Visma | Onguard, the fintech company that focuses on the order-to-cash process, has appointed Adriaan Kom (41) as Managing Director as of the 1st of June. Kom has been working at Visma | Onguard for one and a half years as Chief Commercial Officer. In his new role, Kom will focus on the further growth of the company as part of Visma. Part of this is to accelerate further innovation in the product portfolio and to make the customer even more central. With the appointment of Kom, Visma | Onguard focuses on being and remaining the stable partner and order-to-cash specialist for its global customer portfolio.

20 years of experience in the fintech world

Adriaan Kom is no stranger to the world of fintech. For the past eighteen months, Kom has been involved in the transition from Onguard to Visma | Onguard as Chief Commercial Officer and the commercial activities related to this. Before joining this organisation, he held various strategic and commercial roles at Altares Dun & Bradstreet, a partner of Visma | Onguard. At both the national and international level, Kom advised B2B organisations from various departments on the application of optimal data management in the field of credit management, compliance, fintech, sales and marketing. In doing so, he focused on innovations in the market and operated mainly at the front end of the organisation. 

Adriaan Kom, on his appointment: "Visma | Onguard is an inspiring company with a lot of expertise and domain knowledge that innovates time and time again to stay ahead in our field. It is an honour that, as Managing Director, I can bear the ultimate responsibility for this organisation. Together with my driven and experienced management team, we will ensure that Visma | Onguard is and remains the reliable order-to-cash specialist for its customers. I look forward to giving even more substance and direction to the path we have taken as a company over the past period." 

John Reijnders, Area Director BeNeLux at Visma, is pleased with Kom's move: "We are extremely proud to announce that Adriaan will become Managing Director at Visma | Onguard. I have come to know Adriaan as an optimist, a person who wants to keep learning and developing and who generates energy. His vision on entrepreneurship, balance and sustainability fit with the culture of Visma | Onguard. Combined with his experience on both the customer side and the trust he enjoys within the organisation, this gives me great confidence about the future for our customers and colleagues."  

NEAR Foundation, the Swiss non-profit that oversees the governance and development of the NEAR protocol, today announced it has partnered with local blockchain community Sankore to launch a regional hub in Kenya dedicated to ongoing blockchain innovation, education and talent development throughout the African continent. 

Kenya ranked fifth in last year’s Global Crypto Adoption Index, and Kenyans are already directly trading cryptocurrencies with each other more than elsewhere in the world. Besides expanding throughout Nairobi, NEAR is also reaching lesser-known cities in Kenya where no other Layer 1 blockchain has an established presence as yet. 

The hub will be led by Kevin Imani, the founder of Sankore, and supported by a core team of four members. Comprised of events, an academy, an incubation program, and the Sankore Bounty ecosystem, the hub will be a promising intersection of Africa’s most talented blockchain developers and international support for their innovations. 

“We are thrilled to be working with NEAR to educate and nurture talented individuals to become world-class blockchain developers,” said Kevin Imani, who will lead the NEAR hub in Kenya. “Our dream is to lead the way in blockchain innovations in providing solutions to Africa’s biggest problems. The NEAR Protocol allows tomorrow’s brightest developers to build custom solutions with scalability, security, and transparency and this hub is the next step in turning our shared vision into reality.”

The overwhelming attendance rates of Sankore NEAR-Meets, where locals gather to gain blockchain education and meet people in the NEAR ecosystem, have demonstrated the enthusiasm of younger generations in Kenya towards crypto, blockchain, and web3 education. 

The gatherings have allowed people to learn, share ideas, network, establish opportunities in the open web, and make Web3 a reality. A recent event held in Nakuru focused on Harnessing Opportunities in Web3 with a NEAR-Certified Developer advising local developers on acquiring blockchain certification and NEAR Developer Certification. 

The education arm of the hub has already made strong connections with local universities, with 77 registered students in the NEAR Certified Developer Workshops, seven students registered to the NEAR Certified Analysts Workshops, and six students already officially certified as developers. 

As for incubated projects, Sankore has previously gained local traction by supporting several forward-thinking projects such as Kilimo Shwari, an on-chain solution seeking to hedge Kenyan farmers against agricultural uncertainties such as bad weather and calamities like the recent locust invasion in Kenya. The insurance is based on smart contracts, gathering data on uncertainties and automatically compensating farmers.

Another incubated project is Ledja, which tackles fraud throughout the African region, and fights against forged documentation. By cooperating with higher learning institutions and initiating document digitisation using NEAR Protocol, it enables much faster, safer, and more secure document verification.

The continent has been undergoing a rapid digital revolution over the past decade, and African countries have been adopting crypto quicker than their global counterparts. Cryptocurrency adoption in Africa increased 1200% from July 2020 to June 2021, the fastest adoption rate in the world. Alongside this has been a growing appetite among African youth for technical training and education opportunities. 

“We are excited by the potential avenues throughout Africa for blockchain solutions, which come from innovation in development, education and talent,” said Marieke Flament, CEO of the NEAR Foundation. “This hub represents a unique opportunity to partner with local talent not only for the opportunities that we know exist today but also for the opportunities yet to be created in the future."

Internationally, the excitement continues to build around the potential of the NEAR blockchain. Unlike other networks, NEAR gives software developers easy access to create new crypto applications, from Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to decentralised finance products and launching new business models and consumer products.  

The NEAR blockchain is also much faster than Ethereum, the world’s most used blockchain. It acts as a bridge to other blockchains, allowing for the free flow of assets and communication between networks for the betterment of all.  

Newcastle Intermediaries has removed the minimum income criteria on its Buy to Let (BTL) mortgage products in an effort to broaden its appeal with landlords who have lower or non-traditional incomes.

From 4^th May borrowers no longer need to meet the £25k pa (£30k joint) minimum income requirement on Newcastle Intermediaries’ BTL mortgage products, with affordability instead being assessed on the Interest Coverage Ratio (ICR).

The removal of the BTL minimum income requirement and assessment of affordability via ICR tests will broaden the options available to landlords on the BTL market. Borrowers must be in receipt of an employed, self-employed or pension income.

Earlier in 2022 Newcastle Intermediaries integrated with SmartrFit, Legal & General’s mortgage criteria support service. The successful launch onto the SmartrFit platform has enabled Newcastle Intermediaries to provide more accurate data to brokers, updating them more efficiently with its latest criteria and products on offer, including its BTL product range.

Danny Belton, head of lender relationships at Legal & General, said: “It’s encouraging to see Newcastle Intermediaries take a common-sense approach to lending and ease the barrier to entry for BTL borrowers through the removal of its minimum income requirements. This will prove a welcome change for customers who will now benefit from a simplified mortgage application process.”

Stuart Miller, chief customer officer at Newcastle Building Society, said: “With the primary driver for affordability being rent generated on the property itself, additional affordability assessments such as having the minimum income criteria in place can prove unnecessary. 

“Removing this requirement not only underlines our commitment to the BTL market by ensuring we continue to deliver a competitive and flexible offering, but also helps to broaden the accessibility of Newcastle Intermediaries’ proposition to brokers and their clients.”

The partnership aims to tackle surging fraud and money laundering risks for lawyers

Thirdfort, the risk management platform for professional services, has partnered with legal practice and case management platform Good Law Software (GLS) to help lawyers meet growing fraud and money laundering risks. 

The seamless integration enables GLS’s clients to conduct Know Your Client (KYC), Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Source-of-Funds (SoF) checks all within the GLS platform, removing the need to bolt on additional pieces of software. 

The integration with GLS is a further legal platform partner for Thirdfort and closely follows its partnership with cloud-based software Dye & Durham. The move demonstrates Thirdfort’s aim to better support legal professionals as they tackle the growing fraud and compliance burden. 

Thirdfort’s proprietary risk engine identifies fraud and money laundering risks faster, smoother, and more accurately than manual verification. The risk engine is powered by best-in-class KYC and AML services alongside Open Banking and transaction-specific data. 

GLS is an all-in-one, cost-effective Legal Practice Management Software designed by legal professionals for legal professionals. GLS offers a complete range of integrations and features, among which FCA-approved open banking, accounting, legally optimized calendar, dashboard, advanced reports, HR, CRM, and so many more. 

Matt Berry, Head of Partnerships at Thirdfort, said: "GLS is an innovative legal software provider and we're excited to announce our partnership. Thanks to a seamless integration GLS's clients will now be able to benefit from Thirdfort's best in class product and meet their compliance requirements in a fully integrated way. We're really pleased to add another Case Management provider to our growing ecosystem of integration partners and look forward to working more closely moving forward."

Atef Elmarakby, Founder and CEO of Good Law Software, said: "This is a fantastic milestone for GLS, having now fully complemented and integrated with a powerful digital ID check and AML tool such as Thirdfort. At GLS, we see Thirdfort as a powerful, easy-to-use, secure and cost-effective tool for lawyers and consumers equally.”

Procurement teams within businesses of all sizes are under pressure to drive, and then demonstrate measurable value and savings. Many are choosing to automate and optimise part of or all their finance and procurement operations as part of that process. However, like any other investment, procurement pros need to justify the investment to their CFO or finance team for such an initiative.

In this series of articles, I will look at the key benefits of purchasing and invoicing automation and offer you some tips for building your own business case for wider investment. By following the right steps procurement teams can help their organisation can go from $0 to at least $250K a year in savings, so I will take you through the whole process of fleshing out those savings.

I will guide you through planning and producing a compelling business case for your source or procure to pay process re-vamp. Focusing in on how I see businesses traditionally approaching building a business case for finance and procurement optimisation and automation and explaining why this can cause more problems than it solves. Demonstrating how you should be approaching this critical part of your organisation’s digital transformation to ensure you get it right and secure the buy-in you need.

Getting the scope right

Looking past your burning issue to review your whole source to pay process could help to unlock additional cost savings and business benefits that are far greater than just FTE savings, whilst also delivering more predictable results.

Do any of the following scenarios sound familiar?

• Your business finds a series of invoice duplication and data quality issues. This naturally leads you to look at how you can improve your invoice data entry processes and you end up paying for a new OCR platform to automate the data collection off your invoices. Sounds great? Except you’ve shelled out a lot of money to try and get more efficiency out of a broken process and you have ignored the root cause of your problem.
• A compliance audit highlights that your businesses spend is not pre-approved and that it needs to be rectified. This naturally leads you to look at how you can workflow purchase orders and you end up paying for a consultant to build out a purchase order workflow process in your SharePoint site. Problem solved? Not a chance, you’ve added a whole new workflow to your process without getting any downstream benefits of spend visibility, purchase order matching or budgetary checks.
• Your business identifies it has paid a fraudulent invoice. Your CEO and CFO are livid. You realise that the reason the invoice got paid was that there wasn’t a check in place to make sure that any bank account details match your master data records. This leads to your team changing your process to manually check bank records of each invoice. Risk averted? Not really, fraudulent invoices come in all different shapes and sizes and you’re only mitigating for one type of issue. Time and effort wasted.

These ‘compelling events’ are often the driving force behind most finance and procurement revamps. Whatever fire is burning brightest tends to determine what needs to be fixed. However, this sort of siloed, reactionary approach tends to drive a very limited scope, focussed on just ‘fixing the immediate problem’. It’s widely accepted that a tactical and narrow scope only addresses the burning issue, which tends to result in missed cost saving opportunities and typically only provides FTE savings. This sort of approach can also start a whack-a-mole, domino effect of fixing one problem which, often, highlights another.

What organisations, indeed many procurement teams, tend to forget is that there is a huge amount of measurable value to be unlocked in your wider finance and procurement process. So why not use of the above compelling events as the trigger to review your whole source to pay process and an opportunity to drive huge cost savings and reduce your corporate risk profile.

A strategic scope that looks at the whole value chain will enable you to demonstrate the significant, measurable cost savings that could be achieved, while dramatically reducing the risk profile of your source to pay processes. Once you have defined the correct scope for any project, you need to review your existing processes to get a strong idea of what is working, what is not working and ultimately where the automation, optimisation and cost saving opportunities are.

Understanding your existing processes

Processes do not exist in isolation, if you don’t understand all the aspects of the full value chain – what is working and not working – you won’t achieve any true optimisation, automation, cost savings or risk profile reduction.

Businesses usually stick with a limited scope when they try to understand their existing processes. In the example we used above, where you’ve paid a fraudulent invoice because the bank account details were changed on the invoice, you might end up investing time in basic process mapping for checking bank details on your invoices, for example. Is process mapping alone sufficient? Is a tactical scope sufficient? No. This tends to lead to organisations realising that the actual cause of the problem is not being addressed (albeit too late). So, you end up with a band-aid solution that only half fixes the problems you’ve identified.

The real levers that will drive return on your investment and drive internal/external user adoption are not understood and therefore not fully leveraged. This leads to new processes and/or systems not reaching what your business case promised and an ultimately guarantees poor user experience internally and externally.

How are process reviews typically done in businesses? Most often than not a tactical scope is mapped out with the output being basic process maps, which have limited detail on process exceptions that are causing the problems. Unfortunately, this usually means the source of a problem is not addressed and a detailed understanding of what will drive value and user adoption/change is not fully understood or realised.

I recommend conducting in-depth interviews with your key stakeholders to understand how your processes are working and what requirements your stakeholders have. If you understand the key pain points and levers to drive adoption, the areas that will drive a financial return on investment, any quick wins and long-term development areas, your business case will be far more compelling and harder to ignore.

Start by mapping out your processes and use the opportunity to go deeper across the whole value chain. Follow the process to its logical start and end points not just the part of the process that appears to be the most urgent. Interview key stakeholders and end users in the process to understand what is working well, what is not working well and what exceptions cause the biggest problems in terms of time and manual work.

From these interviews you should be able to gather key insights to questions such as:

• What are the key pain points in the process?
• What automation and process efficiencies will delight users?
• What user experience is needed to drive greater user adoption?
• What will drive return on investment? Where are the opportunities to reduce your cost of processing invoices, buying goods or negotiate greater cost savings across your supplier base?
• What would be the quick wins within your processes what will need to be a longer-term development?
• What cultural and team factors might impact your ability to change processes effectively?
• What different technology platforms are being used in your processes now?

All valuable insights that will help you to build your business case and answer many of the questions your executive team need to know before they agree to your project.

The rest of this series of articles will look at the equally important, next steps of mapping out your existing data and technology, mapping the future and ‘to be’ processes to implement, the technical ‘must haves’ of those processes, pulling together a transformation roadmap and a bottom-up value assessment. 

Jussi Karjalainen is the Founder and Managing Partner of Valta Technology Group (Valtatech). Valtatech partners with companies around the world to simplify their operations, control their spend and focus on value coming in rather than costs going out. Our team has completed more than 60 financial transformation and Shared Services projects in Europe and Asia Pacific that deliver measurable value. Our difference is to understand your business, match the best technology and implement it to your requirements. We leverage our expertise of best practice, a deep knowledge of successful transformation technology implementation for Procurement automation, AP automation to transform your finance and procurement functions.

The global artificial intelligence (AI) market is predicted to reach $267 billion by 2027. But concerns have been raised about whether these advancements could replace humans in jobs as technology is being used to simulate human intelligence processes. In fact, approximately 68.5% of college graduates think that the development of AI could either take their job away or make them irrelevant in the next few years.

But AI can offer many benefits for human connections and collaborations. Here, we delve into the outcomes of AI and how it can benefit businesses.

Increased productivity

Artificial intelligence can help the productivity of employees, which in turn benefits collaborative situations. Implementing these technologies can help recurring meetings by offering insights. It can be tricky to take note of every element of the conversation in meetings, but AI can aid transcription to ensure that vital information is recorded. Alternatively, the customer service sector can reap the benefits too. A survey from 2021 by Economic Impact and Genesys reflected that 65% of customer experience leaders who integrated AI technologies into their businesses acknowledged a significant increase in agent productivity. So not only is technology boosting collaborations in the workplace, but it’s also helping connections with customers, too. 

Offering inclusivity

Connections can be made with remote workers thanks to artificial intelligence. With over 4.7 million people in the U.S working remotely at least half of the time, this is an important addition for businesses to consider. Video calls are essential to those working from home, but what can AI add to this? Weak connections during a video call can often hinder the working process for employees. But AI can offer stronger connections to avoid issues, keep collaborations smooth, and reduce file sizes. Even lighting and background can be altered through artificial intelligence to offer remote workers the office experience.

Personalisation to improve experiences

Collaborations aren’t only improved within the business. AI can also offer personalisation to amplify connections with customers too. By using data, AI tools can learn to understand their specific audience. With this knowledge, online content like websites can be tailored to each specific customer, thus boosting customer engagement and loyalty. And AI chatbots can use this personalisation to ensure that each customer’s needs are met – so human agents can devote their time to complex customer queries.

Finalising decisions

AI is a great tool for decision making. When employees are working together in a creative space to brainstorm, there can be many ideas bouncing off each other. But this can sometimes make final decisions difficult. AI assistants can be given criteria to aid with decision making by analysing and identifying isolating factors. And with IPTV distribution, the decision making can be broadcast across platforms for all employees, whether they are working remotely or in different offices, to allow them to be part of the collaboration and have clarity on the next steps within the business.

Training calls for communication

Business leaders can implement AI technologies within training processes to establish connections and enhance collaborations. Of course, there is always room to learn new skills that will benefit roles within companies. But some training courses that are available to employees might not be straightforward to all – thankfully, with AI, progress can be monitored to discover which employees need help in certain areas. By tracking this, employees who have a wide understanding of a certain topic can work with those who are struggling in a collaborative way. Alternatively, AI can be used in training sessions for a group of people who need more experience where they can work together. As a business leader, this ensures that employees are being cared for and are broadening their skills to help performance.

There are many elements that can be enhanced by integrating artificial intelligence technology tools into businesses. And despite concerns that AI could take jobs, it can provide opportunities for increased human connections and engagement. And as a business leader, employees and customers can be kept happy, as well as the chance to boost the success of your business. 

HCL Technologies UK Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global technology company, has signed a definitive agreement for the acquisition of Confinale AG, a Switzerland-based digital banking and wealth management consulting specialist and Avaloq Premium Implementation Partner. Through this strategic acquisition, HCL will increase its footprint in the global wealth management market with emphasis on Avaloq consulting, implementation and management capabilities.

Founded in 2012, Confinale focuses on IT consulting in key specialist areas in the banking and wealth management sector. Confinale has one of the largest independent pools of Avaloq-certified specialists in Europe and its in-house developed products and solutions accelerate the implementation of the Avaloq platform. Confinale is one of only four companies to be awarded the title of Avaloq Premium Implementation Partner. With offices in Switzerland including Zurich, Zug and Geneva; as well as Düsseldorf and London, Confinale works with a host of leading banks and wealth advisors.

The intellectual properties that are a part of this acquisition support HCL’s strategy to create specialized vertical domain capabilities and positions the company as a leader in end-to-end implementation and lifecycle management of the Avaloq platform. This builds upon HCL’s recently expanded global partnership with Avaloq and its acquisition of German IT consulting company gbs in association with apoBank in December 2021.

“Becoming part of HCL is an exciting new chapter for Confinale,” said Roland Staub, CEO, Confinale. “We strongly believe in the need for banking expertise combined with software competence and HCL is the perfect fit for this. It is a truly global player with strong heritage in the financial services sector. HCL’s reach will enable us to further our growth and at the same time expose our team to new learning and innovation opportunities.”

“There is significant disruption taking place in global wealth management and this means an opportunity for technology-led innovation,” said Rahul Singh, President of Financial Services and Digital Process Operations, HCL Technologies. “This acquisition significantly strengthens HCL’s digital wealth and asset management capabilities and expands our presence in the heart of the global investment banking sector. We welcome the team from Confinale and look forward to continuing to drive digital banking innovation alongside Avaloq.”

“At Avaloq we welcome the coming together of two of our key strategic partners,” said Martin Greweldinger, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Avaloq. “Both HCL and Confinale have considerable domain knowledge in financial services and deep understanding of our technology. We see the combination as immensely beneficial as Confinale has strong implementation credentials, including being awarded as best implementation partner in 2020 and 2021. We believe that this coming together will help accelerate digital wealth transformation for our clients and in turn increase the pace of adoption of Avaloq’s products and services globally.”

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, which is expected to be completed in due course.

Financial technology provider, Iress, today announced continued success with its client Kepler Cheuvreux, as it helped the leading independent European financial services company to further optimise trading outcomes. 

Kepler Cheuvreux ranks 10th in the world for trading, is present in 13 major financial centres in Europe and the US and serves 1200 institutional clients around the world. Today, Iress is Kepler Cheuvreux’s unique market data provider for all front-office applications.

Iress delivers high-performance API data feeds that power the performance of the Kepler Cheuvreux ecosystem - with feeds from more than 100 markets covering EMEA, US, and APAC.   
Kepler Chevreux’s recent review of Iress’ performance in its first full year of use highlighted a number of improvements to trading and business outcomes. For Kepler’s algo quant team, Iress’ API Snapshot feature has provided immediate and vital insights outside of the Iress comprehensive real-time data feeds that Kepler Cheuvreux also relies on to evaluate and predict market movements. 

Iress’ business development director, EMEA, Gilles Antoine said: “Today, data availability is at the core of alpha generation. Advanced trading strategies require comprehensive market data and management of those feeds. We’ve helped Kepler Cheuvreux to seamlessly handle a dramatic increase in post-pandemic global trading volumes. Among other benefits, Iress has contributed to Kepler Cheuvreux improving its hit rate for smart order routers to 97-99% on most UK-based venues.” 
Kepler Cheuvreux’s deputy global head of execution services, Thomas Biotteau, said: “After working with a previous vendor for over 20 years, we have been impressed with the stability of Iress’ systems, the quality of the product, and performance of the feeds. We always strive for constant optimisation and while  our operations were already great, the improvement in our SOR hit rate has been exceptional, which is now even as high as 99% in most UK-based venues.

“We are in great hands, with Iress, even as we replaced extensive existing legacy systems and migrated operations to the Iress platform - we hardly noticed the transition.''
Kepler Cheuvreux’s head of algorithmic trading, quant, Jean-Francois Perreton, said: “The first thing you notice working with Iress is the professionalism and expertise of its people.  They are proactive, responsive and experts in what they do.  They are also quick to evolve, as we and the market evolves.”

“Iress quickly and seamlessly integrated into our systems and the improvements have been obvious. They give us the tooling we need for even closer control over our ecosystem and the flexibility to adapt to our changing requirements.”