The legendary Forex Expo, the most interactive B2B event with a 20 year history in the Forex industry, is once again returning to Cyprus in November 2021.

Forex Expo 2021 will bring together decision makers in the Cyprus FX industry, as well as those from elsewhere across Europe and Asia.

Providing a generous expo hall with over 40 exhibitors, Forex Expo 2021 will also have panels and discussions on topics of interest to the sector, with liquidity, cryptocurrencies, marketing, tech innovation, regulation, and payments being open for discussion.

Industry leaders will deliver the insights to traders and brokers at Parklane, a Luxury Collection Resort & Spa (Marriott), Limassol. The business program will be introduced by government speakers, the Ministry of Finance and CySEC of Cyprus.

Forex Expo creates a seamless networking environment – exhibition floor filled with booths from leading companies, public networking spaces for meetings, the slightly less formal evening events as well as the infamous night party.

The event is supported by FX News Group, the leading news and information website covering the global online trading industry.

You can already explore the opportunities to participate in this amazing upcoming event - https://forexexpo.com/ . Tickets are already available on the website and include standard, business and VIP packages.

As VizyPay continues to grow the company has shifted their hiring philosophy, looking for talent outside of the payment processing field

VizyPay, an award-winning leader in the payment processing industry for small businesses, today announces the appointment of Jason Bahnsen, as General Counsel and Director of Risk/Compliance, and Mana Thongvanh, as Director of Operations. Each is the first to hold their respective roles within the company; both will help to drive the organization forward through streamlined operational workflow, as well as with the development and implementation of a risk and compliance program.

“With VizyPay’s continued growth and success, we knew the next step in our expansion was appointing these directorial roles,” said Austin Mac Nab, CEO and co-founder of VizyPay. “In hiring outside of the payment processing space, we hope to continue disrupting the industry by bringing forth new ideas and innovative offerings, specifically from those who are able to look at the field through a fresh lens.”

As General Counsel and Director of Risk/Compliance, Bahnsen hopes to leverage his legal and compliance knowledge and experience in the financial services industry to help VizyPay develop and implement a risk and compliance program. “I look forward to bringing my own personality to the VizyPay atmosphere and culture,” said Bahnsen. “I’m also excited about the opportunity to partner with the people who have worked so hard to bring VizyPay to the level that it has achieved in such a short amount of time. I’m certain my good attitude and strong work ethic will allow me to quickly learn the nuances of the industry, enabling me to assist VizyPay in taking the next step in it’s already impressive growth.”

Thongvanh, as Director of Operations, will work to streamline the operational processes for five different departments - customer service, tech support, the POS department, file building for equipment and shipping and deployment - including external and internal communications, program implementation, adoption and more. “I’ve known Austin Mac Nab, VizyPay’s CEO and co-founder, for quite some time and have loved watching the company grow,” explained Thongvanh. “Now, I've been offered the opportunity to help drive this growth and success forward, and couldn’t be more excited about both mine and VizyPay’s next chapter together.”

Prior to this role, Bahnsen was with a private law firm where he practiced for 14 years in Creditor’s Rights Litigation as a Supervising Attorney and then Senior Litigation Attorney. Later, Bahnsen transitioned to a national bank where he served as Compliance Officer in Consumer Lending Compliance - Cards, Retail and Merchant Services for nearly 2 years before accepting the role at VizyPay.

Before VizyPay, Thongvanh was in the construction field for 17+ years holding positions including project engineer and project manager, for 13 of those years. In these roles, Thongvanh oversaw 20-25 million dollar projects such as the building of hotels, hospitals, casinos, apartment buildings and more, managing budgets, plans and contractors.

EMV® 3DS Version 2.3 expands support for digital channels and devices to help issuers, acquirers and merchants fight card-not-present fraud, while improving the consumer experience.

Global technical body EMVCo has enhanced the EMV® 3-D Secure (3DS) Specifications to improve the consumer experience and fraud fighting capabilities for issuers, acquirers and merchants across e-commerce channels and devices. The latest version, EMV 3DS 2.3, has been published following approval of its release by EMVCo’s Board of Advisors.

EMV 3DS 2.3 introduces enhancements to increase flexibility for optimising EMV 3DS implementation across multiple channels and devices, help issuers identify fraudulent transactions more quickly and accurately, and streamline the authentication process for consumers to improve the overall payment experience.  

Key updates include:

Greater flexibility to support different technical environments

·         New Split-SDK model with multiple variants makes it easier to implement EMV 3DS across both traditional and non-traditional e-commerce payment channels and devices, such as smart speakers and other IoT devices.

Additional authentication approaches to enhance security and fraud prevention

·         EMVCo has collaborated with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the FIDO Alliance to include support for WebAuthn (Web Authentication) and SPC (Secure Payment Confirmation) that issuers and merchants can use within the EMV 3DS flow to better determine the legitimacy of a transaction in order to reduce the risk of fraud.

Streamlined consumer authentication

·         Support for device binding, which enables the consumer to be remembered on their device and can reduce the need for an authentication challenge.

·         Automated out-of-band (OOB) transitions, which help the consumer to switch seamlessly between a merchant application and an authentication application.

·         Additional recurring transaction data and EMV Payment Token data, which help issuers to better identify the transaction and can simplify the authentication experience for future purchases.

“Fighting payment fraud and reducing checkout friction is key to businesses delivering a safe and convenient online shopping experience for their customers,” says Robin Trickel, Chair of the EMVCo Executive Committee. “EMVCo continually collaborates with the payments community to look for opportunities to optimise efficiencies, improve usability and promote consistency, without compromising security. We are excited about the potential of EMV 3DS version 2.3 to support the delivery of better, safer checkout experiences in new digital payment scenarios.

The EMV 3DS Specifications are available on the EMVCo website and include the EMV® 3-D Secure—Protocol and Core Functions Specification, the EMV® 3-D Secure—SDK Device Information, the EMV® 3-D Secure—SDK Specification, and the EMV® 3-D Secure—Split-SDK Specification.

New Relationship with Outra Puts Industry-leading, Comprehensive Property Data
at Point of Quote

From rebuild cost to square footage and listed-building status to roof type, home insurance providers can now assess risk based on insights from an extensive set of data about a property down to its individual characteristics, going beyond the information traditionally used or requested in the quote process.  LexisNexis® Property Insights is one of the first property data enrichment solutions to combine multiple predictive attributes for an individual address from the choice of 27 property characteristics from Outra, the predictive data science business.  

This combined data is set to support the market as it adjusts to new pricing rulesi, allowing insurance providers to build a very detailed picture of risk for new business and renewal pricing, and to help ensure products are suited to the customers’ needs. It also reduces the reliance on customers to fill gaps in knowledge about their properties.    

The data available from Property Insights can be injected at the point of quote through the LexisNexis® Informed Quotes platform, which connects to all major software houses. This offers a single point of access to a highly comprehensive range of datasets to help inform quoting and underwriting decisions, allowing insurance providers to speed up the quoting process and reduce referrals. The data can also be used to pre-populate application forms, for example, rebuild cost and year built, saving consumers time while helping to ensure accurate and competitive quotations. 

Consumer research by LexisNexis® Risk Solutionsii has found that while 57% of homeowners shop every time their policy is up for renewal, 11% rarely shop, simply renewing each year with the same provider. Accessing a much wider set of data during the quotation process can help insurance providers utilise fair and effective pricing strategies for both existing and new customers in accordance with the new pricing regulations.  

Neill Slane, senior vertical market manager, U.K. and Ireland at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, commented: “Access to a detailed, 360-degree view of risk through Informed Quotes can give insurance providers the power to deliver on competitive pricing and good customer service expectations and help demonstrate to the FCA the steps they are taking to build the most informed view of the risk. Thanks to our new agreement with Outra, insurance providers can use Property Insights for granular data on property characteristics, in addition to other datasets already in use like perils, to gain a deeper understanding of the risk.  

“The availability of this level of detailed, verified data can help insurance providers differentiate their offerings to customer segments and deliver more personalised quotes. In addition, improved risk assessment of the property helps to speed up the quote process for homeowners, improve loss ratios and profitably grow portfolios. This can be hugely beneficial in a competitive market where insurance providers cannot take loyalty for granted and where pricing is coming under much greater regulatory scrutiny.” 

Giles Mackay, CEO of Outra adds: “This new agreement with LexisNexis Risk Solutions will help insurance providers leverage the power of our comprehensive set of property characteristics data for the first time through Informed Quotes.  We are delighted that through this new relationship we can provide the data that helps to power Property Insights – a timely new solution for the home insurance market.” 

LexisNexis® Property Insights comprises extensive and highly granular property data characteristics from Outra about the property.  There are 27 different data attributes including number of bedrooms; bathrooms; kitchens; reception rooms; when the property was built; floor area; heating type; roof type; listed status; rebuild cost; sale value; rental value; tenure; last sale date; last rental date and parking availability. 

Jeremey Gzaiel has joined United Fintech’s London-based team as Senior Sales Executive, with a remit to grow the firm’s client base in French speaking territories.

Jeremy Gzaiel brings a wealth of institutional sales experience to United Fintech, which helps banks, hedge funds and asset managers to accelerate their transition to a digital world through access to fintechs specializing in capital markets. He joins from JP Morgan, where he specialized in Emerging Markets Sales, helping institutional clients with solutions in credit, FX and equity derivatives. Prior to that, he worked at Commerzbank in Cross Asset Solutions Sales.

As a native French speaker, Jeremy’s initial sales focus at United Fintech will be on building a French speaking client-base including insurance companies, pension funds, hedge funds and asset managers. Jeremy Gzaiel joins a global team at United Fintech which consists of over 70 employees across five offices: London, Copenhagen, Berlin, Romania and the US.

Tom Robinson, Partner and Head of Sales, United Fintech says, “Jeremy is another great hire for United Fintech as we continue to assemble a world-class sales team. His experience, relevant skills and multi-lingual capabilities will be a real asset to the organization and we are delighted to welcome Jeremy to our EMEA Sales Team.”

Jeremy Gzaiel, Senior Sales Executive, United Fintech adds, “This is a fantastic career opportunity for me and I am very excited to be joining the United Fintech team, leveraging my knowledge and contacts to help United Fintech grow. From personal experience, I know this is ideal timing to be focusing on accelerating the digitization of banks and hedge funds. United Fintech’s vision is extremely powerful, providing financial institutions with access to a one-stop-shop of fintechs specializing in capital markets.”

Worldline, the European leader in the payments and transactional services industry, has announced a partnership with Livescale, a pioneering force in the adoption of live shopping. Live shopping, a trend in which retailers, influencers, or celebrities promote and discuss products and services with shoppers via livestreaming video, is proving to be one of the fastest growing phenomena in ecommerce today. Together Worldline and Livescale will offer an embedded commerce solution with seamless in-video checkout capabilities across social media and websites, which will support 150 online payment methods so shoppers can pay as they like.

Live shopping has emerged from China as one of the hottest trends in eCommerce. On the popular Chinese shopping platform, Taobao over 50% of its 800 million customers use live streaming eCommerce. For Chinese ecommerce businesses live shopping is becoming a standard toolkit to sell online and particularly within fashion and cosmetics. Its popularity is growing exponentially across the globe and has gained traction in more mature markets such as the United States and Europe, especially as widespread lockdowns have forced physical stores to find new ways to engage with consumers. Live shopping is seeing impressive payment volumes and engagement with Livescale reporting boosting brands sales by a factor of three to six, a conversion rate up of 39% and new customer acquisition rate of up to 40%. This bodes well for future sales. 

The Worldline / Livescale partnership combines Livescale’s embeddable Live Shopping software with Worldline’s connected checkout functionality, increasing e-commerce sales conversion rate well above industry standards. One distinctive feature is in-video check out, which allows consumers to complete the payment for their purchase seamlessly while staying in the live video experience. This facilitates both the promotion and sale of goods or services, as well as deepening effective engagement with consumers in real time as brands look to bridge the physical and digital – “phygital” – gap in retail. This enhanced offering, alongside a robust analytics dashboard, will help provide brands and manufacturers with those three critical factors they are so desperate to share with their customers – inspiration, an enhanced shopping experience and increased loyalty.

The statistics speak volumes. L’Oréal, an early adopter of the Worldline / Livescale Live Shopping solution in Canada, saw a 300% increase in sales in one hour of live shopping compared to one day of ecommerce activity, an average of 40% engagement across all events to date and a 50% boost in new customers. In addition, sales during Lancôme’s special Singles Day event in Canada exceeded expectations, earning a mention in Vogue Business’ holiday trend analysis for 2020.

Jie Xue, Product Manager Innovations at Worldline Digital Commerce commented on the partnership: “The launch of this new initiative is a step change in the way customers will interact with brands in the future. Consumer behavior has changed dramatically over the past few years, and the Covid-19 pandemic has further accelerated the digitalization of retail. Enabling customers to purchase seamlessly without friction and at pace will increase transaction volumes and substantially improve the customer experience.”

Madison Schill, Communications at Livescale, said: “Our market-leading partnership with Worldline underscores one of the key differentiators in our offering at Livescale: embedded commerce and a seamless path to purchase, which we are proud to pioneer in an expanding and diverse global market. By joining forces with Worldline, we provide brands an unparalleled offering built upon a proven model – the fruits of which ensure global brands will push the envelope in customer loyalty, interaction and sales for years to come.”

For more information visit: https://worldline.com/en/home/solutions/online-payments/live-shopping-solution.html

●        With participation from both its Crypto and Growth funds, a16z is making its first investment in an Indian startup

●        Coinbase Ventures joins a16z and existing investors Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, Sequoia Capital India and Tiger Global

●        CoinSwitch Kuber has reached unicorn status and is now India’s largest crypto asset platform, valued at $1.9 billion serving 10 million+ Indian customers

Raiffeisen Digital Bank, a brand of Raiffeisen Centrobank AG, has announced that their new personal lending mobile app has gone live on Mambu. The flexibility of Mambu's SaaS cloud banking platform enables Raiffeisen Digital Bank to innovate fast and to develop personalised and frictionless digital-first financial offerings.

Under the brand Raiffeisen Digital Bank, Raiffeisen Centrobank AG (RCB) offers customers fully digital loans in an easy and fast manner. Embracing best-in-class cloud technologies, RCB built a digital-only offering that allows customers to save time and borrow securely without any hidden fees.

Consumers are able to create a new account in minutes and request a loan fully online, in a paperless process and without visits to branches. They can apply for up to 100,000 PLN (22,000 EUR) with a repayment period of up to 60 months, in a single, native mobile app. The new app offers a basic set of tools for personal lending and, thanks to the flexibility and breadth of Mambu’s ecosystem, will be enriched in a continuous improvement approach.

With Mambu's low-code platform, RCB was able to develop a highly automated seamless architecture. This allows for shorter development cycles, accelerated innovation and fast time to market. 

Jakub Malach, Head of Lending at Raiffeisen Digital Bank, said: “The uptake of digital banking and lending products in Poland and across the entire region is increasing rapidly and we wanted to be part of this dynamic market. We knew that only an advanced cloud-native technology would give us the competitive edge and the ability to reach new markets rapidly.”

Elliott Limb, Chief Customer Officer at Mambu, added: “Covid-19 has shifted customer behaviour towards digital banking, making RCB's new product relevant and timely. But the pandemic has also made customers more demanding. Banks need the flexibility to change and adapt their products and services quickly, and most incumbents don’t have that capability. With Mambu, RCB is well-positioned to capitalise on this growing opportunity. We know that Raiffeisen Digital Bank can take banking and lending in the region to the next level.”

Mambu's implementation and Advisory teams worked closely with RCB in a remote implementation due to Covid-19. Strong collaboration, SaaS technology and cloud implementation accelerated the project timeline and the digital bank application launched in six months, addressing the surge in demand for digital lending.

Will offer complementary therapy sessions to employees throughout the week

Kristal.AI, a private wealth advisory and investment management platform, has launched Mental Health week leading up to the World Mental Health Day on October 10, to promote the overall well-being of employees of Kristal.AI.

Kristal.AI’s five-day mental wellness week includes one activity per day for both emotional and physical wellness. The activities are aligned to celebrate the work of its people and connect with the teams to promote a healthy work culture.

To encourage the people of Kristal.AI to take care of their mental health, Kristal.AI has also announced complementary therapy sessions for the whole organization for the week. This will help in clearing the stigma associated with therapy, especially as the world struggles to cope with the after-effects of the pandemic. To continue the engagement beyond this week, a certified and qualified mental health expert will be empaneled to provide easy access to mental wellness resources at affordable prices.

Commenting on Kristal.AI’s focus on mental well-being, Ms. Asheesh Chanda, Founder and CEO, said, "Only a calm mind can offer balanced advice to clients. When clients call and share their anxiety around markets, a calm response from the advisor is assuring and helps make rational investing decisions. Mental wellness is not a nice-to-have, but a must-have to succeed in our business.”

Kristal.AI has around 170+ employees across  India, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates. This cohort is a diverse, multi-cultural group that advises affluent investors in 20+ countries on their global investments.

On this occasion, Ms. Mubarak Begum HR, Head - Kristal.AI, said, “Nurturing human resources is not possible without taking into account their mental health. We believe a healthy mind is an innovative mind. Since constant innovation is central to our success, we are taking conscious steps to ensure mental wellness of our employees."