IBM and Cisco announced they will partner to combine the market-leading strengths of each company to transform how knowledge-workers collaborate and work. The companies will form a suite of cloud-based workplace tools and applications infused with IBM Watson.

As part of the transformation, the highly secure Cisco Spark and WebEx collaborative workspace platforms will be integrated with IBM's leading cloud collaboration solutions, including Verse and Connections, and underpinned by IBM's cognitive computing capabilities.

dv01, the analytics platform that brings transparency to lending markets, announced the debut of its portfolio management software for marketplace loans. To date, institutional investors have used dv01's cloud-hosted web application to gain real-time insight into $23.5 billionworth of marketplace loans.

Moneris Solutions Corporation ("Moneris"), one of North America's leading credit and debit card processors, today introduced Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC) to its offerings for Canadian businesses. Now when an international customer uses their foreign Visa or MasterCard in a terminal, they'll immediately see the cost of the purchase in their own currency and have the option to pay for it in that currency or in Canadian dollars.

IPC Systems, Inc., a leading global provider of specialized communications and managed network-as-a-service (MNaaS) solutions for the financial trading community, today announced the launch of a Financial Markets Cloud service for securely and reliably trading exchange- traded funds (ETFs).

Blockchain, Blockchain ! The buzz continues to spread from coffee machines to boardrooms. Everyone I speak to nowadays is eager to know how to leverage Blockchain tech and what's in it for them.

A key question in front of us as solution providers is when to choose Blockchain (and when to stick to relational databases) and more importantly which use case to fund/invest.

Based on my experience of Blockchain technology, if your use case meets all the conditions below, using a Blockchain makes business sense:

 FIX Trading Community, the non-profit, industry-driven standards body at the heart of global financial trading, today announced the release of Simple Binary Encoding (SBE) version 1.0 Draft Standard to support high performance demands in transactions and/or data feeds.

OANDA a leading global provider of online foreign exchange (“Forex”, “FX”) and over-the-counter commodities, bonds and indices trading services, has announced that its clients recorded record-high trading volumes on Friday following the UK’s decision to exit the European Union.

Gemalto digital security provider, has been selected to provide its LinqUs On-Demand Connectivity (ODC) subscription management solution and embedded SIMs (eSIMs) for KDDI, a leading operator in Japan with over 40 million subscribers, to enable secure connectivity for connected cars and IoT applications worldwide.

Nordea has the ambition to be in the forefront of digitisation within banking and therefore establishes a new Group Digital unit with the objective to drive the digital agenda forward across the Group. The unit will be co-headed by Poul Raaholt, previously head of Group IT at Nordea, and Ewan MacLeod, previously responsible for the Retail digital transformation programme at Royal Bank of Scotland. Alvaro Garrido, previously Group Head of Technology at Standard Chartered Bank, is appointed new head of Group IT.