Today Zurich will host 30 international startups at an official opening for the Kickstart Accelerator, an initiative of DigitalZurich2025. The shortlisted startups will meet the programme’s 25 corporate partners and mentors, including the French multinational insurance firm AXA, Swiss multinational financial services companies Credit Suisse and UBS, Switzerland’s largest ICT provider Swisscom, the largest food retailer and producer Migros, the largest international operating media company in Switzerland, Ringier and the global consultancy firm EY.

The time has come to stop talking about the characteristics of BLOCKCHAIN and to start realizing its promise.

This is the uncompromising view of one of the financial IT leaders whom we interviewed for this edition of Financial IT. We agree entirely.

Spectators at The Barclays will have the chance to use the latest payment technology from Mastercard throughout the course or while visiting the Mastercard Club this week in Farmingdale, NY. Concession and merchandise point of sale locations throughout the Black Course at Bethpage State Park will accept contactless payments—including the enhanced Masterpass digital payment service the company launched last month. Additionally, the public 18thGreen Bleacher and Mastercard Club will allow fans to order concessions directly to their seat using Qkr!

Horizon Software (Horizon), the leading global technology provider for electronic trading and investment management, today announced that 

 Teradata, a leading analytics solutions company, announced important new deployment options for Teradata Aster Analytics, the world’s most advanced multi-genre analytics engine:  Teradata Aster Analytics on Hadoop and Teradata Aster Analytics on Amazon Web Services (AWS).  Although previous versions of Aster Analytics required dedicated systems, now companies have the flexibility to accelerate valuable analytic insight from their data wherever it resides, building on their existing investments in Hadoop.

 Coupa Software, a leader in cloud-based spend management, announced today that its award-winning platform has been used by its customers since Coupa’s inception to bring more than $250 billion of cumulative spend under management, which Coupa estimates has resulted in more than $8 billion of customer savings to date, based on applying certain savings rates derived from industry benchmarks.

Nordea and DNB have entered into an agreement to combine their operations in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to create a leading main bank in the Baltics with strong Nordic roots.

The Standard has announced the addition of a second Stable Asset sales professional. Joe Bruns has joined Jim Roche, who has served in this role for the past several years.

Nordea Bank AB (“Nordea”) has announced that it has entered into a synthetic risk transfer trade related to EUR 8.4bn of Nordea’s loan portfolio. Under the transaction, investors have agreed to invest in notes linked to the junior credit risk of the portfolio.