SNL Financial has released a new report exploring the state of the U.K’s banking system.

For anyone starting or joining a startup you need to understand something important. Entrepreneurs, like all creative people, are pure petrol*.

Extracting, refining and transporting petrol is complex, costly, sensitive, time consuming to get right. Even once it’s ready to pump, petrol is delicate and dangerous. Throw it about, it’ll evaporate. Leave it in the canister too long, it’ll spoil. But light a match at the perfect moment, and BOOM you have a fireball.

The increasingly mobile-centric lifestyle of many Europeans can largely be attributed to the increase and success of mobile channel initiatives focused on providing cheaper, more convenient services. Although still playing catch up to Western Europe, mobile subscribers in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region are increasingly reliant on their mobile devices and smartphone adoption is increasing.

Financial IT speaks with Mike Schutt, Managing Director/Head of Trading SunGard’s Fox River Execution Solutions about the company’s flagship product designed by traders and for traders.

With the return of the Conservatives to government many of their policies will see a ‘business as usual’ banner hoisted above them. Last year the Chancellor made a potentially game-changing commitment to include crowdfunding within the ISA wrapper. The crowdfunding industry has long asked for a separate ISA, one which is not treated as the same asset class as the renowned and respected Cash ISA, or even to the more complex Stocks and Shares ISA. It is obvious that P2P lending has its very own risk and reward profile, and consumers need to understand these nuances.

There’s a curious “truth” doing the rounds in the peer-to-peer sector. It goes something like this:

Institutional money has arrived in crowdfunding big time. This is a fantastic endorsement of this growing sector. The future will be more institutional money enabling more sector growth. This is brilliant, if bittersweet. It will enable peer-to-peer to become the premier way for companies and individuals to borrow, but retail investors will get squeezed out in the process.

The banks are too big to fail. Everyone says it and so it must be true. The last two decades have seen the rise and fall of the big bank concept. Take the ultimate global bank, the ‘Citi’ that never sleeps. It’s currently in 101 countries, has over 241,000 employees (down from around the 340,000 mark) and occupies over 10,000 properties. Could you imagine a government willing to take on the economic destruction by not bailing out a group of such significance? Well the US government couldn’t bring itself to either, with public money helping out Citi a number of times.

BasisCode Compliance, provider of the industry’s broadest integrated compliance software for asset managers, advisors and other financial services firms, has been named a finalist in the compliance technology category of WealthManagement.com's 2015 Industry Awards, the first program to honor outstanding achievements by companies that help advisors better manage their businesses through innovation, enhanced service quality or an enriched advisor/client experience.

Today Wolters Kluwer announces that Claire Carter has joined as UK Managing Director for its Tax and Accounting software business.

Claire joins from Sage Software where she was formerly Managing Director of its Accountants Division for the UK and Ireland delivering Cloud and on premise solutions to accountants. Before that, Claire worked for Morgan Stanley and Alliance & Leicester in senior commercial roles.

Five exciting new payment start-ups have reached the final for the 2015 Dragons' Den contest at PayExpo. The highly anticipated competition, which received record entries this year, is the ideal platform for emerging companies looking to present their innovative ideas and game-changing payments technologies to a global market.

The 2015 Payments Dragons' Den finalists are:

xWare42 - a software developer whose core product, xPay, allows banks to give customers additional information about their purchases.