With a wealth of new ideas and innovation continually coming to market, the UK’s financial technology sector is a very exciting place to be. New start-ups are constantly emerging, causing incredible changes in the industry.

It’s perhaps not surprising then that many investors’ sights are set on London, a hub for financial services and technology innovation. Indeed, in 2014 alone, the UK government estimates the domestic financial technology sector attracted a massive £342 million in investment and generated £20 billion in revenue.

London-based International Finance Magazine has conferred the 2015 awards for 'Most Innovative Bank' and 'Best Customer Service Bank' in Poland to ING Bank Poland at a gala ceremony in the Landmark Hotel in London on November 27.

The awards in various categories were presented by Peter Meyer, CEO, the Middle East Association (MEA); Dr. Cigdem Kogar, Chief Representative of Central Bank of Turkey in London; Kofi Addo, Head of Trade and Investment, Ghana High Commission; and Thomas Mbun, Head of Treasury and Finance, Ghana High Commission.

Three Swedish municipalities announces, through a contract award decision, that they intend to sign an agreement with Formpipe regarding the e-archiving product Long-Term Archive. The order value is estimated to SEK 20 million over an eight-year period.

Earthport (AIM: EPO.L), the leading payment network for cross-border payments, is pleased to announce the appointment of N+1 Singer and Shore Capital as Joint Brokers to the Company with immediate effect. Panmure Gordon remains as Nominated Adviser and Joint Broker to the Company

Surecomp, the leading global provider of trade finance solutions for banks and corporations, announced today that Isbank AG, the European arm of Turkey’s leading bank Türkiye Is Bankasi A.S., has commenced production with DOKA 5, Surecomp’s configurable back-office solution for documentary trade finance.

Xura, a leading provider of digital communications services for enterprises, announced its strategic partnership with SMS PASSCODE, a technology leader in adaptive multi-factor authentication. Xura complements SMS PASSCODE’s authentication suite by providing reliable and secure messaging connectivity world-wide, through carrier-grade communications.

HSBC announces $10.5 million investment in New York-headquartered cognitive computing startup CustomerMatrix.

JCB International Co., Ltd. (JCBI), the international operations subsidiary of JCB Co., Ltd. has today announced that China CITIC Bank (CITIC), a leading commercial bank in China, started to issue the first JCB virtual cards for online shopping users[1]. 

One question that crops up regularly is how do we open source the bank, Chris?  The reason is that the bank has built itself over decades through thousands of programmes across hundreds of servers into this massively complex technological spaghetti that cannot be unravelled.  That spaghetti has to be serviced by thousands of programmers and developers because it’s all mission critical.  Then there are layers of suppliers on top of the internal spaghetti who have also built their legacies upon the bank’s legacies.  These suppliers are on versions 7, 8, 9 or 10 of their core platforms, and th