IDC Financial Insights today released a new study, Branch Transformation in a Digital World, which discusses the current challenges faced by banks in managing their branch networks and outlines the best ways to transform them.

Fidessa group plc (LSE: FDSA) has today announced the launch of new optimized trading capabilities for its sell-side equities trading platform. Designed to empower traders in an increasingly automated and competitive world, Fidessa’s Order Performance Monitor allows users to monitor all live orders simultaneously and identify any outliers in real time. In conjunction with this, a new Fidessa white paper, Optimized Trading - Empowering the trader in an automated world, examines the challenges brokers face today in achieving optimal trading outcomes.   

Ullink, a leading provider of electronic trading and connectivity solutions to the financial community, today announced the release of the latest version of its popular order and trade monitoring solution, UL Monitoring. Version 2.3 of UL Monitoring adds new capabilities including enhanced support for position management and handling of split and multi-day trading sessions. The latest version has been significantly tuned to improve scalability, now handling hundreds of millions of messages per day.

Financial IT speaks with Brant Clark, Director, Product Marketing - Mobile Products and Solutions at Kofax, Inc about the mobile banking technologies and how they affect the customer experience.

Financial IT: What are the challenges and trends in mobile banking industry?

McGraw Hill Financial (NYSE: MHFI) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SNL Financial for approximately $2.225 billion in cash.  The economic impact to McGraw Hill Financial will be partially offset by tax benefits with an estimated present value of approximately $550 million resulting from the transaction.

Huawei recently announced that it will partner with eleven of the world’s leading banking IT solution providers to establish an open platform ecosystem for the finance industry at Huawei’s Global Financial Services Industry (FSI) Summit 2015 in Beijing, China.

Surecomp^®, the leading global provider of trade finance solutions for banks and corporations, announced today that DOKA 5^®, its configurable bank back-office solution for documentary trade finance, hasbeen awarded the “SWIFT Certified Application – Trade Finance” label for a 15th consecutive year.

Wolters Kluwer Financial Services has signed Nippon Wealth Limited, a Restricted License Bank (NWB) as a user of OneSumX. The restricted license bank, based in Hong Kong and focused on Asia and Japan, will specifically use the solution for anti-money laundering (AML) and regulatory reporting, as it establishes its operations.

AxiomSL, a global provider of regulatory reporting and risk management solutions, announced today that a large Swedish bank has chosen to use AxiomSL’s platform to centralize its head-office regulatory calculations and reporting, and its branch-level reporting in Germany, Norway, Finland, Poland, Denmark, Austria and the United Kingdom (UK). The requirements covered by the agreement include statistical reporting and the Capital Requirements Directive IV (CRD IV).