Dion Global Solutions, the financial technology firm for global markets, today announced the appointment of Benjamin Wawn as Pre-Sales Consultant OMS Solutions.

Dion Country Manager Australia & New Zealand, Simon Smyth, said Mr Wawn’s appointment will strengthen Dion’s Australian client focus.

Thomson Reuters and Singapore Exchange (SGX) today announced that the TR/SGX Singapore Fixed Income Indices (TR/SGX SFI) have been selected as the recommended fixed income benchmark by United Overseas Bank (UOB) following the discontinuation of the UOB SGS Index.

Alpha Payments Cloud, the FinTech industry’s first middleware technology platform that consolidates all vendors across the entire payments, risk and commerce spectrum into one UI, and First Quay Capital, an Australian based private equity firm that invests in early stage, high growth businesses, have joined forces to expand Alpha’s innovative solution within the MENA region.

First Data, a global leader in commerce-enabling technology, today announced a new partnership with Alipay, one of the world’s leading online payment platforms, to bring the Alipay mobile payment solution to United States merchants. Beginning in November, Alipay will be available to Chinese consumers shopping at select retail locations in California and New York. Participating retailers at those locations will use First Data’s Clover Mini point-of-sale solution to accept Alipay.

OPENSTACK SUMMIT – Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Produban, the IT services arm of the Spanish banking leader Grupo Santander, has picked Red Hat as its technology partner to create a modern cloud infrastructure with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, marking what is believed to be one of the world’s first production deployments of Kubernetes and containers on OpenStack.

LGT, one of the largest private banking groups in the world, has decided on BearingPoint’s proven RegTech software ABACUS/DaVinci as the group-wide solution for the reporting of financial information according to the ECB regulation on reporting of supervisory financial information (FinRep). The Management and technology consultancy BearingPoint ranks among the leading providers of Risk and Regulatory Technology (RiskTech/RegTech). With BearingPoint’s solution, LGT will submit FinRep reports from March 31, 2017.

Paysafe, a leading global provider of payment solutions, has expanded its long-term partnership with Handpoint, the award-winning FinTech provider powering NextGen point of sale (POS), to offer EMV-ready mobile point of sale and online payment solutions to merchants and partners in Canada, the US and Europe. Through this partnership, Paysafe offers end-to-end frictionless payments online, in-store and through mobile devices and tablets.

The digitalization of our economy, with the spread of smartphones and of electronic commerce, necessitates the payments industry to constantly level up. Emerging new technologies lead to changes in consumer habits, who are making online purchases on the go.

Instant payments, or ‘immediate’ or ‘real-time’ payments, are the new next step in the harmonization of payments aimed at supporting competitiveness and economic growth and will be the main focus in the next coming years.

Leading bitcoin payments company BitPay today announced the first bitcoin wallet with Intel hardware security integration. This new solution will allow Copay users to rest assured that their data is better protected even if their application code or associated computer is compromised. The Intel® Software Guard Extensions integration offers hardware-level protection for the bitcoin wallet’s private key generation, transaction signing and private keys themselves.

Disclosure is the rage in financial markets regulation and the latest set of proposals relate to order handling rules.

Regulators are seeking to boost transparency into the order routing practices of broker-dealers and trading venues that reroute their orders in U.S. listed equities across exchanges and other trading venues.