ING Netherlands introduces a Mobile Banking app for the smartwatch (only in Dutch) today. It’s ING’s third innovation of the Mobile Banking app in less than a year: in September 2014 hands-free banking with voice recognition was launched and fingerprint authentication was introduced in March this year.

‘Wearables’ like the smartwatch are the latest trend and make it possible to check your account balance even faster by just looking on your smartwatch. The app for Android is available today. The app for iOS will be available in the summer.

Bravura Solutions Pty Limited (Bravura), a trusted supplier of wealth management, life insurance and transfer agency software applications, is pleased to announce the launch of a new deployment model for its Rufus transfer agency (TA) proposition. Ideally suited for boutique and mid-sized fund managers, the solution delivers a cost effective and highly scalable self-administration tool.

RosEvroBank, Russia partnering with BPC Processing (BPC Banking Technologies division) and “Intrade” company being strongly committed to bring convenient and user-friendly products and services. Collaboratively companies have developed and installed new ATM supporting visually impaired people. The first in line terminal is located at one of the All Russia Association of the Blind enterprise.

Diasoft, a global provider of cutting-edge software solutions for the financial industry, announced today that IDC has positioned Diasoft as a leader in its 2015 Worldwide Core Banking MarketScape.

For anyone starting or joining a startup you need to understand something important. Entrepreneurs, like all creative people, are pure petrol*.

Extracting, refining and transporting petrol is complex, costly, sensitive, time consuming to get right. Even once it’s ready to pump, petrol is delicate and dangerous. Throw it about, it’ll evaporate. Leave it in the canister too long, it’ll spoil. But light a match at the perfect moment, and BOOM you have a fireball.

The banks are too big to fail. Everyone says it and so it must be true. The last two decades have seen the rise and fall of the big bank concept. Take the ultimate global bank, the ‘Citi’ that never sleeps. It’s currently in 101 countries, has over 241,000 employees (down from around the 340,000 mark) and occupies over 10,000 properties. Could you imagine a government willing to take on the economic destruction by not bailing out a group of such significance? Well the US government couldn’t bring itself to either, with public money helping out Citi a number of times.

There’s a curious “truth” doing the rounds in the peer-to-peer sector. It goes something like this:

Institutional money has arrived in crowdfunding big time. This is a fantastic endorsement of this growing sector. The future will be more institutional money enabling more sector growth. This is brilliant, if bittersweet. It will enable peer-to-peer to become the premier way for companies and individuals to borrow, but retail investors will get squeezed out in the process.

With the return of the Conservatives to government many of their policies will see a ‘business as usual’ banner hoisted above them. Last year the Chancellor made a potentially game-changing commitment to include crowdfunding within the ISA wrapper. The crowdfunding industry has long asked for a separate ISA, one which is not treated as the same asset class as the renowned and respected Cash ISA, or even to the more complex Stocks and Shares ISA. It is obvious that P2P lending has its very own risk and reward profile, and consumers need to understand these nuances.

Financial IT speaks with Mike Schutt, Managing Director/Head of Trading SunGard’s Fox River Execution Solutions about the company’s flagship product designed by traders and for traders.

Ullink, a global provider of market leading electronic trading and connectivity solutions, today announced that Kotak Institutional Equities (KIE), one of India's leading institutional brokers and a division of Kotak Securities has chosen Ullink’s UL Bridge connectivity solution.