According to SWIFT’s latest RMB tracker, the United Kingdom’s RMB payments value increased by 21% between March 2014 and March 2016, positioning the United Kingdom as the first offshore RMB clearing centre after Hong Kong. Singapore overtook the United Kingdom in February 2014, but the trend started to reverse as of January 2016. Hong Kong still remains the world’s largest offshore RMB centre, processing 72.5% of all RMB payments, followed by United Kingdom with a share of 6.3% and Singapore with 4.6%.

Wick Hill has won the strongly contested ‘Distributor of the Year’ title at the IT Europa European IT and Software Excellence Awards 2016. These are the only pan-European awards that recognise best practices and service excellence in the IT community. Wick Hill won in the supplier section which recognises the distributor who best supported its channel partners to deliver excellence.

 Azul Systems  the award-winning leader in Java runtime solutions, and Pontus Networks, a specialist in improving the performance of software in financial institutions, have launched an Azul Zing®-based edition of PontusVision Thread Manager (PVTM), Pontus’s flagship product which reduces capital and operational IT infrastructure expenditures by improving the wa

Portolani, an independent family office based in Belgium, has selected the InvestCloud digital document portal to enhance client communication capabilities and improve their overall digital client experience.  The launch of the portal is also a growth celebration of Portolani’s 10-year anniversary and a major enhancement to the overall Portolani platform. 

UCL (University College London) has agreed a £280 million loan with the European Investment Bank to develop its Bloomsbury and UCL East campuses, the largest sum ever lent by the bank to a university.

The 30-year loan will provide funding for UCL’s Bloomsbury campus in central London which is undergoing an ambitious programme to upgrade and expand its historic buildings as well as finance for the building of UCL East, the university’s new site at the Queen ElizabethOlympic Park in east London.

The arrival of Nxchange makes it possible to place and trade securities on a regulated platform without the intervention of a bank or broker being required. Companies can activate their network and communities to raise capital both on the central trading platform of Nxchange and using an integrated module on their own websites. A traditional IPO is usually an expensive and complex matter.

Elixium, a new EU-regulated Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF) for collateral and secured deposits, has announced it will launch in May 2016. 

Elixium has been developed to address the growing need for a transparent, open to all, peer-to-peer, regulated marketplace. It seeks to address the growing liquidity concerns that have emerged as a result of changes in regulation and the subsequent composition and availability of balance sheets. 

ACI Worldwide  announced that The Co-operative Group (Co-op), one of the UK’s largest food retailers, has selected the company to run its card payments processing operations and maximise card data security across all of its UK food stores and fuel sites. The retailer, with over 2,800 stores, will utiliseACI’s UP Merchant Payments solution to secure its payment data with the latest version of its point-to-point encryption (P2PE) and tokenisationcapabilities.