Nasdaq (Nasdaq:NDAQ) announced that its US-based Nasdaq Futures, Inc. (NFX)will officially launch today. The platform will initially offer futures and options on oil, natural gas and US power benchmarks, with a fee holiday for the first nine months of trading.

 SETL today announced its plans to deploy a multi-asset, multi-currency institutional payment and settlements infrastructure based on blockchain technology.  The SETL system will enable market participants to move cash and assets directly between each other, facilitating the immediate and final settlement of market transactions. The SETL system maintains a permissioned distributed ledger of ownership and transaction records, simplifying the process of matching, settlement, custody, registration and transaction reporting.

 Aon plc (NYSE: AON), the leading global provider of risk management and human resource consulting and 

The new board will be chaired by Eileen Mercier, who will be supported by a carefully recruited team of accomplished Canadian and international payments, public policy, business and technology experts. The new board will help lead the CPA as it implements its strategy to modernize Canada's core national payments infrastructure as part of its overall vision to be the centre of excellence for payments in Canada.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the acquisition of San Mateo, CA-based Compose, Inc., a privately held company that provides MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, and other database as a service (DBaaS) offerings targeted at

First Financial Bank, N.A., a subsidiary of First Financial Bancorp (Nasdaq: FFBC) (collectively "the Company" and "First Financial"), signed a definitive agreement to acquire Oak Street Holdings Corporation ("Oak Street") for $110 million in cash.

UnionPay International announced on July 23 that the number of overseas educational institutions, including high schools, colleges and universities accepting UnionPay cards for tuition payment has risen to more than 1,200. The service is available in countries and regions for studying abroad such as the US, Canada, Australia, England, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Taiwan and covers many prestigious universities.

The Banking Industry Architecture Network e.V (BIAN) welcomes three new members to its fast growing global network today, creating an international network of 60 of the leading banks, service providers, software vendors and academic partners.

The international software and BPO provider Avaloq, Lebanese banking core applications developer BML Istisharat and financial services technology provider Fiserv, will now work with the current members to continue to develop the standardised IT framework for the banking industry.

Ipreo, a global leader of data, market intelligence and productivity solutions to capital markets and corporate professionals, today announced the acquisition of iLEVEL, a leading portfolio monitoring, analytics and transparency platform for global private capital markets. iLEVEL will be merged with Ipreo's Alternative Assets group to form a new Private Capital Markets division within Ipreo.