Financial infrastructure provider, Banking Circle, which announced it had secured its Banking Licence at the end of February, has added another member to its Executive Board, bolstering its banking expertise.

A growing number of companies have expressed their will to enter the blockchain arena. But after some number of years in which their focus was mainly on the benefits of blockchain in various areas, in terms of speed, costs, streamline operations and increased efficiency, their attention is now turned to the various challenges and bottlenecks that are preventing widespread adoption. In this blog I will go into more detail in these bottlenecks and how the industry is trying to tackle these.

Main challenges

The UK’s first digital mortgage broker, Trussle, announced today the appointment of Ian Larkin as Chief Executive Officer.

ChartIQ, a financial technology company that delivers software to help the finance world work smarter, today introduced Finsemble 4.0, the latest release of the company’s desktop integration platform.

SberCloud, the cloud platform of Sberbank Group, and Huawei, the leading global provider of information and communication solutions, have agreed on strategic partnership that will provide access to SberCloud.Advanced for Russian and foreign users.

Global technical body EMVCo has confirmed its security evaluation methodologies and processes support IoT payment use cases, enabling emerging solutions and devices to be evaluated quickly and efficiently.

Starling Bank has opened its third UK office, creating 400 data science, fraud and customer service jobs in Cardiff.

Define your IT innovation strategy or risk becoming irrelevant, according to insurance leaders. Almost daily, a new disruptive technology is developed with far-reaching effects on the industry.

There is no turning back. AI, Blockchain, Machine Learning and IoT become more commonplace every day. By 2025, according to current estimates, there will be more than 50 billion IOT devices; the number is expected to grow to one trillion by 2030.

Wealth management fintech firm JHC Systems (JHC), has appointed Alan Cole as Head of Cloud and Operations to deliver its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution for wealth managers.

Previously holding positions at Finastra and Temenos, Alan brings unrivalled experience running Cloud Operations for financial institutions globally across banking, wealth and investment management.

JHC’s SaaS offering will allow clients to benefit from the continuous delivery and integration of highly available, cost effective and secure wealth management solutions via Cloud.

Cyber criminals continued a barrage of attacks in 2019, spurred on by botnets of infected IoT devices and by attacker interest in the Eternal Blue vulnerability. A new report from cyber security provider F-Secure, Attack Landscape H2 2019, documents a steep increase in attack traffic in 2019 that was unmatched by previous years.