While McKinsey expect the payments industry to keep growing at a healthy rate, powerful disruptive forces will begin to reshape the global landscape.

Crowdfunding is a key growth area for the funding of small and medium sized enterprises in the UK. Access to capital has traditionally been an extremely difficult challenge for start-up companies to face. Even with a large number of angel investors in the UK market, achieving a fully funded investment round was time consuming, clunky and often the result of luck, as opposed to access to the right people. Crowdfunding has revolutionised that process.

Dell recently announced an agreement to acquire EMC - and with it, control of VMware - in a deal valued at $67 billion. While analyses of the deal so far have been devoted to the implications for the computing, storage, and networking industries or financing of the transaction, analyzing these threads together reveals a far more interesting story.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that tech companies made up only 11% of year-to-date IPOs, the lowest percentage since 2008. Amazingly – or rather disturbingly depending on your viewpoint - VC investors now have at least 117 companies valued at US$1Bn or more (ie the Unicorns), and the investors may be facing an IPO market that will not allow them to cash out.

The cyber security firm Sophos, today announced plans to IPO on the London Stock Exchange in early July where it will join the FTSE250.

What do a Braille printer made out of Lego and a drone that helps farmers monitor crops have to do with chipmaking? The Economist examines how fear of being displaced by startups is turning firms into venture capitalists.