news 2022

One in ten people in Switzerland already uses a smartphone bank. Although such neo-banks have so far only been used as secondary and third-party banks, they could also challenge the established banks' status as principal bankers in the future. This is the result of a study by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts on the Swiss retail banking market.

Threat or salvation? The way in which people judge globalization depends on whether it benefits them or not. Our own experiences are crucial here, and carry more weight than forecasts of potential gains. This has been shown in an experiment by researchers at the University of Basel. November 2022 For decades, global political and economic relations have been seen as the secret to greater prosperity, and have therefore been consistently nurtured and intensified.

Returns are an integral part of online retailing. Up to 60 percent of the goods ordered are returned in individual online stores. This causes high costs, as the online retailer survey by the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts reveals. An HSLU research team asked online stores how returns can be avoided.

The composite containers developed by AELER, an EPFL startup, deliver better performance across the board: they're stronger, have a bigger payload, are better insulated, allow for enhanced tracking and can help cut carbon emissions.

We aren't very good at predicting what will make us happy. That is one finding from a study by Basel economists.

Simultaneous extreme heat and drought events have consequences in a variety of areas - for example the economy, health and food production. In addition, due to complex socio-economic connections, such extreme events can cause knock-on effects, researchers at the University of Zurich have shown. More systematic risk assessments are needed to make affected regions more resilient.

A team of cryptographers at ETH Zurich conducted extensive testing on the New Zealand-based cloud platform Mega. In doing so, they discovered security holes that would allow the provider to decrypt and manipulate customer data. -Mega - The most trusted, best-protected cloud storage this is how New Zealand-based cloud provider Mega advertises its services.

The Mobiliar Lab for Natural Risks of the University of Bern shows that far greater floods are possible in Switzerland than previously assumed. These extreme events underscore the importance of supra-regional emergency planning. A new modeling tool is designed to help manage large floods. Even experts could not have imagined the extent of these floods: Nobody had expected the devastating storms of summer 2021 in Germany.

Researchers at and the Frankfurt School have developed an artificial neural network that can solve challenging control problems. The self-learning system can be used for the optimization of supply chains and production processes as well as for smart grids or traffic control systems. Power cuts, financial network failures and supply chain disruptions are just some of the many of problems typically encountered in complex systems that are very difficult or even impossible to control using existing methods.

When investors shop for mutual funds, they typically focus on performance, which is generally measured by the level of returns (compared to a given benchmark). However, far less is known about value creation, i.e. whether funds, or rather the fund managers, are capable of extracting genuine value from capital markets through their investment decisions.