LISNR, the creator of SmartTones, a new communication protocol that sends data over audio, recently announced that it closed $10 million in Series B funding. The company's founder attributes participation PowerMoves@Detroit sponsored by Morgan Stanley as a flashpoint in the startup's growth.

Today, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced its intent to acquire Acano Limited, a privately held company based in London that provides collaboration infrastructure and conferencing software. Acano's hardware and software includes gateways, and video and audio bridging technology that allows customers to connect video systems from multiple vendors across both cloud and hybrid environments.

ING announces that it has joined a consortium of 30 leading global banks, coordinated by the financial technology firm R3, to collaboratively evaluate and apply emerging block chain technology to the global financial system. The stated goals of the group are to collaborate on research, design, and engineering that will advance innovative solutions for clients that meet banking requirements for security, reliability, performance, scalability, and auditing. 

Kyobo Securities Co.

Personal Financial Management (PFM) tools have become a very convenient solution for individuals and businesses to get a holistic view of their transactions and overall financial situation. It aggregates information from our transactions and allows us to see where we spent our money, the value of our assets and what liabilities we have. But those are just basic functionalities of first-generation PFM solutions.

Stonegate is pleased to announce that the bank is now offering a Debit MasterCard that can be used at any of Cuba’s 10,000 hotels, restaurants and other card-accepting merchants.

“This is the first step in relieving the burden of U.S. travelers carrying cash when travelling to Cuba and another step in normalizing commercial relations between the two countries. Hopefully more issuing banks will help this process by approving credit and debit cards as well,” said Dave Seleski, president and CEO of Stonegate Bank.

 Sigma Systems, the pioneer in idea-to-install software, today announced that they have completed the implementation of a cloud-based automated provisioning solution for the Polycom® RealPresence® Group Series video collaboration solution.

Infosys today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Noah Consulting, LLC, a leading provider of advanced information management consulting services for the oil and gas industry. The acquisition is in accordance with the terms set out in the agreement announced by the company on October 19, 2015.

Noah’s deep industry knowledge, information strategy planning, data governance and architecture capabilities combined with Infosys’ ability to provide technology and outsourcing services, will offer clients in the oil and gas industry next-generation data analytics solutions.

When you are immersed in an industry it’s sometimes difficult to see how it’s really changing. Global financial markets are a good example of this as the populist headlines can easily miss the subtlety of what is really going on. The polemic against misbehaviour by some market participants is obviously deserved (estimates of the total in fines and related costs are approaching USD 300 billion) and, of course, no conversation about the industry is complete without mention of the ‘R’ word.

WEX Inc. (NYSE: WEX), a leading provider of corporate payment solutions, today announced the completion of its acquisition of Benaissance, a leading provider of integrated software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies and services for healthcare premium billing, payment and workflow management. Benaissance is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of WEX and will be part of the Evolution1 business unit.