ING announced today that it will redeem two series of outstanding perpetual securities: the €750 million ING Perpetual Securities II (NL0000113587) and the €1 billion ING Perpetual Securities III (NL0000116127), both on the optional redemption date of 30 September 2021.

Due to the expiration of the grandfathering period effective 1 January 2022, the two series of perpetual securities would no longer qualify as grandfathered Additional Tier 1 capital. The two series of perpetual securities were part of an exchange offering in 2011, which reduced the outstanding principal amounts thereof to the current €432 million for the ING Perpetual Securities II and €563 million for the ING Perpetual III Securities.

ING Groep N.V. will redeem all of the outstanding securities of both series, in accordance with their terms, on the Coupon Payment Date falling on 30 September 2021, at their principal amount together with any outstanding payments. Detailed information on both series of securities can be found on ING’s website under www.ing.com/Investor-relations/Fixed-income-information/Debt-securities-ING-Groep-N.V./Hybrid-securities.htm.

The Principal Fiscal and Paying Agent for the Perpetual Securities II and the Perpetual Securities III is ING Bank N.V., Foppingadreef 7, 1102 BD Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and the Paying Agent in Belgium is ING Belgium S.A./N.V., Avenue Marnixlaan 24, B-1000 Brussels, Belgium. The Trustee for both series of securities is Amsterdamsch Trustee’s Kantoor B.V., Prins Bernhardplein 200, 1097 JB Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Any future decisions by ING as to whether it will exercise (or cause to be exercised) calls and redemptions in respect of any of its debt securities (including its perpetual securities) will be made on an economic basis, taking into account the interests of all stakeholders. Other factors that ING will consider include prevailing market conditions, regulatory approval and capital requirements.

2Q2021 result before tax of €2,065 million; capital position strengthens to 15.7%

• Growth in fee income of 18.3% year-on-year, especially in daily banking and investment products. Net interest incomedeclined due to liability margin pressure.

• Net release of risk costs following an update of macroeconomic indicators. Expenses remained under control.

• Shareholder distribution of €3,618 million after 30 September 2021. More customers choose ING as their primary bank; lending decreases

• Primary customer base rose by 281,000 in 2Q2021 to 14.0 million.

• Net core lending growth of €-3.7 billion in 2Q2021 due to repayments; improvement in lending margin. Net core deposits growth of €4.9 billion.

CEO statement

“I’m pleased with another set of resilient results in the second quarter,” said ING CEO Steven van Rijswijk. “Fee income of €855 million was in line with the strong result in the first quarter, while net interest income and in particular our liability margin remained under pressure. The improving economic environment meant that risk costs were significantly reduced, and expenses are developing in the right direction, which I will continue to monitor closely.

“I’m encouraged by the growth in primary customers, and we continue to see high demand from retail customers for digital investment products, which complement our savings product offering. An example is ‘Komfort-Anlage’ (‘Comfort Investing’), launched in Germany during the second quarter. ‘Komfort-Anlage’ empowers customers to invest online in one of seven funds that best matches their risk appetite, and features enhanced digital and video interaction capabilities to provide customers with advice when needed.

“In addition to diversifying income, we continued to take steps to future-proof our business and optimise capital allocation by making decisions on where and how we serve customers. We’ve reached an agreement to transfer our retail banking operations in Austria to bank99, the digital banking arm of the national postal service Österreichische Post. And the transfer of our retail customers in the Czech Republic is proceeding smoothly, with around half of customers and 60% of client balances migrated to Raiffeisenbank. We’re also conducting a strategic review of our retail banking business in France. I know these changes cause uncertainty for our colleagues and I’m grateful for their continued commitment.

“The effects of climate change are increasingly apparent, and taking action becomes more urgent by the day. I believe that for climate action to be successful, with the goal of net zero emissions by 2050, a concerted collaborative eff ort is needed from all sectors of society. That’s why ING has committed to the Net-Zero Banking Alliance. The pathway to net zero brings many opportunities for financing and investing in the necessary transition, and in the first half of 2021 we supported 133 sustainability deals. An example is the US$401 million Infrastructure Asset-Backed Securitised (IABS) issuance by Singapore based Bayfront Infrastructure Management. This was the first public securitisation with a sustainability tranche, for which ING acted as Joint Global Coordinator and Sole Sustainability Structuring Advisor.

“We will distribute €3,618 million after 30 September 2021. We will pay an amount of €0.48 per share in October 2021 and make an additional distribution of €1,744 million related to the amount reserved over 2019. The latter will be in the form of cash and/or a share buyback, subject to relevant approvals.

“With the pandemic continuing to affect life and business, I want to once again thank all ING colleagues, more than 80% of whom are still working from home, as they continue to help customers through these challenging times.”

ting can also be followed via live audio webcast at www.ing.com.

Payoneer Global Inc., the commerce technology company powering payments and growth for the new global economy, today announced the appointment of Robert Clarkson to a new leadership role as Chief Revenue Officer.

“Robert is an expert business executive with more than 20 years of experience leading global revenue and account management teams at leading fintech and payment companies, like PayPal and American Express. He will be responsible for leading the global go-to-market team, driving the overall business and more deeply penetrating our target markets,” said Scott Galit, Chief Executive Officer of Payoneer. “I’m excited to add Robert to the leadership team as we execute on our growth strategy and pursue our mission, to democratize access to financial services and drive growth for digital businesses of all sizes from around the world.”

Robert was most recently the Chief Commercial Officer of NortonLifeLock, where he was responsible for Global Revenue including customer acquisition/retention, strategic partnerships, and customer success. Prior to joining NortonLifeLock, Robert was the Head of Global Partnerships and Global Business Development responsible for PayPal’s largest global merchants and platform partners. His team also managed global business development initiatives. He joined PayPal from American Express, where he was a Vice President guiding the firm's efforts to define new growth strategies and strengthen the company's B2B business.

“I’m thrilled to be joining Payoneer as it enters a new period of expansion and growth,” noted Robert. “The company is addressing an exciting, evolving, and massive market. I look forward to working with Scott and the rest of the team to help strengthen Payoneer, and make the right investments so we can exceed our long term goals and help customers all over the world succeed and grow in the global digital economy.”

In Q2 of this year, Payoneer also brought on Ya Wen as the new VP Enterprise, Americas. Ya was previously a GM at Amazon, leading Amazon’s US Global Selling business, and brings a wealth of experience as a senior executive, and an expert in ecommerce, especially in the field of cross-border selling. In his new role, Ya will drive growth of Payoneer’s Enterprise business, serving many of the biggest names in digital commerce with an expanded offering, while also pursuing new verticals.

By Devin Redmond, CEO and Co-Founder of Theta Lake

Whether an organization is attempting to meet with compliance regulations or assessing its customer service agents to ensure quality of service, call recording practices are often leveraged to review and evaluate digital conversations. Regulated industries face the challenge of reviewing countless hours of audio and video conference recordings to identify areas of potential risk to the business. This is especially true in the financial services space, as audio recordings are crucial to ensuring compliance and safeguarding integrity. However, as more interactions take place virtually, the expanding amounts of content are becoming harder and harder to manage.

Tupicoffs, a leading independent financial planning practice based out of Australia utilized the power of call recordings to conduct business, and as a result, accumulated large volumes of Zoom video and phone recordings that required supervised review. With over a decade’s worth of audio and video conference recordings, attempting to sort through the data was massively cost prohibitive, rendering the carefully culled information useless and putting the firm at a disadvantage.

Eager to forgo the cumbersome review process, gain better visibility of recordings, and streamline its entire call recording review process, Tupicoffs turned to Theta Lake for a holistic solution that would solve its supervision problems. More often than not, legacy tools make audio review difficult, inaccurate, and resource intensive as they are not built to handle media-rich communications, but Theta Lake removes these challenges and streamlines the process. Tupicoffs was able to use a purpose-built compliance offering that made the call recording review easier, faster, and more accurate. Additionally, the company was able to satisfy its record keeping and archive objectives because of Theta Lake’s deep integration with the entire Zoom platform.

Tupicoffs implemented Theta Lake because of its end-to-end capabilities for ingestion, analysis, review, and archiving. By partnering with a trusted compliance and supervision vendor, it can detect regulatory, privacy, conduct, and security risks across all digital content. Moreover, organizations like Tupicoffs can scale their supervision with automation to save time and resources. Tupicoffs was able to streamline its recording supervision workspace and process, saving the cost of three full-time employees, and demonstrating a proactive compliance practice to align with the company’s high standard of operation.

Financial services institutions leverage recordings as an essential best practice for compliance. Choosing turnkey solutions that leverage a highly efficient process to manage the workflow from recording through to supervision is vital. This demonstrates compliance and, fundamentally, improves ROI. Tupicoffs, with the help of Theta Lake, automatically analyzed for risky behavior and potential compliance violations.

It is imperative for organizations looking for efficiency in their call or video recording practices to implement intuitive solutions that streamlines the recording supervision process. As Tupicoffs’ business grew and it continued to accumulate high volumes of Zoom video and phone recordings, the company needed to pursue an approach that would provide a smarter and better way to manage the recording supervision review. As a financial services company, Tupicoffs relied on audio and video conference recordings and needed to a partner that allowed them to gain visibility and make the call recording review easier, faster, and more accurate. Theta Lake did this and provided a truly modern and next generation technology solution to solve a complex communications data problem.

NYMBUS®, a leading provider of banking technology solutions, today announced a $3 million financing round led by OFG Ventures, LLC, a subsidiary of OFG Bancorp [NYSE: OFG]. The investment is intended to further support significant demand for Nymbus’ unique financial services model that accelerates digital innovation for creating new products, routes to market and revenue streams for banks and credit unions.

“Our mission has remained steadfast to help financial institutions of any size succeed with impactful, intentional innovation,’ said Jeffery Kendall, Chairman and CEO of Nymbus. “OFG Ventures’ investment is an added vote-of-confidence to the value our strategy brings to an industry widely in need of immediate and sustainable business growth opportunities.”

Nymbus integrates everything needed to build out and operate a full-scale digital bank positioned for success on day one. Its Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) model means skipping a core conversion and the need to hire additional resources. The Nymbus Labs award-winning support team further leads marketing efforts through intentional branding and comprehensive data. This partnership empowers client institutions to offer robust solutions founded on speed, flexibility and meaningful growth.

“We believe banks should strive to innovate and redefine their business models in order to serve their customers better. Today’s digital world forces banks to be agile and inventive when it comes to customer convenience and value-added services,” said Ganesh Kumar, Director at OFG Ventures. “We are excited to contribute in the effort for assisting more of our financial institution peers with access to Nymbus’ proven strategy to profitable innovation.”

New role to focus on driving global growth within Hyland’s partner ecosystem

Hyland, an industry leading content services provider, has named Bob Dunn Vice President of Global Partner Programs. Following his six years of service successfully growing Hyland’s international sales and operational practices in multiple dedicated regions, including EMEA, APAC and LATAM, his new role will be dedicated to assessing and growing Hyland’s investment and support of its partner ecosystem, to drive global growth and provide outstanding support and management within all segments.

“Bob has been an incredible asset to Hyland, providing a selfless passion for Hyland’s success. His global experience, combined with his time working within the Hyland partner ecosystem, makes him uniquely qualified for an expansion of his remit to include leadership of our U.S. and international Channel and Alliances groups,” said Ed McQuiston, EVP and chief commercial officer at Hyland.

“As Hyland looks to extend its leadership in cloud-based content services, I look forward to Bob working closely with Hyland’s Strategic Alliances and Channel teams and building greater alignment within Hyland’s channel strategies to both expand and best support all of our partners. Bob is charged with improving on and evolving a set of programs that maximises opportunities for Hyland and its partners, to assist our mutual customers in accelerating their digital transformation initiatives.”

Hyland’s partner ecosystem includes multiple segments supporting more than 400 value-added resellers, solution partners, system integrators and strategic alliance partners across multiple industries. From boutique specialty partners to global SI’s and technology partners, joining the Hyland partner community helps technology providers deliver more agile processes, empowered employees and connected customers. Hyland’s exclusive programs provide full support for partners:

• Building business practices around Hyland offerings to sell, design and implement end-to-end digital solutions
• Enhance the value of joint solutions through expanded product functionality
• Offer complementary functionality and investment-enhancing solutions

“I’m beyond excited to continue my more than 30-year journey dedicated to the content services industry, helping organisations around the world take better control of their content and evolve business operations to remain competitive and provide the best service to their customers,” Dunn said.

“This new role combines many of my passions and areas of success where I can deliver continued results for our partner ecosystem. I’m looking forward to growing and evolving Hyland’s partner programs with a cloud-first approach, connecting technology providers with the content services, intelligent automation, collaboration and business process automation tools organisations need to support new and evolving business operations.”

ices, intelligent automation, collaboration and business process automation tools organisations need to support new and evolving business operations.”

Intelligent Systems Corporation, the leading provider of innovative credit technology solutions and processing services to the financial technology and services market, announced today its financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2021.

“Our strong momentum continued into the second quarter of fiscal 2021, led by CoreCard’s flexible and agile platform in a constantly shifting environment,” said Leland Strange, CEO of Intelligent Systems. “As expected, we recognized $2.3 million in license revenue, and the total revenue for the quarter increased 66% year-over-year to $13.4 million. Our substantial top-line growth more than offset higher costs associated with our infrastructure and platform investments and resulted in meaningful growth in income from operations and net income."

“While the situation remains fluid, the COVID-19 trajectory in India continues to improve. Additionally, we still expect license revenue in the second half of 2021. However, we expect a portion of that revenue to be pushed into 2022 due to routine project delays with key clients. That said, we had a solid first half of 2021, our investments in our infrastructure are already showing results, and we are well on our way to achieving top-line growth of 20% to 25% for the year.”

Mr. Strange continued, “In addition to our recently announced partnership with Vervent, we continued to provide constant support for key customers who continue to leverage CoreCard's consistency, agility, and ability to implement new and customized features. The partnerships we entered validate our CoreCard platform and the strategic investments we made in the Company. We remain confident in our strategy and our ability to generate long-term value for our shareholders.”

Financial Highlights for the three months ended June 30, 2021

Total revenues– Total revenue in the three-month period ended June 30, 2021, was $13,355,000 which represents an increase of 66 percent compared to the comparable period in 2020.

In the following table, revenue is disaggregated by type of revenue for the three months ended June 30, 2021:

Income from operations was $3,858,000 for the second quarter compared to income from operations of $2,703,000 in the comparable prior year quarter.

Net income was $2,805,000 for the second quarter compared to net income of $2,200,000 in the comparable prior year quarter.

Earnings per diluted share was $0.32 for the second quarter compared to $0.24 in the comparable prior year quarter.

Investor Conference Call Today

The company is holding an investor conference call today, August 5^th, 2021, at 11 A.M. Eastern Time. Interested investors are invited to attend the conference call by accessing the webcast at https://www.webcast-eqs.com/intelligentsystems_08052021/en or by dialing 1-877-407-0890. As part of the conference call, Intelligent Systems will be conducting a question-and-answer session where participants are invited to email their questions to questions@intelsys.com prior to the call. A transcript of the call will be posted on the company’s website at www.intelsys.com as soon as available after the call.

The company will file its Form 10-Q for the period ended June 30, 2021, with the Securities and Exchange Commission today. For additional information about reported results, investors will be able to access the Form 10-Q on the company’s website at www.intelsys.com or on the SEC website, www.sec.gov.

Trading derivatives in Robinhood stock (HOOD) was one of the top ten most traded markets on the European trading and investing platform, Capital.com yesterday (4/8/2021). This follows reports that Robinhood had allegedly halted trading of their own stock on their own platform as volumes surged.

David Jones, Chief Market Strategist at European investment trading platform Capital.com, evaluates why there is a sudden peak in interest for HOOD.

He says: “After a disappointing market debut last week, the online broker Robinhood Markets ended Wednesday trading 50% higher than the day before. Short-term market moves can make little sense at the best of times - and this is just as true for newly listed stocks. Of course, Robinhood has been front and centre this year as the broker of choice of retail investors involved in so-called meme stocks such as GameStop and AMC. The stock price was so volatile on Wednesday that Robinhood allegedly had to stop trading of its own stock, on its own platform.

"The company was a hot topic of discussion on Reddit's Wall St Bets forum this week and some are suggesting that this sharp rise is once again down to FOMO - the fear of missing out. This can potentially create real momentum in a market that could last for some time - the meme stocks earlier this year are a good example, as was the strong run for the cryptocurrency sector in May.

"Alternatively it could be a short-lived spike. But after the disappointing IPO, is Robinhood suddenly worth twice as much as it was last week? This  could be an interesting one to watch but it wouldn't be surprising if those whose "fear of missing out" led them to buy, end up nursing a different sort of regret in the days ahead."