Enterprise Minister Arlene Foster today announced US based, CyberSource’s plans to invest almost £2.8million, in R&D at its Belfast centre.

CyberSource is a world leader in the development of payment-management solutions with approximately 295,000 customers worldwide.

Cognotec, the technology innovator that delivered the first automated foreign exchange dealing system, as well as the first hosted e-commerce enabled trading platform is being acquired by First Derivatives plc (AIM: FDP.L, IEX:GYQ.I), a global technology and service provider to the capital markets industry.

Raising investment can often seem confusing and frustrating; however this does not have to be the case. Raising capital is a lot like selling a product; before you even meet prospective clients, you need to decide who to approach, understand their needs and speak their language.

Most UK companies raise their first few rounds of investment from Business Angels and Small Funds within UK and Europe.

by Lyra McKee

Have you ever watched the film Rocky? The rags to riches story of a young boxer, played by Sylvester Stallone, who gets a shot at the ‘big time’ when a contender for the world heavyweight title breaks his hand? It’s inspiring stuff.

Northern Ireland's £5m Invest Growth Fund (IGF) has completed its fourth investment in Sembarc Ltd as part of a financing round from the IGF, Business Angels and other sources of financial support

Sembarc is a leading edge telecoms design company, supplying Intellectual Property solutions targeted at the Next Generation telecoms transport market segment. Sembarc is built around a carrier-class design team specialising in telecoms Silicon Design with Embedded Software and System Architecture (the company is named after these three founding disciplines). The Funds will be used principally for sales purposes and the company is targeting the Data Fabric Market for Inter-organisational Data Integration and Web 2.

Northern Ireland's £5m Invest Growth Fund (IGF) has completed its third investment, taking a stake in Replify as part of a financing round from the IGF and other sources of financial support.

Replify virtualised products accelerate applications over wide area and mobile connections without the need for proprietary hardware. After listening to the market, Replify has focused over half a century’s development experience on development of easy to use, and easy to deploy application acceleration products.

Enterprise Minister Arlene Foster urged more young people to focus on developing their business skills and become part of Northern Ireland’s economic future.

The minister was addressing students at W5 in Belfast at the final of The Make Your Mark Challenge, a national competition for students aged 14-19, funded locally by Invest Northern Ireland and sponsored by the Department of Education. As part of the initiative, NYSE Euronext has partnered with Invest NI to offer a two day trip to New York which includes a visit to the New York stock Exchange for some of the winners.

First Minister Peter Robinson, MP MLA, and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, MP MLA, today formally welcomed plans by NYSE Euronext (NYX) to expand the business operations of its NYSE Technologies division in Belfast.

Invest Northern Ireland will provide up to £9.6million to support the move of NYSE Technologies business operations into a new state-of-the-art development facility in 2010 and the creation of up to 400 new technology, operational and corporate jobs, which include 75 positions from a prior agreement, in the coming years.

‘Deal grows our presence in Asia Pacific region and accelerates global expansion’ says CEO Brian Conlon

First Derivatives plc (AIM: FDP.L, IEX: GYQ.I), the Newry based provider of software and consulting services to the world’s financial markets, this morning announced the acquisition of Hologram, an Australian technology company specialising in risk management and data management systems, in a deal worth approximately 2.

In this Wall Street and Technology article Conor Allen, Conor Allen, VP and director of research and development at NYSE Technologies, discusses the use of hardware acceleration in low latency financial systems.

NYSE Technologies absorbed Belfast based Wombat Financial Software.

Read the article in full:

http://www.

This is an interesting article in the FT regarding "near-shoring" of key support services within the Banking sector.

Among the examples given were Citigroup who over the past 18 months, have moved 250 operations jobs, mostly in trade settlement, to Belfast, where they joined more than 500 IT workers.

This bolsters the Citigroup workforce in Belfast to 750 - reinforcing the companies commitment and confidence in Northern Ireland.

China Construction Bank International Securities is the first Chinese broker to go live with Fidessa’s institutional trading platform

Hong Kong, 12 February 2009 – Fidessa group plc (LSE:FDSA), the world’s leading provider of trading systems, market data and global connectivity, today announced its state-of-the-art Asian trading platform is being used by CCB International Securities Limited (CCBIS), the Hong Kong-based securities trading subsidiary of the second largest bank in the world, China Construction Bank1.

CCBIS has started using Fidessa’s advanced institutional trading platform in response to growing demand for international solutions from institutional investors.

http://www.

NYSE Euronext is the parent company of NYSE Technologies who acquired local company Wombat Financial Software in early 2008.

NEW YORK – Feb. 9, 2009 – NYSE Euronext (NYSE: NYX) today reported a net loss of ($1,338) million, or ($5.

Collins Stewart, an independent UK-based investment banking group, has gone live with the full suite of Fidessa's advanced trading tools, which includes list management, wave and pairs trading and the BlueBox algorithmic trading engine.

BlueBox gives Collins Stewart, a Fidessa-hosted client since 2004, access to algorithms, including volume- and time-weighted average price, arrival price and percentage of volume.

Fidessa list management and wave trading tools enable Collins Stewart to trade mixed baskets while consolidating all trades and performance data in real time.

Bro McFerran, head of Allstate Northern Ireland, appears on the BBC NI panel show - Let's Talk. Regarding jobs and the recession Bro's message was positive with respect to Allstate's recent good performance. Worth a watch on iplayer:

http://www.

Cisco Systems and NYSE Euronext’s trading technology arm are jointly developing an Ethernet-based messaging system they say will speed up automated trading environments and bolster application performance.

The solution combines the Data Fabric middleware of NYSE Technologies--until recently known as NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions--with Intel Corp.’s NetEffect 10 gigabit Ethernet network interface cards and Cisco’s Nexus 5000 series switches and Remote Direct Memory Access Accelerated Buffers.

Fidessa group plc (LSE: FDSA), provider of the award winning Fidessa and Fidessa LatentZero trading, compliance and global connectivity solutions for the sell-side and the buy-side, has today announced the appointment of two new key staff as part of the expansion of its operations in the Middle East.

The company will also open a new office in Bahrain which will serve as its Middle East headquarters. This represents the latest step in the company’s ongoing strategy of global expansion.