It’s no secret consumers have a fairly poor perception of high street banks, with the financial crisis, numerous high profile outages and the PPI scandal doing little to ingratiate traditional banks to the national public. It’s therefore unsurprising so many competitors are emerging, disrupting a market which is traditionally quite stuck in its ways.

 EZ-Link Pte Ltd, Singapore’s largest issuer of CEPAS-compliant cards, welcomes the full launch of the new unified Point of Sale (POS) system in Premier Taxis that accepts ez-link and other contact and contactless modes of payment including MasterCard, American Express, Diners Club, JCB, Union Pay and NETS, and soon Visa cards.

Ipreo Private Capital Markets today announced the release of iVAL™, a cloud-based valuation solution that integrates data sources, valuation models, and reporting tools into a single platform and workflow for Private Equity ("PE") professionals.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced today that it will make it easier for start-ups and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to access securities-based crowd-funding (SCF) in two ways.

CME Group, the world's leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace, and CloudMargin, the award-winning collateral management provider, today announced they have collaborated to offer CME Clearing and CME Clearing Europe customers the first cloud-based software service that integrates and automates the management of collateral in one place. This allows market participants access to a consolidated view across their complete collateral inventory that they can utilize for both cleared and non-cleared derivatives transactions at any given time.

Convergex, an agency-focused global brokerage and trading related services provider, is pleased to announce that it has enhanced the configuration options in Darkest, its liquidity-seeking algorithm, to provide greater flexibility, block-trading functionality and enhanced anti-gaming tools when trading in European dark pools. Convergex's Darkest algorithm is designed to dynamically source non-displayed liquidity from Regulated Markets, MTFs and broker-crossing networks, while maintaining anonymity.

FairFX, the FinTech low-cost multi-currency payments service, has extended its international payments service into the domestic South African market through a tripartite agreement with Morgan West Ltd and Mercantile Bank.

Services providing foreign exchange into South African Rand (ZAR) to send into South Africa are widely available. Converting ZAR into other currencies for movement out of South Africa is more challenging and demands a local footprint, which FairFX now offers.

TANGO is the transaction processing system developed by Lusis Payments for banks, merchants, processors and retail companies that deal with large volumes of payments. It is hardware and software agnostic. That means that it can run on any hardware and operating environment including HP NonStop™. The main strength ofTANGO is in its ability to handle any type of payment. It works for all industries, and not just banks and financial institutions. Lusis has customers in all regions of the world.