Dion Global, the financial technology firm for capital markets, announced its official launch in Australia this week.

Dion Global Solutions delivers improved equity and options trading and risk management to retail banks and stockbrokers, financial advisers and the online trading community. Providing adviser desktop, tablet and mobile devices or a combination of all three, Dion’s Trading suite seamlessly integrates with portfolio and back office systems providing CRM “Productivity tools” for advisers to better service their clients.

Solucom announces that it has entered exclusive negotiations with Management Consulting Group PLC with a view to acquiring most of the European activities of its subsidiary Kurt Salmon.

 LISNR, the creator of SmartTones, a new communication protocol that sends data over audio, recently announced that it closed $10 million in Series B funding. The company's founder attributes participation PowerMoves@Detroit sponsored by Morgan Stanley as a flashpoint in the startup's growth.

Today, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced its intent to acquire Acano Limited, a privately held company based in London that provides collaboration infrastructure and conferencing software. Acano's hardware and software includes gateways, and video and audio bridging technology that allows customers to connect video systems from multiple vendors across both cloud and hybrid environments.

ING announces that it has joined a consortium of 30 leading global banks, coordinated by the financial technology firm R3, to collaboratively evaluate and apply emerging block chain technology to the global financial system. The stated goals of the group are to collaborate on research, design, and engineering that will advance innovative solutions for clients that meet banking requirements for security, reliability, performance, scalability, and auditing. 

Kyobo Securities Co.

Personal Financial Management (PFM) tools have become a very convenient solution for individuals and businesses to get a holistic view of their transactions and overall financial situation. It aggregates information from our transactions and allows us to see where we spent our money, the value of our assets and what liabilities we have. But those are just basic functionalities of first-generation PFM solutions.

Stonegate is pleased to announce that the bank is now offering a Debit MasterCard that can be used at any of Cuba’s 10,000 hotels, restaurants and other card-accepting merchants.

“This is the first step in relieving the burden of U.S. travelers carrying cash when travelling to Cuba and another step in normalizing commercial relations between the two countries. Hopefully more issuing banks will help this process by approving credit and debit cards as well,” said Dave Seleski, president and CEO of Stonegate Bank.

 Sigma Systems, the pioneer in idea-to-install software, today announced that they have completed the implementation of a cloud-based automated provisioning solution for the Polycom® RealPresence® Group Series video collaboration solution.