Pandemic pressures inspired company leaders to design a workweek that provides the flexibility to balance work, family and community responsibilities while accommodating aspirations beyond work

Commerce protection provider Signifyd announced today that it will advance the future of work by permanently shifting its operation to a four-day workweek after months of trials that proved beneficial to productivity and employee satisfaction.

The four-day workweek will provide Signifyd’s predominantly remote workforce with the flexibility to perform a work/life rebalance and the opportunity to better care for themselves, their communities, and their friends and families. While company leaders had long discussed the move, the unique pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic played a key role in focusing attention on the change.

“When employees are literally working in the same place where they’re supposed to play and relax, burnout just becomes a very real possibility,” Signifyd Senior Vice President of People Operations Emily Mikailli said. “The data demonstrates that four-day workweeks have proven to help with that. Our business is based on the power of data. It wouldn’t make much sense to ignore the data in this case, especially when it concerns an issue that is vital to our employees’ well-being.

The nature of work and the workplace have shifted dramatically in the two years of the pandemic. In many companies, working from home is no longer the exception. It’s often the rule. Hybrid work arrangements are commonplace. The next wave of change is likely to be dominated by shifts that make those arrangements more pleasant, productive and gratifying for employees.

“We’re proud to be among the leaders in this movement to think more deeply about the initiatives we chose to work on so that we are all working fewer, but more meaningful hours. Focusing intelligently on what we choose to prioritize makes us more efficient and more fulfilled as people,” CEO Raj Ramanand said. “We believe in the not-so-distant future, the four-day workweek will be table stakes for companies looking to hire the most capable, creative and committed candidates in the market. We’re happy to be showing others the way and we’ll continue to innovate in the areas of work-life and the workplace.”

The keys to a successful four-day workweek program are communication and flexibility, Mikailli said. A policy that means employees aren’t expected to work on a given day does not mean employees cannot work on a given day. Some might see the day as a chance to focus more deeply on a work-related project — without the interruption of meetings. Some might use a few hours to catch up on work-related tasks that they’d otherwise find themselves catching up on, on a Saturday or Sunday. “The end goal is to alleviate stress and help people be more efficient, and that may look different across employees,” Mikailli added.

Signifyd provides mission-critical order automation and fraud and policy abuse protection for ecommerce retailers, including some of the world’s largest. The work by its nature is 24 hours, seven days a week, every week.

Teams at Signifyd will structure schedules so that constant support and consultation continue to be available, while still providing every team member with a four-day week.

Productivity did not wane during the company’s months-long trial of shorter workweeks and employees expressed broad support for the innovative initiative, both of which were key in adopting the arrangement permanently.

- Powering new development capabilities and business expansion plans 

- Follows exceptional growth in 2021 

- Driving accelerated adoption of real-time data collaboration technology solutions 

MDX Technology (MDXT), the leading innovator of real-time data collaboration technology, announces it has secured significant investment from a group of private backers. The new investment will accelerate the firm’s ambitious business development plans and new technology development activities.  

The investor group includes Daniel Simpson, Emanuel Mond, co-founders of Cadis, now IHS Markit  EDM and Graham Denyer, ex CTO of the IHS Markit EDM offering. The group have worked together  on several other investment opportunities, including the Livingstone Software Asset Management business. The investment amount is undisclosed.  

Paul Watmough, CEO at MDXT, commented.

“The investment is the next exciting step in the MDXT  journey. Our proven data collaboration technology is robust and highly flexible, used by nearly 40 high  profile investment banks, interdealer brokers and buy-side firms. It also underpins the MDXT  marketplace, which is fast gaining traction within the data provider community, including ICE and IGM  and the new breed of data consumers, all of whom are looking for a modern, highly cost-effective  alternative for data delivery and acquisition. We finished 2021 on a high, and with access to this  investment and the expertise of our investors, we can accelerate our ambitious business growth plans  and new technology development goals, particularly around Symphony and other key technology  partners.” 

Daniel Simpson concluded:

“Fast, efficient access to real-time data is essential for informed  decision-making that drives trading strategies and increases profitability and is why MDXT has earned  its market-leading position. The technology is best in class, developed by the industry’s leading  experts in this field; its loyal, blue-chip customer base speaks for itself. However, we believe there is  much more to achieve through new product innovation and forging deeper and stronger relationships  with our customers and partners. This is a high growth sector, and the opportunities to add additional  value for our users are endless. We are excited to be part of it.” 

Transcend, a leading provider of collateral, liquidity, and funding solutions, and Acadia, a leading provider of integrated risk management services, have partnered to deliver an automated, comprehensive and independent Collateral Validation Service. This service allows the buy-side and broker-dealers to confidently manage the growing complexity and volume of margin activity driven by Uncleared Margin Rules (UMR). Transcend and Acadia’s Collateral Validation Service is designed to ensure that all end of day collateral balances held at third-party and tri-party custodians meet the required criteria, including collateral eligibility, sufficiency, concentration, and wrong-way risk according to the requirements defined in their related collateral agreements.

This service integrates Transcend’s tri-party and custodian connectivity and collateral validation analytics with Acadia’s margin, collateral, and agreement management products. Delivered together, the combination provides sophisticated validation capabilities in accordance with client agreements and transparently communicates results daily. 

By ensuring clients’ collateral portfolios effectively mitigate their derivatives exposures, the Collateral Validation Service will help firms comply with UMR Phase 6 requirements and address  the manual challenges that clients in earlier phases of UMR are still looking to resolve. The service will be hosted on Acadia’s platform independent of a client’s existing collateral management workflow, ensuring flexibility.

“With increased pressure from UMR, asset managers and broker-dealers alike are challenged with creating efficient and scalable processes for new compliance requirements. Our Collateral Validation Service empowers firms to confidently and seamlessly respond to the new and existing margin requirements,” said Bimal Kadikar, CEO, Transcend. “As we formally extend Transcend’s offerings to the buy-side, we are excited for the many opportunities ahead with Acadia and look forward to expanding our capabilities in new, transformational ways.”

“Acadia provides a range of services that assist firms with their regulatory requirements. By partnering with Transcend, we continue to ensure that our clients benefit from a more streamlined and automated approach to UMR compliance,” says Mark Demo, Head of Business Development, Acadia. “Our overarching goal is to deliver value and reduce risk for our clients and we are excited by this partnership since it firmly delivers on this objective.”

The connectivity, interoperability, and automation powered by Transcend and Acadia’s joint Collateral Validation Service delivers a seamless validation workflow for buy-side and sell-side participants on a global-scale. As Transcend and Acadia kick off their partnership, the Companies are already exploring a number of other collaborative opportunities to meet increasing demand.

 Scienaptic AI, a leading global AI-powered credit decision platform provider, announced today that Mont.-based Intrepid Credit Union has chosen its platform to boost its credit decisions. 

Established in 1936 as Helena U.S. Employees Federal Credit Union, Intrepid Credit Union has multiplied its member base over the decades, becoming a notable and reliable name in the community of Helena and Bozeman. Scienaptic’s credit decisioning platform will enable the credit union to tap into untapped credit opportunities, increase loan accessibility and transform the member experience. 

“We have been a member-community centered organization for 86 years, and we believe in delivering solutions that inspire success,” said Greg Strizich, CEO of Intrepid Credit Union. “With Scienaptic AI's credit decisioning engine, loan decisions are going to become automated, faster and smarter. It will empower us to provide an exceptional member experience, enhanced credit access and greater financial empowerment, one person, one family and one community at a time.”

Correspondingly, Pankaj Jain, President of Scienaptic AI, cited, We are excited to be working with Intrepid Credit Union to help strengthen the credit and financing opportunities for its members. We are sure that Scienaptic's unique, adaptive AI technology will enable the credit union to serve more members, boost loan approvals and enhance member experience and wallet share without increasing risk.”

Percent, the capital markets platform transforming the multi-trillion-dollar lending industry, today announces the launch of Percent Underwriter, its digitally-native solution designed to streamline the deal-making process for both sell-side and buy-side firms underwriting private credit transactions.

Percent's underwriter solution brings the entire lifecycle of a private credit deal into one intuitive platform that delivers time-saving workflow automation, directly addressing a notoriously inefficient underwriting process. Financial firms on this crucial side of private credit transactions, which previously had no other alternative to manual deal-making, can now utilize Percent's framework to efficiently source new clients, structure market standard offerings, choose to syndicate to a fast-growing investor base, and utilize Percent's post-close reporting and servicing.

"Our underwriter offering was built by underwriters for underwriters," said Prath Reddy, President of Percent. "Thanks to our evolving infrastructure, we are opening up an area of the market that until now has been uneconomical for underwriters to consider. The old saying, 'The $1 billion deal takes just as much time and effort as the $1 million deal' is simply no longer the case as we've been able to profitably execute on hundreds of 'smaller' private credit deals using this framework, which we are now making available to any qualified underwriter."

Throttle Capital and All Ships Investors are among the initial wave of underwriters that will be joining the platform in Q1.

"The Percent platform enables a replicable, systematic, and data-driven underwriting process coupled with cost-efficient legal documentation and near real-time key collateral performance monitoring to help scale deal origination and probability of closing," said Rana Mookherjee, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Throttle Capital. "Our partnership with Percent — and being able to find and engage in transactions across its platform — will be a key driver of growth for us in 2022 and beyond."

Percent is poised for continued advancement in the rapidly evolving private credit space. The underwriting offering is the latest in a string of product releases aimed at empowering market participants on Percent. In late 2021, the company launched Sync to further accelerate the growth of the innovative fintech lenders and financing companies on its platform. It also brought to market Percent Blended Notes, which offers investors exposure to multiple private credit investments from a single touchpoint and was created in response to robust investor demand.

"Before the launch of Percent, private credit – a massive $8 trillion market – was an especially opaque and disorganized field," said Dick Parsons, former Chairman of Citigroup and former CEO and Chairman of Time Warner. "Percent is completely disrupting this area of the market as it continues to bring standardization to private credit transactions, much in the way Wall Street did when it developed mortgage-backed securities and high-yield bonds. And thanks to modern technologies and the talent and dedication of its team, Percent is doing it in a fraction of the time. I remain beyond impressed with the speed of their innovation and their ability to address the evolving needs of all market participants: investors, borrowers and now underwriters." Dick Parsons and his business partner Ronald Lauder are investors in Percent through R&R Venture Partners.  

Led by CEO and founder Nelson Chu, Percent has underwritten more than $700 million in transactions across more than 250 offerings since launching in 2019. Going forward, underwriters can now leverage Percent's infrastructure platform and solutions, as well as benefit from the company's innovative workflow tools and technology — all while engaging in an interoperable three-sided market powered by the startup.

TruSight, the financial industry’s leading provider of validated third-party risk data, announced today that it has completed a comprehensive risk assessment of the leading pan-European market infrastructure, Euronext (ENX.PA). The assessment provides high-quality, fully validated data on Euronext based on a standardized, industry-backed control assessment methodology designed to meet the rigorous requirements of financial institutions.

The TruSight assessment methodology covers 27 diversified control domains, including information and cybersecurity, privacy, business resiliency, and other operational risk areas, replacing duplicative questionnaires and response processes with robust test steps and attribute validation derived from collaboration among industry leaders. TruSight’s comprehensive risk evaluation of Euronext included structured inquiries, policy and procedure inspection, evidence-based validation, and dynamic control observations and validation. In addition to the Euronext assessment, TruSight assessed the applicable data center providers to validate that the resiliency requirements of a stock exchange are enabled. An in-depth data center assessment was conducted at the target production and backup sites to fully cover the control set.

“Obtaining an external validation of our risk controls is an important part of our strategy as the leading market infrastructure in Europe, and as a reference in terms of operational excellence,” said Georges Lauchard, chief operating officer of Euronext. “We chose TruSight as its methodology has become the global standard for assessing third-party risk.”

The TruSight utility model, in which assessments are performed once and shared by many, reduces the time and effort spent by both financial services institutions and third parties by eliminating the need for repetitive and duplicative questionnaires. The TruSight assessment methodology also leads to more consistent, higher-quality data, quicker third-party onboarding, and better allocation of resources to managing risk.

“Euronext recognizes the value of an industry-standard third-party risk utility and has taken proactive steps to engage with TruSight to ensure it meets the most stringent requirements of the financial services market,” said Jonathan Pressman, CEO of TruSight. “Completing the TruSight assessment enables Euronext to enhance its risk assurance and achieve significant efficiency gains for the market industry.”

Elliptic, the global leader in cryptoasset risk management, today announced the launch of full compliance coverage capabilities of the Tezos blockchain and its native asset XTZ, and expanded  support of USD Coin (USDC) to include the Stellar blockchain.  In addition, new screening capabilities will be added to Elliptic Lens to enable users to check for sanctioned addresses on nearly 400 new assets. 

The news comes as Elliptic continues to build out products and services designed to make cryptoasset use in business and finance transparent and secure.  

Elliptic’s new capabilities across the Tezos blockchain and its native asset XTZ will provide businesses with the ability to safely and securely create smart contracts that allow participants to directly control the rules of the network. Tezos has seen rapid growth in popularity in recent years as market participants increasingly view it as an important part of the future of contract settlement in business and finance. 

Additionally, Elliptic will now be able to provide analytics and screening for parties exchanging USD-backed stablecoin USDC across Stellar, which is an open source, decentralized protocol for digital currency to low-cost fiat money transfers, allowing cross-border transactions between any pair of currencies. 

The new capabilities across Tezos and Stellar come as part of Elliptic’s New Year platform expansion. This will see a raft of upgrades and launches across blockchains and product areas targeting the financial services and crypto industries,  as the business builds out capabilities on offer to these companies.

The full range of Elliptic’s platform upgrades and launches include:

• Full coverage of the Tezos blockchain and its native asset XTZ
• USD Coin will now be supported on the Stellar blockchain alongside  Ethereum, which is already operational
• Added screening capabilities to Elliptic Lens, allowing users to check for sanctioned addresses on nearly 400 new assets
• Increased coverage breadth of virtual asset service providers (VASPs) on Elliptic Discovery, the only tool that now provides users with access to on and off-blockchain activity analytics of over 1,000 VASPs
• Provision of real-time analytics capabilities on Ethereum, Stellar and Ripple blockchains, improving user accuracy by providing the ability to screen activity as it happens
• Adding Risk Graph functionality to Ethereum, Stellar and Ripple blockchains, providing users with a visual interpretation which allows them to plot and visualize the flows of funds immediately and map the relationship with between parties within a transaction

“There is an increasing appetite among the business and financial services community for products that can increase the transparency and security of blockchain technologies that are now part of the financial mainstream,” said Elliptic CPO John Connolly. “Our continued progress in delivering deeper analytical capabilities across a broad range of technologies is critical to supporting businesses to adopt and use cryptoassets in a way that is trusted and safe.”

sync. – the smart open banking app, partnered with Salt Edge, leader in providing open banking solutions, to significantly boost its open banking offer and enable users to link their bank accounts from a wide number of new countries, including Australia, South Africa, and Hong Kong.

With open banking gaining more and more popularity, consumers are getting the taste of better control of personal finances and associated personal data. Recent surveys show that pandemic has shifted the way people approach data privacy and control, which is enforced by the expansion of the services underpinned by APIs. Consumers are not asking for open banking specifically. They are asking for control, safety, and convenience, which is exactly what sync. app has been offering ever since its launch back in 2020.

sync. uses open banking channels and allows consumers to connect their existing bank accounts and credit cards alongside their sync. current account directly in the app, making it easier to effectively manage money and budget. Throughout its development, the company behind the app found it critical to offer as wide a coverage of open banking-based services as possible, beyond Europe. And since Salt Edge has the fastest-growing and broad global connectivity, sync.’s choice was obvious, and achieving its goals meant leveraging Salt Edge’s global data aggregation solution.

Partnering with Salt Edge helps us achieve our vision of leading the way in open banking and providing real benefits to our users. We were obviously aware of SaltEdge as one of the leading open banking aggregators in the world and it was clear that the breadth of connections they had developed meant they were a clear market leader.

Ricky Lee, CEO and Co-Founder of sync.

Salt Edge’s award-winning global bank connectivity with up to 5,000 banks from more than 50 countries worldwide is contributing to sync. offering its users the chance to fully control their finances, manage and track their money, tailoring its solutions with customised insights.

End-users may not really care about the name of the technology backing-up the services they’re using. What they do care about is the safety of their data, the commodity of having it all aggregated in one single app, and the coverage they get, by connecting as many banks as possible, from as many locations as possible. We are thrilled to be able to work with sync.money on achieving that and ensuring that their users get truly the best out of open banking while staying secure.

Cristian Gheorghita, Open Banking Expert at Salt Edge

About Sync.Money.

sync. app aims to differ from major challenger banks by being an all-in-one service that supports users with all their financial needs. Its ultimate goal is to help customers budget, spend and track their money, in one place, offering a unique user experience as a money management platform with tailored insights. The sync. app will be a way to manage their entire financial life in one app. It does this by leveraging Open Banking, allowing users to connect all their debit and credit accounts, loans and mortgages, alongside their own sync. X card, powered by Mastercard.

More information: www.sync.money

About Salt Edge

Salt Edge – a financial API platform with Open Banking solutions. The company has two main vectors of activity: enabling third parties to get access to bank channels via a unified gateway, and developing the technology necessary for banks to become compliant with the open banking regulations globally. ISO 27001 certified, the company employs the highest international security measures to ensure stable and reliable connections between financial institutions and their customers. The company is integrated with up to 5,000 financial institutions in 50+ countries.