and assessed under operating conditions. CurieOS is intended to shorten that process by combining literature review, data analysis and simulation in a single scientist-directed workflow.

At the centre of CurieOS is Orb, the company’s atomistic simulation model. Orbital Industries says the model can predict the properties of new materials and give researchers what it describes as a virtual laboratory for evaluating candidates computationally before committing to physical testing.

Orb can simulate 100,000 atoms on a single graphics processing unit, according to Orbital Industries, which also says the model runs faster than competing systems from large technology groups and academic teams. It cited independent benchmark results in support of those claims.

Automotive pressure

The BASF unit is entering the agreement as carmakers and suppliers face continued pressure to adapt emissions technologies to tighter regulation, changing powertrain designs, alternative fuels and cost constraints. Those factors have kept catalyst development a priority across the automotive supply chain.

Saeed Alerasool, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for ECMS at BASF, said this backdrop had made faster development more important.

“The agreement comes at a critical time for the automotive sector. The development of mobile emissions catalyst technologies continues to be driven by tightening emissions regulations, evolving powertrain technologies and alternative fuels, as well as growing cost pressure. At BASF ECMS, we continuously explore new approaches to accelerate development and further improve R&D and application efficiency. Through this agreement, we look forward to leveraging emerging AI technologies to enhance our ability to deliver leading solutions and help address evolving customer and market needs,” Alerasool said.

Research tool

Orbital Industries describes CurieOS as an AI research system that can follow goal-based instructions from scientists across several steps, including reviewing published work, analysing experimental results and running simulations to generate new hypotheses. It says this approach can reduce the number of physical experiments needed in the earliest stages of a programme.

That matters in catalysis because the field involves interactions at material surfaces that can be difficult to model accurately with lower-cost methods. Larger, more detailed simulations can help researchers narrow which candidates should move to laboratory testing.

James Gin-Pollock, Chief Technology Officer at Orbital Industries, said the technical demands of catalyst work made it a useful proving ground for the software.

“Catalysis is a brutal test for any simulation model – you’re dealing with complex surfaces, large systems, and subtle interactions that cheaper methods miss. Orb was built for exactly this: it can simulate systems of a scale and complexity that were previously out of reach, fast enough that scientists can actually iterate. That’s what makes it valuable for real industrial workflows rather than just a research demo,” Gin-Pollock said.

Jonathan Godwin, Chief Executive Officer of Orbital Industries, said the BASF agreement was a practical application of the company’s work in industrial materials development.

“The hardest part of materials discovery is knowing where to look. CurieOS gives scientists a way to explore and test ideas computationally before committing time in the lab, which means more of their effort goes into the candidates that matter. ECMS hosts exactly the kind of demanding, real-world materials development we built this for,” Godwin said.

The agreement places Orbital Industries in a segment of the industrial software market where chemical and materials companies are increasingly testing artificial intelligence tools against established laboratory processes. For BASF ECMS, the immediate use case is catalyst development for emissions systems, an area where small gains in material performance can carry commercial and regulatory significance.