At Synechron, we’re often asked by our financial services clients for our perspective on the blockchain platform most suited to their use cases. Having developed functional applications upon each of the leading enterprise blockchains–Ethereum and its enterprise version Quorum, Fabric, and Corda – all have one thing in common: they are open source platforms.

Dragos Inc., (pronounced Dray-gohs), an industrial control system (ICS) cybersecurity company made up of industry experts with the vision of securing global industrial infrastructure, announced today that it has received a $10 million Series A round of venture capital from co-lead investors Energy Impact Partners (EIP) and Allegis Capital, with additional support from DataTribe, a cybersecurity startup studio that initially funded Dragos.

For quite some time now, millennials have been the primary target market for a vast majority of industries. Everything they do – every website they visit, purchase they make, and even their location throughout the day – is analysed by numerous businesses, ensuring that they are showcasing the right products to them at the right time, desperate to gain their custom and ultimately their loyalty.

Peer-to-peer mobile payments are nothing new with the likes of Paym, Google Wallet and most major UK bank offering this feature, but the announcement of WhatsApp offering P2P payments could accelerate the adoption of this payment method. With P2P money transfer users expected to grow in the UK by almost 2 million, to over 10 million users by 2020, this move by WhatsApp is only going to accelerate this growth.

The online payments landscape is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. Global retail eCommerce transaction volumes for products and services reached US$1.9 trillion in 2016 and are estimated to grow to over US$4 trillion by 2020.

With such large volumes and the constant evolution of the digital payments sphere, security is naturally the number one concern.

The 3D Secure protocol has been around since the early 2000’s and provides an extra layer of security in card-not-present online payments. The benefits of implementing 3DS are widely known and accepted.

PayPal said it had opened two innovation labs in India to support projects in the field of machine learning, artificial intelligence and other new technologies.  

Paypal now intends to bring innovation in India to new levels with its Bengaluru and Chennai centres, on the line of its US and Singapore counterparts. The facility will also house a diverse range of hardware and gadgets for PayPal employees to experience. 

Deposit Solutions, the leading Open Banking platform for deposits and operator of investment platform ZINSPILOT, today announced that it has acquired Berlin-based platform for retail deposits SAVEDO. 

Commcise, the multi award-winning provider of integrated commission management and research evaluation solutions for investment management firms, today announced the successful implementation of CommciseBUY at Pictet Asset Management (Pictet AM) who manage over EUR150bn in a range of asset classes globally.

IRESS today announced that ASX-listed wealth management, financial advice and insurance group, ClearView, has selected XPLAN Prime as its objectives-based, scaled-advice solution.