The United States’ first-of-its-kind, real-time payments system, available to all financial institutions nationwide, is nearing reality thanks to FIS™ (NYSE:FIS), a global leader in financial services technology, and The Clearing House Payments Company L.L.C. (TCH).

The Capital Partnership, a private investment office and independent asset manager, today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire 100% of the ownership of Northgate Capital, the California-based venture capital and private equity investment firm, from Religare and certain members of Northgate’s management team. Religare, the India-based diversified financial services group, acquired a majority interest in Northgate in 2010. Completion of the transaction is subject to the satisfaction of certain conditions precedent, including certain regulatory approvals.

A new online property investment platform, InvestSure, has been launched to bring together professional investors and property developers to help address the chronic lack of available finance in the UK property market.

InvestSure says it will allow property developers to access a diverse range of funding for projects, where previously traditional banks have been unable or unwilling to provide it. InvestSure explains that better access to funding will be a vital component in helping Britain solve the housing crisis.

We had a fascinating chat about digital identities at the Innovate Finance Global Summit (#ifgs2016) today. It was a private roundtable with members of government, central banks, the banking and Fintech community and commentators/observers.

Listening to the dialogue going to and fro, I realised that this is one nut that’s too tough to crack. Here’s the lowdown.

Halifax is further enhancing the services its current account customers receive with the launch of ‘Balance Extra’, an online banking feature which provides a simple view of the amount of money customers actually have available to them before their next pay day.

By automatically deducting forecasted debits, such as Standing Orders and Direct Debits alongside pending transactions, customers are given greater insight into their personal cash flow, enabling them to manage their money more accurately without having to manually work out the total amount of money leaving their account.

The OCBC Mobile Banking app for iPhones, launched in March 2015, was the first banking app in Singapore to allow customers instant fingerprint access to view their balances and transaction histories across their bank accounts, credit cards and investments.

 Teradata  announced innovative Hybrid Cloud advancements across its data warehouse product line, offering the next generation of agility, flexibility, and integration between systems.  Teradata Hybrid Cloud is a customer environment using a mix of on-premises, managed cloud, and public cloud resources orchestrated to deliver ease-of-use benefits such as automatic synchronisation, optimised query routing, and end-to-end management across the ecosystem.

 Niu Solutions, the leading provider of IT consultancy and infrastructure services, has secured a contract with Mi-Pay, the digital e-commerce payments and security services specialist, to support the company’s international expansion.