PPRO Group, the cross-border e-payment specialists, have become a direct acquirer for Bancontact, the leading Belgian electronic payment scheme. The relationship will provide merchant aggregators worldwide with an efficient method to allow their merchants accepting payments from a potential 15 million Bancontact card users, across online and mobile platforms, thus boosting cross-border sales out of Belgium. 

Finastra, a Vista Equity Partners portfolio company, today announced the establishment of its Future of Banking Center of Excellence at Cyberport in Hong Kong. This strategic move is part of the worldwide program at Finastra to continue to build its innovation ecosystem and collaborate with strategic partners around the globe. Robert F. Smith, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, joined the team in Hong Kong for the announcement.

Houlihan Lokey, Inc., the global investment bank, today announced that it has agreed to acquire Quayle Munro Limited (Quayle Munro), an independent advisory firm that provides corporate finance advisory services to companies underpinned by data & analytics, content, software, and services. The agreement was signed on January 15 and is expected to close following regulatory approvals.

SWIFT and seven central securities depositories (CSDs) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to work together to demonstrate how distributed ledger technology could be implemented in post-trade scenarios, such as corporate actions processing, including voting and proxy-voting.  The group will investigate the types of new products that can be built using it, and how existing standards such as ISO 20022 can support it.

Red Deer, a financial technology company dedicated to enhancing the performance of active investment managers, is pleased to announce that Raymond James Investment Services (“Raymond James”), one of the fastest growing wealth management businesses in the UK today, has selected its MiFID II solution in order to adhere to the regulations that came into effect earlier this year.

After initial hesitation, the financial services sector is warming up to the potential of cloud computing. The use of private and public cloud is growing exponentially in the space. Why? It’s due to a number of factors coming together.

A better development and deployment approach

Not surprisingly, it was the large internet companies and SaaS providers, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, that that were first off the mark when it's come to cloud adoption and benefiting from the innovative opportunities that these new ways of working provide.

With MIFID II’s rules on inducements now a reality, buy-side firms are paying close attention to the costs associated with their front-office trading platforms and analytics.

The EU regulation, which took effect on Jan. 3, could draw scrutiny to execution services and tools that are sponsored by brokers, such as order management and execution management systems as well as trade analytics.

Graft aims to bring a lasting solution to most of the problems that existing cryptocurrencies face at the point of sale, including long wait times and high transaction costs. The demand for cryptocurrencies has grown dramatically in recent years. This is apparent in the tremendous increase in the prices of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin, considering that their prices are mainly demand-driven.

To continue the ongoing migration to EMV chip, and to bring increased security and convenience to the point of sale, Visa is making the signature requirement optional for all EMV contact or contactless chip-enabled merchants in North America, beginning April 2018.