PayPal announced the appointment of Paul Parisi as the new general manager of PayPal Canada, effective today. Paul is a results-focused Canadian leader who joins PayPal with a strong record of more than 17 years in the payments industry.

As general manager, Paul will be focused on building on the company's successful 10-year history in Canadaand driving the next phase of growth for the company and its customers. He will play a critical role in bringing innovations to market and further solidifying PayPal as one of the leading online and mobile payment services in Canada.

Barclays and innovative start-up company Wave have become the first organisations to execute a global trade transaction using blockchain technology.

The letter of credit transaction between Ornua (formerly the Irish Dairy Board) and Seychelles Trading Company is the first to have trade documentation handled on the new Wave platform, with funds sent via Swift. It is hoped this landmark transaction could herald a new era of simpler, safer and faster trade finance.

Mambu, the SaaS banking platform provider, today announced the company is on target to achieve significant growth in 2016. The past 12 months has seen accelerated expansion of Mambu’s business with the company’s platform now used for managing nearly $600 million in portfolio with this figure growing by 10% month on month.

AxiomSL, the leading global provider of regulatory reporting and risk management solutions, announced today that it has expanded its liquidity reporting solution for financial firms in Switzerland to cover the Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR) requirements. This is following the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority’s (FINMA) requirement for NSFR disclosures from 30 June 2016.

Today the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) is introducing five new members to its network of leading banks, technology providers, consultants and academics.

Colt today announced that Colt PrizmNet financial extranet is enabling connectivity to a cloud-based ecosystem of MiFID II compliant solutions, helping capital markets firms deal with the various aspects of the directive, due to come into force in January 2018. Current partners include TraderServe for algorithm testing, Aquis Exchange for best execution, and TRADEcho for trade reporting.

 OneMarketData, LLC, the creators of OneTick, the premier solution for event stream processing and tick data management, today announced that TORA, a global leader in technology for investment managers, has gone live with their OneTickCloud service. TORA solutions span the entire trading process, offering a full suite of execution and pre/post trade compliance tools as well as order, portfolio and risk management capabilities in global markets. Customers include hedge funds, mutual funds and sell-side proprietary trading desks.

The financial services companies and their fintech vendors are rapidly entering new reality of the on-demand and peer-to-peer market model. This ‘uberization’ of the industry or so - called ‘sharing-economy’ stimulate the emergence of marketplace banks - an alternative way to traditional banking. The marketplaces start attracting many companies due to its promises of softer regulation and greater flexibility for all parties involved in the economy of scale.

Building upon Friday’s discussion of how the system treats the poor, there are interesting movements afoot at the Brookings Institute.  If you’re not familiar with Brookings, it is one of America’s oldest Think Tanks and provides independent research into social sciences, particularly economics, governance and foreign policy, for the US Government.