Edgewater Technology, Inc., a leading consulting firm that brings a blend of classic and product‐based consulting services to its clients, today announced that it has acquired the assets of Chicago‐based Branchbird, LLC ("Branchbird"), an Oracle Gold Partner and Cloudera Partner specializing in Big Data and Data Discovery technologies and solutions. Branchbird will join Edgewater Ranzal ("Ranzal"), a wholly‐owned subsidiary of Edgewater and a Platinum provider of Oracle Enterprise Performance Management ("EPM") and Business Intelligence ("BI") solutions and services. 

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the global leader in content delivery network (CDN) services, today announced the appointment of Ashutosh (Ash) Kulkarni as Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Company's Web Experience Division. 

Wells Fargo Capital Finance, part of Wells Fargo & Company (WFC), announced that Nick Lawrence has been appointed as managing director for Supply Chain Finance (SCF) as it finalizes the build out of its European platform to support all three international products, Channel Finance, Supplier Finance and Sales Finance.

 Mooreland Partners (www.moorelandpartners.com), the leading independent investment bank providing M&A and private capital advisory services to the global technology industry, today announced it acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Proxibid on a growth equity financing led by Primus Capital.

Nasdaq (Nasdaq:NDAQ) and Ant Financial Services Group (Ant Financial) today announced that Nasdaq Last Sale (NLS) real-time data is now available to the millions of Ant Financial clients through the Alipay and Ant Fortune apps. NLS provides a real-time and comprehensive view into trading activity in all Nasdaq U.S.-listed equity securities.

Custom House Fund Services, a leading provider of financial services to the alternative investment sector, has announced the appointment of Richard Hale as Director, Business Development UK. He is based in the newly-established London office and is responsible for developing business in the UK and Europe.

 Mobey Forum will lead the banking industry in addressing the digitalisation of financial services at its annual Mobey Day conference, taking place in Barcelona on 14-15 October and today confirms CaixaBank, Equens, MasterCard, Sequent and UBS as speakers.  

EMVCo, the global technical body that manages the EMV® Specifications, will also host a seminar at Mobey Day which will educate delegates on EMVCo’s role in promoting the global interoperability of payment tokenisation and provide an overview of the technical body’s current mobile activities.

Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the global interconnection and data center company, today announced that it is working with Aqua Comms Limited (AquaComms), a provider of scalable, subsea capacity-based network solutions, on the deployment of its new transatlantic fiber optic system, America Europe Connect (AEConnect). Scheduled to be ready for service before the end of 2015, AEConnect, spanning more t

Innovations in prepaid cards and mobile phones are beginning to erode the traditional monopoly of banks as the home of ‘first accounts'.

According to new research by Prepaid International Forum (PIF), the next generation of financial services customers is more likely to use a prepaid card or mobile device, instead of a bank account, when they first become active consumers.