Santander InnoVentures, the fintech venture capital fund of Santander Group, today announced its latest portfolio investment in Tradeshift, a leading business commerce and supply chain finance platform based in San Francisco. The Santander InnoVentures investment will be used to further broaden Tradeshift’s capabilities, fuel the development of its platform and grow the ecosystem surrounding its B2B marketplace.

It’s always great to attend Franklin Templeton’s unique innovation summit which took place for the third time this week. It brings together all sorts of new FinTech players, established firms, thought leaders and, crucially, outsiders to provide valuable insight into the direction of our industry (the fact it’s in Fort Lauderdale at this time of year doesn’t hurt either!).

Thomson Reuters is working with FX analytics specialist BestX to enable buy-side participants using Thomson Reuters FXall and FX Trading to streamline analysis of transaction costs, helping them define, achieve and demonstrate best execution.

Financial IT speaks with Lee Murphy, owner of Pandle about the impact of cloud computing on financial services industry and the most efficient cloud based bookkeeping software.

Financial IT: How cloud computing is impacting on the financial services sector?

OCC, the world’s largest equity derivatives clearing organization, today announced three additions to its senior management team.

With global outflows on the rise and

IFINSEC Financial Sector IT Security Conference and Exhibition (www.ifinsec.com) will be held on 14-15 November 2017 in Istanbul, Turkey. IFINSEC is a global, niche and dedicated conference focusing on IT Security technologies and solutions for financial sector.

Singapore Exchange (SGX) is pleased to appoint Michael Luk as the new Head of Fixed Income Origination and Sales, effective 1 January 2017.

Reporting to Mr Chew Sutat, SGX Head of Equities & Fixed Income, Mr Luk is tasked with spearheading the growth of SGX’s fixed income businesses through deeper and broader relationships with market participants. This includes extending SGX regional leadership in bond listings and driving institutional client adoption of OTC trading in the Asian bond market via SGX’s new Bond Pro trading platform.

Tieto and the Federation of Finnish Financial Services have presented an initiative on digitalized value-added tax (VAT) reporting. The new standard would allow companies to report VAT information faster and facilitate real-time reporting. Adopting a uniform standard could help to increase European tax revenues by up to EUR 160 billion a year.

I was intrigued by a comment made by Anne Boden, founder of Starling Bank, on a panel I chaired the other day.  Anne used to work for ABN Amro, AIB and RBS, and is now a Fintech start-up and her comment went along the lines of: “I’ve now realised that the simple changes I needed to make in my old jobs would usually cost $3 million or more, and yet now I can make those changes for $3,000”.