Today Payhawk, the growing platform that combines expense, payment and invoice management in one solution, and nhs* group, a global tax and accounting firm headquartered in Duesseldorf, announced the launch of Scaling Up, a guide to opening an entity in Germany.

This follows Payhawk’s successful launch of Scaling into the UK, a corresponding guide for launching in the UK, written in partnership with law firm Mishcon de Reya.

A key player in the European Union, Germany represents an attractive opportunity for companies looking to open or expand. Yet opening an entity is not easy -- there is a large amount of paperwork, and opening a business bank account is challenging and requires many official translations. As a result, it is vital to have a trusted partner who can manage location-specific tasks.

Scaling Up is written by experts from Payhawk and the nhs* group. It is aimed at startups, scaleups, FGBs and growing SMEs, and includes guidance on the benefits of launching in Germany, how to register, details on German corporate taxes, employment advice and how to choose the right finance stack.

The nhs* group helps companies to register in Germany, and also offers accounting, payroll, tax, audit and business consulting services. Payhawk currently has offices in four cities across Europe. Therefore, its team has the knowledge and experience of setting up in Germany that will be invaluable to numerous growing companies. 

Hristo Borisov, CEO and Founder of Payhawk, says, “Numerous fellow scale-up CEOs have asked me about how they can open an entity in a new country. Therefore I am delighted to partner with nhs* group; a team of expert consultants specialising in company registration, accounting, payroll, tax, audit and business consulting services in Germany, who supported Payhawk -- as well as many other companies -- to establish business in Germany. We agreed that no easily accessible guide in English existed, therefore we decided to write one. Scaling Up includes a checklist that ensures companies do not miss an important step of their journey when launching in Germany.”

Mathias Niehaus, Certified Public Auditor, Certified Tax Consultant and Partner at nhs* group, says, “Payhawk represents the exact kind of scale up we want to support - one that can help us to reach out to more exciting scale ups who we can help along on their journey. Payhawk’s financial management experience is invaluable to the creation of such a guide, and our deep knowledge of German business requirements represents the perfect partnership.”

Scaling Up is available via the Payhawk website, with versions available in English, Spanish and German. Further blogs and webinars on the topics covered are soon to be released

Ternary ends the first year with more than 100 active enterprise customers as well as FinOps Foundation certification and Seed funding of $6.72M

Sasha Kipervarg, CEO of Ternary

 Ternary, the leading FinOps platform for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), announced new product capabilities that provide cloud engineering and IT finance teams with granular insights and automation to optimize GCP service costs proactively.

Forecasted by Gartner to surpass traditional IT spending by 2025, public cloud spending is now a material portion of IT budgets. While FinOps has become the industry standard operating model for managing the variable spend model of cloud computing, most organizations remain reactive in managing cloud costs. In particular, application development and DevOps/SRE teams lack the inspiration and tools to manage cloud costs better. As a result, these teams have been slow to expand their ownership of application health beyond quality, performance, and reliability to optimize the cost to serve.

Ternary is an advanced SaaS platform purpose-built for optimizing the costs of GCP services. Ternary provides the automation to empower application development, DevOps/SRE, IT finance, IT executives, and other stakeholders to understand, plan, and optimize GCP costs to control variable cloud spending. With Ternary, teams collaborate to identify unseen savings and ensure they continuously spend to plan. 

New Ternary platform capabilities include:

Scoped Views:

Providing actionable information to stakeholders is critical to the success of enterprise-wide FinOps adoption. Scoped Views simplifies the tailoring of data for stakeholders with administrative controls for individual and group access, alerts and notifications, and the assignment of optimization recommendations for GCP services such as Kubernetes and BigQuery.

Automated Resource Recommendations:

Understanding opportunities for cost optimization is a significant challenge for public cloud customers. Ternary now automates recommendations for optimization of GCP services including compute, storage, BigQuery, GKE, CloudSQL, and other services. In addition, Ternary improves cross-team collaboration and accelerates the resolution of recommendations by providing workflows to assign and track recommended optimizations. 

Capacity Optimization:

Enterprises struggle when comparing cloud service providers, sizing up-front commitments to secure significant discounts, and ramping consumption to meet contractual commits. Cost Compare and Ramp Plans support the full lifecycle of capacity optimization as follows:

Cost Compare:

With Cost Compare, the main cost drivers for GCP and AWS are modeled and compared side by side for better insights into providers' differences for improved decision-making.

Ramp Plans:

With Ramp Plans, contractual commitments are compared to actual and forecasted consumption, helping enterprises better manage consumption to meet commitments. 

Datadog Integration:

Ternary expands third-party integrations to include Datadog. The integration enables the ingestion of Datadog data using a configurable API to provide custom metrics such as granular usage costs for services, unit costs for the business, such as cost per sale or cost per customer, and improving the right-sizing of services. 

Low-Touch Onboarding:

Customers can connect their GCP and AWS accounts to Ternary and understand their cloud costs within minutes. This rapid time-to-value is unique to Ternary, removing the need for time-consuming and costly services engagements that are the standard across the industry.

FinOps Certified Platform:

Ternary provides a SaaS platform supporting cloud financial management best practices meeting FinOps standards. By achieving FinOps standards, the FinOps Foundation has certified Ternary as a FinOps Certified Platform.  

Ternary also announced closing $6.72 million in seed funding led by FinVC and NEVA SGR. Other participating investors include Oceans Ventures, Operator Partners, Great Oaks Venture Capital, and Riverpark Ventures. Ternary will use the funds to accelerate product development, expand sales and marketing efforts and build its team to meet the rising demand for its SaaS platform.

"Ternary is the only purpose-built FinOps platform for GCP. Key to our success is inspiring all stakeholders, including finance, application developers, and DevOps/SRE teams, to better manage cloud costs with Ternary," said Sasha Kipervarg, Ternary CEO. "Legacy players like Cloudhealth and Apptio have done little to serve the needs of GCP customers. By addressing the specific challenges GCP customers face, we've seen tremendous adoption of the Ternary platform. With this new round of funding, Ternary is accelerating product innovation and supporting our go-to-market strategy and investments to better serve our customers and partners."

"Before Ternary, the founders built and operated cloud applications at a multi-petabyte scale on GCP. They were active participants in the early days of the FinOps Foundation, advocating for and contributing to many of the FinOps best practices used today," said J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation. "Ternary is a FinOps Certified Platform specifically built for GCP cloud cost optimization that applies the founders' practitioner-level know-how and learnings in a platform."

"We consider the investment in Ternary as strategic to the cloud transition journey," said Mario Costantini, CEO of NEVA SGR, the Intesa Sanpaolo Group's venture capital subsidiary dedicated to the high-tech sector. "Ternary helps improve profit margins, invest more in innovation, and expand usage of Google Cloud. We believe that the company has enormous potential to become a leader in innovative solutions for the finance sector."

Global insurtech for embedded insurance hits major milestone following a momentous year of growth as XCover sales increase by 667% and US team triples

Cover Genius, the insurtech for embedded insurance, is pleased to announce that it has sold more than 10 million policies. This milestone follows a year of continued growth in which the insurtech saw a 667% increase in sales for XCover, its award-winning global distribution platform that enables digital companies to embed and offer any line of insurance or warranty product directly to customers with a single API call. In addition, the insurtech has tripled its US team as the demand for embedded protection continues in the region.

“Following a year of substantial growth, we are delighted to have reached this major milestone, which further shows that the majority of digital customers want the convenience of protection when purchasing items or signing up to a service from their favorite brands,” said Angus McDonald, CEO and co-founder of Cover Genius. “Having helped partners integrate protection for almost a decade, we understand that it's the key to making insurance relevant for customers and brands – which are best placed to curate it for each individual's needs.”

By the end of 2021, Cover Genius expanded and solidified partnerships with global brands in multiple industries, including travel brands such as Booking Holdings, Skyscanner and Hopper; airlines such as Ryanair and Icelandair; global retailers including Flipkart, Shopee, eBay and Wayfair; property technology companies like Rhino; auto and mobility brands like Ola; business services and fintech companies such as Intuit; logistics brands like Descartes ShipRush and Freightos; and ticketing companies like AXS. XCover is also available at Amazon.

While multiple industries saw significant growth, the global insurtech saw a 1,900% increase in policies sold for retail partners, indicating that an overwhelming number of consumers are shopping online and buying protection for their purchases. There was also an 865% increase in sales for travel partners, with attach rates 6X higher due to the pandemic, indicating that travelers are looking to protect their trips against the unexpected.

“I am incredibly proud of the global team at Cover Genius and what our technology has achieved for our partners by embedding relevant protection to global customers, regardless of their location, language or currency,” said Dave Brune, President of the Americas. “In this past year, our global distribution platform - XCover - exceeded expectations for partners with quick integrations, instant claims payments and an industry-leading NPS score of +65.”

In September of 2021, Cover Genius secured $70M in a Series C round led by Sompo Holdings to fuel international expansion and support new and existing partners and solutions. This round followed a six-month period where Cover Genius tripled its gross written premiums (GWP).

In 2021, the financial threats landscape witnessed positive changes with the overall number of users affected by malware reduced significantly, including a 35% drop in PC malware. Still, financial organisations, as cybercriminals’ most lucrative targets, continue to face massive threats. According to Kaspersky’s new Financial cyberthreats in 2021 report, attacks are becoming increasingly corporate rather than consumer focused. In 2021, every third (37.8%) PC banking malware attack targeted corporate users, representing a growth of almost 14% since 2018.

While 2021 saw an expansion in threats to financial organisations on a global scale, there was a continuation of the downward trend of PC and mobile malware previously seen in 2020. In fact, the number of users who encountered PC malware decreased by 35% – from 625,364 in 2020 to 405,985 in 2021.

Although the overall statistics look reassuring, the risk of cyberattacks is far from over, especially for corporate networks. Kaspersky experts report a continuation of this decade’s emerging trend of banking Trojans targeting corporate users. Between 2020 and 2021, corporate users’ share of banking malware attacks rose by almost 2% and increased a significant 13.7% points between 2018 and 2021.

PC malware attacks directed at corporate users, 2018–2021

Notably, in recent years the growth of corporate users’ share was slower than in pre-pandemic years. Kaspersky experts attribute this to the continuing shift towards remote and hybrid work modes. While the pandemic saw both the rise and fall of mandatory restrictions, many companies have decided to continue with remote or hybrid work models and not return to the traditional office work mode. During the pandemic, some organisations’ employees resorted to using home devices protected by consumer solutions, which are insufficient for working purposes. Because attacks detected on home devices are counted as ‘consumer’ threats, regardless of whether the device was being used for working on corporate networks, there is a likely possibility that cybercriminals are even more interested in corporate users than Kaspersky statistics reflect.

What is more, only four malware families were responsible for the attacks on about half of all affected users. While Zbot maintained its position as the number one used malware among financial cybercriminals, SpyEye surged from the eighth most common banking malware, at a 3.4% share in 2020, to the second most common at 12.2% in 2021. At the same time, Emotet (9.3%), described by Europol as “the world’s most dangerous malware”, saw a drop of five percentage points between 2020 and 2021. This coincides with law enforcement agencies’ global collaboration to obstruct the botnet’s infrastructure at the beginning of 2021, which limited Emotet’s activities for at least part of the year.

‘The growth of attacks on corporate users demonstrates that good security measures and high levels of security awareness are integral to the safety of organisations. Successful financial attacks directed at corporate users often impact the whole organisation, not just a single user. And, from our experience, large botnets, such as Emotet, do not target particular users or companies but instead go for the low-hanging fruit, penetrating any organisation that they can and later determining whether it is worth expanding its attacks further. Once a cybercriminal penetrates a corporate network, the whole system is at risk. The target does not even have to be connected to devices in the accounting or finance departments – by infecting any device on the same network, attackers can often access devices from those departments. To prevent such attacks from happening and spreading, organisations must make sure that users are aware of the risks that phishing emails or untrusted websites present,’ comments Oleg Kupreev, security expert at Kaspersky.

To read the Financial cyberthreats in 2021 report, visit Securelist.com.

Kaspersky suggests the following tips to protect you and your business from malware attacks:

• Invest in regular cybersecurity awareness training for employees to educate them on best practices, including not clicking on links or opening attachments received from untrusted sources. Follow this up with a simulated phishing attack to ensure they know how to distinguish phishing emails.
• Leverage advanced detection and response technologies, such as  Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response, which is part of the Threat Management and Defense solution. This solution makes it possible to catch even unknown banking malware and gives security operation teams complete visibility over the network and provides response automation.
• Always keep software updated on all devices to prevent attackers from exploiting vulnerabilities and infiltrating your network. 

With new customers, a growing channel, and subscription volumes doubling WALLIX has achieved its growth plans with international turnover up 35% to €9.2 million

WALLIX, a European cybersecurity software developer and expert in privileged access management (PAM), has reported its full-year 2021 turnover.  

WALLIX maintained its growth trajectory in 2021 with turnover up 15% to €23.2 million, with brisk sales throughout the year and a record number of new accounts. A total of 581 new clients expanded the company’s client base by 44%, and international turnover rose 35% to €9.2 million in 2021, accounting for 40% of total business versus 34% in 2020. The group estimates orders carried over to the current fiscal year at around €2.0 million. 

The relevance of WALLIX’s expertise in business verticals, healthcare and industry in particular, and the expansion of the distributor and partner networks, including TechData’s partnership in Spain and the UK, and IT2trust in Scandinavia, contributed strongly to the group’s business growth over the year. In addition, WALLIX continued to invest in expanding its partner network in target markets, with 230 international partners now onboard who have enabled the sharp rise in sales.  

Alongside expected growth in France, WALLIX has continued to expand globally making significant momentum over the year in the European Union, the UK, and Africa-Middle East region. The group signed an increased number of major contracts in the international market, which generated invoices totaling €3.2 million for the year. WALLIX estimates potential turnover from supply contracts at €9.8 million over the next three years.  

License sales were up 11% YoY, and channel contributions were also responsible for strong growth in international markets. 2021 turnover from subscription contracts, including SaaS licenses and managed services, totaled at €1.5 million, a 90% increase from €0.8 million in 2020. Combined with the impact of the increase in clients served on maintenance turnover, recurring business rose 31% in 2021 to 48% of total business compared to 42% in 2020. As of December 31, 2021, WALLIX estimates the future value of subscription contracts billed in 2021 at €6.6 million over three years, versus €3.9 million as of December 31, 2020.  

As of December 31, 2021, gross cash and cash equivalents amounted to €22.7 million, versus €23.2 million as of December 31, 2020.  The group used no cash in H2 of 2021 - €22.7 million was amounted as of June 30, 2021. WALLIX's financial strength affords the group the flexibility required to self-fund investments under the UNICORN25 plan, and take advantage of acquisition opportunities.  

Similarly, to the first half of the year, WALLIX expects to see a further improvement in H2’s operating earnings over the previous year. However, given the postponement of orders towards the end of 2021 due to the Omicron variant, WALLIX does not expect to breakeven for the period. The current medium-term market outlook is particularly buoyant, forecasting an average annual growth of 21% and expected to reach $3.1 billion in 2025.  

Jean-Noël de Galzain, Chairman of the WALLIX GROUP Management Board, said: “We posted strong growth in 2021 and made significant progress on key indicators for WALLIX's future developments. As a result, we strengthened our client acquisition rate with nearly 600 new accounts opened this year, thanks to our comprehensive product portfolio and recognised technological leadership. The international segment, which currently accounts for 40% of our business, is growing strongly, driven by the global partner network we have built up. Our subscription offers increased sharply this year; this gradual transition towards a recurring business model, 48% of 2021 turnover, is a solid foundation for our medium-term growth ambitions. 

While 2021 revenue growth was slightly curtailed towards the end of the year due to orders postponed to first half 2022, this did not undermine the WALLIX’s excellent growth momentum, nor alter the achievement of the targets we set under the UNICORN25 plan presented in December 2021. This bold strategy aims to address the security challenges presented by digital transformation." 

The UNICORN25 plan has been scaled to enable WALLIX to reach turnover of €100 million by 2025.With UNICORN25, WALLIX is entering a new development phase that will enable the group to consolidate its leadership in access and identity security and play a unifying role as a leading cybersecurity player that guarantees protection for organisations in a digital first world.  

Virgin Money has enhanced the way customers who have fallen into arrears provide their income and expenditure (I&E) information as part of a new digital affordability platform, delivered by Paylink Solutions.

The customised software brings Virgin Money’s operations together as part of a consistent affordability system for agents and customers to self-serve.

Andrew Alder, Director of Partnerships and Development at Paylink Solutions, said: “As people struggle with the increased cost of living, Virgin Money has taken its next step towards digital transformation by using

Paylink Solutions’ Embark platform to align its affordability systems and provide new ways for customers to engage.”

Virgin Money staff will benefit from using Embark’s self-assist I&E configuration when in dialogue with customers, with prompts that highlight any customer over and under spending.

Embark allows agents to seamlessly refer customers to PayPlan for free debt advice, with details of their I&E and financial circumstances being presented to PayPlan’s debt advisors in real time. The platform also has Credit Referencing Agency (CRA) integration, which provides optional access to import other credit commitments to give a holistic view of their financial situation.

Nick Watson, Head of Collections at Virgin Money, said: “We’re really excited to be using Paylink Solutions’ Embark solution, which will allow us to streamline our affordability processes, align our teams and provide new ways for our customers to engage.

“We want to make our processes as straightforward as possible for agents and customers, and the new software is something both will benefit from.”

Alder continued: “We’re delighted Virgin Money has chosen our software, which reflects the bank’s significant investment in supporting its staff and customers. As the cost of living and number of customers struggling financially increases, this couldn’t have been done at a better time.”

Successful year supports IDnow’s journey towards becoming the European leader in identity verification and authentication

IDnow, a leading European Identity Proofing Platform, reports another record year, closing 2021 by organically doubling the number of transactions in its core business. The growth rate is fueled by strong momentum in new sales, increased use of the platform among its existing client base and is further supported by the successful integration of ARIADNEXT in France and identity Trust Management AG (“identity.TM”) in Germany. 

The acceleration of advanced digital business models has led to a shift in demand from single-product identity verification towards comprehensive identity proofing platforms. IDnow’s acquisitions of ARIADNEXT and identity.TM in 2021 have allowed the Company to seamlessly meet this rising demand across Europe with one of the broadest sets of identity verification methods available in the market.  

Andreas Bodczek, CEO at IDnow, commented: “Our goal is to build the leading unified identity proofing platform that meets the multi-dimensional user needs of our customers, whilst meeting stringent and often complex regulatory demands. Through our successful M&A ventures, the IDnow group is now positioned to offer best-in-class products and services that deliver a seamless user experience across an expansive range of geographies and verticals.”

The combined IDnow platform provides a holistic suite of products, catering to the advanced needs of its leading, international clients. In the past year, IDnow added a record number of new clients, including some of the fastest-growing European brands, such as etoro and Lydia. The IDnow platform is used by leading companies globally, with half of the top 20 banks in Europe as well as each of the top 4 relevant telecommunication operators in France and Germany relying on its services.

IDnow has made a series of senior hires in the past year to support the Company’s rapid growth, including Johannes Meerloo as COO, Doug Pollock as Director of Customer Success, Jamie Turner as Vice President People as well as Dr. Heinrich Grave as Senior Vice President Digital Identity.  The Company has also opened offices in the UK as well as in the Middle East to cater to regional surges in demand.

“The identity verification and proofing space is experiencing tremendous growth as companies increasingly adopt digital-first strategies. Our automated verification product solutions have proven themselves to be the first choice for some of the biggest companies across Europe, which is a testament to the levels of fraud assurance we continuously offer our customers.

"Looking forward to the rest of the year, I am very excited about our position in the market. With our holistic identity proofing platform, strengthened team and additional regional locations, we’re in a unique position to offer enterprises exactly what they need from a single source,” says Andreas Bodczek.

“I am looking forward to 2022 - a year in which we will continue to bring our three combined companies closer together and strive for increased market leadership as a unified force.”

Bybit, one of the world's fastest-growing cryptocurrency exchanges, will soon release its USDC perpetual contracts. The new product will allow users to trade using their USDC balance on Bybit's derivatives exchange.

Bybit's new USDC perpetual contract will first open to whitelisted traders, allowing them to use USDC as collateral and place long or short contracts with up to 100x leverage and no expiration date.

Taking Bitcoin perpetual as an example, traders will be able to place an order based on the quantity of Bitcoin, and calculate the margin, profit, and loss based on USDC. The new contract joins Bybit's other perpetual offerings that accept USDT and several cryptocurrencies (BTC, ETH, EOS, and XRP) as collateral.

In a prominently bull or bear market, perpetual contracts are popular as a diversified trading product that can help make the most out of a volatile market. Bybit has released this series of articles to help users fully understand the product.

"We are excited to offer our clients another great trading opportunity in launching USDC perpetuals," said Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Bybit. "We are always looking for ways to help our users make the most of market conditions, and our USDC perpetual contracts will make an excellent addition."

- Accounts Payable activity for the fashion brand now only takes 10-15% of the finance team’s time -

Lulu Guinness, the quintessentially British and iconic handbag brand, has partnered with Yooz, the cloud-based provider of real-time purchase-to-pay (P2P) automation software, to transform its financial department and provide a 100% remote workforce.

For a business that achieves £10+ million of sales per year through its single flagship store in the heart of London’s Covent Garden, as well as a successful online store selling handbags and accessories all over the world, accurate financial processes are a must.

But to continue its growth and support its entry into new markets across Asia, Lulu Guinness quickly realized it needed to transform its finance capability with modern technology.

Simon Rose, Finance Consultant at Lulu Guinness, identified that processing 150+ invoices per month using an email-based process with no full-time accounts payable (AP) manager was laborious and ineffective if the business wanted to continue to grow.

A Yooz report showed EU businesses spend 36 hours a month on average managing vendor invoices, with the average time taken to approve invoices around 19 hours.

It was clear that the existing Accounts Payable (AP) process was no longer fit-for-purpose, and the need for a reliable cloud-based AP automation solution was a critical business requirement.

Able to connect directly to Netsuite, the integration of Yooz allowed for tailored user access according to job function and financial responsibility, making user adoption much easier across the business.

Rose explains, “What I liked about the Yooz software is the simplicity. It does what it needs to do and it’s really user friendly. I think it was a one-hour job for me to follow the instructions and get Yooz set-up and intertwined with Netsuite - that was priceless.”

With Yooz software, Lulu Guinness can remain confident that all invoices are accurately captured and stored correctly as part of an automated invoice processing system.

With only two people in the finance team, efficiency for Lulu Guinness is key. With the automated workflow process in Yooz, the Lulu Guinness finance team avoids misplacing any invoices, has eradicated any potential for human error and, crucially, is able to export financial data directly into Netsuite - saving time and money.

“The accuracy that Yooz provides has been massively important” continues Rose, “You can search directly for what you need thanks to the search function. By just typing the name of the supplier you can access all the invoices, and with just one click you can bring up any invoice on screen.”