Research from BlackLine suggests Finance and Accounting is struggling to keep up with the pace of digital transformation across the wider business

A global survey of C-suite executives and finance professionals commissioned by BlackLine, Inc., a leading provider of financial controls and automation software, has revealed that just 14% of CFOs are confident that their finance function has the skills required to help their organization grow and adapt over the next five years.  Furthermore, more than a third (35%) of C-suite respondents believe Finance and Accounting (F&A) is failing to keep up with other areas of the business when it comes to digital transformation.

The survey of 1,150 business leaders and finance professionals (conducted by independent research agency Censuswide across the US, UK, Germany, France, Singapore and Australia) suggests that talent acquisition and retention are high on the C-suite’s agenda as companies seek to implement more aggressive growth strategies post-pandemic.  However, it also identifies a major skills gap that threatens F&A’s ability to provide the consultancy, analysis, planning, and due diligence required to support these broader business goals.

New Generation of Talent Critical for Growth

With close to a third (32%) of C-suite respondents saying they are planning to focus more on international markets for growth and acquisitions and a similar number (31%) planning to be more aggressive when it comes to acquisitive growth over the next 12 months, skills will be critical.  Many C-suite executives plan to invest heavily in talent with nearly a quarter of these respondents (24%) focusing on developing existing talent from within, and a similar number (23%) on new talent acquisition at a leadership level to drive post-pandemic recovery and growth.

The Finance Challenge

The research showed that skills and talent are particular concerns for CFOs.  When asked what their most pressing business concerns are for the next five years, many CFOs (32%) said maintaining a robust balance sheet is their number one priority, but almost the same number said the same of acquiring new talent (30%).  This concern is likely being driven by a skills shortage within F&A, something that was acknowledged by most survey respondents, with only a fifth (20%) expressing confidence that F&A currently has the right skillset. 

The Post-Pandemic Skills Gap:  Need for Talent With Concurrent Tech and Business Skills

When asked about the skills their organization currently has within the finance function, both C-suite executives and finance professionals highlighted a number of vital gaps.  More than a third (38%) of respondents said that not everyone in their finance team has the broad business leadership knowledge or skills required today.  A similar number (35%) said that not everyone in their finance team has the skills to help with more strategic work (like analysis and planning).

31% of global CFO respondents said they do not currently have enough people with software and technology experience within the finance function.  Furthermore, when asked what the biggest challenge is for recruiting future F&A talent, more than a third (36%) of overall respondents noted that it is difficult to find candidates with both technology and F&A skills.

“It’s positive to see that so many companies are now focusing on growth and that business leaders plan to pursue ambitious strategies to make this happen.  The global economy is in a period of recovery and it is vital that the finance function, which lies at the heart of business, is appropriately skilled to address the many challenges ahead,” said BlackLine CEO Marc Huffman.  “Business leaders must ensure that we retain and develop the people we have and are also in a position to attract the best the market has to offer; but as the survey shows, this can be challenging.”

The Way Forward

Responses suggest there are a number of areas businesses could invest in to help solve this modern-day skills gap, including updating outdated technology or processes.  The importance of addressing these issues is clear, with a quarter of respondents (25%) saying legacy technology and processes at their organization make it difficult to attract the best candidates.  In fact, legacy technology and processes were seen as more of a challenge for recruitment than being able to offer a competitive salary (19%).  Other challenges and opportunities identified include:

• The need to reduce transactional, mundane work.  When asked about the biggest negative impact on finance employee retention the top three issues were: a lack of opportunities to develop new skills because transactional work takes up so much time (28%); no time to focus on future career development (26%); and becoming bored with the mundane, repetitive nature of the job (26%).
• Addressing outdated perceptions of F&A roles that make it challenging to recruit good candidates.  When asked what stops people from starting a career in F&A, a lack of understanding about F&A’s integral role within the wider business was identified as the main reason by both C-suite execs and finance professionals.
• Revising traditional educational pathways that young F&A candidates tend to follow.  29% of C-suite and F&A professionals believe academic courses need to focus more on technology skills.

Mr. Huffman continued: “Finding people with the right technology and F&A skills seems to be at the heart of the issue.  To attract the best and the brightest finance talent moving forward, we must reevaluate tools, training and development, in addition to the perceived role that F&A plays within the business.  Delivery of business growth as opposed to purely survival will be dependent upon building a finance function that is as technology literate as it is financially literate.  People need to be freed from the mundane and given the space to focus on strategic business insight and value.”

More information, including a detailed whitepaper on the research, can be found here.

Blockpass is excited to reveal its most recent integration with IDO platform PlayPad. This effort will see Blockpass providing its enhanced solution for KYC, with a dedicated KYC remediation team, multiple reviews per identity, manual checks on selected profiles and spot reviews.

PlayPad is a fully decentralized launchpad protocol in the metaverse which specifically targets Games and NFT centered projects with a 'Tiers' system that aims to create a fairer IDO process. Supporting VR, Gaming & Play2Earn projects in the metaverse, PlayPad offers multi-chain support, working with the Binance Smart Chain and Avalanche ecosystem, in addition to the Ethereum, Polygon, and Phantom networks.

Blockpass is a digital identity verification provider which provides a one-click compliance gateway to financial services and other regulated industries. Through Blockpass, users can create, store, and manage a data-secure digital identity that can be used for an entire ecosystem of services, token purchases and access to regulated industries. For businesses and merchants, Blockpass is a comprehensive KYC & AML SaaS that requires no integration and no setup cost. You can set up a service in minutes, test the service for free and start verifying and on-boarding users. Currently with more than 200,000 verified user identity profiles, Blockpass facilitates instant onboarding, and to date thousands of businesses have taken advantage of this opportunity to get access to users with reusable digital identity profiles.

"PlayPad has shown how seriously they take regulation and compliance by electing to use Blockpass and the turnkey managed service opportunity." said Adam Vaziri, Blockpass CEO. "It's reassuring to know that the next generation of VR, Gaming and Play2Earn - which represents a significant source of income or entertainment for many - is being developed by those who hold safety, security and identity in high regard."

"It has been very important for us to find the right solution partner since the beginning of our project. Blockpass has taken the security of both us and our members to a high level with the KYC solution it offers in every aspect. All our members who have completed KYC can easily participate in all IGOs on PlayPad. We appreciate Blockpass Team effort." said PlayPad CEO.

Blockpass has grown significantly in size and use since its inception, both in the number and range of users and organizations it has partnered with and the scope of its work. Blockpass continues to develop its digital identity protocol with updates and additions to improve the compliance experience. The existential need for DeFi projects to be regulatory compliant and the recent integrations have led to a surge in interest for Blockpass' On-chain KYC(TM) solution which promises to change the way blockchains enable compliance. Through its recent work with Animoca Brands, Blockpass is developing the ability to provide KYC where the delivery of the verification result is provably sent and shown on a blockchain without sharing the underlying data. This represents a significant step towards the future Blockpass hopes to bring about where identity verification can be proved without revealing any personal information at all.

ControlUp gives employees the freedom and flexibility to access any line-of-business application from anywhere.

ControlUp, the industry leader in Digital Employee Experience management, announced today that it has completed a $100 million funding round, co-led by K1 Investment Management and JVP. This new investment will help drive innovation and partnerships, to give people the flexibility and freedom to work anywhere.

ControlUp helps deliver remote work environments that people can count on. Bringing together the largest and most diverse set of real-time metrics across mission critical SaaS applications, IT teams get a 360-degree view of their entire digital employee experience. Taking less than 10 minutes to deploy and see value, now IT teams are quickly empowered to proactively monitor and improve the health of their systems, gain architectural-level insights, and ensure employees have the freedom and flexibility to access any line-of-business application from anywhere.

“This injection of capital will accelerate our ability to help more enterprises open the door to the limitless possibilities of a simpler, more reliable work-from-anywhere experience,” said Asaf Ganot, CEO and Co-Founder at ControlUp. “We give IT real-time visibility into system status, with the ability to resolve help desk calls faster, and even handle potential system issues before they happen. All this translates to fewer headaches, lower costs, higher productivity, and happier people.”

Around the world people are demanding remote work options because its better.  Both managers and team members see increased productivity, improved work satisfaction, and meaningful reductions in attrition rates when they have the freedom to work the way they want. Enterprise IT teams want to deliver a seamless remote work experience, but obsolete systems can’t meet these new requirements. Today, enterprises need a new generation of tools that track in real-time system performance, solve problems faster, and leverage advanced technology like AI and ML to handle potential issues before they happen.

“In the post-COVID-19 era, IT managers of large organizations have the unique challenge of monitoring the performance of the network for each of their employees in the office, at home or in any other remote location,” said Erel Margalit, Founder and Chairman of JVP. “ControlUp provides a deep analysis of mission critical applications—for every employee—highlighting problems and finding remedies to solve them. The company’s dashboard enables IT managers to monitor, assess and improve the productivity for all the employees in the company.”

For over ten years, ControlUp has been working to make remote work simpler and more reliable. ControlUp is used by the largest enterprises to support their hybrid workforces including four of the top five US health insurance companies, five of the top eight US healthcare companies, and four of the top six global telco companies.  This past year, ControlUp has seen 50% revenue growth and 67% growth in enterprise accounts, and over 1 Million new seats deployed around the world.

“We continue to see a significant shift toward work-from-anywhere across all industries,” said Roy Liao, Senior Vice President at K1. “K1 is proud to partner with ControlUp as it continues to innovate and change the landscape of the digital employee experience market. By focusing on making the employee experience simpler, faster, and more cost-effective, ControlUp provides a unique value proposition that no other vendor fills.” 

Aerospike for Ad Tech on AWS accelerates and optimises adoption of hyperscale real-time data platforms essential to modern digital advertising

Aerospike Inc. and AWS today unveiled a new advertising technology (Ad Tech) industry solution designed to accelerate and optimise deployments of the Aerospike real-time data platform on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Modern Ad Tech platforms race to buy, sell, and serve hundreds of billions, or even trillions of ads per day to the right customer. Workloads reach tens of millions of read and write events per second at or near petabyte scale. This scale of data use and throughput requires extreme and elastic capacity and predictable, linear, sub-millisecond performance. 

The Aerospike real-time data platform enables organisations to act instantly across billions of transactions while reducing server footprint by up to 80 percent. Aerospike for Ad Tech on AWS enables customers to accelerate deployments using an AWS Quick Start guide, reference architectures, customer examples, prescriptive benchmarks, and cloud managed services for Ad Tech companies running Aerospike on Amazon EC2 instances. 

“Real-time data use is the lifeblood of digital advertising. Our real-time bidding (RTB) system has millions of ad requests per second, and we need low-latency access to lots of data to accurately respond to each one in milliseconds. If the platform fails to perform, scale or stall, advertisers instantly start losing opportunities and revenue,” said Ram Kumar Rengaswamy, SVP of Engineering at FreeWheel, a Comcast company. “The combination of Aerospike and AWS allowed us to build and optimise for the cloud, delivering an elastic, low-latency, automated and highly reliable real-time data platform that’s managed by just a single engineer.” 

Earlier this year, Aerospike unveiled the industry’s first petabyte scale database benchmark. Done in collaboration with AWS and Intel, the benchmark illustrates Aerospike’s sub-millisecond performance at petabyte scale on a remarkably small 20-node cluster—hundreds of nodes less than other databases for a savings of up to $10 million per application.

“Advertising technology businesses continue to see request volumes and throughput requirements soar, challenging infrastructure performance, maintenance and costs,” said Amit Shah, Principal - Product Management, Amazon EC2 at AWS. “As Ad Tech continues to push the limits of petabyte scale and millisecond latency workloads, customers can use this solution for Aerospike on AWS to reduce capital expenditures, innovate faster, and accelerate deployments to get to market faster.”

Customers can subscribe to the Aerospike real-time data platform from the AWS Marketplace, and as part of the AWS ISV Accelerate Program. Amazon’s global field sales will co-sell and support both Aerospike Cloud Managed Services and customer managed environments.

“Real-time and reliable access to data is table stakes in Ad Tech and many other industries. In addition to the scale, speed and reliability of the combined Aerospike and AWS platform, organisations also get the business advantage of being able to use even more data, from the core to the edge, for better real-time decisioning,” said Srini V. Srinivasan, Chief Product Officer and Founder, Aerospike. “As real-time data platforms continue to permeate more industries, companies that select Aerospike and AWS early in their lifecycle can confidently grow their infrastructure with linear performance at any scale without the need for replatforming down the line.”

For more information, please read the AWS technical blog about the solution and listen to the free webinar about how FreeWheel leverages Aerospike for Ad Tech on AWS.

Ketch, the next generation data control platform for privacy, governance and security, named a Gartner® Cool Vendor in Privacy^[1]. Ketch provides granular control over protected consumer data, including data discovery and classification. Ketch also offers end-to-end privacy automation including data subject rights (DSR) fulfillment --ensuring people’s privacy preferences are fully honored across data ecosystems.

In evaluating vendors, Gartner notes that: “Digital transformations and continued adoption of cloud services mean that personal data is processed in more locations than ever. It is imperative that organizations automate data discovery and governance functionalities in order to better protect personal data throughout the data life cycle.”

To help with this challenge, Ketch automates the discovery of personal data across a company’s data systems, and uses machine learning to classify and label data (e.g. personal, sensitive, and social security number, address, etc.). Through a central policy center, Ketch customers can articulate and enforce policies for access, security and privacy on data wherever it lies.

“Companies need an automated, scalable way to discover, classify, and inventory data for their privacy and data governance programs,” explained Tom Chavez, Founder and CEO of Ketch. “We believe that Gartner nailed the challenge succinctly: it’s not feasible for any company to comply with globally expanding regulations with a manual approach. We built Ketch to provide a programmatic approach to privacy, to help companies respect and honor people’s privacy rights, while responsibly using data to grow.”

To book a virtual demo with a Ketch expert today, visit: https://www.ketch.com/request-a-demo.  

CurrencyWorks Inc., an award-winning, full service blockchain platform provider, is pleased to announce that the Wave 2 “Rare” NFT packs released through its Motoclub platform as part of the Barrett-Jackson 2021 Las Vegas Collector Series have sold in 30 minutes in yesterday’s drop.

The final packs went on sale November 9, 2021, priced at $25 each, selling out to NFT collectors within 30 minutes. The complete run of “Rare” tier packs in the 2021 Las Vegas Series are now all sold, and no further packs of this will be minted to ensure scarcity and exclusivity to those that own them.

On November 16, 2021, Motoclub will release the last 20 packs from the Las Vegas Collector Series “Epic” tier. This Wave 2 drop represents the last of the packs from this campaign, and draws to a-close the 2021 Las Vegas Collector Series. Priced at $50 per pack, sales will go live on Motoclub.io at 12pm PST.

“The Las Vegas Collector Series has been incredibly well received within the space,” said Cameron Chell, Executive Chairman of CurrencyWorks. “The confidence these sell out drops have given us, provide a strong framework for real long-term success with Motoclub as we scale up with new products, new partners and a growing customer base.”

For more information on the Barrett-Jackson 2021 Las Vegas Series please click here.

New partners work with Mastercard to maximize scale, inclusion and consumer protection across more payment choices

Mastercard today announces further expansion of Mastercard Installments, its unique Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) program that delivers greater choice of flexible, digital-first payment options at checkout, both in-store and online.

In the U.S., American Airlines, CSI, Fiserv and TSYS, a global payments company, will work with Mastercard and the already diverse and dynamic array of participants in the program. In Australia, BNPL players hummgroup and Limepay are embracing the benefits of adopting Mastercard's innovative open loop model.

Mastercard Installments makes BNPL available to millions of consumers and merchants worldwide. It enables banks, lenders, fintechs and wallets to offer a variety of flexible installment options to consumers - including a zero percent interest, pay-in-four model – without onerous merchant integration. This allows participating partners to quickly offer secure and competitive BNPL experiences at scale through Mastercard’s trusted global acceptance network.

“Our diverse set of new partners demonstrate the versatility, flexibility and agility of our BNPL program,” said Craig Vosburg, Chief Product Officer, Mastercard. “Mastercard Installments offers a digitally focused way to pay today and tomorrow, delivered through consumers’ most trusted relationships with their banks and other lenders, at merchants of their choice. The program’s unique, open loop model provides lenders, merchants and consumers alike the ability to enjoy the benefits of BNPL purchasing, with the security and consumer protections they’ve come to expect from Mastercard.”

Delivering scale, inclusion and consumer protection

Consumers access BNPL offers, either through their lender’s mobile banking app or through instant approval during checkout. Pre-approved installments can be used directly on a merchant’s website or can be stored in digital wallets like Click-to-Pay to be used wherever Mastercard is accepted.

Mastercard Installments will also provide access to and support from a new suite of APIs at each step of the BNPL journey, from installment calculation to multiple repayment options. Learn more on Mastercard Developers.

Rebecca James, CEO of hummgroup said, “Mastercard is a key strategic partner for hummgroup as we roll out our BNPL products across our markets. We launched the first open loop BNPL in the world with bundll, using Mastercard’s rails, so truly believe in the benefits of this model for consumers and will work very closely with Mastercard to continue making BNPL even simpler for merchants to use. Partnerships are core to hummgroup’s growth strategy, and we’re delighted to continue working with Mastercard on their new open loop BNPL initiative to help us further scale our products.”

hummgroup has been offering BNPL to its customers for more than a decade, operating in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.

Willie Pang, CEO of Limepay said, “Mastercard’s new Installments program brings clever thinking and innovation to the evolving payments and BNPL ecosystem. As a brand-first, white-label payments solutions enabler that brings brands closer to their customers, however they pay, Limepay is looking forward to unlocking Mastercard’s scale and open loop network to enhance and build on its core offering to merchants. We’re excited to bring new innovations to our existing and growing portfolio of merchants by combining Mastercard Installments’ capabilities with Limepay’s white-label payments platform. We see our participation in Mastercard's program as a smart way to accelerate adoption of our platform, which is all about empowering brands to own their customer experience, loyalty and customer data."

Leading fintech bank breaking both traditional model and challenger approaches to drive next wave of integrated UK banking

FinecoBank, one of Europe’s leading fintech banks has continued to set the pace of revenue growth in Q3 2021 – following strong results reported in H1, exceeding last year’s record-breaking growth.

In the first nine months of the year, Fineco opened more current accounts in the UK than in the whole 2020, while improving the penetration of active clients on brokerage, representing more than 70% on new current accounts.

Highlights:

-                      Overall Fineco recorded robust net profit of € 257.2 million in 9M21 (+4,4% y/y)

-                      Revenues at 596.9 million in 9M21 (+4,1% y/y)

-                      FinecoBank has a strong and safe capital position: CET1 (Tier 1 Capital) Ratio is 18.37%

-                      Further European expansion with plans to launch in Germany by next year 

Paolo Di Grazia, vice general manager of FinecoBank commented:

“Financial needs are changing. The first nine months of this year have confirmed that a one-stop approach to connect banking, investing and trading all in one platform is the future for UK customers. New current accounts in the last quarter have been almost 70% higher compared to the whole of 2020. As we approach the end of the year, we expect this momentum to continue. We continue to grow at speed in the UK with the launch of Fineco ISA this year, and now over 20 asset managers available through our investing platform. We are also excited to announce that plans are underway to launch in Germany – a one stop digital solution across banking, investing, and brokerage will be the default model of the future in Europe.”

Fineco continues to drive its UK customer offering and has further expanded its investing platform with the introduction of more than 20 asset managers and the launch of the Fineco ISA in April. Fineco now has plans to improve its ISA with the introduction of multicurrency options, focusing on value and a personalised approach for customers by ensuring they can select the best investment solutions to align with their goals.