• The latest launch is a further development on its partnership with Decision Tech following the successful rollout of its energy switching service
• The widening of Zopa’s marketplace offering shows its commitment to helping people get the most out of their money
• On average, people could save £276* by switching internet providers

Neobank Zopa has today launched a broadband comparison and switching service within its app. Free to use for anyone with the Zopa app, the new service will be offered alongside Zopa’s existing energy switching service, making it possible for customers to find even more of the best money-saving deals on the market.

As many people continue to work flexibly, heavily relying on broadband for both work and entertainment is now the norm and Brits are cautious when it comes to switching providers. A recent Which? survey** highlighted that one in five people said they’d never switched providers because they hadn’t been able to find a better deal. With internet speeds, reliability and price all to consider, it's understandable that switching takes time and consideration. However, MoneySuperMarket data has revealed that people could save £276* just by switching internet providers.

Zopa is now making it easier to find the right deal by launching a broadband comparison and switching service in its app. The tool enables app users to view internet speeds and prices all in one place in order to find the best deal for them in three minutes. This is the second partnership rollout between Decision Tech and Zopa, following the successful introduction of the energy switching service in the Zopa app earlier this year.

Clare Gambardella, Chief Customer Officer at Zopa said: “At Zopa, we want to help people improve their finances. Reducing monthly bills not only helps to save money but can also improve your credit score by increasing your disposable income. That’s why we have introduced money-saving services like Broadband switching in our app.  We hope this will help customers to spend just minutes comparing deals to find the best value for them” 

Anyone can use Zopa’s comparison switching service simply by downloading the Zopa app. The broadband switching service sits alongside a host of other free services within the Zopa app all built to help people improve their financial health. App users can also find Zopa’s energy switching service and its unique credit health tool Borrowing Power that gives users tangible ways to improve their credit score and find better Zopa loan rates. Since Borrowing Power was launched, more than 30% of customers have progressed their score. Other products from Zopa can also be found in the app, including its innovative credit card and personal loans product.

Against the backdrop of a very difficult year for all, Path Solutions has been honored with the ‘Best Islamic Technology Provider’ award at the Triple A Islamic Finance Awards 2021 organized by The Asset Publishing and Research Ltd.

The Asset Triple A Awards are Asia’s defining recognition for excellence in the financial services industry and represent the industry’s most prestigious awards for banking, finance, treasury and capital markets. The world’s largest awards programme has expanded year-on-year, reflecting unparalleled industry understanding and notable momentum in distinguishing best-in-class organizations.

Upon receiving the news, Mohammed Kateeb, the Group Chairman & CEO of Path Solutions quoted, “This prestigious accolade celebrates the resilience, strength, commitment and focus of our people at a particularly challenging time. While the pandemic has disrupted our lives in ways we could never have imagined, it has also forced industry stakeholders to think beyond their processes and strategies and adopt digital innovation in a more agile approach to improve the overall customer experience. Path Solutions has been the first provider of Islamic banking software with a customer-first approach, which made it thrive and differentiated itself amid industry disruption. Our objective is to ensure that we are always incorporating new technologies that improve customer experience, provide convenience as well as cutting-edge security, and deliver additional value to our clients”. 

To date, Path Solutions is the most awarded Islamic financial software provider at the Triple A Islamic Finance Awards. The company has won this category seven consecutive times.

Path Solutions is an industry-leading open banking solution provider that helps banks adapt successfully in a new era of digital and behavioral transformation. Additionally, it is the only AAOIFI-certified financial technology firm. Such a certification offers a clearly distinct advantage over its rivals.

The Asset Triple A Islamic Finance Awards 2021 premiere will be broadcasted live at 5:00 pm (HKT) on 15 September 2021 on TheAsset.com. The awards results have been published at www.TheAsset.com and will be published again in The Asset September 2021 issue.

Celent recognizes standout capabilities with awards for breadth of functionality, customer base and support

 Finastra has been named a leader in corporate digital banking platforms by Celent. Two reports, which cover North America and the rest of the world, recognize Finastra’s standout capabilities in this sector.

The reports, titled ‘Corporate Digital Banking Platforms: North America Edition’ & ‘Corporate Digital Banking Platforms: EMEA/APAC/LATAM Edition’, are aimed at banks looking to enhance their corporate digital banking offering and highlight Finastra as an attractive platform in this market. Finastra has excelled in the ‘Breadth of Functionality’ and ‘Customer Base and Support’ categories.

Patricia Hines, Head of Corporate Banking, Celent, said, “Banks looking to capture a greater share of the corporate banking wallet must think carefully about their investment decisions in order to ensure they meet their clients' unique demands for ease of use, flexibility, and convenience. […] Banks must vigorously analyze their corporate digital banking platform, the linchpin to effectively deliver a bank's products and services to its customers. Finastra’s solution has shown stand out capability to support banks as they embark on their digital transformation journeys.”

Veena Rao, Vice President, Fusion Corporate Channels, at Finastra said, “We are thrilled that a much-respected industry analyst house has recognized the success and potential of our corporate digital banking solution. The platform paves the way for step-by-step transformation, with standard APIs and a microservices approach that supports digital transformation. Moreover, connectivity with our FusionFabric.cloud development platform drives open innovation and co-creation of value-added solutions.”

Patricia Hines added, “Finastra is the only provider in this analysis that supports nearly every functionality attribute in the Celent taxonomy and the majority of digital channels, demonstrating notable breadth of functionality. Finastra also stood out in new deals over the past two years, number of clients on the latest software version, customer references, breadth of training types, and annual client conference.”

Finastra’s Fusion Corporate Channels solution delivers portal technology to unify trade, supply chain finance, cash, lending, and treasury services for corporate clients. More than 100 financial institutions and multinational corporations use the technology, benefitting from flexible, intuitive channel applications that can be delivered on demand, globally, and on any device.

Access the report extract here:

·       North America

·       Rest of World

Financial providers and banks now benefit from an end-to-end digital transformation solution 

Today, Ohpen and Yellowtail announce they have entered-into a long-term strategic partnership. Banks and financial providers across the Netherlands and Benelux region can now utilize Ohpen's modern digital retail banking platform combined with Yellowtail's smart data-driven front-end platform to give their customers innovative and personalized banking experiences. 

The collaboration spans across core financial products like mortgage, loans, savings, investments, and is already proving successful in the pension market for several large clients.  For these pension clients, Yellowtail offers smart data-driven pension portals where participants get insights into their pension and personal financial situation, while Ohpen takes care of the unit administration and portfolio management processes. This combination provides pension companies with communication, unit administration and investment perspectives related to portfolio management and personalized and real-time insights in participants’ pension performance. 

Ohpen acquired Davinci Group in September 2020 with the aim of strengthening its SaaS platform by adding a modern mortgage component to the platform and serving customers with all retail banking products. Davinci's consultancy and services organization was then resold by Ohpen to Yellowtail | Conclusion, which makes for a better strategic fit. 

Matthijs Mons, Managing Director Yellowtail | Conclusion adds: "The collaboration with Ohpen fits perfectly into our growth strategy. Yellowtail likes to work with strong, winning brands like Ohpen. Both sides complement each other very well. Ohpen has a particularly good future-oriented SaaS platform for the financial sector, and we are very good at implementing complex, domain-specific software. Especially when there is innovation at play. We look forward to further shaping the market together with Ohpen." 

Matthijs Aler, CEO of Ohpen provides further perspective: "Consumers demand financial transparency and better banking experiences making digital transformation projects crucial. To ensure both business- and consumer needs are exceeded, collaboration, deep domain knowledge and modern scalable technology are key. Yellowtail's proven track record, expertise and front-end technology perfectly complements Ohpen's platform technology and strategic vision.”  

Ixaris becomes a Nium business unit and will enable companies in the travel, media, marketing, and insurance sectors optimise billions of dollars in outbound payments  

Leading fintech acceleration platform Nium, today announced the completion of its acquisition of London-based, Ixaris, a leader in payments optimisation for the travel, media, marketing, and insurance sectors. Nium has received all regional jurisdiction regulatory approvals for the acquisition and welcomes Ixaris as its latest payments business unit. The definitive agreement to acquire Ixaris was announced on June 7. All of Ixaris’ 86 employees in London and Malta are now part of the Nium family.  

“Ixaris has earned a reputation for delivering superior payment solutions, especially for the travel sector. It introduced Europe to virtual credit cards for travel payments back in 2014, which have since become the industry standard.  We look forward to extending their digital payments influence to new growth markets, beyond Europe, including Asia, Africa and North America. Together we will deliver the payments infrastructure this industry has long deserved.” - Prajit Nanu, CEO and Co-Founder at Nium. 

In the wake of the global pandemic, hardest hit sectors, such as the travel industry, are reimagining new payment technologies to replace outdated systems. Modern solutions, including virtual cards are gaining traction as a new and improved way to make B2B travel payments. These highly automated solutions offer complete control over payments and remove the need for manual reconciliation.  

Ixaris has established itself as one of the clear leaders in the B2B travel payments space, with more than 10 million virtual cards issued in 2019. In partnership with Ixaris, Nium published its latest ebook which makes a compelling case for why travel agents should adopt virtual cards to transform their payment strategy. 

Haitong International, one of China’s leading financial institutions in Hong Kong, has chosen the Avaloq Wealth platform, which offers a state-of-the-art client experience based on real-time intelligence, helping wealth managers to provide highly personalized investment advice.

The Avaloq Wealth platform offers a modern microservice architecture, allowing financial institutions to consistently scale the growth of their wealth management business. Haitong International is going to implement Avaloq Wealth’s specialized solutions over the coming months for its Private Wealth Management operations in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Austin Luo, Haitong International’s Head of Private Wealth Management, said: “As in most other similar industries, we are seeing a strong trend towards digitalization in wealth management. We endeavour to help our clients optimize their portfolios by designing top-notch investment solutions for them. We look forward to the partnership with Avaloq to bring premium experience to our clients.”

Pascal Wengi, Managing Director for North Asia at Avaloq, said: “We are delighted to welcome Haitong International to the growing Avaloq Community. As a digital and core-agnostic platform, Avaloq Wealth is designed to seamlessly integrate into existing IT landscapes. It is therefore ideally suited to unleash the full growth potential of Haitong International’s Private Wealth Management business.”

Editor’s note: Learn more about Avaloq Wealth here

Prelim, a fintech provider optimizing digital banking experiences for financial institutions, has announced a proprietary framework technology that allows banks and credit unions to connect with any technology company, including core providers, through a single line of code.

Traditionally, community financial institutions in particular have been challenged to create thousands of lines of code (either by an in-house or outsourced IT team) to connect disparate technology systems within an institution’s technology stack. With its most recent enhancements, Prelim provides bankers with a more efficient, user-friendly process to achieve these connections and in doing so, offers greater control over their institutions’ digital banking ecosystems.

For financial institutions using Prelim, the platform can essentially serve as a connector between a bank or credit union’s core system and its mobile banking, digital account opening, commercial banking, treasury management, or any other supplemental technology that plays a role in the customer journey.

“My experience working with financial institutions of all sizes has shown how important it is to have both the flexibility and scalability to handle the connections between different providers and systems,” said Marcio DeOliveira, CTO and Chief Digital Banking Officer of Climate First Bank. “This enhancement from Prelim provides FIs with this capability and level of control by allowing any bank or credit union to quickly and easily connect all their preferred technologies and systems.”

“We enable community FIs to more effectively compete in the marketplace by providing a modern, efficient customer journey by leveraging the easy-to-use API connectors,” explained Heang Chan, CEO and founder of Prelim. “Too often, banks’ and credit unions’ digital transformation initiatives are hindered by operational challenges and the level of resources required to complete them. By distilling system interfaces down to a single line of code, we are bringing a new level of accessibility, control and convenience to financial institutions as they implement their digital roadmaps.”

Bloomberg announced today that HDFC Bank, India’s largest private sector bank, has adopted Bloomberg’s Multi-Asset Risk System (MARS) in its technology stack, as it prepares for the transition to risk-free rates (RFR).
With the December 2021 deadline of LIBOR cessation approaching for banks, HDFC Bank will adopt and integrate Bloomberg MARS Front Office and MARS Valuations solutions with their core banking system, to efficiently implement and transition into the new RFR regime. HDFC will tap on Bloomberg solutions to calculate interest using the new “1 Day effective rate” and pass on entries into their Core Banking System.
Bloomberg’s Pricing Library and Market data are fully geared up for the new RFR curves and analytics. The MARS and MARS API (Application Programming Interface) tools provide all the necessary valuation and risk numbers for both cash and derivatives securities.
Ashish Parthasarthy, Treasurer, HDFC Bank said: “Moving to a new reference rate system is extremely complex and resource intensive, and requires us to take into account local jurisdictions, overnight rates, combination of holiday calendars and new conventions of lookback and observation shifts. Bloomberg’s Multi-Asset Risk System enables us to overcome operational challenges with easy-to-use tools that are adapted to the new alternative rates.”
“The end of LIBOR brings many operational challenges for firms with the need to supplement or even replace risk management systems to support new rates and conventions. We are pleased to support HDFC in structuring and managing post-LIBOR risk, with consistent calculations across their entire portfolio with various asset classes,” added Bing Li, Head of APAC, Bloomberg.
“There are important fundamental differences between IBORs and RFRs, and so it is imperative for banks and other market participants to have updated systems and infrastructure, as the transition away from LIBOR takes place. Bloomberg’s comprehensive set of solutions to support this transition enables our clients to efficiently meet complex challenges in terms of pricing and risk of their portfolios,” said Jose Ribas, Global head of Derivatives, Risk and Pricing, Bloomberg.
Bloomberg MARS, which is delivered on the Bloomberg Terminal and via APIs, provides risk analytics for cash and derivatives securities, from vanilla to complex and cash structured products. MARS Front Office delivers a comprehensive suite of on-demand risk analytics, advanced scenario and stress test capabilities and term structure of risk as a streamlined workflow solution. MARS Valuations provides credible and complete end-of-day market valuations for enterprise usage and reporting.
Bloomberg delivers a comprehensive suite of solutions to support IBOR transition, including scenario analysis to determine the impact of the transition on portfolios. On the Bloomberg Terminal, clients can also access fallback datasets to identify IBOR-linked securities in their portfolios and negotiate trades using Risk Free Rates (RFRs). In addition, Bloomberg publishes term and spread adjustments for the fallbacks that ISDA intends to implement for certain IBORs.

Leading banking credit information provider CRIF today announced a global commercial partnership with award-winning RegTech company Know Your Customer underpinned by a strategic financial investment into the firm.

A global company based in Bologna (Italy), CRIF specialises in credit bureau and business information, as well as advanced digital solutions for business development and open banking.

Know Your Customer is an award-winning RegTech company headquartered in Hong Kong with offices in Singapore, China, Ireland, and the UK. It provides digital solutions for corporate KYC and client onboarding automation to financial institutions worldwide.

The partnership will enable Know Your Customer to leverage CRIF’s long-established and extensive customer network across 40 countries and 10,500 financial institutions to accelerate growth in new and existing global markets. The capital injection will allow Know Your Customer to broaden its product scope to target previously untapped sectors and extend the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation components within its platform.

Under the agreement, CRIF will expand its existing KYC data offering to include Know Your Customer’s premium cloud-based platform to power end-to-end digitisation of corporate onboarding for the global financial sector.

The collaboration between the two firms aims at accelerating innovation processes for banks and FinTechs in need of extensive digital transformation in our new business environment. The partnership will also provide an enhanced customer experience to individuals and businesses worldwide by leveraging a more comprehensive and updated data set, ultimately making access to credit simpler.

The transaction follows significant business growth for Know Your Customer over the past 18 months. The company’s client base spans 11 sectors and 18 jurisdictions, including Tier 1 banks, leading corporate service providers, large credit card issuers, fast-growing FinTechs and Asian and European challenger banks.

Claus Christensen, CEO & Co-Founder of Know Your Customer, commented:

“This new partnership and investment represent a tremendous achievement as well as an essential foundation for the next phase in Know Your Customer’s global expansion. The entire team at Know Your Customer is looking forward to collaborating closely with CRIF to expand the reach and further advance the capabilities of our cutting-edge corporate KYC solution”.

Carlo Gherardi, CRIF CEO, added:

“Know Your Customer’s technology represents a strategically important addition to our product portfolio, strengthening our position as centre of excellence for corporate KYC solutions in Asia and at global level”.

Following the investment, Paola Galassi, Executive Director of B2B Services at CRIF, will join Know Your Customer’s board of directors.

Zelig acted as exclusive strategic and financial advisor to Know Your Customer on the investment by CRIF.

DigiMax Global Inc. (the "Company" or "DigiMax") , a company that provides artificial intelligence ("AI") and cryptocurrency technology solutions, is pleased to announce that it has signed a Collaboration Agreement with Bitget Exchange based in Singapore ("Bitget"). 

Established in July 2018, Bitget has become the fastest growing derivatives exchange in the world, with over 1.6 million registered users. According to CoinmarketCap, a world-renowned website for cryptocurrency markets, the average daily trading volume of Bitget has exceeded US$5 billion, ranking seventh after professional derivatives exchanges (FTX and Bybit), and the top three traditional comprehensive cryptocurrency exchanges: Binance, OKEx and Huobi.

With its innovative products and an increasingly robust ecosystem, Bitget has gained a sound footing amid ferocious and homogeneous competition in just three years. Following the launch of USDT-Margined Futures, One-Click Copy Trade and Quanto Swap Futures, the platform announced this April its full acquisition of decentralized wallet Bitkeep to lay a solid foundation for its future development in this segment.

The Collaboration Agreement will provide DigiMax and Bitget opportunities to collaborate on mutually beneficial business arrangements, including without limitation allowing Bitget users to first learn about CryptoHawk, and ultimately directly access CryptoHawk information inside the Bitget system. The companies further intend to develop an API system that would allow Bitget users to access CryptoHawk signals and permit direct one-button trading by Bitget users based on new CryptoHawk indicators being issued.

"We are very pleased to be able to partner with DigiMax to allow our exchange users to have better trading information which in turn, will allow them to substantially increase their trading profits from the AI-based trading signals provided CryptoHawk," said the CEO of Bitget. "In turn, we are excited to be able to offer CryptoHawk subscribers a high-security, low-cost platform for long and short trading in their personal or institutional accounts."

"By becoming a collaboration partner with Bitget, CryptoHawk users will have a great opportunity not only to increase the efficiency and security of their trading, but in the near future they will also have access to automated trading from the CryptoHawk signals," said DigiMax CEO Chris Carl. "We are excited to partner with Bitget to deliver ever increasing value to both of our sets of users now, and in the future."

CryptoHawk is an AI-driven, price trend prediction tool that can be used by any investor to maximize their digital trading profits. It continues to deliver hourly price-trend prediction indicators to help subscribers interested in trading Bitcoin or Ethereum, and now provides overall trend guidance for a broader portfolio of crypto currencies. The

CryptoHawk tool is unique as it uses AI and machine learning to capture profit from the volatility of crypto currencies, rather than incur the risk of buy-and-hold investments. As previously announced by the Company, the combined June-July 2021 period saw

CryptoHawk trading signals generating returns of +44.9% for Bitcoin and +22.1% for Ethereum before trading commissions. During that same period Bitcoin had a net change of +5.1% while Ethereum dropped -3.6% during the period.
DigiMax also announces that it has issued each of its four Directors an Option for 250,000 shares at $0.20 cents per share with a Term of two years effective as of today's date.