VocaLink, the international payment systems provider, today announces a five year deal with UnionPay International, which will enable UnionPay cardholders to access ATMs in the UK and continental Europe.

Corporate treasuries have more connectivity options for their growing operations, using new version 16.0 of the Reval Cloud Platform for treasury and risk management (TRM).  The first of two annual releases, 16.0 introduces new straight-through processing capabilities, leveraging Reval’s recent partnerships with Oracle and SWIFT.

ValueWeb makes the contention that you cannot have an internet of things without a real-time and cheap internet of value.  A core part of this is focused upon building a cheap shared ledger structure for digital identity and digital currencies and guess what?  That cheap shared ledger is most likely going to be built in Africa.  In fact, 

In increasingly competitive markets, the payment experience has emerged as a critical factor to grow market share. Yet a new Global Payments Insight Study of consumer finance, higher education, insurance and other billing organization executives—conducted by ACI Worldwide and leading market research and advisory firm Ovum—found that most organizations lack the payments innovation necessary to win consumers.

Principle findings of this study include:
Executives not prepared to innovate

Great Western Bancorp announced today that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of HF Financial Corp. (“Home Federal”). The acquisition of Home Federal increases Great Western’s assets to approximately $11.3 billion, and will add 23 locations to its 155 branch network with a new presence in North Dakota and Minnesota.

Great Western will be changing the existing Home Federal and Infinia branches over the next few weeks in connection with its systems conversion, which is expected to be completed on June 10, 2016.

HID Global®, worldwide leader in secure identity solutions, today announced it has been selected by CityPoint to streamline security and management systems for its 35-storey office building used by thousands of people on a daily basis in London,.

MiFID II, taking things a strident step forward.

Of all the regulation that has been issued by the pan-European regulatory body, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) since the financial crash, MiFID II looks set to have the greatest impact in terms of investment protection, governance, third country, markets and processing. 

Pacific Commerce Bancorp parent company of Pacific Commerce Bank, and ProAmérica Bank  announced that their respective shareholders have approved the merger of the two banks. The transaction is expected to close as of May 20, 2016.