Qumram, a leading global provider of digital compliance solutions for the financial services industry, has announced two game-changing appointments to the firm’s Board of Directors, following its Annual General Meeting on June 6, 2016.

Capital markets firms will stop thinking blockchain is something to be suspicious of and start to realize its enormous possibilities this year.

Blockchain will soon evolve into “the” disruptive technology that will totally transform the banking system, eliminating the need for securities depositories and central clearing, and reducing settlements delays.

X Open Hub, a multi-asset liquidity provider partners with PFSOFT, a multi-asset technology provider, in order to integrate X Open Hub's liquidity and market data into PFSOFT's Protrader brokerage solution. The new integration will include market data and execution for over 1500 global instruments divided among FX, Indices, Commodities, Shares and ETFs.

The Hard Truth

I stand for the health and vitality of community banks and have watched for too long as the core and IT vendor oligopoly enjoyed by Fiserv, Fidelity, Jack Henry and the likes have gone unchecked, putting the entire community banking industry at great risk. Unable to develop and deploy the same affordable, cutting-edge, customer-facing services as those produced by larger national banks, community financial institutions have been left at the mercy of their core and IT providers.

So, What Can We Do?

Morningstar, Inc, a provider of independent investment research, published its annual study of investor returns, which measure how the average investor fared in a fund. Morningstar Investor Return is a dollar-weighted return that incorporates the effect of cash inflows and outflows from purchases and sales as well as the increase in a fund's assets.

2015 marked a new record for the number of mergers and acquisitions reported. According to Dealogic more than 38,000 were launched during the year. However, many of these, in reality, did not succeed. Certain large transnational mergers were undermined by the activism of the Obama Administration. Pfizer, which was due to merge with Allergan for $160 billion, has indefinitely postponed this operation, for example.

Crestone, which was established by client advisers, senior management and employees of UBS Wealth Management Australia Ltd, has opened its doors this week with the newly implemented Avaloq Banking Suite.

Hoist Finance AB acquired a well-diversified portfolio of non-performing banking claims originated by four regional Spanish banks. The portfolio is made up of approximately 115,000 loans, of which 86,000 are consumer unsecured loans and 29,000 are loans to small and medium-sized enterprises (“SME loans”).

The total investment amounts to just over EUR 22 million. The Estimated Remaining Collections ("ERC") amounts to approximately EUR 48 million over 120 months.

-  Corvil, the leading analytics company for financial markets, today announced that Exane BNP Paribas, a European broker dealer, is using the Corvil platform to assure the strength and performance of its electronic trading businesses and to support compliance wi