Doug Clare, Vice President of Product Management, Fraud Protection and Compliance, FICO, describes the benefits of examining the full picture

Billions of friction-filled moments, which risk upsetting a customer’s journey, occur daily, as financial organizations of all kinds—from traditional banks to fintechs and telecommunications providers—contend with making millisecond-quick authentication decisions. Mobile devices aim to make transactions fast and easy, but the mix of underlying data has become incredibly complex. That’s the challenge contextual intelligence promises to help cut through.

Contextual intelligence provides the answer to a bank’s question, “What answer, to what question, do I need to know, at what moment in time in the customer journey, to make sure the transaction is legitimate?”

PSD2 regulation in the UK and European Union also impacts, as it frequently compels the use of strong customer authentication. Online payments, transfers from bank accounts and even changing account details can all trigger an authentication requirement – even when the payment service provider deems it unnecessary. Constant demand for multi-factor authentication is frustrating for customers so when a provider can limit them it’s a win for customer experience.

How do financial institutions benefit from contextual intelligence?

There are three main advantages to working with contextual intelligence.

• The customers’ experiences will simply be better. Less friction, fewer false positives, higher detection rates of actual frauds and scams and better experiences translate into greater customer loyalty and ultimately, more profits.
• Cost. By right sizing the quantity of data that is relevant to answering each question, companies can buy significantly less data from external sources, saving costs.
• Streamlined operations. Delivering more efficient, integrated foundations, contextual intelligence provides a decision framework that can be applied to many customer journeys: account opening and KYC, retail banking money transfers, person-to-person (P2P) transfers, credit applications — anything that requires the orchestration of data from multiple sources to answer point-in-time questions.

Real-world example

A customer goes on holiday in Thailand, she wants to access her online banking to pay a bill but didn’t bring her laptop on the trip, and her phone has run out of battery. She goes to the computer in the hotel lobby to log into her online banking. Contextual intelligence can drive the following sequence, to simultaneously ensure security and a streamlined customer experience.

• This new device appears risky. The customer is asked to authenticate via an email link since, at the moment, she can’t accept a text on her phone.
• The customer logs in, and it’s immediately apparent she’s a long way from home, on a computer she’s never used before. It’s appropriate to step up her authentication; she is presented with challenge questions that are successfully answered, and she pays the bill.

Here’s a twist on that scenario: Half an hour before logging on, she made a withdrawal at the ATM in the hotel lobby using her debit card. The stepped-up authentication above would have been bypassed because, although the customer is logging in from a new device and is in Thailand, her bank knows:

• She withdrew money at an ATM at the same location.
• That appeared suspicious, so an agent from the bank’s fraud desk called the customer to verify that she was indeed making the withdrawal. The customer verified the transaction, and then her phone ran out of battery.

When the customer logged on to online banking from the hotel lobby, contextual intelligence would have dictated that, since the customer has verified she is in the same geolocation and had used her card, no further authentication would be required to pay a bill. Adding friction to this low-risk activity would be unpleasant for the customer — but if she decides to do a high-risk online banking activity, such as send a large payment from her bank account to a person or business she’s never paid before, the system will ask to authenticate further.

Different transactions require different questions and different answers —and different contextual intelligence.

Take the pain out of getting Financial Market Data by using the newly launched Python Software Development Kit (SDK) by TraderMade. This kit makes it easier and more accessible for users to get data.
The SDK enables users to query and download real-time and historical Forex, CFD, and Crypto data in three lines of code. Get the full tutorial and accompanying video to get started.

TraderMade CEO Chris Randall said: "Working with an API requires users to understand the detailed workings and all the routes and their responses. With our Python SDK, we aim to make this process simpler and accessible to a wide range of users."

The addition of Python SDK shows TraderMade's ongoing commitment to support global fintech organizations with the data and tools required to build high-tech applications in both the traditional markets and new emerging Crypto and On-Chain spaces.
There are a few ways that TraderMade stands out from the rest. One is that its products are all built on cutting-edge systems. They run over numerous sites powered by Amazon Web Service (AWS). 

Also, it is cost-effective, an established player in the FX Market, and has been around since 1984. 

The CEO of TraderMade, Chris Randall, has more than 20 years of experience and an in-depth understanding of real-time data. 

TraderMade can provide first-class support by allowing users access to data through its Market Data website and managing it through a user portal. 

It has a clean and reliable catalogue of data sourced and trapped from established partners.
 

The Scottish National Investment Bank has committed £20 million of cornerstone funding to Lothian Broadband Group (LBG) to help tackle digital inequality in rural communities and small towns in Scotland.

The Bank’s funding commitment is in addition to £5 million of new investment from the company’s current shareholders and is part of Lothian Broadband Group’s plans to invest £75 million to connect over 70,000 new premises in rural communities and small towns across Scotland over the next four years.

LBG is already investing to deliver full-fibre broadband across East Lothian. Today’s announcement signals an expansion of LBG’s geographic ambitions, with funding now secured to drive further operational scale-up and rapidly accelerate fibre deployment in 2022.

Digital inequality has been heightened during the pandemic, and the Bank will be supporting a strong and experienced management team to roll out a future-proofed broadband network to tens of thousands of households and businesses who would otherwise be waiting years before receiving a Gigabit-capable broadband service.

Eilidh Mactaggart, CEO of the Scottish National Investment Bank said: “The Bank’s investment provides the cornerstone funding required for LBG to rapidly accelerate its operational scale-up and fibre deployment in 2022.

“This investment will support the improvement of digital connectivity in rural and semi-rural areas of Scotland, helping to address inequality of access to digital infrastructure outside of our cities and major towns.”

One of the Bank’s three key missions is to extend the equality of opportunity by improving places. The LBG investment will help increase digital connectivity to under serviced communities.

A vibrant rural digital economy can also help reduce car journeys and assist a just transition to net zero by 2045.

Gavin Rodgers, CEO of Lothian Broadband said: “The backing of the Scottish National Investment Bank enables us to continue our rapid scale up as we establish the leading fibre-to-the-premise deployment platform for rural communities and small towns across Scotland.

“This new investment supports LBG’s commitment to building quality digital infrastructure and our inclusive, community-based approach to every village and town we serve.”

The Bank’s investment supports UK and Scottish government commitments to high-speed broadband access. The UK Government has a target of at least 85% of the population having access to gigabit (1,000 Mbps) broadband by 2025 under its National Infrastructure Strategy.

 Trading Technologies International, Inc. (TT), a global provider of high-performance professional trading software, infrastructure and data solutions, confirmed today that it has invested $6.35 million in KRM22 plc (AIM: KRM), the technology and software investment company that focuses on risk management for capital markets. This is the first investment TT has made since its acquisition by 7RIDGE in late December.

In addition, TT has entered into a distribution agreement to market and distribute KRM22 risk management products. The products will leverage TT’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform ecosystem and significantly expand the firm’s risk management offering. The initial integrated risk service offering is anticipated to address pre-trade risk and will be available for TT clients to use in March, with details to be announced.

The investment and distribution agreement represent the first stage of cooperation between TT and KRM22.

Keith Todd, the new CEO of Trading Technologies, said: “The broadening of TT’s risk management capabilities is an important step in the firm’s evolution to providing more comprehensive trade execution services. The ease of integration into the robust TT SaaS platform ensures that time to market will be short. This is the first of many third-party services to leverage the TT platform ecosystem to access and add value to the global TT customer base in the months and years ahead.”

TT Chief Revenue Officer Guy Scott said: “Our customers are increasingly looking for TT to help improve their end-to-end trading ecosystem, including risk services, across all execution platforms – not only TT. This arrangement with KRM22 accelerates our ability to meet this demand.”

Delta Capita continues to strengthen its capability and accelerate growth with the acquisition of JDX Consulting. The acquisition establishes Delta Capita as a significant force in global managed services and consulting in Capital Markets, leveraging its bank as a service ‘one bank' infrastructure platform. Delta Capita is the Financial Services division of Prytek and this acquisition is part of the committed $500m allocation of capital to accelerate the build and deployment of the ‘one bank’ infrastructure platform.

JDX are a successful global resource augmentation and consulting business, headquartered in the UK; its established presence in both the US and APAC provides Delta Capita with stronger capabilities in these regions.   The combined firm will have a comprehensive product and service offering as well as an enhanced UK and EU footprint. Clients will benefit from the increased global scale across its complementary consulting offerings, technology and managed services. Delta Capita will have revenues of $130m and more than 1100 professional staff.

Both organisations share core values underpinned by an inclusive and supportive people culture and a relentless focus on client needs. Delta Capita has a keen focus on talent acquisition, development and retention that will be further enhanced by JDX’s leading academy programme. The combination of Delta Capita’s industry expertise, its experienced staff, and JDX’s ability to rapidly respond at scale to clients’ demands, provides clear opportunities and a strong career path for all employees.

Following the acquisition, Jonathan Davies, CEO of JDX said “I am delighted by the combination of JDX and Delta Capita and believe the combined firm now has the people, technology and solutions to much better address our clients’ needs. There are also considerable benefits for our staff in being part of what will now be a larger and more diversified organisation”.

Joe Channer, CEO of Delta Capita Group, said “We continue to listen to our clients and this acquisition allows us to take on globally significant consulting and managed service engagements at scale. Clients are evaluating their operating models to drive efficiency and simplification and require innovative solutions that significantly reduce their costs. We recognise JDX’s expertise in its successful resource augmentation business across Financial Services, and in particular, Capital Markets, and I am delighted that the team joining us will allow Delta Capita to offer an enhanced capability to our clients. I can see that as two organisations combining, we have a great cultural fit and many capabilities that are truly complementary.  I expect this combined capability to rapidly accelerate our growth”.

The acquisition of JDX Consulting is the third acquisition completed by Delta Capita in the last 15 months. This significant growth has been recognised by the Financial Times in their FT 1000 ranking.

The award-winning global multi-asset liquidity provider and prime brokerage, Finalto has announced that it will add 32 leveraged equities belonging to some of the most prestigious companies listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange (SGX) to its already impressive list of offerings. Finalto already offers over 1,000 single stock CFDs to its clients. Through its continuous investment in technology, the fintech firm can automate corporate actions and take care of all the back-office requirements of its clients. This announcement cements the company’s position as a leader in the industry.

The Singapore stock market has witnessed strong performance in 2021, with a 13.78% increase as of November 22, 2021, making it one of the top performers in the Asia-Pacific region. With a high proportion of industrial and financial stock listings, the SGX is very cyclical. These sectors tend to perform in sync with macroeconomic changes, providing investors more upside potential during times of economic recovery.

Alex Mackinnon, CEO Finalto Asia, said, “The addition of the Singapore leveraged equities further establishes Finalto as a business that listens to the market and responds to our clients’ needs. This is just another step in our commitment to bring the best and latest opportunities giving our clients an edge over the competition.”

Singapore’s High Growth Potential

With one of the fastest vaccination roll-outs globally and progressive easing of border restrictions, Singapore expects a strong recovery in H2 2021. The government revised its economic growth estimates upwards to 6%-7% in 2021, from the earlier projection of 4%-6%. The QoQ GDP growth stood at 0.80% in Q3 2021.

With overall global economic recovery from the pandemic-induced recession, the Singapore stock market is expected to do well. The Singapore government has launched a series of initiatives to push high-performing companies in the region to get listed on the stock exchange. This includes offering high-growth companies the chance to raise funds privately before a public listing. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) plans to increase its grants to aid companies to cover the cost of listing.

By offering 32 additional single stock CFDs from the Singapore equity market, Finalto will be able to provide its clients exposure to a region with high growth potential, which incidentally also has one of the cheapest valuations. Not only will mergers and acquisitions (M&As) drive the market in the future, but the huge banking sector in the country is poised to benefit from rising yields in the US.

This means top brokers, hedge funds and other clients of Finalto will be able to offer these assets to their respective clients, thereby increasing their ability to provide value offerings and expand their client base.

Finalto Adds Several Reputed Stocks from the Financial Sector

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) estimates that the financial services sector in the country expanded by 6% in H1 2021. In 2020, the sector had outperformed the overall economy by 5.1%. This includes entities like payment firms, insurance services, fund management, and banking.

Increased fee income and expected writebacks of bad loan provisions are expected to help Singapore’s major banks sustain a steady earnings momentum through Q4 2021. They are set to gain from a rise in interest rates sooner than expected if inflation rates worldwide persist at high levels. However, interest margins could take a long time to recover, with easy monetary policies to support economic recovery worldwide.

The city’s top banks posted net profit gains in Q3 2021. DBS Group Holdings Ltd. posted YoY growth in net profit of 31%, while United Overseas Bank Ltd. saw 57% YoY growth. This growth was driven by lower credit allowances and higher fee income.

DBS expects resilient asset quality in the future, with lower total allowances. Moreover, the stock had been trading with a steady price increase for 12 weeks as of November 18, at the upper end of its 52-week high-low range. This is a signal of bullishness ahead.

Apart from DBS Group Holdings Ltd. and United Overseas Bank Ltd, some other banking stocks now available among Finalto’s offerings include Hong Leong Finance Ltd. and Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp.

Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp Ltd (OCBC) is the second largest lender in the country. In early November 2021, it announced that its quarterly net profit climbed 19%, beating estimates.

State Investor Temasek Holdings Pte. Contributes to Higher Stock Market Valuations in Singapore

The state investor firm, Temasek Holdings Pte., is making trading in Singapore more compelling for millennials and Gen Z investors. Almost a quarter of its $283 billion global portfolios is in Singapore. Finalto has added many of these prominent companies to its asset list, including Singapore Airlines Ltd., Singapore Telecommunications Ltd., CapitaLand Investment Ltd., and Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. All these stocks are much sought after by the city’s long-term investors due to their steady dividends and their reputation of having a state-owned triple-A-rated holding company backing them.

As Temasek bids against itself in the takeover war over Singapore Press Holdings Ltd., there has been a rise in the share price from S$2.099 per share to S$2.40. This is a 60% premium over the stock price, which stood at S$1.5 in March 2021.

The Asian market is expected to gain from the global economic recovery and solid economic data. With the inclusion of Singapore single stock CFDs in their product portfolio, Finalto seals its reputation of being a true global liquidity provider.

90 West, the leading provider of a unique consumer transactions dataset covering the entire United States market, with a particular concentration on the midwest region, is pleased to announce a partnership with Exabel which will result in the creation of a new insights platform for 90 West’s investment clients.

The 90 West Insights Platform will give portfolio managers and hedge funds additional insights based on 90 West’s unique panel of consumer transaction data, which track the pricing and performance trends across a broad range of companies. The platform delivers user-friendly dashboards, visualizations and KPI monitoring capabilities.  This assists investors in idea generation by spotting trend shifts in 90 West’s consumer data. Partnering with Exabel gives alt data vendors a compelling extra presentation and monitoring layer that investors value, utilising Exabel's unique Al analytics, financial modeling and data science platform.

The 90 West Insights Platform forms part of Exabel’s growing partnership program.  The platform empowers data vendors to discover new value-added insights in their datasets, demonstrate extra value to potential customers in easy-to-create report cards, and deliver a new, proven Insights product that appeals to a wide group of professional investors. Through the partnership with Exabel, 90 West’s clients can now much more easily and quickly leverage raw alt data to exploit investable insights.  

John Farrall of 90 West commented: “90 West is excited to partner with Exabel.  Leveraging Exabel’s intuitive data visualization platform, clients and prospective clients can easily drill down on specific sectors or stocks, flagging outliers and inflection points. Our partnership with Exabel is a huge step towards simplifying the evaluation of, and subsequent engagement with 90 West’s data offering.” 

Neil Chapman, CEO of Exabel commented: “Making the most of alternative data is all about combining complementary data sources, which is why we are so excited to be partnering with 90 West. 90 West’s unique consumer transactions panel sits very well alongside the powerful transactions data already available via Exabel’s market offering, and we believe investors will be able to extract huge value from it. The uniqueness of 90 West’s dataset also makes it immensely compelling for investment teams to use on its own, and we are glad that Exabel’s software will be able to empower 90 West’s clients even further.”

“Today most investors want to use alternative data, but many find the cost and complexity of modeling data in-house a prohibitive burden. Exabel allows active managers to benefit from alternative data immediately to supplement fundamental strategies.”

“We are looking forward to working with 90 West to create actionable insights on its data. Dashboards, intelligent screening KPI prediction models and company drill down tools are among the many features our easy-to-use SaaS platform can deliver.”

The equity funding round is provided by Toscafund and its private equity arm, Penta Capital, and will be used to extend CellPoint’s global reach and penetrate new market verticals.

CellPoint Digital, a leading global provider of digital commerce and payment solutions, today announced an equity financing round of $25M provided by Toscafund and its private equity arm, Penta Capital, to build on a series of major successes in recent years.

The move follows a series of investments by Toscafund and Penta Capital into CellPoint Digital following their initial investment in 2019 and brings their total investment to over $56M.  It also marks a strengthening of the relationship between the businesses. As a market leader in payment orchestration for travel, CellPoint Digital is now offering its platform to new markets including retail, gaming, crypto and digital content.

By orchestrating payments across regions and payment methods, CellPoint Digital allows merchants to adopt a multi-acquirer payments model that opens up new opportunities for growth. CellPoint Digital helps increase top-line revenue utilizing intelligent routing, increasing authorizations, and providing system uptime transparency, and reduces the operation cost of accepting cross border payments. CellPoint Digital also adds value at checkout by delivering a frictionless payment experience, presenting customers with the payment methods they want to use, no matter where they are in the world.

Kristian Gjerding, CEO at CellPoint Digital said: “The past few years have seen extraordinary growth for CellPoint Digital. We continue to experience strong demand from a range of enterprises wishing to optimise their digital payment and commerce solutions, while countering the major challenges they face with existing providers to deliver quickly and cost-efficiently.”

“With a business foundation that is stronger than it’s ever been, the logical next step is to widen our global reach and penetrate new market verticals that stand to be transformed by our solutions.” 

Steven Scott, Founding Partner of Penta Capital, said: “We are delighted to finance this next stage of CellPoint Digital’s expansion. The company continues to solve the most critical problem that businesses face today: the optimization of a customer’s entire path to purchase across all their digital channels.”

“Based on winning key new clients,  and with the aggressive growth strategy and penetration into new sectors, we see yet another compelling growth opportunity and look forward to working together with CellPoint Digital’s experienced management team to support this new phase of development.” 

Echoing the thoughts of Penta Capital, Paul Glover, CFO at CellPoint Digital: “Our expansion plan is exciting, and we are thrilled to partner with Penta Capital once again to further accelerate our company’s development.”

“Toscafund have a great track record of investing in high-growth companies and their commitment is testament to our market traction and growth potential by delivering high ROI digital solutions. The new investment will enable us to further scale our team globally as well as drive additional innovation into our unique platform.” 

Yeahka Limited ("Yeahka" or the "Company") (09923.HK) founder and CEO, Luke Liu, sent an open letter to all employees via email, looking back on the 10-year history of the company and announcing its future development plan on January 3.

In the email titled "Toward a More Promising Future", Luke looked back on Yeahka's transformation over the past 10 years since its inception, sharing how the Company grew from payment focused business to a comprehensive 2B business solution provider with extended product offerings including SaaS, Fintech, and other; subsequently evolved to an ecosystem with recently added In-store E-commerce business that covers both 2B and 2C markets; finally successfully transformed into a "payment-based digital commerce ecosystem". Till now, Yeahka serves nearly 7 million active merchants, with its service covering over 800 million consumers and generates nearly 100 million daily payment transactions within its ecosystem.

To prepare for the increasing complexity and uncertainty of macro environment, Luke outlined Yeahka's future development blueprint in his letter, which is "upholding value creation principle, establishing strategic certainty and implementation certainty". He said that the Company's positioning and overall big picture strategy is getting clear and the Company's next steps will be the refinement of sub-strategy in the future. He also added that the strategy execution will be realized by strengthening corporate management, optimizing organizational mechanism, cultivating talents and leveraging scientific management methodologies.

In relation to the Company's recent focus on the In-store E-commerce business, Luke reiterated his confidence in Yeahka's entry into the local lifestyle market. According to Yeahka's 2021 interim report, the Company has served more than 10,000 merchants with its in-store e-commerce services, with over 1.42 million paying consumers and a GMV exceeding RMB71 million. In order to further strengthen its capabilities in local lifestyle services, the Company invested RMB100 million for 60% equity of Dingding Cultural Tourism (Chengdu) Co., Ltd., expanding the scope of the Company's in-store e-commerce business.

Full text of the 10th Anniversary Letter from Luke Liu, the founder and CEO of Yeahka

Title: Yeahka's 10th Anniversary Letter - Toward a More Promising Future

Happy New Year, colleagues of Yeahka!

In today's world where uncertainty has become a challenge, we need to keep reflecting ourself both in work and life. Thinking about the many moving pieces of the Company's businesses and what is happening with life, I want to take the opportunity to review the path we have all travelled together at this meaningful point in time, and to discuss how we should develop as a company going forward.

On this day 10 years ago, I moved to 1802 Chang Hong Building, filled with anticipation for starting the offline payment business.

In the following five years, my colleagues and I explored possibilities of various products in the offline payment space. However, the product/market fit was less than optimal, so we could only rely on the venture capital investments and hang on to our firm belief, that immerse opportunities lie in the offline payment space, to survive with strong will.

In 2015, we set company strategy to be a "cloud platform for offline merchants", and chose the development direction of the Company to move "beyond payment". So we started the Smart Shopkeeper SaaS and fintech businesses. Looking back, these were very forward looking positioning and planning, way ahead of its time.

In 2017, we foresaw that mobile payment would change people's lives, and started to invest into QR code payment early on. We strongly believed that if we dedicate ourselves to each and every single payment transaction, we could accumulate massive merchant and user base, traffic, channels, bring more value to merchants, and develop our comprehensive technology services.

In 2020, we officially positioned Yeahka as a payment-based technology company, successfully listed the Company on HKEX, and became a high-profile IPO stock in the Hong Kong capital market. Ever since our listing 18 months ago, we have been thinking: where is Yeahka's next peak summit?

Currently, although we have experienced the global pandemic for the last two years, and are facing the greatest changes in the century, we still firmly believe that the nearly 7 million active merchants and over 800 million consumers we serve, the nearly 100 million daily payment transactions we support, the flow of capital and information among different entities, and rich portfolio of value-added services will create the foundation for a payment-based digital commerce ecosystem, same as the exchange of matter and energy to create a natural ecosystem.

Recently, we entered into the trillion dollar "local lifestyle" market in a big way, leap frogging from payment pureplay to providing enhancement of 2B business efficiency and financial performance, and subsequently to elevating the broader 2C consumer experience. Our chosen path has derived from mature and long-term business thinking, our drive comes from our innovative and assertive company value and genes, as well as our mission to consistently create value for merchants and consumers.

10 years is enough for a toddler to become a teenager, but for a startup company, 10 years is only long enough for us to go from survival to just starting growth. Perhaps Yeahka does not yet have a revolutionary product to change the world, but we have the resilience, the long-term and forward-looking ways of thinking, and the capabilities to grasp industry opportunities, which are most-needed for an entrepreneurial company like Yeahka. The qualities we possess make us confident about our future, and keep us as curious and excited as we were 10 years ago.

How do we deal with the complexity and uncertainty in the environment and still maintain our leading position? I believe the goal will be achieved primarily by upholding value creation principle, establishing strategic certainty and implementation certainty.

On strategic certainty front, through 10 years of continuous exploration, we have developed a proprietary "clover" model to analyze and measure the user value of our business, to assess our competitive advantage and economic moat, and to accumulate long-term company value. After 10 years of shaping and reshaping, the Company's positioning and overall big-picture strategy has become crystal clear, and the Company's next steps will be the refinement of sub-strategy in the future.

On implementation certainty front, we need to focus on management. Firstly, the robustness of the Company's organizational capability and the vitality of the corporate culture is the source of management power. It takes people with similar values to run a business. We ought to optimize our organizational mechanism to train and nurture talents. Also, we need to achieve goals by adopting scientific methodologies, identifying the core essence and key process points of issues, dissecting tasks from top down, and simplifying complicated matters. We will become very efficient on problem solving by adopting the above-mentioned practices.

In the past 10 years, we have gone through ups and downs, tears and joys through our journey of entrepreneurship. But for every enterprise to achieve its goals, this is a necessary experience. The experience is just like the youth we have all experienced. It is filled with contradiction and uncertainty, and there is absolutely no need to be overly joyful or depressed, as I believe the journey itself is actually the most wonderful part.

As long as we stand by our beliefs of creating value for users and society, we will be able to smile honestly and advance down the right path.

Let us march forward towards the promising future.