Callsign has beaten 10 other start-ups to win the London stage of NTT DATA’s 2018 Global Open Innovation Contest, and its team will now fly to Tokyo, Japan to compete against entrepreneurs from around the world in the competition’s Grand Finale. Contestants will be competing for the chance to win a three-month in-kind contribution to support the development of their proposed new business, and an opportunity to break into the highly innovative Japanese market.

Africa’s financial services landscape continues its dynamic evolution as the rapid growth of FinTech on the continent drives both the disruption and leapfrogging of legacy systems and further accelerates the digital transformation of financial services. In South Africa, the major banks are rapidly ramping-up their own innovation strategies and collaborating with new game-changing start-ups to drive efficiencies, make digital profitable and capture new markets.

ABN AMRO, the third largest bank in the Netherlands with more than 22,000 employees, has chosen Wolters Kluwer and SAS to provide a truly integrated finance, risk and regulatory reporting software solution. The implementation of the software is part of the bank’s major transformation project, the Finance and Risk Architecture Alignment Initiative (FRAAI), which is designed to better meet increasing requests internally as well as from regulatory bodies for ever more granular or different data within shorter time lines.

Finastra and Microsoft have formed a strategic alliance to deliver secure, flexible and cost effective financial services cloud solutions. As part of the alliance, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s enterprise-ready trusted cloud platform, will underpin FusionFabric.cloud as Finastra’s strategic cloud platform. In addition, Finastra will launch a selection of its global payments and retail banking products on Azure over the course of this year.

State Street Corporation (NYSE: STT) today announced it has developed and begun licensing a suite of rules-based investment strategies, or Investable Indices, for institutional investors.

“This is not smart beta or thematic investing,” said Will Kinlaw, head of research and advisory for State Street Global Exchange^SM. “These investable indices represent a new phase of dynamic investing. We’re packaging an active strategy in rules-driven index, where security weights can change dynamically as relevant factors and big data indicators evolve.”

Today at Finovate Europe 2018, Meniga, the global leader of white-label digital banking solutions and three-time Finovate winner, presented its latest personal finance innovation that encourages banks to branch out from the familiar digital banking customer experience.

Fiserv, Inc. (NASDAQ: FISV), a leading global provider of financial services technology solutions, announced today it is offering Mastercard^® Decision Intelligence^™, a comprehensive decision and fraud detection service.

iwoca, one of Europe’s largest small business lenders, is pledging to lend £100 million to micro and small businesses in the North of England by 2020. The alternative finance provider is making the pledge in response to the withdrawal of credit facilities for small businesses by the UK’s banks, which has been most acute in the North.

 Trifacta, a global leader in data wrangling, announced the availability of Wrangler Enterprise in the Azure Marketplace, allowing organizations to deploy Trifacta in less than 30 minutes. Trifacta & Microsoft Azure have already seen early success with large-scale enterprise customers including Chubb, Donnelley Financial Solutions, and Etihad Airways.