As Sibos 2017 comes to a close, the hall’s a little quieter and the meetings fewer and far between, I caught up with our Head of Markets & Clients, Valerio Roncone, to reflect on the week. One thing we agreed on is that, this year, there’s been a real shift to the ‘back to business’ ethos. While, over the past couple of years, conversations have focused on the newest and most innovative technologies, in Toronto, we’ve seen the needle move to questions such as “what value does this bring to my business?” and even “is this business model still adequate?”.

Northern Trust today announced the release of a white paper that outlines key steps investment managers and investors can take to potentially achieve greater transparency in alternative investments such as hedge funds, private equity, infrastructure, real estate and natural resources. The paper, Alts Transparency: Finding the Right Balance, is a follow-up to an industry-wide survey conducted earlier this year by The Economist Intelligence Unit for Northern Trust, which confirmed that transparency remains a top priority among alternative investors.

Xpress Money – one of the world’s most dependable money transfer brands – is set to showcase Xpress Money ‘Flex’, ‘One’ and ‘Biz’, its customisable remittance solutions, at Money2020 – the world’s largest marketplace for ideas, connections and deals in Payments and Financial Services. Xpress Money’s business solutions are designed to give organisations customisable options based on their business needs.

SWIFT will reinforce its connectivity to Verdipapirsentralen ASA (VPS), Norway’s central securities depository (CSD), which could make a shift in transaction volume to SwiftNet from other networks.

Banks connected to VPS currently use different networks to connect to VPS, SwiftNet being one of them. The banks have the freedom to choose among the network connectivity offered by VPS. By signing the Swift CSD Community Agreement, VPS’s members benefit from SWIFT’s CSD Community Offering, which significantly reduces current level of SwiftNet costs for connectivity to VPS.

Concurrent (NASDAQ:CCUR), a global leader in storage, protection, transformation, and delivery of visual media assets, announced today that Zephyr Transcode, which Concurrent launched last year as an integral part of its content delivery network (CDN) solutions, is now deployed with customers in Asia, Europe and North America.

Panduit EMEA, the data centre physical infrastructure and connectivity company, has opened its new UK Customer Briefing and Demonstration Centre in London. The new facility, based in the heart of the City, provides 200m² of data centre, enterprise and industrial automation demonstration, conference and office space. This facility doubles the space available in the previous London site and expands the company’s customer experience capabilities in the EMEA market.

Verizon recently released its annual Payment Security Report. And for retailers, the report highlighted significant areas for improvement in encrypting data, securing transmitted data, and authentication.

This should serve as an industry-wide wake-up call, for the impacts of data breaches cannot be underestimated.