We are now well into October and market participants are still waiting patiently for ESMA to provide details of instrument data for MiFID II. The industry is keen to consume important data to drive functionality and trading strategies; basics such as which instruments are in scope, which are classed as liquid, what is large in scale and where the equity dark volume caps will fall. The download interface mechanisms also remain a mystery.

Pelican, a global provider of Artificial Intelligence powered payments and financial crime compliance solutions for banks and corporates, today announced the expansion of its North American operations with the appointment of financial services and technology industry expert John Keelan. John joins the team as Senior Sales Manager for the Americas region, reporting to Bill North, Pelican’s Global Head of Sales.

Australian Securities and Frankfurt Stock Exchange cross listed iSignthis Ltd (ASX: ISX / DE: TA8), the global leader in RegTech for identity verification and transactional banking/payments, is pleased to announce that it has completed integration of its services to Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) regulated Tradefinancial (www.tradefinancial.com.au).

Citizens Bank has selected payments technology company Transactis to expand its Treasury Solutions offering with electronic billing and payment solutions. 

American Express has announced a new addition to its suite of business financing products, which are designed to help businesses with access to working capital and short-term financing: Business Loans. 

SWIFT has published an interim report on the proof of concept (PoC) for real-time Nostro reconciliation using a SWIFT-developed distributed ledger technology (DLT) sandbox with 33 global transaction banks, as part of its SWIFT gpi service. 

B-Hive, an innovative collaboration platform connecting financial services players and FinTech startups & scale-ups, has officially opened the doors of its hub in New York City. Along with our community, B-Hive hosted its sold-out launch event at the BNY Mellon offices in New York City’s Financial District on Thursday 12^th October.

Finastra is bringing its next-generation payments solutions to the cloud via Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s enterprise-ready trusted cloud platform. The move enables Finastra to deploy value-added services to clients more efficiently. Banks will benefit from streamlined onboarding, as well as faster access to new products and upgrades.

Silicon Valley analytics firm FICO today announced that the latest version of its FICO^® Enterprise Security Score is twice as accurate at predicting a data breach as the previous model, and more than four times as powerful as the best results claimed by competing solutions. The FICO Enterprise Security Score gives subscribers the ability to assess the forward-looking cyber breach risk of their organisation and their partners, and improves breach insurance underwriting.