Blockchain Conference Abu Dhabi, the main FinTech event in the Middle East region, will be held on December 8 at Marriott Downtown Abu Dhabi. This activity promises to be multinational, with representatives from 12 countries to share their views on the future of Blockchain technology.

We are glad to announce that the conference agenda includes 5 panels, which are as follows:

Bill Gates was once quoted saying “the internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow”. These days the global village has firmly been established and the meagre town square has been usurped by an e-commerce marketplace so vast that it now fuels the majority of global GDP.

The modern connected world is the “smallest” it has ever been and the internet has without doubt been the biggest catalyst, driving global innovation, opportunity and collaboration like never before.

JMP Group LLC, an investment banking and alternative asset management firm, announced today that JMP Securities has entered into an agreement with Bryan, Garnier & Co, a leading European full-service investment bank, to partner on the origination and execution of cross-border mergers and acquisitions, strategic advisory mandates and public and private capital-raising transactions.

Nuvias has teamed up with Riverbed Technologies to offer a unique service that delivers proactive monitoring, alerting and reporting for Riverbed SteelHead™ and SteelFusion™ solutions. The highly flexible and adaptable service provides recommendations to improve WAN acceleration performance, reduce problem resolution times, identify and isolate persistent performance issues and avoid unplanned expenditure to maximise ROI.

When a brand is in the middle of a crisis, it’s make or break time for their customer service. With Tesco Bank customers unable to contact the organisation in the wake of money being stolen from multiple accounts, there’s clearly an important building block missing. Today’s customer is largely self-servicing, less tolerant and expects to be serviced at lightning speed; brands need to update existing customer service functions that do not meet the customer experience expectations of the new generation.

CLS Group (CLS), a leading provider of risk mitigation and operational services for the global foreign exchange (FX) market, today announced the completion of its project to upgrade its settlement members to a new member gateway and market infrastructure (MI) channel.

Intended to promote practical convergence and common supervisory approaches and practices, like EMIR and MAR before them, the MiFID II Q&A is fast becoming a favourite on my browser. In its recent Q&A on transparency topics, for example, ESMA has clarified for those firms wondering if, when and how to become a systematic internaliser (SI) that they will have until September 2018 to work it out and comply.

Global piracy has shifted away from hijacking and towards kidnapping, according to new analysis released today by IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO), a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions.

“Piracy has changed in the past three years,” said Devlin McStay, data analyst at IHS Maritime and Trade. “The number of piracy attacks is decreasing overall, but kidnapping is becoming more common. We are seeing the number of kidnappings rise in the piracy hotspots of Southeast Asia and West Africa.”

Ingram Micro announced Microsoft Azure has been added in New Zealand to the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace, a leading automated cloud services platform that allows partners to purchase, provision, manage, and invoice cloud technology with confidence and ease.

 Adyen, the payments company powering global commerce for companies such as Uber, Facebook and Netflix, today announced it was positioned as a leader among the select companies that Forrester invited to participate in its evaluation, “The Forrester Wave ™: Global Commerce Payment Providers, Q4 2016.”