While Bitcoin technology has been hitting the headlines over the last few years, Blockchain is the essence that underpins it. But what is Blockchain? It’s essentially a ledger which logs transactions between two parties. Yet while most ledgers are kept in banks or accounting departments, Blockchain is a distributed ledger in which copies are kept at several computers or nodes (under different owners). Each block represents a financial transaction and comprises a set of transactions, which have been captured as a sequence based on time.

“The CMA are looking to the power of better information to help improve customer outcomes in current account banking. Greater transparency around the price of current accounts and overdrafts must be a good thing, but we’re not sure that cold data is not enough to swing the needle on the issues that affect competition and pricing of current accounts.

Ullink, a global provider of electronic trading and connectivity solutions to the financial community, today announced that Daiwa Securities, one of the leading Financial Services firms in Asia, has selected Ullink’s Middle Office solution (UL Middle) for deployment across its Asia-Pacific Equities electronic trading operations.

Algomi, the network company providing information-matching solutions for the optimisation of fixed income liquidity, has won the “Most Innovative Trading Product/Service” category, for the second consecutive year, at this year’s Financial News Awards in Trading & Technology.

Radius Bank, a full-service bank with an industry-leading virtual banking platform, has added Apple Pay to its mobile payment options. Beginning today, Radius debit card holders can use their eligible Apple devices to make purchases at more than a million stores worldwide. Radius also has plans to support Samsung Pay and Android Pay starting in 2016, which will give its clients the option of using these mobile payment platforms in addition to the Bank's own Radius Pay app powered by LevelUp.

Cyber crime has formally emerged as the single largest type of offence in the UK following the reclassification of crimes by theOffice for National Statistics (ONS).

Diebold, Incorporated (NYSE: DBD), in partnership with SimplyTapp, a mobile near field communications (NFC) payment and host card emulation (HCE) technology company, are continuing to securely connect the digital and physical worlds of cash with a secure, white-label mobile wallet offering.

Eagle Investment Systems LLC, a BNY Mellon company and leading provider of financial services technology, today announced that Old Mutual Wealth, one of the largest wealth management businesses in the United Kingdom, has selected Eagle’s enterprise data management solution to support its Solvency II compliance programme. Deployed over Eagle’s secure private cloud, Eagle ACCESS^SM, the solution will centralise and streamline Old Mutual Wealth’s data management processes to support the creation of new regulatory reports on assets.