National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository, announces its implementation of the back-to-back settlements technology for off-exchange DVP transactions with securities denominated in Russian rubles, USD, Euro and CNY.

Back-to-back settlements allow for mitigation of settlement failure risk by means of netting the parties’ liabilities within a general pool of instructions to settle the instructions that could not be settled individually due to the lack of assets required for execution of such instructions at the beginning of a clearing session.

Ormuco, today announces it has chosen MigSolv as its UK data centre partner. The partnership will allow Ormuco to deliver high quality, service based colocation services to the large enterprises.

Ormuco, an HP Helion Network charter member, offers a cloud services platform for service providers, ISVs and businesses around the globe. With nodes in Canada, U.S., EMEA and soon, LATAM and Japan, it is rapidly building a global network of cloud services to service both local data requirements as well as global, multinational companies.

ICC today announced it has joined the Nimble Partner Network as a managed services partner. Nimble Storage is a provider of flash storage solutions that enable enterprises to meet performance and capacity requirements for any workload in virtualized datacenters and cloud environments.

Xignite, the leading provider of market data cloud solutions for financ

Ullink, a leading global provider of electronic trading and connectivity services to the financial community, today announced a new partnership with LiquidMetrix, experts in financial data research and execution quality analysis. The partnership enables Ullink to provide its global community of market participants trading over Ullink’s NYFIX network with cutting edge post-trade analytics powered by LiquidMetrix analytics.

I have considered before that the fintech/alternative finance marketplace represents an evolution, not a revolution. A cynic might question the value of alternative finance in the first place, but the fact is this sector is making waves.

 ITG (NYSE: ITG), a leading independent execution broker and research provider, announced this week the appointment of Nick Johnston as Managing Director, European Head of Sales Trading. He will lead ITG’s European high-touch business. Sales trading at ITG is part of a global high-touch agency trading service, which also includes Portfolio/Index Trading and ETF Trading.

Barclays has launched a first of its kind cloud-based contingency payment service banking access channel in order to boost its commitment to corporate clients.

There has a been a lot of talk about how to trade blocks that are smaller than the LIS waiver but that are still too big to go to regular lit markets. The debate has been ratcheted up by the 4 and 8% dark pool caps that are part of the MiFID II spectre looming above us all. One approach, of course, is to chop your block into smaller pieces with an algo but this is becoming increasingly unattractive in an HFT-dominated world.

Venues like Turquoise have done their bit to help solve for this with their innovative Block Discovery service which has been gaining momentum steadily.