• Using instant account to account payments, Citizen Ticket can offer a faster, more secure checkout experience for clients

• Improves revenue by removing card interchange and transaction fees

TrueLayer, Europe’s leading open banking platform, today announced its industry-first collaboration with Citizen Ticket, a platform that provides online payments and ticket management tools to events organisers throughout the UK.

Citizen Ticket is a self service platform built to problem solve the live events industry. It ensures creators and event organisers can easily get paid for their projects and are protected from touts, counterfeiting and inflated booking fees. Citizen Ticket services events attended 'in-person' by thousands, live experiences streamed to the world and hybrids of both.

Citizen Ticket turned to market leader TrueLayer to deliver instant, account-to-account payments using open banking. With TrueLayer, it can provide digitally-native payments to customers that securely connect a purchasers’ bank account to the event organiser through the Citizen Ticket platform, using biometric methods such as fingerprint or Face ID to authenticate a payment in a matter of seconds.

As well as improving the customer experience, open banking payments through TrueLayer provide Citizen Ticket with much lower and more predictable processing fees compared to cards and other payment methods such as PayPal. This is because open banking payments remove the various middlemen and do not involve additional costs that card payments typically do, such as PCI compliance and chargeback processing. 

There is also a reduced risk of unauthorised payments and fraud, thanks to embedded strong customer authentication (SCA) and pre-populated payment details. TrueLayer’s higher payment acceptance compared to other open banking providers and payment methods, coupled to instant settlement capabilities, means less time spent managing failed payments that can lead to customer complaints and churn.

Harry Boisseau, CEO at Citizen Ticket, commented: “We have always prided ourselves on leaning into the future and innovating every aspect of our product. When it comes to processing our payments, integrating TrueLayer was a total ‘no-brainer’. We believe the future landscape of e-commerce payments will look very different in the years to come and we are excited to lead the way with progressive technical partners like TrueLayer.”

Roger De’Ath, Head of ecommerce at TrueLayer added: “The opportunity – and need – to create the best-possible online payment experience is huge, but it clashes with the reality of incumbent payment methods. Merchants are facing the challenge of mounting costs from failed payments, transaction fees and chargebacks. Open banking’s combination of higher payment conversion and lower operational costs represent the future of ecommerce checkouts. That is why we are excited to be collaborating with Citizen Ticket to deliver more user-friendly payments for the event booking market by making the checkout process as hassle free as possible.”

• Flip is an Indonesian fintech company leading in the consumer payment platform
• First investment by Insight Partners in Indonesia
• The new funding will fuel the company’s business expansion, technology innovation, and team development

Flip, Indonesia’s leading consumer payment platform, announced that it has raised $48 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Sequoia Capital India, Insight Partners, and Insignia Ventures Partners. This investment round in Flip also marks Insight Partners’, a New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm, first investment in Indonesia.

Flip plans to use this round of funding to further accelerate its business expansion, strengthen its operations in Indonesia, invest in technology to provide a higher quality of service, and expand its workforce with a focus on engineering and product teams.

Today, transferring money can be quite tedious for bank account holders – from funds getting stuck while transferring to lengthy clerical processes and poor product experiences with outdated interfaces and complicated flow. Flip aims to change this by helping individuals and businesses to eliminate complexity and execute their money transfers at a low cost.

Flip intends to be the most customer-centric financial technology company in the world and enable users to do fair financial transactions from anywhere to anyone. The company’s most prominent products include online P2P payments with interbank transfers to more than 100 domestic banks, international remittances, e-wallet top-ups, and business solution products.

“We are honored to continuously receive trust and prolonged support from our partners. We are also excited to welcome a leading global venture capital and private equity firm, Insight Partners, which has proven successes in the financial technology landscape globally. We believe this partnership will help us in pursuing growth and realizing our vision to build the fairest financial products,” said Rafi Putra Arriyan, Co-Founder and CEO of Flip. “This new funding is a testament to our team’s commitment and persistence. It gives us the resources we need to fuel and accelerate our mission to build innovative solutions that simplify money movement in Indonesia.”

Flip has grown significantly amidst the increased adoption of technology. The company serves over seven million users for various kinds of financial transactions from and to different regions in Indonesia as well as for overseas money transfers. In addition, its business solutions have hundreds of companies of all sizes, including SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) as users of disbursement and remittance services such as employee payroll, customer refunds, invoice/supplier payments, and international transfers

“Interbank transfer is the most dominant payment method in Indonesia’s fast-growing digital economy. Flip has a massive user base and is growing rapidly with outstanding retention metrics, all of which point to the delightful and seamless product that the company has built. Having partnered with over 50 fintech companies and several distribution-first payments unicorns, Sequoia Capital India believes that Flip is the most exciting consumer fintech company in Indonesia. The firm is thrilled to be leading the third consecutive round, testament of its high conviction in the company.” Aakash Kapoor, VP, Sequoia India.

“Flip is disrupting the existing interbank transfer market and has established itself as a clear leader in the category, with its superior product that allows for seamless payment movement between bank partners,” said Deven Parekh, Managing Director at Insight Partners “We look forward to working with Flip as they continue to scale and expand its product.”

“As the first institutional investor in Flip, we have witnessed the incredible growth of the product, and the execution of the team over the past two years. Flip is now the dominant player in its space with millions of Indonesians trusting the platform for their day-to-day financial needs. We look forward to working with Flip as they deepen their lead in Indonesia.” said Samir Chaibi, Principal at Insignia Ventures Partners.

The new funding follows Flip’s Series A round in 2020 led by Sequoia Capital India and Seed round in 2019, co-led by Insignia Ventures Partners and Sequoia Capital India.

Flip was founded by University of Indonesia alumni; Rafi Putra Arriyan, Luqman Sungkar, and Ginanjar Ibnu Solikhin who started building the company while studying. The platform is an answer to the problem Rafi himself experienced as a college student – having to wait for a long time to transfer funds and pay a transfer fee each time to different banks.

Continuing to work remotely, Flip has added over 250 team members to build fair financial services for millions of Indonesian people. The company has increased its team size by 140% over the past months.

18 million American students gain a stronger footing to access financial services online

Trulioo, the leading global identity verification company, today announced the addition of U.S. Student Records to the Trulioo GlobalGateway marketplace of identity services supporting compliance, know your customer (KYC), and anti-money laundering (AML) solutions. With the addition of this new service, Trulioo customers can now verify the identities of 18.3 million (97%) of American students.

This capability levels the playing field for Gen Z to access financial products and participate economically given that many students have little to no credit history — and are known to be experiencing heightened financial hardship from the COVID-19 pandemic compared to other generations. According to one study, 36% of American college students are food insecure, and 36% are housing insecure. What’s more, with home address being a conventional data point vetted in the identity verification process, it can be challenging for financial services providers to verify students that are in-between residences.

“Many Gen Zers, and even millennials, often encounter problems opening accounts or getting a loan due to their thin credit files,” said Steve Munford, Trulioo CEO. “The robust network of digital identity services from Trulioo enables organizations to reliably onboard thin file customers, remain compliant and mitigate fraud and risk, all while providing a seamless experience.”

With help establishing their financial footing, Gen Z represents a powerful consumer group for businesses. Gen Z grew up with the internet, making them known to be the world’s first generation of digital natives. They expect quick, seamless transactions where they shop, or they will likely move on to the next website or mobile app. In fact, according to an IBM study, 62% of Gen Zers will not use an app or website that is slow to load and 60% won’t use an app or website that is hard to navigate. These shopping patterns introduce novel pathways for accessing financial services. Together, Gen Z and millennials represent a major demographic force with substantial spending power estimated at $44 billion annually.

With the expansion of the digital economy, the need to reliably verify students and younger generations will continue to climb. GlobalGateway provides access to over 400 identity sources and services to reliably and securely verify the identities of over 5 billion individuals around the world through one API. Learn more here. 

AllianceBlock is one of the first DeFi players selected to join the Swiss OpenWealth Association of traditional finance players including Credit Suisse, LGT, VP Bank, and many more

Furthering its mission of compliantly bridging the gap between decentralized finance (DeFi) and traditional finance, AllianceBlock has joined the renowned Open Wealth Association, the leading Swiss ecosystem of global financial institutions and WealthTechs. 

The Open Wealth Association aims to define, maintain and operationalize the open Application Programming Interface (API) standard for the global wealth management community, allowing for more seamless sharing of financial information between institutions. 

Building the future of finance today, AllianceBlock currently provides a stable, compliant gateway for institutional players to access opportunities and technologies within DeFi. Its membership of one of the most connected circles of top-tier banking and traditional finance institutions in Switzerland reflects the growing institutional interest in DeFi and a desire to create a seat at that table for AllianceBlock and other DeFi players within traditional finance networks. Traditional banking members include Credit Suisse, LGT, VP Bank, as well as leading WealthTech members such as Assetmax and InvestSuite. 

The AllianceBlock product suite allows banks, institutions, and WealthTechs to gain access to DeFi via a suite of integrated products that allows banks to connect with and retain clients and assets in a seamless, compliant way. These compliant solutions include an NFT lending platform for illiquid assets (e.g. art, collectables, illiquid funds) for wealth managers and a decentralized investing platform for investors and start-ups. The suite also provides investment products based on tradable DeFi yield strategies wrapped certificates, with International Securities Identification Numbers (ISIN) that can be traded on any stock exchange, and a number of DeFi data solutions that channel all DeFi data into one enterprise-grade API.

Rachid Ajaja, CEO and Founder of AllianceBlock said, “One of the greatest challenges to widespread adoption and integration of DeFi is a lack of understanding. In joining the Open Wealth Association, AllianceBlock is opening its door to other members, where we will both lend our expertise and learn from those working at the forefront of change within the global financial system. AllianceBlock is well-poised to educate a new network of institutional players about DeFi’s ability to reshape the traditional finance world, making it more open, streamlined, and cost-effective. We are excited to work with a host of incredible people to foster innovation, collaboration, and further integration of DeFi  across the finance industry.” 

• Around 10% of global card payments are commercial or corporate in nature
• With a projected market size of $90.4 billion in 2020, the global corporate cards market is set to experience a compound annual growth rate of 18.9% between 2020 and 2025
• Virtual cards will continue on their strong growth vector and, with increasing recognition of the working capital benefits that the payment vehicle provides, should continue to grow long term at a 30% rate

The Payments Association (formerly The Emerging Payments Association (EPA)), today announces the release of its report Navigating the New Opportunities for Corporate Cards. The report looks at how the way that larger companies pay has changed in the two years following the pandemic, when digitalisation of payments was a major trend in banking for individuals and small companies.

The insight shows that although innovation in this area is slightly lagging behind the choices available to individuals through ‘challenger banks’, the fintech industry is increasingly offering larger companies increased flexibility and choice through digital technology. Created by a consortium of The Payments Association’s members that included senior figures from FIS, Cardlay, Schiltz & Schiltz, NatWest, FLEETCOR and Accenture, this expertise mix drawn from established banks, fintechs and regulatory experts gives a broad view of the corporate cards landscape and its future.

The consortium has found that commercial cards, whether they are issued to individuals to pay for expenses or used to pay for larger business expenses by the company itself, are a critical component of commercial client relationships, and the use of these cards is growing. Europe had an estimated corporate card market size of $7.8 billion in 2020, and this is predicted to grow by 7.4%, largely fuelled by demand for corporate and procurement and purchasing cards from governments, public sector entities and large corporations.

The rising demand for better payment solutions at enterprise level is driven by the difficult economic environment in the early part of 2020, in which commercial credit card spend outside of North America dropped by 42%. Although data shows that commercial card spending has almost returned to pre-pandemic levels, this experience showed large organisations the need for agile, modern payments technology to protect their cashflow.

Fintech companies have entered the $7.8 billion European commercial card market with innovative solutions that expand upon what a commercial card can do with new digital functionality. Virtual cards that can be configured for each user with custom rules can significantly drive cost savings and reduce administration while also reducing fraud and misuse. Open Banking protocols are allowing companies to use Request-to-Pay (RTP) services to send and request money instantly. API integration means that companies can keep track of transactions from a single integrated platform, giving them an overview of spending in real time. These examples barely scratch the surface of what will be possible in corporate card payments in the coming years.

Tony Craddock, Director General at The Payments Association, comments: “We are very encouraged by what we have seen both from within the fintech industry, from established players in the payments space and from companies across Europe when it comes to the evolution of payments. Two difficult years have meant that the necessity of having access to working capital today rather after the sixty days terms in an invoice has been driven home, and we are seeing the payments industry create new products to meet that need.”

Silvia Mensdorff-Pouilly, SVP and Head of Sales Europe at FIS, adds: “The regulatory and accounting requirements of large organisations often mean that change is slow, but there is a golden opportunity here for companies to become more efficient and increase their own working capital by embracing new digital payment solutions. We can predict that there will be a much greater uptake in modern commercial card solutions among large companies over the coming years.”

Up to 40% Better Price Performance than Existing GPU-based Amazon EC2 Instances  is Now Available with a Single Click

cnvrg.io, the operating system for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) built by data scientists, today announced that Habana’s Gaudi AI Accelerator is available on cnvrg.io’s  Metacloud marketplace of AI infrastructure solutions.  cnvrg.io Metacloud enables AI developers to run AI/ML workloads on a mix of infrastructure and hardware choices, even within the same workflow or pipeline.  Today, AI developers can reduce the cost to train models, and innovate faster by optimizing training capacity, effectively merging their on-premises capacity with Amazon EC2 DL1 instances powered by Gaudi accelerators.

Many AI projects are stalled due to the limitations of existing IT infrastructure to meet the growing demands of AI workloads. From the Metacloud marketplace, developers can now choose the Gaudi-accelerated Amazon EC2 DL1.24 xlarge instance for any AI workload, which is optimized for training neural networks.  Gaudi-accelerated instances yield up to 40% better price-performance than GPU-based instances.

This latest integration of Gaudi accelerator solution on cnvrg.io Metacloud Marketplace enables AI developers using cnvrg.io Metacloud to take advantage of Habana’s cutting-edge technology on the fly, free from vendor lock-in and the need to develop a new AI stack.

“cnvrg.io and Habana are helping Seagate seamlessly employ our on-premises data center infrastructure and burst incremental capacity onto the AWS’s Amazon EC2 DL1 instance cloud based on Gaudi AI training processors—within a single Seagate AI workflow pipeline,” said Bruce King, Data Science Technologist at Seagate Technology. “Merging our data center resources with AWS EC2 instances via cnvrg.io integration of Habana Gaudi is expected to yield unprecedented productivity results for Seagate and enable us to lower TCO, while accelerating our time-to-train functions.”

“cnvrg.io and Habana are pioneering the AI industry with the combination of two industry firsts: processing power for AI on demand from combined cloud and on-premises infrastructure and AI training instances by AWS based on Habana Gaudi,” commented Yochay Ettun, CEO and Co-Founder at cnvrg.io.  “Together, we are making AI more accessible and powerful so enterprises can generate better insights faster to achieve higher levels of efficiency and superior customer experiences. cnvrg.io Metacloud is the first AI platform in the industry to support CPU, GPUs and Habana Gaudis seamlessly in the same pipeline”

“Our combined solutions provide flexibility and high-performance processing, making AI more open, cost effective, and powerful”, said Eitan Media, Chief Business Officer  at Habana Labs.  “The ability to choose the Gaudi AI computational power—whether in on-premises infrastructure or in the recently launched Amazon EC2 DL1 instance-- on the fly makes the advanced technology more available so enterprises can experience the benefits of AI/ML flexibly and with speed and ease.”

cnvrg.io Metacloud provides integrations with the Gaudi AI Accelerator, Intel CPUs, AWS EC2 instances, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Dell, Red Hat, VMWare, Seagate and more. Exclusive early access to the cnvrg.io Metacloud is now available upon request on our website at https://metacloud.cloud.cnvrg.io/early-access.

Secret Server recognized once again for leadership managing privileged accounts and access

ThycoticCentrify, a leading provider of cloud identity security solutions formed by the merger of privileged access management (PAM) leaders Thycotic and Centrify, is proud to announce that it has won the 2021 Computing Security Excellence Awards in the Identity & Access Management (IAM) category.

A statement from the award organizers stated that the company’s Secret Server solution is an “interesting take on the concept of privileged management.” Secret Server enables organizations to ensure that all accounts with privileged access capabilities are vaulted and protected against misuse. The solution empowers IT teams to discover any overlooked accounts on their system and bring all of them up to the same standard of security.

“We’re honoured to be recognized with the Computing Security Excellence award, a testimony to our leadership in identity and access management and Secret Server’s innovative approach to privileged access management,” said Chris Smith, Chief Marketing Officer at ThycoticCentrify. “In IT environments redefined by digital transformation, remote workforces, and the cloud, every user is now a privileged user, making PAM a more significant part of any IAM strategy. This award ends an eventful 2021 for ThycoticCentrify on a high note, and we will carry this momentum into the new year.”

As cyber threats continue to increase, effective and agile PAM has become mission-critical for organizations of every size. Secret Server is a fully-featured Privileged Access Management solution available both on-premises and in the cloud. Secret Server makes it easy to detect, control, change and audit privileged accounts, giving security and IT ops teams the agility to secure and manage all types of privileges, protecting administrator, service, application, and root accounts from cyberattacks.

The full list of 2021 Computing Security Excellence Award winners can be found here.

The 2021 Hacker-Powered Security Report: Industry Insights reveals ethical hackers have reported over 66,000 valid vulnerabilities to organizations this year

HackerOne, the world’s most trusted hacker-powered security platform, today announced that hackers have reported over 66,000 valid vulnerabilities this year - over 20% more than 2020 - with hacker-powered pentests seeing a 264% increase in reported vulnerabilities. Pandemic-led digital transformation and cloud migration continue to create vulnerabilities as attack surfaces expand and services are outsourced.

The annual Hacker-Powered Security Report: Industry Insights provides insights from the world’s largest database of vulnerabilities and bug bounty customer programs. This year’s report revealed bounty prices for high and critical vulnerabilities are rising as organizations prioritize high-impact bugs. Businesses are also remediating vulnerabilities faster than ever as vulnerability management increasingly becomes a core business priority. The report also includes the latest Top 10 vulnerability data, showing where efforts are going to prioritize fixing vulnerabilities and what vulnerabilities organizations see the most value in paying out for.

“Even the most conservative organizations are recognizing the power of the outsider point of view,” said Chris Evans, HackerOne’s newly appointed CISO and Chief Hacking Officer. “We’ve continued to see high growth in the financial services sector, for example. Measuring and quantifying risk is their business, and they’re seeing that both risk and business outcome is better if they embrace hackers. Across the board, we’re seeing customers using vulnerability report data to inform their software development lifecycles. Organizations are catching issues earlier, and remediating them, at greatly reduced cost by focusing on improvements to developer education, source code integrations, and development frameworks.”

Additional key findings from the report include:

• The adoption of hacker-powered security programs is growing across all industries, with a 34% increase in total customer programs in 2021.
• The traditionally conservative industries of financial services and government continue to lead in adoption of hacker-powered security testing programs, with a 62% increase in financial services programs and an 89% increase of government programs, led this year by the UK’s Ministry of Defence and Singapore’s GovTech agency.
• Hackers reported 21% more vulnerabilities in 2021 than 2020. While traditional bug bounty saw a 10% increase in valid vulnerability reports, Vulnerability Disclosure Programs (VDPs) saw a 47% increase, and reports from hacker-powered pentests rose by 264%
• The median price of a critical bug rose 20% from $2500 in 2020 to $3000 in 2021. The average bounty price for a critical bug rose by 13%, and by 30% for a high severity rated bug. 
• In the past year, the industry-wide median time to resolution fell by 19% from 33 days to 26.7 days, with some industries such as retail and e-commerce seeing time-to-remediation dropping by more than 50%.
• The number-one most discovered bug on HackerOne continues to be Cross Site Scripting, but other bug categories have seen a significant increase in reports since 2020. Information Disclosure saw a 58% increase in valid reports and Business Logic Errors had a 67% increase, giving them a spot on the Top 10 for the first time.