Evercore (NYSE: EVR) announced today that Lea Lazaric Calvert has agreed to join the Firm's Private Capital Advisory business (PCA) as a Managing Director.  Mrs. Lazaric Calvert will be based in London where she will focus on advising leading financial institutional investors and fund sponsors on secondary transactions.

 Appian, provider of the leading application platform for

 ACL, the company that is transforming audit and risk, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Denver-based Artletic LLC, a digital design firm focused on creating exceptional user experiences through web and mobile applications.

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.