Blockchain, the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies, continues to remain something of an enigma. Perhaps it is a little less mysterious today than it was six months ago, but you can’t deny that it has the financial services industry foxed. How does it work? How will it impact the industry? What can I do to ward off the blockchain bogey? Or, better yet, what can I do to turn it into a business ally? Since blockchain and cryptocurrencies work on the basis of customer anonymity, many have natural apprehensions, since identity is central to financial services.

China's Fujian Rural Credit (FJRC) has selected IBM (NYSE: IBM) for its new storage infrastructure to help to speed up deployment and raise efficiency of Internet- and cloud-based new financial applications, such as mobile banking, for the province's increasingly prosperous agricultural population.

 Interac Association/Acxsys Corporation (“Interac”), Canada’s domestic debit network, is pleased to announce the participation of additional financial institutions offering Apple Pay to Interac debit cardholders.  Interac debit cardholders from BMO Financial Group, Scotiabank and TD can now use Apple Pay on supported Apple devices to make easy, secure and private contactless debit transactions when shopping at hundreds of thousands of merchants coast-to-coast.

In the past three years, 100 million people have opened bank accounts for the first time in Africa. In China, there are 500 million people who are ‘newly banked’. In India, 187 million new accounts were opened in just one year on a governmental scheme. In the UK, around 100,000 people came into the banking stream, either for the first time or after a long break, in the last three years.

OT (Oberthur Technologies), a leading global provider of embedded security software products and services, today announced a key partnership with PCARD, the Saudi leader in smart card personalization services, to provide high quality secure payment solutions for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

This Partnership will allow Banks of Saudi Arabia to provide innovative cutting-edge payment technology that will enhance and secure their customers’ shopping experience.

 Exaxe, an award-winning specialist solution provider for the life and pensions industry, has announced that Police Mutual has successfully gone live with its Admin Plus and Illustrate Plus solutions.

The renewable five year licence agreement marked the fourth of six licence sales for Exaxe over the past twelve months.

Thomson Reuters today launches the WM/Reuters 2pm CET benchmark, a new FX benchmark service designed for corporates looking to value, hedge and settle cross-border transactions. The Thomson Reuters 2pm CET benchmark offers a reliable, transaction-oriented alternative to the European Central Bank (ECB) 2:15pm CET reference rates.

 Information Builders, a leader in business intelligence (BI) and analytics, information integrity, and integration solutions, today announced that its WebFOCUS BI and analytics platform is now available on Microsoft Azure.

·         Information Builders’ WebFOCUS, a BI platform that delivers rich, consumable, interactive information to a wide range of end users, is now available on the Azure cloud platform

Technology is proving business’ Achilles heel in the fight against fraud. New research by KPMG reveals that while a quarter of fraudsters use technology to rip off companies, only three percent of businesses detected illegal behaviour using data analytics.

In fact 24 percent of technology-enabled frauds were caught accidentally, demonstrating that companies are failing to harness new methods of fraud detection.