Online fraud fighters, SEON, is predicting that this year’s Black Friday will be a dark day for personal loan providers. According to the company’s internal data, this week’s shopping bonanza is likely to generate a 150% increase in attempted loan fraud, as cash strapped consumers try to illegally gather funds to secure bargain deals. 

It’s part of an alarming online fraud trend, which is being driven by cheap virtual phone numbers, custom domain names and email accounts. Fraudsters are utilizing these services to set up fake online profiles that are then used to apply for real cash. Sadly, this fraudulent process has never been easier, quicker or more affordable to pull off. 

The hyper-growth startup is also predicting that online lending sites will see a 300% surge in the use of suspicious emails ahead of Black Friday. This increase highlights the nature of many modern fraud schemes, which enable crooks to remain one step removed from online merchants and take advantage of distinct weaknesses in the application processes of BNPL and pay-day loan providers.

Lending companies could be about to suffer greatly in the lead up to Christmas. Unfortunately, huge discounts across the aforementioned methods of fraud have given criminals the upper hand this festive season. By raising industry awareness on this important topic, SEON hopes to help quell the issue before its full effects are felt.

New York, Toronto, Charlotte, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Novi Sad, Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad.

Synechron, Inc., a leading digital transformation consulting firm focused exclusively on the financial services industry, today announced that it has proudly joined the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) as a Silver corporate member. The announcement was made November 10 at the FINOS Open Source Strategy Forum held in New York. Synechron is among five new corporate members to join the consortium which brings the non-profit organization’s membership to 54 members. Synechron is joined by new members Bank of Montreal, WhiteSource, the EDM Council and the International Securities Lending Association.

As a new corporate member, Synechron will join the expanding consortium in its initiatives to bring open-source collaboration to the financial services industry. The broad and growing adoption of open-source technology allows financial services firms within the financial ecosystem to empower the next wave of developer-driven innovation. Synechron will be contributing its deep financial services industry domain experience and wide innovation expertise toward the FINOS 2022 focus on developer-centric financial services modernization. Specific attention will be paid to areas such as cloud services certification and DevOps mutualization.

“We are excited to join FINOS and its industry-leading members in their mission to foster the adoption of open source, open standards and collaborative software development practices in financial services,” said Faisal Husain, Co-founder, and CEO of Synechron. “Being part of FINOS and contributing directly to the Cloud Data Management Capabilities (CDMC) framework gives us the opportunity to collaborate with many of our clients at the same time towards a common goal of accelerating secure and compliant cloud use. We’ve been pioneering the development of cloud and pipeline controls over the last decade and are proud that our control testing technology is being deployed at the heart of the CDMC framework. We’re looking forward to expanding our involvement as maintainers of the Compliant Financial Infrastructure and Open Compliance for CDMC.”

“FINOS’ membership is growing in number, and we are glad to welcome collaborative organizations like Synechron that have extensive experience working with open source technologies across the entire financial services industry,” said Gab Columbro, executive director of FINOS. “By contributing time and resources to new endeavors, such as Open Compliance for CDMC, Synechron will be an important partner to further our goals to expand open source adoption across the industry. We see great potential for our work together and expect strong community engagement for our projects.”

“We plan to offer our expertise, initially, in relation to the Compliant Financial Infrastructure and Open Compliance for CDMC, thereby enabling contributors to build post-deployment validation tests that can be run from any infrastructure-as-code pipeline. That will ensure resources meet the strict CDMC standards,” said Eddie Knight, Senior Consultant at Citihub Digital (a Synechron company) and Developer Advocate for Probr.

Receiving the highest possible scores in 9 out of 24 criteria, TIBCO has been named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Master Data Management, Q4 2021 report. 

"Innovation in the master data, metadata, and reference data management markets is exploding. Cloud migration, new sources of real-time data, and AI-created synthetic data makes managing enterprise data a bigger challenge than ever,” said Mark Palmer, senior vice president, engineering, TIBCO. “TIBCO EBX is part of our agile data fabric blueprint, providing an automated, easy-to-navigate, scalable, and accessible platform to everyone, any system, on any cloud platform."

TIBCO defines “master data” as a single record of each person, place, or thing in a business, which must be reconciled, enriched, and corrected to become a trusted view of shared, business-critical data. Effective MDM promotes more accurate reporting, eliminating errors caused by bad data and enabling anyone to make better business decisions based on trusted data.

According to the Forrester report, “TIBCO Software is a long-time provider of MDM, and its purchase of Orchestra Networks made its platform feature-rich to support multiple domains. EBX is an all-in-one software solution to model, manage and govern enterprise shared assets. It is a multi-domain MDM, reference data management, and metadata management platform. TIBCO provides modeling, integration, data quality, and process-based collaboration. Key capabilities include REST APIs, built-in graph modeling, container support, and advanced authentication. TIBCO's strategy focuses on a higher degree of automation through AI/ML, simplified implementation, and extending its end-to-end MDM platform to accelerate use cases.”

TIBCO’s recognition as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Master Data Management, Q4 2021 follows a growing list of 18 acknowledgments as a leader from recognised analyst firms and peer review sites, positioning the company as a leader in data management, analytics, integration, and the cloud.

One of the most important Forex industry events took place on November 18-19, 2021 in Limassol

Live event are finally back so is the legendary Forex Expo with its return to Cyprus. Last Thursday and Friday became flagship for the Forex industry as a big part of it gathered in Parklane Hotel to network, learn and have fun. Panel discussions, workshops, networking at an expo zone, two parties and an award ceremony - this is just a part of what participants and attendees have experienced. Those who couldn’t travel for the event also got the chance to watch an online stream as the event was presented in a hybrid format to provide more than 10,000 viewers with an unforgettable experience.

Around 700 visitors have attended the expo zone and conference halls throughout two days where company representatives from different parts of Europe and Asia gathered to share their expertise and build new connections. As a result, many contracts have been signed and even more, networking done in comfortable spaces by a cup of coffee and a snack. 

The conference program became a great success too giving an opportunity to learn and grow. Last panel discussion on the topic of Affiliates, IBs in FX Industry featuring the moderator Andrew Mreana and such speakers as Jan Robert Schutte, CEO & Co-founder of CryptoAcademy.nl, Mahmood Noorani, CEO at Quant Insight Ltd and Elena Christodoulou, Regional Manager at DACH markets.com became a real show.

The pre-party welcomed the participants with an opportunity to meet and greet and finally hug those who they haven’t seen for a long time. Tasty food and amazing cocktails accompanied by great music created a mood for the productive expo-days. The main party saluted guests after the first day and granted the best companies with prestigious awards.

Some of the companies got their well-deserved awards. Nuvei was granted The Best Forex Payment Processing and The Best Forex Payment Gateway whilst PepperStone became the Best European Forex Broker. The Best Introducing Broker Program in MENA Region went to Delta FX, The Best Forex Multi-Asset Trading Platform to Match Trade and The Best Forex PR & Advertising to Buzz Dealer. FIDELCREST received an award for The Best Micro Forex in Europe, WIKI FX for The Best Forex Mobile App and Certus Finance for The Best Multi-Feature Financial Portal. To conclude, The Best Security Solutions Platform award went to eSafe Solutions.

Overall the event became a great occasion and an unforgettable opportunity for professional growth and expansion. Follow Forex Expo for more details on future events.

●      Only seven months after closing its $20m Series A financing round, Payhawk announces its Series B of $112m all equity round led by US investor Greenoaks, who previously invested in high-growth companies like Checkout.com, Robinhood, Stripe and Brex

●      This is the second largest ever Series B for a B2B company in the CEE region after UiPath, and is the largest and fastest Series B in the spend management space across Europe

●      All existing investors, including QED Investors, Earlybird Digital East and Eleven Ventures are participating in the round

●      Payhawk currently serves companies in 27 countries with its company cards and spend management platform across Europe and will continue its global expansion with aims to open offices in the US, Netherlands, France, Australia and Singapore

●      The fintech will use the new funds to accelerate its product roadmap with the launch of a credit card in Q1 2022, and low-cost cross-border transfers as an alternative to SWIFT payments

Payhawk, the payments and expense solution with offices in London, Sofia, Berlin and Barcelona, has raised $112 million just three years after its inception, valuing the company at $570m. The Series B round is led by the San Francisco-based investor Greenoaks, who has a strong track record of investing in high-growth technology companies such as Gorillas, Robinhood, Stripe and Brex. All existing investors, including QED Investors, Earlybird Digital East and Eleven Ventures are participating in the round.

Currently, finance teams are still bound to a high amount of manual work as they are using multiple disconnected tools for cards, payments, invoices and expense management. Payhawk reduces the amount of manual work by combining those key elements in one platform and therefore acting as a one-stop-shop for finance teams.

With high-growth companies, in particular, looking to digitise financial processes, Payhawk emerges as the leading platform for large SMEs and enterprise customers, especially those multinationals who have multiple offices worldwide.

In 2021, Payhawk introduced 3% cashback on all payments, new enterprise features, free bill payments, and support for Apple Pay and Google Pay in 30 countries. Since its Series A round, transaction volume through the platform has increased by 663% and continues to grow at 45%+ month-on-month in October. Its customer base consists of a mix of scale-ups and corporates in 27 countries across Europe, including A.T.U, Luxair, Flink, Viking Life and Wagestream.

In 2022, Payhawk will continue its expansion by aiming to open offices in the U.S., the Netherlands, Australia and Singapore, enabling the company to further expand its product offering by introducing credit cards and allowing smarter and cheaper cross-border transactions on top of its invoice management system.

These expansion and product build plans will run in tandem with growing the marketing and sales team in Payhawk’s key markets of the UK, Germany, Spain and Benelux. To further boost its enterprise focus, the company has appointed Paul Albert as SVP Global Sales, who will lead direct sales, partnerships and customer success.

Patrick Backhouse, a Partner of Greenoaks, said, “Ask any business owner, and they’ll tell you that managing corporate spend is among the most frustrating parts of running a company. It requires significant manual work that consumes employee time and introduces substantial room for error. Payhawk turns a fragmented process into a seamless one, providing a single place to manage the entire spending lifecycle from company cards to expenses and bill payments to invoices. We’ve been thrilled to see how fast they’ve grown, already serving a truly global customer base that’s attracted by powerful and delightful software. We think that painful expense reports and bill payments should be a thing of the past, and we are excited to partner with Payhawk on the way to getting there.”

Hristo Borisov, CEO and Founder at Payhawk, said, "Managing company cards, especially reports, bill payments, and invoices is currently a disconnected experience bridged by finance teams through a lot of manual work. We are building enterprise software running on global payments infrastructure that automates all spend processes. Our strong product background and engineering team allows us to move at break-neck speed. This, in turn, will enable global enterprises and fast-growing technology companies to transform how they manage their company spending, and improve efficiencies while unlocking employee time to be better spent elsewhere"

Adanian Labs has launched the Adanian Labs Venture Building Program call for startups for 2022. The program invites applications from tech entrepreneurs for the 2022 cohort of exceptional startups to join Adanian Labs in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria and South Africa.

Since its establishment in 2020, Adanian Labs has incubated fourteen (14) groundbreaking tech startups across sectors; have established a first in Africa partnership with Emurgo Africa, a vehicle of EMURGO, the commercial arm of Cardano and have raised seed funding for 4 of its existing startups. Some of these notable startups include:

• Afya Rekod (https://bit.ly/3kYpdLK)  - a consumer driven digital health data platform
• Phema Agri (https://bit.ly/3FK3BdZ) - an agriculture crowdfunding platform
• Paylend (https://bit.ly/3DJu0I4)  - an SME credit lending solution and others such as Twaa (https://bit.ly/3nJi5EP), eCobba (https://bit.ly/3HMOlyv) , Reward Adz (https://bit.ly/3ln5BBd) , Bloow and Ada Animation (https://bit.ly/3HOyZcO) .

As a smart technologies lab, Adanian Labs has two centers of excellence on AI and Blockchain, AICE Africa (AI Center of Excellence Africa) (https://bit.ly/3xcUBe4) and The Africa Blockchain Center (The ABC) (https://bit.ly/3oTh0JJ) to help achieve its mission of actuating the technology revolution in Africa.

The Adanian Labs venture building program offers a blend of technology development, technical support, business mentorship, access to market, partnerships and funding while helping startups apply lean principles in processes, learning, iteration and scaling of their innovations.

Adanian Lab’s mission is to build 300 impact driven tech startups that are commercially viable and scalable across the continent and beyond, with a vision to create exponential impact on the African economy through youth empowerment.

“We aim to build the next generation of socially impactful and commercially driven companies that will change the world from Africa. We are intentional in how we support entrepreneurs by de-risking the potential for failure through a 360 degree intervention that takes care of the key resources needed to help startups succeed.”  said Adanian Lab’s CEO, John Kamara.
 

Adanian Labs uses its unique positioning to provide critical support for startups through an evolving socio-economic ecosystem revolving around the sharing of resources, creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption.
 

Eligible Startups can register for the program on Adanian Labs website at https://bit.ly/3cCwqfT

AppTech Corp. a fintech company powering commerce experiences, announced today it filed its proxy statement and will hold its Annual Shareholder Meeting on December 29, 2021 at 10:30 am pst. To enable shareholders to attend despite their location, AppTech will hold the meeting exclusively online. 

Meeting details and instructions to access proxy materials have been disseminated to shareholders of record via direct mail in accordance with the notice and access model. Only such shareholders as of the November 10, 2021, record date are entitled to notice of the Annual Meeting or any adjournment thereof. If you are a shareholder and do not receive notice by December 8, 2021, please contact AppTech Investment Relations to obtain meeting details.

About AppTech (OTC: APCX)

AppTech Corp. is a publicly listed FinTech company utilizing innovative payment processing and digital banking technologies to complement our core merchant services capabilities. Our patented and proprietary software will provide progressive and adaptable products that are available through a suite of synergistic offerings directly to merchants, banking institutions and business enterprises.

AppTech is developing an embedded, highly secure digital payments and banking platform that powers commerce experiences for clients and their customers. Based upon industry standards for payment and banking protocols, we will offer standalone products and fully integrated solutions that deliver innovative, unparalleled payments, banking, and financial services experiences. Our processing technologies can be taken off-the-shelf or tapped into via our RESTful API to build fully branded and customizable experiences while supporting tokenized, multi-channel, and multi-method transactions.

For more information about our company, please visit www.apptechcorp.com.

With the launch of the new product, called Transparent Checkout, Volume seeks to do away with hidden payment fees and boost checkout conversion rates for ecommerce businesses 

• The ecommerce checkout experience is broken, costing online retailers globally $260 billion per year

• Two out of three shoppers don’t feel confident enough about security at the checkout

• Merchants face payment fees of up to 4%, which end up as hidden fees for shoppers

• Volume seeks to solve the dual issue of unfair fees and checkout conversion, making use of open banking rails to connect shoppers’ and merchants’ bank accounts and cut out middlemen in the payment process and a secure, seamless front-end

• Transparent Checkout’s end-to-end process takes under one second and fees are a flat rate with no additional per-transaction fee; on average 10X cheaper than e-wallets and 4X cheaper than cards

Volume, the payments fintech startup, has launched its 1-click checkout product for the ecommerce industry - Transparent Checkout. As well as seamlessly enabling consumers to pay online in one click straight from their bank accounts, the startup will allow merchants to save up to 75% in fees by cutting out payment transaction costs. Volume was founded in May 2021 by former WorldRemit, Mastercard and HSBC employees, Simone Martinelli and Chris Tarnawski.

The eCommerce payment experience is broken, with shoppers finding the checkout process at most ecommerce businesses too insecure, slow and confusing. YouGov reports that two out of three shoppers are concerned about security at the checkout. And according to Baymard, cart abandonment worldwide stands at 69%, costing retailers $260 billion in lost sales annually. In addition, merchants are also paying extortionate fees - every online payment today incurs a gateway fee, a transaction processing fee and an interchange fee eroding up to 4% of top line revenues. And the money can take up to seven days to arrive in the merchant’s bank account.

Volume aims to radically upgrade today’s broken customer experience at online checkouts. Building on top of open banking, Volume’s new 1-click online payment solution facilitates direct account-to-account payments between merchants’ and online shoppers’ bank accounts, eliminating intermediaries and cutting transaction fees by up to 75%. And the money is instantly settled with the merchant.

“What Transferwise did for currency exchange, we are doing for ecommerce payments, and more. Online transaction fees can go as high as 4% when using Fast, PayPal, or other e-wallets. This results in merchants being forced to raise prices, essentially creating hidden fees for online shoppers. But today, the existence of open banking renders fees imposed by card networks completely unnecessary,” said Simone Martinelli, co-founder and CEO of Volume. 

“We are transforming the checkout experience to make it as seamless and practical as possible for consumers, increasing conversion rates as well as boosting profitability for merchants,” he continued. 

Transparent Checkout’s end-to-end payment process incorporates native biometric security and takes less than one second, making it five times faster than conventional card payments. Volume charges a small percentage fee with no additional per-transaction fee, making it about ten times cheaper than PayPal and four times cheaper than cards. Its closest competitor, Fast, recently launched in the UK and charges merchants approximately 3% + 30p for each transaction. 

“Our mission is to create a universal checkout experience on the internet that works for both consumers and merchants alike. For the average ecommerce store, optimising the checkout area could lead to up to 40% more conversions. We want to optimise the checkout experience for merchants and the latest needs of online shoppers,” said Martinelli.

“We are already looking at new business models to help drive payment costs down as close to zero as possible. And we are also thinking of going beyond ecommerce payments, to make log-in and authentication more seamless across the internet,” he added.

Volume expects to soon close a seven-digit Pound pre-seed round before expanding to Europe and the US in 2022.