Seasoned executive brings more than 25 years of corporate, Wall Street and business strategy experience

Jumio, the leading provider of orchestrated end-to-end identity proofing, eKYC and AML solutions, today announced the addition of Susan Walker as chief financial officer. 

Walker was most recently the CFO at SaaS enterprise data loss prevention leader Digital Guardian through its recent sale to HelpSystems. Before that, she was CFO at video software firm Telestream and KYB firm Avention through its sale to Dun & Bradstreet. Walker’s 25 years of leadership experience includes managing a successful initial public offering (IPO), serving as CFO Americas for publicly traded Novell and extensive experience leading and managing investor relations. She holds a Master of Business Administration from The Wharton School and bachelor’s degrees in applied mathematics and economics from The University of California, Berkeley. 

Walker’s appointment is the latest development in a pivotal year for Jumio in which the company grew sales by over 140% in Q1 2022, completed its acquisition of 4Stop, welcomed Stuart Wells as chief technology officer and unveiled its new Innovation Lab in San Diego. 

“Jumio is entering a new phase of growth and development and we are delighted to welcome Susan at such a critical moment in the company’s evolution,” said Robert Prigge, Jumio CEO. “Susan’s experience in leading financial strategy in scaling technology organizations will support our high-velocity goals.” 

“Jumio is a leader in the identity market with well-established technology, and I see extreme value in the company’s mission to eradicate online fraud,” Walker said. “I am so proud to join at a time when the company is experiencing record growth and look forward to partnering with a deep bench of talented leaders and innovators.”

To learn more about Jumio and its award-winning, AI-powered solutions, visit jumio.com. 

Unification of marketing capabilities promotes collaboration and visibility across all marketing stakeholders, streamlining tasks and improving outcomes for campaign management

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today announced Zoho Marketing Plus, a new unified platform that enables CMOs to drive up performance through bringing together marketing sub-functions working on activities across campaign ideation, creation, execution, management and measurement.

This provides stakeholders across the entire marketing organisation with a single, shared view of critical information for improved collaboration and results. The new marketing platform increases the effectiveness of digital marketing strategies by giving marketing leaders a deeper understanding of prospect preferences and behaviours so they can deliver engaging, high-value experiences that increase the quality and volume of leads.

CMOs require their teams to use technology solutions that capture prospect insights in ways that add value to the business. Through automation and business intelligence, the platform synchronises data to help marketing teams better understand prospects, make more informed decisions, and ultimately provide better results, growth and potential revenue.

"Consumers and digital marketing continue to evolve at warp-speed, leaving marketers struggling to keep up. It's becoming increasingly difficult to properly manage multiple campaigns, channels, potential customer profiles, data and ROI", said Suvish Viswanathan, Head of European Marketing at Zoho. "The complexity of data and personalisation at scale only raises pressure on marketers and CMOs to deliver effective campaigns and revenue. By eliminating redundancies and confusions arising from multiple siloed solutions, Zoho Marketing Plus maximises efficiencies, productivity and team collaboration, allowing marketers to stay nimble. We have experienced that first-hand as we use Marketing Plus for our own campaigns in our 10K+ employee size company.  When marketers are not bogged down by operations, they can deliver creative campaigns that promote meaningful relationships between the brand, prospects and customers."

The unified platform empowers marketing teams to build continuous, consistent and more personalised experiences for prospects through:

Improved Collaboration Across Campaigns: Marketing teams will be able to connect and collaborate on various projects in tandem and with ease, enabling users to create, manage, execute, and monitor individual activities, across different stakeholders, and accurately track the progress of each task and brand asset. The platform delivers a strong creative suite that empowers teams to develop and improve marketing assets through comments, with the ability to maintain version control with flexible sharing capabilities for both internal and external stakeholders.

Streamlined Management of Marketing Projects: Brand Studio eliminates the need for siloed solutions by serving as the centralised workplace where marketing campaigns can be created and managed. Users strengthen the brand from a single, unified platform where they can oversee all marketing strategies and progress. Capabilities like Brand Assets, powered by Zoho Workdrive, for example, help digital marketers better manage documents and assets, serving as the repository for all project support materials.

Unified Digital Brand Asset Creation and Repository: Documents, presentations, sheets, videos, and other files can be kept in a single shared space, making assets easy to locate, reuse, or share. Machine-learning-powered search capabilities streamline team efforts, quickly and accurately locating the correct file.

Strong Marketing Automation Capabilities: Prospect insights are surfaced through AI-powered data analysis, which activates marketers to design the journeys customers and prospects respond to best. The platform properly tracks engagement and response data of prospects, giving marketing teams insights to improve their journeys over time. This clear and granular understanding of prospect behaviours gives marketers the ability to collaborate with prospects like never before, ultimately delivering experiences that speak to their unique wants and needs.

Omnichannel Engagement: Prospects bounce between channels and devices regularly, yet marketing teams can be ill-equipped to adapt to this rapid movement. Zoho enables marketing teams to access and manage all channels, driving better connections with prospects and brand engagement. Email campaigns, social media, surveys, webinars, events, and more can all be created and managed from one single interface within the platform.                                                                                                           

Supported Integrations: Zoho's new marketing platform supports strong integrations with third-party solutions, making it easy to share data and insights where needed. For example, sales teams can connect insights from Zoho CRM to existing systems like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot, and more to help measure how much marketing spend is converting to sales. Other key integrations across finance, commerce, and event management strengthen the connections between apps that marketers already have in their arsenal. Platform integrations include Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search console, YouTube, Survey Monkey; on the finance side it integrates with QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe; on the commerce front it integrates with WooCommerce and Shopify; and on the events front, it integrates with Eventbrite. Integrations can be accessed via Zoho Marketplace from the Campaigns and Analytics sections of the platform. 

Advanced Data/Marketing Analytics: Real-time data aggregation and analytics deliver business intelligence that helps marketing teams and leaders determine true marketing ROI. Integrations further support a more accurate view of impact, ROI, and revenue growth projections. 

The unified platform includes a vast array of integrated capabilities aimed at helping digital marketers achieve greater results through simplified processes, tighter collaboration, shared assets, and consistent data. Zoho Marketing Plus combines the capabilities of multiple Zoho applications including Campaigns, Social, Webinar, Analytics, Marketing Automation, Workdrive, PageSense, Survey, and Backstage. This newest iteration of Marketing Plus will continue to evolve through tighter integrations with existing Zoho tools such as Cliq, as well as new apps including LandingPage, a no-code page builder that enables marketers to create high-converting website landing pages in minutes without needing a developer-level skillset.

Pricing and Availability

Zoho Marketing Plus is available immediately with a starting price of £20/month, billed annually. For more information, please visit www.zoho.com/marketingplus/.

New ActiveStor Solutions Drive Performance in AI/ML Training, Simulation, Analytics, and Large-Scale Data Environments

Panasas^®, the data engine for innovation, today unveiled its new portfolio of high performance storage solutions for the industry’s most complex data challenges. Two new ActiveStor systems will accelerate advanced AI/ML training, modelling and simulation, high performance data analytics, and massive-scale data workloads.

All-NVMe ActiveStor^® Flash and massive-capacity ActiveStor^® Ultra XL now join Panasas’ industry-leading price/performance storage platform, ActiveStor^® Ultra. The new portfolio is powered by the company’s flagship PanFS^® data engine, the original parallel file system for Linux clusters.

Mark Nossokoff, Research Director and Lead Storage Analyst at Hyperion research, remarked, "We've witnessed a significant 13% increase in on-premises HPC spending from 2020 to 2021 and are projecting a market growth CAGR of 6.4% over the 2026 forecast horizon. The growth is largely driven by organisations' emerging use cases, such as AI/ML and big data analytics, that require new technologies and solutions from the HPC space to address some of today’s biggest challenges. We’re excited to see an HPC storage veteran vendor like Panasas embrace these newer workloads with their new portfolio of ActiveStor storage appliances.”

Panasas’ PanFS data engine is the world’s leading parallel file system and the heart of the ActiveStor storage family. It is exceptionally simple to manage, yet it delivers extreme performance, unlimited scalability, and unparalleled reliability. The industry-pioneering PanFS software is a reliable and autonomic data management engine built on 20+ years of hardening through commercial deployment. This powerful data engine takes the complexity out of high performance data environments and provides high-speed direct file-based data access to applications with no manual administration required. It orchestrates all data management to automatically recover from failures, continuously and seamlessly balance data loads, and scrub and encrypt stored data for the highest levels of protection.

The introduction of the ActiveStor portfolio is validation of the PanFS data engine’s robustness, as well as Panasas’ ability to easily deploy tailored data solutions that meet customers’ specific workload, footprint, and environmental requirements.

“Forward-thinking organisations are harnessing the exponential data growth we’re seeing today to build a brighter tomorrow, from developing life-saving pharmaceuticals to designing energy-saving autonomous vehicles. The technology they use to store, deliver, and secure their data is vital to their success,” said Tom Shea, Panasas President and CEO. “Choosing the optimal data foundation for your organisation’s specific needs and goals is not just a good business strategy – it’s imperative. That’s why we’re introducing a portfolio of products for the first time in our history. Our storage systems have been purpose-built to provide a diverse range of high performance data solutions for all workload types at the best total cost of ownership.”

The ActiveStor products are optimally suited to a variety of computing environments across industries.

• ActiveStor Flash. The new all-NVMe ActiveStor Flash provides outstanding scratch and small- and random-file storage performance. It is ideal for AI/ML training, trading strategy backtesting, as well as life sciences and electronic design automation projects.
• ActiveStor Ultra XL. The new high-capacity ActiveStor Ultra is optimal for massive-scale data environments in addition to workloads with cooler and reference datasets and large file sizes, such as seismic resource exploration; scientific, academic, and government research; manufacturing; and media and entertainment.
• ActiveStor Ultra. The hybrid ActiveStor Ultra has been a stalwart high performance mixed workload solution for traditional and enterprise HPC. It delivers exceptional performance for high performance data analytics, complex modeling and simulation, molecular imaging techniques in life sciences, and converged HPC/AI data use cases.

Panasas will be at Booth #A20 at World Summit AI Americas in Montréal, Canada on May 4^th – 5^th, 2022. You can also visit them at Booth #E507 at ISC High Performance in Hamburg, Germany on May 29^th – June 2^nd, 2022.

Largest market share maintained across Asia-Pacific for the fourth year

For the fourth year in a row, Alibaba is ranked as the third largest Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider in the world and the biggest in Asia Pacific in 2021 by revenue. The latest Gartner® report, Market Share: IT Services, 2021, showed Alibaba’s global market share expanded to 9.55%, while in Asia Pacific the company has achieved 25.5%. 

With 84 availability zones in 27 regions, Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, provides IT services to millions of customers globally. According to the 2021 report, the business was able to increase its individual worldwide market share across verticals including transportation, banking and investment services, insurance, manufacturing and natural resources, and wholesale trade, with revenue growth between 49-67.5% for these sectors from a year earlier.

“Acting as the backbone for the digital transformation of a wide range of industries, IaaS is a key service for our business and we are glad to be recognised for our continued growth in this area. Over the past year, our customers have sped up their cloud migrations to ensure business continuity against the ongoing impact of the pandemic across the world. We see this transition to cloud-based operations as necessary for business growth,” said Jeff Zhang, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “Our commitment to supporting our global customers in these challenging times has helped us maintain a strong competitive position in the market. We will continue to deliver innovative products and services to drive the growth of the digital economy.”  

The global IaaS market showed strong growth in 2021. According to the Gartner report, the IaaS market grew to USD90.89 billion, up from USD64.29 billion in 2020. Asia Pacific recorded faster growth than the global average, with market revenues totalling USD33.16 billion.

Alibaba Cloud has been increasing its resources in strategic markets across Asia Pacific. In the past year, the company’s data centres in Indonesia and the Philippines commenced operations. It also announced the availability of its first data centre in South Korea in March 2022.

Alibaba Cloud launched Project AsiaForward in 2021, pledging an initial USD1 billion in funding and resources to cultivate a million-strong digital talent pool, empower 100,000 developers and support the growth of 100,000 technology startups in Asia Pacific.

To increase its product capabilities, Alibaba Cloud has launched an array of innovative solutions. For example, the fourth generation of ApsaraCompute Shenlong Architecture, unveiled in October 2021, has leading capabilities in container elasticity, storage, input/output (IO) performance, low latency and chip-level security hardening features. It is also equipped with the industry’s only large-scale Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), which reduces network latency to as low as five microseconds.

Last year, Alibaba Cloud was also evaluated in the 2021 Gartner® Solution Scorecard for Alibaba Cloud International IaaS & PaaS.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Small business loan approval percentages at big banks ($10m + in assets) rose from 14.9% in March to 15.1% in April, and small banks’ approvals also increased from 20.6% in March to 20.8% this past month, according to the Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index™ released today.

Among several categories of non-bank lenders, approval percentages also climbed. Institutional lenders approved 25.4% of funding requests in April, up one-tenth of a percent from 25.3% in March. Alternative lenders’ approval rates rose from 26.6% in March to 26.8% in March. However, Credit unions stalled at 20.6% in April after dropping one-tenth of a percent in March.

“Small business lending approval rates continue to take incremental steps, but we are still nowhere near pre-pandemic highs,” said Biz2Credit CEO Rohit Arora, one of the nation’s leading experts in small business lending and FinTech.

“With the Federal Reserve raising interest rates last week, the cost of capital for small business borrowers will rise,” added Arora. “This will have an impact on future borrowing decisions. Most small business loans come with variable rates, and in the foreseeable future, those rates are likely to rise.”

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 428,000 in April, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.6%, according to the Jobs Report released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Friday, May 6. Job growth was widespread, led by gains in leisure and hospitality, in manufacturing, and in transportation and warehousing. Many of these jobs are created by small businesses.

Biz2Credit analyzed loan requests from companies in business more than two years with credit scores above 680. The results are based on primary data submitted by more than 1,000 small business owners who applied for funding on Biz2Credit's platform.

Cygnet Infotech aggregates its credit underwriting and financial risk assessment solutions under Cygnet Fintech

Cygnet Infotech, a leading technology company with its clients across India, North America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, announced grouping of its products and solutions for the Fintech space under the Cygnet Fintech brand. 

SMEs and MSMEs are the major growth engines of economies that rely on banks and financial institutions to help with their funding needs. Banks and financial institutions need solutions to help them navigate through multiple challenges of minimizing lending risks, securing data, streamlining credit operations, and safeguarding their profitability.

To meet such challenges, Cygnet Fintech offers solutions such as Credit Assessment & Decisioning platform which comprises of GST Data Analysis, Bank Statement Analysis, ITR & Financial Statement Analysis, Underwriting Model, Invoice Verification for Trade Finance or Bill Discounting and more. These offerings equip banks, NBFC’s, and other financial institutions with data, financial ratios, and insights for a better credit assessment to reduce risk and turnaround time for credit underwriting decisions. With a rich experience in technology, Cygnet Fintech also assists to digitize lending journeys from onboarding to disbursals.

“Cygnet Fintech is yet another step in the digital transformation of the financial sector. It will empower and enable businesses to take informed financial decisions, automate and simplify financial institutions' customer acquisition process, and manage underwriting services with ease. We envision to build a connected and smart ecosystem that helps businesses reduce data-driven credit risk by providing intelligent insights’’, observed Niraj Hutheesing, Founder and Managing Director of Cygnet Infotech.

Cygnet Fintech will build on Cygnet Infotech’s existing base of customers that use its credit risk assessment and compliance of vendor ecosystem. These solutions will enable credit managers, business heads and product heads make informed decisions to drive sustainable growth. Irrespective of the borrower ticket size, these offerings will help them quickly analyse borrower creditworthiness and digitize the entire lending journey from customer onboarding to loan disbursement for improved customer experience.

Study finds most companies have automated too few steps in the AR process to achieve true benefits of end-to-end AR automation 

BlueSnap, a global payment orchestration platform committed to helping B2B and B2C businesses accept and optimize payments around the world, today announced the results of its 2022 Automating Accounts Receivable survey. 

For this report, BlueSnap surveyed executives globally to examine the extent to which businesses are adopting automation in their accounts receivable (AR) processes and its benefits. One major takeaway from the findings: organizations have only automated a fraction of their AR processes with plenty of gaps left to close to reap the full rewards of true end-to-end AR automation.

Supply chain issues and inflation put increased pressure on businesses to get paid on time. Now more than ever, it is imperative businesses find ways to increase efficiencies to keep a positive cash flow. BlueSnap's survey results found that 89% of businesses that have automated AR processes are getting paid within their agreed payment terms or faster.

The data shows that nearly half (49%) of global businesses are stuck using legacy AR processes. While many organizations have started to automate AR processes, they are often only automating one or two steps. When it comes to generating invoices, only 19% have completely automated the process and a mere 15% have completely automated sending the invoices. 

Only 8% of the companies surveyed had completely automated the setup and management of customer payment plans, while more than half (51%) said they had the process mostly, but not completely, automated. These fragmented attempts are small steps in the right direction, but to see the full operational benefits like better cash flow, increased customer satisfaction and improved employee productivity, it is essential for businesses to completely automate AR processes. 

Nikhita Hyett, Managing Director, Europe, at BlueSnap said: “It is clear from the report that most companies have an AR automation gap that must be filled in order to operate at optimal efficiency. Hence, it is encouraging to see that almost 90% of the senior executives that we surveyed now recognize the value of AR automation and are willing and ready to invest in it. The pandemic has done a lot to show businesses the weaknesses in their operating processes - many of which are costing them money. To fully absorb the benefits of automation, now is the time for businesses to completely pivot away from legacy, manual processes.”

The factors preventing organizations from fully automating their AR processes include: a lack of understanding around the technology available (71%), a fear that automation will take the human element out of the business (47%), lack of technical expertise to implement new systems (44%), and a concern that people will lose their jobs (23%). 

Afterpay, known as Clearpay in the UK and Europe, to leverage Adyen's local acquiring across key markets

Adyen (AMS:ADYEN), the global financial technology platform for leading businesses, today announced it has expanded upon its partnership with one of the leaders in Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL), Afterpay Limited (ASX: APT). Afterpay is working with Adyen to process payments across key markets including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Europe, U.S., and the U.K. to support the company’s  global growth and momentum. Adyen's global reach and focus on enterprise businesses as an acquirer provides Afterpay with the capability needed for its fast growing business.

Adyen and Afterpay began their local payment method partnership in 2018. A number of Adyen’s merchants already offer Afterpay’s installment payments -  including MandM Direct, Revolution Beauty, and Superdry - with more expected to come online. Afterpay, known as Clearpay in the UK and Europe, is now available to Adyen merchants in the UK, France, Italy and Spain.

BNPL payment methods continue to gain global momentum. Globally, 24% of consumers have used BNPL services, with adoption highest in Sweden, Norway, Mexico, France, the USA, and Denmark.

“Holiday season 2021 was the holiday for BNPL - with consumers using Afterpay to pay responsibly for their holiday gifts,” said Zahir Kfhoja, General Manager, Afterpay Global Platform and Partnerships. “Our partnership with Adyen is allowing us to bring a better way to pay to millions of shoppers across multiple regions around the world.”

“We are excited to further expand our longstanding partnership with Afterpay to now include local acquiring in key markets. Afterpay is already a household name globally and we are proud to be able to continue to come together, leveraging both our technology and innovation to meet the needs of today’s evolving retail landscape,” said Roelant Prins, Chief Commercial Officer, Adyen.

 Stanhope Financial Group, an Ireland-based global fintech company that provides businesses with a full suite of banking services, has raised in excess of USD 10 million for its Series A funding round. The funding, led by venture capital firm Gate Ventures, will be used to develop the group’s product offerings, strengthen the management team, increase its market share, and prepare for the launch company’s upcoming affiliate digital assets division, SH Digital.

Stanhope Financial Group has seen substantial growth across its business divisions since it began operations in October 2021. Its SH Payments division, licensed as an Electronic Money Institution, offers businesses banking services to efficiently send and receive money globally, including FX, multi-currency accounts, and innovative payments solutions. The company’s SH Capital division, which is licensed in the DIFC, Dubai, allows institutions and family offices to gain access to premium global investment products across all capital markets. Its affiliate company, SH Digital, offers cryptocurrency liquidity and trading services. Stanhope Financial Group has also been granted financial services licences by both the Bank of Lithuania and (IPA) by Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA).

Kevin von Neuschatz, Group CEO of Stanhope Financial Group, said:

“Our suite of Tier 1 banking services has been specifically designed and developed to enable ambitious businesses to make faster, more effective payments, access investment products, and embrace digital trading with complete confidence.

For too long, fast-growing SMEs have been overlooked by the established banks and institutions and we’re here to change that. This major funding round will go directly towards expanding our expertise, developing new products, and offering companies access to all the services they need to thrive, but have been denied.”

Mohit Davar, Executive Chairman of Stanhope Financial Group, said:

“These are exciting times for Stanhope Financial Group, and this investment will enable us to further expand our key divisions which have already made huge inroads into the market. 

With the upcoming launch of our new digital affiliate, we have the perfect team and fintech platform in place to drive growth for our customers.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all investors, especially Gate Ventures, for the confidence they have shown in the team to continue to deliver on its strategic plans and create tremendous shareholder value.”

Kevin Yang, Investment Director of Gate Ventures, said: 

“The adoption of cryptocurrency and convergence with mainstream traditional banking has accelerated the need for Gate.io to work with innovative and regulated companies like Stanhope Group to further develop our product portfolio and continue to build innovative solutions for our customers. We really like the team at Stanhope and look forward to working with them.”