One of my favorite American historical personalities is Ben Franklin, born 1706 and died 1790.

In its first year in Canada, North America’s fastest-growing technology conference has officially announced it has now reached maximum capacity for this year’s Collision event, to be held in Toronto’s Enercare Centre from May 20 - 23.

The size of Collision’s now sold-out floor space is set to be seven times larger than Collison 2018, formerly held in New Orleans. The size of the space has also surpassed its flagship event, Web Summit. This year’s Collision is also bringing more than twice as many speakers, startups and investors compared to last year’s conference.

Today, Amazon Web Services Inc., an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon Managed Blockchain, a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks. Customers who want to allow multiple parties to execute transactions and maintain a cryptographically verifiable record of them without the need for a trusted, central authority can quickly setup a blockchain network spanning multiple AWS accounts with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console.

Bahrain’s Open Banking compliance deadline of 30^th June is rolling round quickly and its regulator, the Central Bank of Bahrain has already signalled that it has no plans to extend it.

Eagle clients can now source sanctions data directly from SIX for use within Eagle solutions. The alliance will help to streamline efforts by clients to source, validate, and align sanctions data with existing portfolio data, helping firms minimize the risk of reputational damage and fines that can result from dealing with sanctioned entities.

FINRA today announced the formation of an Office of Financial Innovation that will serve as a central point of coordination for issues related to significant financial innovations by FINRA member firms, particularly new uses of financial technology (fintech).

Bankable, the global provider of “Banking as a Service” solutions, today announced a strategic partnership with Visa (NYSE: V) to enable financial institutions and banks to access real-time and modular banking solutions worldwide.

 The world’s first open banking business lending platform, Trade Ledger, has won a place in the inaugural Hong Kong-UK FinTech Bridge Program announced last night (29th April 2019) at a special event hosted at Mansion House by the Lord Mayor of London.  In just three years Trade Ledger has established its ground-breaking business lending platform on three continents. This latest achievement means Trade Ledger is the first global technology platform to leverage both the AU-UK and UK-HK bridges.

Volante Technologies Inc., a global provider of software for accelerated end-to-end payments processing and financial message integration, has expanded VolPay-as-a-Service, its cloud-based ecosystem of business services for payments innovation and modernization, with key innovations for U.S. financial institutions.

The leading robotic process automation (RPA) company, UiPath, is blazing a path to an “automation first” era, closing its Series D investment round, raising $568 million at a post-money valuation of $7 Billion. This was led by Coatue and joined by Dragoneer, Wellington, Sands Capital, and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.