Earlier this month, Cognito joined the Museum of American Finance to celebrate the launch of free Saturday admission for the remainder of 2013, thanks to a sponsorship by Southport Lane, a New York-based private equity and asset management firm. Cognito is proud to bring together our two partners in this historic event which marks the first time a private organization has sponsored free admissions to the Museum.

The London team recently went to the SWIFT Business Forum London, held on 30 April at The Brewery, to hear the latest perspectives on the future of financial services from some of London’s key industry professionals. The event is now SWIFT’s second biggest after Sibos, SWIFT’s annual conference, attracting over 800 attendees, a record number of delegates for the annual forum. Sir John Gieve, Chairman of VocaLink and former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, and Mark Garnier, UK MP and member of the Treasury Select Committee were top billing for the event that bought together practitioners from across the financial markets to debate the industry’s hot topics, including regulation, compliance and collaboration.

Following the success of our latest Breakfast Byte which focused on trends and hot topics for communications professionals, the Cognito team in London unveiled the first “Breakfast Byte Lite”. The team invited Bruce Love, Editor of the new publication Global Macro Trader to discuss their offering, the market-moving topics that they would be covering and what they are looking for from PR professionals.

For years, the yen has been on the path of a steady appreciation against the US dollar, with the greenback reaching an all-time low of 75 in October 2011.  But over the past 7 months, the yen took a U-turn and began a downward decline of 18%.  George Soros, the billionaire well known for breaking the Bank of England in 1992, reportedly made over a billion dollars by making a  bet against the yen since last November.

Cognito has called New York City home for nearly 10 years. In that time, we’ve moved from Midtown to Financial District and then some. It has always been important to us as a public relations and marketing firm for financial services to give back to this city, however we can.

Crisis Communications After Sandy - Lessons Learned from the Conference Board of Canada

Last week, Cognito was onsite at TradeTech Europe, the leading electronic trading conference focused on trading technology for equity and derivatives trading. This year, we were selected for the fifth year running as the event’s official communications agency.

Cognito New York hosted its first Breakfast Byte of the year on March 20 at the 21 Club in Manhattan, and welcomed a record number of attendees to discuss the topic of “Measuring and Monetizing Communications.”

Cognito Reads is our new book club. Every month here on the blog, we’ll be highlighting a recent financial or business non-fiction book, and discussing the communications questions and examples raised in the text. Our inaugural edition comes from New York-based Account Manager Oksana Poltavets.