Many financial advisory firms have a strong preference toward easier-to-use cloud solutions, whether due to internal IT staff constraints or the desire to focus more resources on core competencies. Aligned with this trend, RedBlack, an intelliflo solution, has released the cloud edition of its market-leading portfolio rebalancing and trading platform, which is used by more than 150 RIA firms, investment managers and family offices to manage over $300 billion in AUM.

The RedBlack Cloud Edition provides a high-performance software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to deliver advanced, personalized rebalancing and robust order management at scale in a multi-custodian environment. RedBlack Cloud capabilities include:

• Portfolio monitoring at the account and household level
• Rules-based rebalancing and trading on portfolio drift, restrictions, equivalents, asset location preferences and other rebalance settings
• Tax-sensitive rebalancing in line with household tax budgets
• Real-time compliance and restriction validation
• Order management via FIX to major custodians and brokers
• Compliance-ready, searchable archives of historical orders
• Integrations with portfolio management and trust accounting systems, custodial data providers, brokers, market data feeds, and more

According to Aite Group, cloud services are expected to see heightened adoption as wealth managers aim to achieve greater operational efficiencies across the value chain.¹ Accenture estimates that companies migrating business areas to the cloud can cut total cost of ownership (TCO) by as much as 40 percent.²

“The cloud is an essential part of business continuity and accelerating growth. Combined with the resource efficiencies and other proven benefits, rebalancing and trading have never been more personalized, precise, efficient and scalable than with RedBlack Cloud. It also makes us capable of reaching even more RIAs looking to grow their businesses,” said Jennifer Valdez, president, Americas for intelliflo. “We are fully committed to advancing both our traditional desktop version and our new cloud edition and continuing to offer firms a choice in delivery model.”

Company recognized for innovation, technical excellence and transformation in blockchain-based digital payments

Tassat Group Inc., a global provider of blockchain technologies and products for financial institutions, today announced that it has won a Google Cloud Financial Services Customer Award, recognizing the technical excellence and innovative capabilities of the TassatPay^TM Network.

The inaugural award was presented at the Google Cloud Next ‘21 global digital event on October 12, 2021. Tassat was selected for its achievements with Google Cloud, utilizing the industry-leading service to help power its offerings, which give banks the benefits of blockchain, such as real-time payments, smart contracts and enhanced data capabilities.

TassatPay enables real-time, on-demand, 24/7/365 payments for banks to offer their commercial customers and works by tokenizing their U.S. dollar deposits. The only platform of its kind to be vetted by major banking regulators, TassatPay has been fully operational for almost three years and has processed billions of dollars in tokenized payments.

Ron Totaro, CEO, Tassat said: “It’s an honor to be recognized by one of the world’s foremost technology providers as a leading innovator in blockchain payments. TassatPay is a mission-critical centerpiece of our bank customers’ digital infrastructure and working with Google Cloud enables us to easily add new banks to our network and deliver a secure, robust and reliable operational experience. We’re excited by the role we’re playing in shaping the digital economy as we onboard new banks and the businesses they serve onto the TassatPay Network.”

 InsurTech NY, the largest InsurTech community in North America, announced today its second growth-stage InsurTech accelerator cohort.

15 startups were chosen to participate in the hybrid virtual and in-person insurance accelerator program. The program will provide resources to help startups with traction, talent, and financing. Founders will work with insurers seeking to provide risk capital to digital MGAs and to pilot new technologies.

“We are proud to welcome our second cohort into the program to accelerate their growth,” said David Gritz, InsurTech NY Managing Director. “They are fortunate to be supported by a strong alumni base that has already raised more than $210 million of follow-on funding and completed one acquisition.”

Selected startups include:

Life, Health, and Benefits Lines: 360F, Amplify, Bright Dime, Manifest, PerfectQuote, Spring, Sqwire, and Trusty.care

Property and Casualty Lines: Humn.ai, Innoveo, JAUNTIN', Joshu, Safely, Steadily, and a stealth startup

“The hybrid accelerator format made it possible for Amplify, a San Francisco Bay Area startup, to access the global network organized by InsurTech NY,” said Hanna Wu, Co-founder of Amplify. “We will seize the opportunity to collaborate with the program mentors to accomplish our mission -- enabling the next generation to build wealth through permanent life insurance.”

For traction, more than 30 members and mentors from insurance carriers and brokers will work closely with startups to establish partnerships and support investment. Participating startups had the opportunity to participate in 2 full days of networking and education in New York City on September 22 and 23. The program will continue to run virtually until its culmination at a Demo Day in NYC on November 16.

Fintech Startup Fills Gaps Left by the Traditional Financial System

CapWay, Inc., a financial technology startup based in Atlanta, has announced the launch of its neobank, the core service in its financial system of inclusive products and services. With a CapWay Money Account and CapWay Visa (virtual and physical) debit card, benefits include the ability to make online transactions, send and receive money, and round-up change per transaction to direct towards "Money Goals."

Prior to launching, the company had amassed a lengthy waitlist of individuals interested in opening an account, which CapWay onboarded over the summer. Now open to all, consumers can download the CapWay mobile app or visit the website to open a CapWay Money Account; create, save, and collaborate on Money Goals; consume financial content; and enroll in financial programs.

With CapWay Money Accounts, there are no monthly, minimum balance, nor overdraft fees, and account holders can get their direct deposit early, which allows more of their money to work for them. CapWay's saving product, Money Goals, enables users the option to share their money-saving progress or ask for financial contributions from family and friends to achieve their Money Goal.

In addition to a debit card, CapWay offers financial content and education through its platform. CapWay financial literacy programming, called Phunds, is available to different organizations - including employers, schools, and community organizations. Individuals can also subscribe to Phunds programs and modules.

Other content includes Learn Money - articles, videos, and infographics - and Money Talk, a place to vote on polls and have conversations with other CapWay users about hot financial topics.

"There are many financial gaps in the traditional banking and financial system. Whether it is income, access, digital, or information gaps, they all impact the working-class American's ability to get ahead," says Sheena Allen, CEO of CapWay, Inc. "My vision for CapWay is to build an inclusive financial system and offer access and opportunity to everyone - especially those who have been misunderstood, overlooked, and underserved. We have to start at the root of the systematic challenges and address those issues by first filling the gaps to allow people to improve their financial health and ultimately help them create generational wealth."

CapWay operates under direct business-to-consumer (B2C) and indirect business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) models through CapWay's partnership model.

"As a founder from a rural, underbanked community, I recall discussing the impact of the cashless economy years ago when CapWay was in the idea stage. We then went into stealth mode and considered and understood the forever impact of COVID-19 on banking. And with that, we are ready to bring innovation to the financial service industry for those who need it and deserve it the most," adds Allen.

Initialized Capital led the pre-seed funding round for CapWay, Inc. CapWay's seed round included investors Y Combinator (S20), Khosla Ventures, Softbank Opportunity Fund, Commerce Ventures, Fearless Fund, Valor Ventures, Indicator Ventures.

Michele Shepard Joins as Chief Commercial Officer and Balaji Devarasetty Joins as Chief Technology Officer

Paya, a leading integrated payments and commerce solution provider, today announced the addition of Michele Shepard as Chief Commercial Officer and Balaji Devarasetty as Chief Technology Officer. With these leadership appointments, Paya continues to strengthen its position within integrated payments and enhance its go-to market strategy and solutions suite.

“The addition of Michele Shepard and Balaji Devarasetty to our executive team positions Paya to drive continued growth through accelerated innovation and expanded distribution of our leading, enterprise-grade integrated payments platform,” said Jeff Hack, Paya CEO. “The ability to attract this caliber of talent speaks to the momentum of our business and the enhanced brand visibility Paya has created since becoming a public company almost a year ago and will serve us well as we focus on expanding our leadership position within attractive end markets. Both Michele and Balaji have a proven track record of developing high performing talent and cultures, delivering exceptional results for both customers and shareholders,” Hack concluded.

As Chief Commercial Officer, Michele Shepard will focus on developing and executing forward-thinking customer engagement strategies across sales, marketing, and customer success. Michele’s previous experience includes leading high-performing sales, marketing, and business development teams, as well as developing and implementing successful go-to-market strategies at high growth vertical software companies Insurity and Vertafore. Michele also served as a senior sales leader at Gartner, focusing on tailoring sales to targeted vertical end markets.

In his role as Chief Technology Officer, Balaji Devarasetty will oversee product and platform development to support Paya’s growth trajectory. Most recently, Balaji was Head of Technology at Bakkt, a leading digital asset platform. Balaji’s previous experience includes leading high-growth financial technology and integrated payments teams and he served as the Chief Technology Officer for Integrated Payments at Vantiv.

Darrell Winfield, Paya’s Chief Information Officer, continues in his role, focusing on Paya’s long-term innovation agenda and product roadmap. Additionally, Darrell will take responsibility for further developing relationships with key clients and prospects across Paya’s verticals.

Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements made in this press release are "forward looking statements" within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. When used in this press release, the words “anticipate,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “might,” “plan,” “possible,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “should,” “would,” “will,” “approximately,” “shall” and similar expressions may identify forward-looking statements, but the absence of these words does not mean that a statement is not forward-looking. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, conditions or results, and involve a number of known and unknown risks (such as Paya’s inability to achieve its growth objectives or integrate and benefit from new executives), as well as uncertainties, assumptions and other important factors, many of which are outside our control, that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.

Smart Engines developed a new version of credit card scanner to OCR data of cards of 21 worldwide and national payment systems. The new OCR scans more types of free-form credit cards with a breakthrough AI-powered 2X speed up. The technology allows to streamline payments and money transfers in mobile apps as well as in web applications and real-time in-browsers solutions.

The 2x speed up boost was added to a wide range of supported types of cards — free-form cards — personalized cards with data flat printed anywhere on the card. The Smart Code Engine 1.7.0 supports scanning credit cards issued according to the standards of VISA, MasterCard, Maestro, American Express, JCB, UnionPay, Diners Club, Discover, RuPay, Elo, Verve, VPay, Girocard, PagoBancomat, MyDebit, Troy, BC Card, Interac, Carte Bancaire, Dankort, MIR, and provides an automatic credit card scanning for cards of any type: embossed, indent, and flat printed, with horizontal or portrait layout, with digits printed on the front or backside.

The Smart Code Engine software delivers a next-level user experience and security when entering bank card data. The user does not need to focus on the card to extract the card number, the expiration date, the cardholder’s first and last name, and EU IBAN card numbers. The credit card scanner automatically detects the card at any angle and works even when the card is not entirely within the frame. The OCR is also resistant to poor lighting conditions and can accurately scan worn cards. The accuracy of the credit card number scanning reaches 99.68% at a speed of 0.035 seconds per frame on modern smartphones.

Using Smart Engines Green AI-empowered private GreenOCR® technology allows to OCR credit card data on devices with limited processing power: from cheap smartphones (Android, iOS) to tablets, thin clients, data collection terminals, etc. The embedded packet size for Android and iOS apps is only 4.5 MB. The credit card scanning is performed automatically, in real-time, and on-device — from video or a single photo. Smart Engines OCR is a GDPR, CCPA, PCI DSS compliant solution.

Wins showcase LexisNexis Risk Solutions as an industry leader for

its range of fraud and identity solutions

LexisNexis® Risk Solutions announced today that it is the recipient of four prominent awards, all of which highlight excellence in the fields of fraud prevention, identity authentication and verification and cybersecurity. The wins include:

• The 2021 CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards - Overall Cybersecurity Company of the Year
• The Global Banking & Finance Awards® - Decade of Excellence Anti-Fraud / Security Solution USA 2021 Award
• Juniper Research Future Digital Awards - AI in Fraud Prevention Innovation Gold Winner for LexisNexis® ThreatMetrix®
• Pan Finance Awards – Best Financial Services Cybersecurity Solutions

“It’s an honour to win all four of these prestigious awards, especially at a time when fraud and digital identity are more complex than ever,” said Steve Elliot, Managing Director UK & Ireland,  LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “Digital fraud has rapidly evolved in a short time amid the pandemic. Our solutions have adapted with this ever-changing landscape and we’re thankful for the global recognition of our commitment to helping organisations keep their business and their consumers more protected from criminal activity.”

CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards

The CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards strive to recognise the best companies, products, technical innovations and people in the cybersecurity industry. LexisNexis Risk Solutions earned the title of 2021 Overall Cybersecurity Company of the Year, showcasing the company as a leader in the fraud and identity space. The competition was particularly strong, with more than 4,000 nominations from companies all over the world.

The international competition is available to all individuals, companies and organisations involved in producing cybersecurity products and services.

Global Banking and Finance Awards

LexisNexis Risk Solutions won top honours with the 2021 Decade of Excellence Anti-Fraud / Security Solution award for the United States. Earlier in the year LexisNexis Risk Solutions won the Best Anti-Fraud/Security Solutions Provider award across the APAC, LATAM, U.S. and Western Europe regions.

The Global Banking & Finance Awards have honoured innovation, achievement, strategy and inspirational change across the financial industry since 2011. Sponsored by Global Banking & Finance Review, the Decade of Excellence Awards honour companies that have shown exceptional leadership and innovation in their field since the founding of the Global Banking and Finance Awards.

Pan Finance Awards Program

The Pan Finance awards programme serves as a measure of excellence, shining a spotlight on leading examples of best practices across the world of finance. Beyond the realm of the balance sheet alone, the awards programme also measures success through innovation, stewardship of the environment and positive contribution to society. The Program recognised LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Best Financial Services Cybersecurity Solution.

At a time when the world's economies have faced unprecedented levels of uncertainty, each award recognises an outstanding individual or organisation that has excelled over the last 12 months.  

Juniper Research Future Digital Awards

LexisNexis ThreatMetrix is an enterprise solution for digital identity intelligence and digital authentication that is trusted by thousands of leading global brands to inform daily transaction decisions. The Juniper Research Future Digital Awards awarded LexisNexis ThreatMetrix the Gold honour for AI in Fraud Prevention Innovation in the Fintech and Payments category.

Since 2008, the Juniper Research Future Digital Awards has recognised companies that are at the forefront of their respective fields. These companies deliver imaginative, innovative products or services that have the potential to disrupt their ecosystems and provide significant benefits to their target audiences.

Steve Elliot continues, “Our significant growth in recent years ultimately equates to us being able to better help our customers make communities safer, commerce more transparent, economic opportunities more inclusive, business outcomes more predictable and risk decision processes more streamlined. We want to inspire insightful decisions in a world of hidden risks and opportunities. As an innovator in the space, we continue to take bold steps to ensure broader fraud prevention, identity verification and authentication across all risk domains.”

Learn more about fraud and identity management solutions from LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

In a significant development for the global payments industry, BNY Mellon has collaborated with Microsoft to migrate infrastructure supporting wire payments into Microsoft Azure. As part of this advancement, BNY Mellon has developed a treasury cash management relationship with Microsoft Treasury built on the Azure cloud payment system.

This cash management relationship establishes the capability to secure high value wire payments that are critical to the orderly functioning of markets over cloud technology. BNY Mellon is driving forward the resiliency of the bank’s payments platform and the broader financial market infrastructure that it serves. The migration into the cloud also represents the latest step in BNY Mellon’s drive to digitize the payments industry with premier technology clients, like Microsoft. BNY Mellon is building on its strong existing relationship with Microsoft in which each company has served as a client and service provider to the other over years of collaboration.

Wire payments are the backbone of the global payments network, enabling institutions to move trillions of dollars around the world each day. Until now, the infrastructure supporting these high-value payments has relied upon on-premises processing centers, and while they remain the bedrock of payments functionality, sharply elevated payments activity during the height of the pandemic-related trading volatility focused attention on how best to enhance the resiliency of critical market infrastructure.   

Migrating wire payments into Azure is the most efficient way to expand capacity while simultaneously increasing industry resiliency by introducing an alternative workflow outside of physically hosted servers in processing centers. Collaboration began at SIBOS 2019, when BNY Mellon and Microsoft set out to determine how wire payments infrastructure could be hosted in Azure as the first step in a larger cloud-based digitization effort for payments.

While cloud-based payments are not designed to replace on-premises wires, they represent an important channel for capacity expansion during episodes of market volatility and could act as a pressure valve in the case of a risk event or some other disruption impacting processing centers. Furthermore, cloud-based wires increase industry bandwidth almost immediately, versus the six-month time horizon it would take to build a comparable physical payment processing center.   

“The events of 2020 demonstrated the need to accelerate digitization and helping clients in their digital journey. BNY Mellon’s cloud-enabled capabilities are critical to the strategy,” says Saket Sharma, Chief Information and Digital Officer for BNY Mellon Treasury Services. “Working closely with Microsoft Azure and our collaborators in Microsoft Treasury, this is further testament to our ambitions to digitize the entire payments industry, making it faster, more transparent, and more resilient for all market participants.”

“BNY Mellon’s successful migration of Microsoft Treasury’s wire payments into the cloud, using Microsoft Azure, is an exciting milestone in the modernization of payments,” says Bill Borden, corporate vice president of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft Corp. “We look forward to further combining Microsoft’s and BNY Mellon’s cloud, engineering and payments expertise to bring innovation to the broader financial services market, with the scalability, reliability and security it needs.”

Cloud-based wire payments is just the latest innovation BNY Mellon has introduced into the global payments infrastructure. Last month, the firm announced that Verizon is the first corporate client to utilize its Real-Time E-Bills & Payments service for retail customer bill pay. In July, BNY Mellon announced it was the first US bank to support SWIFT Go, a new service for low-value cross-border payments. 

To better serve clients and the financial services industry, Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:BR), a global Fintech leader, today announced the launch of the Broadridge Anti-Money Laundering Solution (AMLS), bringing new, leading-edge capabilities to Broadridge’s existing Intelligent Automation suite. The new solution delivers an end-to-end machine learning (ML) powered Anti-Money Laundering platform covering transaction monitoring, name screening, alert prioritization, and customer risk scoring.

“The application of machine learning to improve the results of primary transaction, KYC, or sanction screening services makes sense for firms across the financial services spectrum that have entrenched investments in legacy applications,” said Alastair McGill, General Manager of Data Control Solutions at Broadridge. “By leveraging new ML techniques to identify suspicious activity, we are enabling firms to make faster and more informed decisions, enhancing operational efficiencies, realizing savings, and bringing together entire Data Control functions within one intelligent automation platform.”

The current financial crime prevention ecosystem is fragmented and vulnerable to emerging threats. The amount of money laundered annually stands at $1.6 to $2 trillion and less than 1% of this laundered money is traced. Many existing rules-based AML solutions in financial institutions are not sufficient as money laundering techniques become more sophisticated and the resulting reputational and financial risks firms face accelerate.

The Broadridge AMLS is for firms and institutions looking to enhance their anti-money laundering surveillance to detect illicit money flows and bad actors. Broadridge’s product, powered by Tookitaki, is an ML-based AML platform that global financial institutions can use to substantially decrease false alerts and realize productivity gains while improving risk mitigation. It leverages innovative machine-learning techniques like AutoML, federated learning and network science to accurately detect complex money laundering activities and triage legacy system alerts through a Smart Alert Management system to accurately prioritize alerts for either rapid disposition or increased due diligence.

Broadridge’s AMLS platform complements existing rules-based systems by utilizing supervised machine-learning to identify thousands of risk factors that legacy solutions cannot replicate, to detect threats, and to self-learn via a proven Champion-Challenger framework that keeps pace with increasingly complex laundering techniques.

 Lendable Inc. ("Lendable" or the "Firm"), a leading emerging market fintech credit provider, is targeting a ground-breaking $100 million closed-ended fund focused on emerging and frontier market fintech investments.

The Lendable MSME Fintech Credit Fund (the "Fund") is designed to unlock access to financial services for over 150,000 Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), providing investors with high impact exposure to important markets and the potential of high uncorrelated returns.

This Fund provides credit to African and Asian fintech companies, who in turn offer fair credit facilities to MSMEs. These same MSMEs are the engines of wealth creation, financial inclusion, and economic growth in these regions, yet historically have had limited access to fair credit and financial services.

Backed by leading impact and development financial institution (DFI) investors, the Fund today has soft closed a $49 million investment from DFC, EMIIF (DFAT), Calvert Impact Capital, Ceniarth, BIO, FMO and FSD Africa (FSDAi). Another $20 million is on track to close in the fourth quarter and the fund is expected to hard close above $100 million in 2022. This is a five-year blended finance closed-ended Luxembourg Reserved Alternative Investment Fund (RAIF), with FSDAi and EMIIF providing the first loss capital tranche.  

Combining West Coast technology with Emerging Market needs, Lendable's proprietary Risk Engine analyses live borrower data from its investee fintech CRMs, opening-up an unparalleled level of granularity across the entire loan book. It is this level of transparency, both on an individual loan and portfolio basis, that enhances loan underwriting and allows for more effective and efficient risk management. This technology has already proven its predictive power, by accurately forecasting the impact of adverse weather, election unrest, COVID-19 lockdowns, and other local events.

The Lendable MSME Fintech Credit Fund is Lendable's fourth fund and with the soft close takes the Firm's overall committed capital to over $200 million. Since inception (October 2016) to 31 August 2021, Lendable has delivered an annualised net return of 14.32% to investors.

"We have had an amazing response to this Fund and have brought on board an impressive slate of leading impact investors and DFIs who back our approach," commented Daniel Goldfarb, co-Founder of Lendable. "Through our fintech investments, we are providing essential working capital for MSMEs that enables off-grid customers to buy energy products and opens the door to innovative digital banking services to consumers. It is about making a high impact difference."

Chris Wéhbe, CEO of Lendable adds, "We are incredibly proud of our track record in delivering genuine impact and consistent high returns. With our additional fund raising we can grow our committed capital, which will allow us to expand our reach into new markets, where we have a targeted pipeline of investment opportunities."

Marnix Monsfort, Director Financial Institutions, FMO, added, "Emerging market fintech investment has a direct and highly important impact on regional development. Sadly, all too often, quality firms struggle to scale due to a lack of adequate, tailored capital. FMO is excited to partner with Lendable as its proposition directly addresses this issue by bringing new capital to the table combined with their strong record of delivering competitive risk-adjusted returns for investors."

Algene Sajery, Vice President of the Office of External Affairs and Head of Global Gender Equity Investments, DFC, concluded, "Our investment in the Fintech Credit Fund will help catalyze the next wave of commercial investment into emerging market fintech companies. Development finance institutions like DFC can play an outsized role in attracting different types of capital with different risk appetites to the sector. By supporting transformative fintech companies, DFC and our partners can achieve greater impact while expanding access to finance for underserved communities – particularly women – in emerging economies."