London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) today announces the launch of ELITE Club Deal (ECD), a new online private placement platform for ELITE companies and professional investors. The initiative will help to bridge a funding gap by bringing together professional investors with high growth companies in a secure and efficient environment through an online platform. Pilot phase testing with five European ELITE companies will begin shortly, with a full go-live planned for late 2016, subject to regulatory approval.

As illustrated in our Pulse of Fintech Report, funding to VC-backed fintech companies globally was up significantly in the last quarter, rising to $5.7B in Q1’16 from $3.1B in Q4’15. Asian tech corporates are among the investors that have been finding opportunity in fintech, betting on startups both within their region and outside of it.

To the DAO and the Ethereum community,

I have carefully examined the code of The DAO and decided to participate after finding the feature where splitting is rewarded with additional ether. I have made use of this feature and have rightfully claimed 3,641,694 ether, and would like to thank the DAO for this reward. It is my understanding that the DAO code contains this feature to promote decentralization and encourage the creation of "child DAOs".

Key stakeholders behind the alternative blockchain platform ethereum are debating changes to the platform's code after millions of dollars in ether were diverted from a major project by an alleged attacker.

The value of the digital currency Ethereum has dropped dramatically amid an apparent huge attack targeting an organisation with huge holdings of the currency.

The price per unit dropped to $15 from record highs of $21.50 in hours, with millions of units of the digital currency worth as much as $50 million stolen at post-theft valuations.

The Bank of England (BoE) will launch its own fintech accelerator to harness innovation for central banking.

Fintech firms will be invited to carry out a proof of concept with the BoE. The bank will then act as a reference site for these companies.

One month ago, Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase in a sweeping, 2,500-word blog post, took aim at what he called a "stagnant" bitcoin community that he characterized as being outperformed by innovators working on the Ethereum network. In the post, Ehrsam sought to position Ethereum as a possible competitor to bitcoin, indicating his belief that the competing protocol could "blow past bitcoin entirely" (perhaps he was merely peeved at the lack of commission fees Coinbase was generating).

Adobe Digital Index’s (ADI) “State of Banking” noted a leadership position for Australia in Mobile Banking, particularly in terms of improving customer experience.

Adobe analyzes developed markets like US, Canada, UK, as well as Australia: in US, mobile banking services were used on average 27 times in 2015, almost half of all the other countries mentioned above.