BEQUANT, the leading cryptocurrency exchange, announced today that it has hired Daniel Clayden as its new Head of Product Development. With 25 years’ experience in Capital Markets and Financial Services Technology, Daniel’s appointment will strengthen the company’s growing roster of products in the cryptocurrency market. Daniel has previously held roles at a number of Tier 1 Investment Banks, including J.P. Morgan and Credit Suisse. Before joining BEQUANT, he was Managing Director at IT Consultancy Levvel.io, and an Executive Director at Morgan Stanley.

Commerzbank and Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW) have today announced that they have – for the first time – successfully executed the necessary data transfers to complete two commercial transactions via blockchain-based trade finance network Marco Polo. 

Global FinTech firm InvestCloud has announced Mark Trousdale as Chief Growth Officer. The appointment will see Trousdale lead InvestCloud’s growth in EMEA as the firm looks to capitalize on growth.

Part of InvestCloud’s founding team, Trousdale has held various positions at the FinTech firm since joining in 2012, most recently as Chief Marketing Officer, based out of the firm’s San Francisco office. Prior to InvestCloud, Trousdale held leadership roles within the Asset Management Advisory practice of Deloitte & Touche LLP.

Grupo Fleury, one of Brazil’s largest diagnostic medicine companies, has created an automated demand planning management platform – the Fleury Forecaster – with the help of FICO^® Xpress Insight. Using this platform, Group Fleury has slashed the time needed to create a sales forecast. Forecasts have also become more accurate and granular in detail, with the overall margin of error now less than 10 percent.

SigFig, a financial technology company that is reimagining customer experiences in financial services, today announced the launch of SigFig Atlas, a financial advice and software-guided sales platform for banks and customers.

ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW), a leading global provider of real-time electronic payment and banking solutions, and The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU), a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement, today announced that the Federal Trade Commission has granted early termination of the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 with respect to ACI’s previously announced acquisition of Speedpay, Western Union’s United States bill pay business. This satisfies one of the closing conditions.

Digital lending platform Esme Loans, has today announced that it will now offer its loans to UK businesses operating as sole traders. Under its extended proposition, sole traders will be able to obtain loans from £25,500 - £150,000, for up to five years.

In the database management world, graph database is huge right now. Industry and vendor-neutral site DB Engines has shown that, since 2014, the graph data model has far outpaced every other data model in terms of growth, while IT analyst company Gartner recently identified graphs as one of itsTop 10 Data and Analytics Technology Trends for 2019. 

Today, Klarna, one of Europe’s leading payment providers and the global market leader in payment initiation services, announces the launch of its own Open Banking Platform. This platform will enable access to more than 4,300 European banks through a single Access to Account (XS2A) API in line with Payment Services Directive (PSD2). Klarna’s XS2A API is the most established and proven solution that has been developed at scale across markets for almost 15 years through the Klarna Group company Sofort.