Taking blockchain mainstream, Blockchain Live is back and will be returning to London Olympia on 25^th September as a festival of blockchain education. A one-day event, packed with engaging, thought-provoking and quality content, this year Blockchain Live will be moving away from the traditional exhibition model, in to a ground-breaking festival of content and collaboration.

It’s positive to see the FCA and Bank of England take an interest in issues with current post-trade infrastructure and look at the cost and benefits of alternative approaches.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) announced (9 May 2019) that the Monetary Authority has granted banking licences under the Banking Ordinance to Ant SME Services (Hong Kong) Limited, Infinium Limited, Insight Fintech HK Limited and Ping An OneConnect Company Limited for them to operate in the form of a virtual bank. The granting of these banking licences takes effect today. According to their business plans, these four newly licenced virtual banks intend to launch their services in around 6 to 9 months.

London based FinTech, Flagstone, developer of the UK’s largest cash deposit platform which provides clients with access to over 550 deposit accounts from 30 banks through asingle application, has raised

£11m in growth capital from investors including Kindred Capital, Moneysupermarket Group plc, VentureFounders and a number of private individual investors.

Path Solutions, a global provider of technology solutions, consulting, and outsourcing services to the Islamic finance industry, has signed a partnership agreement with Infrascale, the leader in Hybrid Cloud Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). 

With the partnership in place, Path Solutions will offer Infrascale’s Disaster Recovery solutions to its existing and potential clients. The strategy will bring a strong DRaaS offering and data protection to customers throughout the Middle East.

Payment  leader Ingenico Group (Euronext: FR0000125346 - ING) has launched LinkPlus, a simple and secure solution for businesses who handle payments over the phone. The solution enables online businesses to send payments through a link or QR code, removing the need to manually process unsecured credit card details or banking information. 

Judo Bank, the first SME focused bank operating in Australia, today announced that it has gone live in record time with Temenos T24 Transact, Analytics, Financial Crime Mitigation and Channels – a module of Temenos Infinity – running on Temenos Cloud.

Fenergo, the leading provider of digital Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) software solutions for financial institutions, revealed that 20% of C-suite executives in banks say that the maturity of their technology infrastructures is preventing them from investing in new, disruptive technologies including big data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve CLM. 67% are not currently partnered with a fintech/regtech provider to improve operational efficiencies and just 40% of respondents have integrated with an external data or Know Your Customer (KYC) utility provider.

Horizontal data lineage traces the journey of a piece of data as it moves through the system from source to destination. It could be a piece of content originally picked up from a prospectus or a company’s articles of incorporation; that is incorporated into a data product, is licensed by a financial institution; and put into a database before it flows through to a report or business application.

Cloud experts Renovite Technologies has strengthened its position in the electronic payments market through the appointment of two senior product managers.

The appointment of Anton Godfrey and David Lock adds over 60-years’ specialist payments experience to Renovite Technologies, who deliver cloud-native payments solutions to banks and financial organisations worldwide.

Mr Godfrey and Mr Lock will fulfil global roles, working closely with development teams across Renovite’s global offices.