The firm, headquartered in Cardiff, Wales launched in 2015 and has already experienced fast growth, opening offices in London and now Brussels. Working with a range of firms from small family offices and corporate finance boutiques all the way through to global financial institutions and investment organisations, across the UK, EU and Switzerland.

To help service its growing base across Benelux, Delio is now recruiting for a senior country manager to head up the region and build a local team as it looks to double its headcount across Europe from 10 to 20 staff by the end of this year.

David Newman, co-founder and COO of Delio, said: “We’ve seen a real appetite for our platform in Benelux with demand growing as fast as it is in the UK. As we expand our presence, we want to demonstrate our commitment to service our customers with a local team of experts dedicated to the region. Brussels is also a natural gateway to Europe and has a deep talent pool and infrastructure. This, combined with the fantastic support we have received to date in Belgium, from ING Fintech Village through to B-Hive, makes a Brussels office a logical next step in our ambitious growth strategy.”

With its bespoke white-label platform, Delio is a complete private asset solution for financial institutions, allowing them to create and deliver a structured and compliant offering linking investors with direct investment opportunities in a way which works for them. Developed specifically to the requirements of each individual financial institution, the white-label platform links high-net worth and ultra-high net worth investors with a diverse range of private deals in areas such as equity, debt and real estate - deals a new generation of wealth creators have had limited access to until now.

Gareth Lewis, co-founder and CEO of Delio, added: “We created Delio in direct response to the growing appetite for new, distinct opportunities among high-net worth investors. It’s this appetite which is disrupting the industry spurring financial institutions to shake-up the way they currently engage with investors and the deals they offer them. Investors are increasingly becoming more entrepreneurial; looking for direct investment deals and hands-on projects alongside a rising trend for impact investing which deliver philanthropic as well as financial returns. Until now, this need has been unmet and we’re pioneering a new approach through FinTech innovation, becoming the go-to firm providing the solution. And with strong organic growth, we’re very excited about what the future holds.” 

WorldRemit customers can now send overseas money transfers to be collected in one of the 1620 Wafacash cash pick up locations all over the country, including Marrakesh, Tanger, Tetouan, Salé, Fes, Agadir, Meknes, Oujda, Kenitra, and Nador among others.

Remittances play an important role in Morocco’s economy – considering that over 8 million Moroccan expatriates are currently living abroad. The country received 7% of its GDP in remittances in 2015 according to the World Bank, totaling some $7 billion.

Catherine Wines, co-founder and Executive Director at WorldRemit, comments: “We are very proud to be joining forces with the leading financial partner for money transfers in Morocco. Wafacash’s impressive market penetration and its reputation for excellence and innovation for 26 years guarantees superior customer service for thousands of customers via 1620 Wafacash branches across the country”.

Samira Khamlichi, chief executive of Wafacash adds: “Our partnership with WorldRemit reflects our commitment and continuous investment into international growth and expanding product offerings for our customers. Moroccans can now receive vital remittances from their family members abroad instantly, simply making use of their unique transaction reference number and a valid ID.”

“I am excited to be joining Roostify at a very significant time for the company, which has gone from an early stage startup to a key player in a quickly-growing industry,” said Gelbart. “I look forward to continuing our momentum, fostering key relationships within the mortgage and real estate industry and fundamentally changing the way consumers obtain home loans.”

Gelbart brings over 20 years of experience in enterprise software, including several early-stage, venture-backed software companies. Prior to Roostify, Gelbart served as president/CEO and Co-Founder of Appfluent Technology, a business intelligence infrastructure company, which was acquired by Attunity (NASDAQ: ATTU) in 2015. Prior to Appfluent Technology, Gelbart was the VP of Worldwide Sales at Peakstone Corporation, a venture-backed startup pioneering a new category of e-business capacity management solutions for the enterprise. Gelbart has held senior management positions at Entevo Corporation, Cheyenne Software, and Equinox Corporation. Gelbart is a graduate of the University of Southern California, where he studied Business Administration.

“As Roostify enters its next stage of growth, Frank’s extensive background in enterprise technology and finance will play a pivotal role in producing and managing additional revenue streams for the company,” said Rajesh Bhat, CEO of Roostify. “We welcome Frank to our growing team as we continue our mission to accelerate and simplify the home purchase experience for consumers, lenders, and others.” 

The move offers BT’s global financial services customers more choice in the selection of predictable, low-cost, highly efficient data centers to house and connect their applications and services. It also allows BT’s financial markets customers to join a growing ecosystem of participants already located in the Verne Global data center.

BT Radianz Services are designed specifically for the global financial markets. They include connectivity and hosting services between and within global trading venues. The BT Radianz Cloud platform supports the world’s largest secure networked financial community offering access to thousands of applications and services from more than 400 providers.

Strategically located between key North American and European financial centres, the Verne Global data center will provide members of the Radianz Cloud community with an additional choice of secure compute location. It adds to an existing global footprint of more than 20 data centres that offer BT Radianz services.

Iceland is unique in its abundance of low cost geothermal and hydro-electric energy sources complemented with year-round free cooling. This allows Verne Global to present a compelling and sustainable solution for financial services firms looking to reduce costs and carbon emissions, particularly for power-hungry technologies such as high performance computing (HPC) and grid applications.

Stef Weegels, Director of Business Development at Verne Global commented, “We are pleased to expand our financial services capabilities with the addition of BT Radianz Services, which offer a key industry network and a range of connectivity and hosting solutions.” He added, “With the right connectivity, compute and infrastructure resources in place, firms located at the Verne Global data center are able to use technology in ever more innovative, valuable and cost effective ways.”

Michael Woodman, Head of Radianz, BT, commented, "Adding Verne Global’s Icelandic venue to our portfolio of more than 20 global data centers provides BT customers with a new breed of connectivity and hosting opportunities where power and cost efficiencies help our customers to optimise their operations at an application level.” He adds, “This agreement continues to reinforce our reputation as a creator of innovative capabilities, specifically developed for the financial services industry.”

The addition of the Verne Global data center to the Radianz footprint is part of BT’s ‘Cloud of Clouds’ portfolio strategy aimed at helping large organisations connect easily and securely to the applications and data they need, regardless of where they are hosted and where they are based.

TradAir’s fully managed low-latency trading technology solutions hosted in Equinix LD4, are now also hosted in the AWS London Region. The new AWS UK Region provides the scale, reach and high-availability critical for TradAir’s cloud-based trading platform.

The AWS London Region’s proximity to TradAir’s industry-leading selection of primary FX liquidity providers and trading venues helps reduce round trip order latency, which results in higher fill ratios and reduced slippage. This has resulted in improved execution performance and an outstanding trading experience for TradAir clients and their customers.

TradAir live in the AWS London Region delivers significant benefits to TradAir clients:

 Robust, futureproof FX trading platform: Latest in high-performance, scalable and fully managed Web, Cloud, BigData, and HTML5 technology, with superior customer support

 Security, scalability, and high-availability: AWS provides the security, scalability, reach and high-availability required to support our high-performance trading platform

 Improved execution and performance: Servers being deployed in proximity to LPs and trading venues, helping to reduce trip trade latency and improve execution performance

 Outstanding trading experience: Fully customizable, zero install HTML5 trading platform, delivers high-performance, and ease of deployment with global reach

 Advanced trading analytic engine: Deep, actionable insight across platform, to optimize liquidity provision, client pricing and risk management

David Elliot, Solutions Architecture Manager, Financial Services, Amazon Web Services, commented on TradAir’s deployment:

“We are delighted that TradAir is now live in the AWS London Region, they have been a customer for many years.
By leveraging AWS, TradAir benefits from lower latency with servers deployed in proximity to key FX liquidity providers and trading venues in the city of London.” 

Under MiFID II, execution reports are required to distinguish between notice of execution and informational reports. Depending upon the role of the intermediary, the same set of trades on behalf of a customer order can be deemed a notice of execution as partial fills or may be informational only. Execution reports now require additional party identification.

Itiviti clients have concluded the vast majority of FIX order flows that fall under MiFID II will require modification to ensure compliance. The specific mappings and usage of FIX to support MiFID II are still being addressed within FIX working groups, which means that actual implementation work cannot yet be made.

"We are concerned that once the complete blueprint for MiFID II implementation becomes available, firms and development staffs will lack sufficient capacity to manage onboarding and re-certification in a timely fashion," says Jim Northey, SVP, Strategy and Research, Itiviti. "We thus see a clear need for relieving clients' staff as well as their trading technology infrastructure from this burden, which is why Itiviti's MiFID II Certification Solution is easily integrated as a fully managed service or deployed on premises."

Itiviti's MiFID II Certification Solution in a managed environment integrates with existing test environments and can be implemented with minimal impact on these, while eliminating the need for additional servers and firewalls.

The solution uses FIX Conductor by Itiviti, a pre-packaged tool for reducing the time and cost for onboarding and certification of FIX counterparties. It enables automation for executing a large number of test cases and clients have access to an intuitive white labeled interface which guides their testing with instant feedback. The ability to run multiple tests in parallel with 24/7 access to the testing environment drastically reduces the time frames, enabling firms to speed their time to revenue by 80%. These efficien­cies can also translate into quality benefits, as FIX Conductor allows for more sophisticated test scenarios.