Collaboration will deliver cost-optimized solutions with greater flexibility to customers

Qumulo, the breakthrough leader in radically simplifying enterprise file data management across hybrid cloud environments, is announcing a strategic relationship with Super Micro Computer, Inc. (Nasdaq: SMCI), to offer customers more flexibility and choice with cost-efficient file data storage and compute solutions.

To meet growing data center density and digital transformation needs, this global alliance expands Qumulo’s Server Q offerings. Customers can now take advantage of a new generation of all NVMe systems with multiple capacity options, available through Supermicro, while continuing to receive industry-leading, first-level support provided by the Qumulo Customer Success team. 

“Our customers want flexibility and choice when building enterprise file storage solutions. Qumulo’s new go-to-market strategy with Supermicro gives our customers a high-performance option in an ultra-dense footprint that addresses a huge span of workloads from edge to analytics,” said Craig Bumpus, Chief Revenue Officer of Qumulo. “We are excited to continue solving our customers’ data management problems while expanding our offerings to include more flexibility and efficiency with Supermicro.”

Qumulo’s software offers a flexible foundation that creates deployment options on-premises, in the cloud, and at the edge, via a wide selection of powerful partner hardware platforms and the world’s largest cloud service providers. Our software-only approach gives customers the freedom to store, manage, and use their unstructured data everywhere they need it. Through Qumulo’s all-inclusive software subscription, customers get every feature and embedded data service in a unified platform to help manage the voluminous growth of data.

“Supermicro is excited to collaborate with Qumulo and their data management platform targeting on-prem, hybrid, and cloud deployment environments,” said Don Clegg, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales, Supermicro. “Supermicro’s application-optimized systems, combined with Qumulo’s Server Q platform, target customers that are experiencing significant data growth and want to achieve higher performance and lower TCO.”

Qumulo software solutions are available through Supermicro and Qumulo’s network of channel resellers worldwide.

Payhawk, the growing platform that combines expense, payment and invoice management in one solution, today announced that it now integrates directly with digital wallet platform, Google Pay.

Google Pay facilitates a process called 'tokenization’, in which a token is generated in place of a customer’s actual credit or debit card number, thus facilitating instant transactions without sharing sensitive data.

Hristo Borisov, CEO and Founder of Payhawk, says, “We want to build a world-class infrastructure to protect your company’s money, where payments are seamless. The integration with Google Pay represents a step forward for our platform, in both convenience and the security of a company’s sensitive financial data.”

With employees working remotely or on-the-go, the process of making transactions on behalf of an employer should be both convenient and secure. The integration of Google Pay allows employees to make transactions using the devices they carry with them every day. Employees can add the card to their Google Wallet and easily make payments at POS terminals and online, without the need to input card details.

Many employees will already use Google Pay for their personal spending, or otherwise have access to a smartphone on which Google Pay app can be easily installed. To make a purchase, a customer taps their mobile device on a point-of-sale terminal or chooses to pay in the mobile app. Google Pay responds with the customer's tokenized card and a cryptogram, which acts as a single-use password. The card network validates the cryptogram and matches the token with the customer’s actual card number.

Payhawk provides end-to-end management of company spending. It delivers an integrated platform that manages all company spend; providing commercial Visa debit cards for employees with built-in spend rules and collection of receipts, and automatically reconciles and extracts data from invoices in more than 60 languages. The company recently raised $20m from Klarna-backers QED Investors and others.

Neo & Partners Global, a certified FinTech Company by Singapore FinTech Association and recognized by the Monetary Authority of Singapore serving the Capital Markets sector buy-side community of commodity trading advisors, family offices, fund management companies and proprietary trading firms, has been named the Best Capital Markets FinTech Company - Asia in the 2021 FinTech Awards by Wealth & Finance International.

The award recognizes Neo & Partners Global’s efforts to inspire and empower every trader anywhere in the world through the sophistication and innovation of its Trading Atrium; ultimately, to fulfill Neo & Partners Global’s vision of being the change leader to help realize Singapore as an international financial trading hub for Asia. The end result: Neo & Partners Global's clients can operate more profitably, continually adapt better to a fast-changing environment and grow sustainably with its coined award-winning 360° innovative Trading Atrium ecosystem methodology.

Now in its fourth year, the 2021 FinTech Awards honor the companies that have delivered game-changing financial innovations in the last 12 months. Winners are chosen based on a combination of votes gathered from the publication’s respected network of industry partners and rigorous in-house research. Wealth & Finance International assesses each nominee’s performance over the past year, their commitment to ongoing innovation, as well as the competitive landscape to ensure the most deserving candidate is selected.

The recognition by Wealth & Finance International is the latest in a series of industry accolades Neo & Partners Global has received. In 2020, Neo & Partners Global received the WatersTechnology Asia Awards 2020 for Best Infrastructure Provider alongside one other Singapore-based luminary as DBS Bank. As a leading financial market technology information provider since 1983, WatersTechnology reserves its coveted Asia Awards for the vendor categories that recognize excellence in the deployment and management of financial information and technology within Asia's capital market community.

“As a Singapore homegrown SME serving the capital markets sector community, I am honored that Neo & Partners Global was selected as the Best Capital Markets FinTech Company – Asia by Wealth & Finance International,'' said Eric Neo Say Wei, Chairman and founder of Neo & Partners Global. “Everything we do in FinTech must always have a larger purpose and our team is passionate about the continuing developments in the Capital Markets FinTech, its uniquely resilient and vibrant ecosystem journey of innovation, inclusion and inspiration while promoting industry standards. This recognition is a testament to their hard work and dedication.”

Synechron Inc., a leading digital transformation consulting firm focused exclusively on the financial services industry, and  Kasisto, the creators of KAI, the leading digital experience platform for the financial services industry, have partnered to deliver superior, future-forward client engagement solutions for financial institutions across the globe.

Synechron’s top tier banking, asset management and insurance clients will have access to KAI and Kasisto’s state-of-the-art, next-generation intelligent digital assistant solution, Enlighten. By using each individual users’ financial and engagement history, further empowered with deep behavioral insights, Kasisto’s Enlighten assembles a full financial picture for each individual customer. It can then proactively engage with the customer via human-like conversations across voice, text, and touch modalities, deliver hyper-personalized next best action suggestions and guide users on their individual financial journey.

This important partnership will bring together the proven industry-leading conversational AI capabilities powered by KAI and the next generation of cognitive customer engagement; Enlighten by Kasisto, with Synechron’s years of digital transformation strategy and implementation experience, allowing top tier organizations to deliver a best in class and humanized digital transformation experience to institutions across the banking and finance industry.

“Financial services firms have witnessed that clients are increasingly demanding on-the-spot answers and guidance across digital channels. Moreover, within banking and financial services firms, both complexity and accuracy matter. An advanced AI-powered intelligent engagement platform, which already recognizes the customer’s full profile and history, can add great value to both customers and provide opportunities for attracting and retaining clients. The ability to provide a full financial services taxonomy, along with enterprise-scale integration, is the key to success.”  said Sandeep Kumar, Managing Director and Head of the InvestTech Accelerator program at Synechron, “We are pleased to be partnering with Kasisto to further the innovation of their conversational AI solution that will greatly enhance customer experiences and deepen relationships, while building brand loyalty with providers.”

Zor Gorelov, CEO and Co-founder of Kasisto said, “Our intelligent digital assistants bring the new age of cognitive banking customer engagement to the financial services industry. Enlighten by Kasisto offers previously unimaginable levels of digital engagement based on deep contextual insights and customers’ individual preferences. Making digital assistants the preferred channel for customer engagement.” He added, “We are excited to be working with Synechron to offer a solution to their clients and the financial services industry’s current and anticipated engagement challenges.” 

Synechron's partnership with Kasisto will result in superior, future-forward client engagement solutions that are highly beneficial and cost-effective for a wide range of financial services enterprises. These solutions both enable and help financial institutions to re-think and re-imagine their contact center strategies through the use of digital self-service tools, like intelligent digital assistants. Synechron will offer these customer engagement solutions to both existing and new clients across a broad global arena

Leading global AI-powered credit decision platform provider, Scienaptic AI announced that Drive Appeal has selected its AI-powered platform. The implementation will enable Drive Appeal to approve more loans and enhance the used car financing experience.

Since opening its doors in 2008, Drive Appeal (formerly AC Motors) has kept a firm commitment to its customers.  It offers a wide selection of vehicles and makes the car buying process as quick and hassle free as possible. It offers an online inventory, and outstanding financing options, making Drive Appeal the preferred dealer for Minneapolis, Eden Prairie, Anoka, Crystal, Shakopee, St. Cloud, Ramsey, New Hope, Plymouth, Maple Grove, Brooklyn Park, St. Paul, Eagan, Woodbury and Bloomington buyers.

“Scienaptic's AI-powered platform is a fantastic fit for the AI roadmap we have in mind”, said John Prosser, President, Drive Appeal. “Using Scienaptic's AI, we will be able to make better lending decisions for every single customer. This will make vehicle financing easier, and more customers will be able to own their dream car.”

“We are pleased to partner with Drive Appeal in their endeavor to enable a more streamlined, efficient loan decisioning process,” said Pankaj Jain, President of Scienaptic. “Scienaptic’s powerful, adaptive AI will equip them to create more approvals faster, strengthen customer relationships and drive an unparalleled experience.”

New DTCC data platform will offer new insights into notional outstanding, net notional and trading volume metrics along with enhanced analytics capabilities

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the premier market infrastructure for the global financial services industry, today announced the launch of an enhanced DTCC CDS Kinetics platform to support growing demand for more transparency into the credit default swaps (CDS) market within the over-the-counter derivatives space.

DTCC CDS Kinetics provides position data on credit default swaps sourced from DTCC’s Trade Information Warehouse (TIW), offering notional outstanding, net notional, and trading volume metrics on securities including single-name, index, and index tranche. TIW is a centralized infrastructure for reporting and asset servicing on approximately 98% of all credit derivative transactions outstanding worldwide.

Recognizing that credit default swaps are a critical data source for understanding market risk, the DTCC CDS Kinetics service has been enhanced to support increased analysis and understanding of the CDS market. The service, which previously featured point-in-time snapshots of credit default swaps data, has been upgraded to provide over 10 years of historical and time-series data, a new user interface with graphical representations, and the ability to search for CDS instruments by a range of attributes including underlying reference entity, market sector, market type, and geographical region.

“The new DTCC CDS Kinetics platform provides unparalleled transparency into the credit default swaps market, offering unique insights on credit risk that will not only inform trading strategies, but will also help banks better prepare for potential market dislocations,” said Tim Lind, Managing Director of DTCC Data Services. “Now more than ever, it’s critical for firms to begin drawing upon more robust and higher-quality data sources to heighten their risk preparedness and response, as well as their overall business resilience.”

The DTCC CDS Kinetics platform will also be made available in DTCC’s API Marketplace, as part of a planned future platform update. The API “App Store” allows direct programmatic access to DTCC processing functionality and includes comprehensive documentation and training materials to help developers use the APIs.

Added Lind  “We worked closely with clients to develop the new API capability, which will allow users to leverage DTCC’s technology to suit their own business needs.”, 

Latest offering brings the simplicity of modern Software as a Service (SaaS) onboarding and support to cloud payment processing for financial institutions  

Volante Technologies, the global leader in cloud payments and financial messaging, announced today the launch of The Volante Experience™, its latest Payments as a Service (PaaS) customer experience offering. Volante Experience will bring the speed, lower cost and simplicity of the modern SaaS customer onboarding experience to banks and financial institutions adopting Volante’s cloud-native payments solutions. 

“Financial institutions are eager to provide their customers with market-leading payments services,” said Erika Baumann, Research Director, Aite Novarica. “Payments as a Service in the cloud can be an ideal pathway to success, giving them a way to evolve past legacy limitations.” 

“However,” continued, Baumann, “the traditional onboarding and operational experience for banks can be costly, slow, and lacking transparency. This can deter some institutions from adopting Payments as a Service. The landscape is ripe for disruption by providers that can bring consumer-grade customer experience to the world of bank payments processing.” 

The Volante Experience™ onboarding packages are tiered in a manner similar to CRM or ERP SaaS platforms. Banks can select the tier that best suits their needs. The focus is on simplified onboarding and training rather than complex implementation and customization. Pricing is clearly presented and publicly available on Volante’s website, allowing customers to easily calculate the TCO and ROI of payments modernization and compare outcomes.  

All packages provide the industry’s fastest onboarding experience, with customers able to start processing payments from as little as $40,000 in just 60 days – in deep contrast to existing industry paradigms that are ruled by often year-long implementation cycles and opaque pricing models.  

Volante’s new, transparent approach breaks with the legacy way of doing business and represents an important step in the democratization of payments processing. For the first time, banks of all sizes can be onboarded to proven payments services already enjoyed by larger institutions, at a fraction of the cost and with unprecedented time-to-value. 

Deepak Gupta, Global Head of Payments as a Service, Volante Technologies, said, “In many areas of financial services, cloud and SaaS are the norm. This is not yet the case in payments, but we are seeing significant uptake of our Payments as a Service solutions. The Volante Experience™ will now allow banks to enjoy the productivity, cost, and time-to-value benefits of PaaS faster than ever. This is just the start: over time, The Volante Experience™ will radically simplify every aspect of the customer journey, from onboarding to service operation and support.” 

“As a long-time customer and now investor in Volante, we have seen first-hand how Volante’s payments modernization solutions can help financial institutions rapidly evolve,” said Nick Nadgauda, Global Head of Technology, Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions. “The move to cloud and the evolution of Payments as a Service represent the future of the business, and Volante is a key piece in making this happen.” 

For more on The Volante Experience™ and how you can get onboarded in 60 days or less, get started here.  

Despite the perception they are too small to target, SMBs are increasingly vulnerable due to supply-chain attacks and greater use of automation by ransomware groups

Acronis, the global leader in cyber protection, today released the Acronis Cyberthreats Report Mid-year 2021 update, an in-depth review of the cyberthreat trends the company’s experts are tracking. Released at this week’s Black Hat 2021 event, where Acronis is a Diamond sponsor, the report warns that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are at particular risk based on the attack trends seen during the first six months of the year.

The report revealed that during the first half of 2021, 4 out of 5 organisations experienced a cybersecurity breach originating from a vulnerability in their third-party vendor ecosystem. That’s at a time when the average cost of a data breach rose to around $3.56 million, with the average ransomware payment jumping 33% to more than $100,000.

While that represents a major financial hit to any organisation, those amounts would sound the death-knell for most SMBs, which Acronis believes is a major concern for the second half of 2021.

“While the increase in attacks affects organisations of all sizes, something that’s under-reported in the coverage of current cyberthreat trends is the impact on the small business community,” explained Candid Wüest, Acronis VP of Cyber Protection Research. “Unlike larger corporations, small and medium-sized companies don’t have the money, resources, or staffing expertise needed to counter today’s threats. That’s why they turn to IT service providers – but if those service providers are compromised, those SMBs are at the mercy of the attackers.”

By utilising supply-chain attacks against managed service providers (MSPs), attackers gain access to both the MSP business and all of its clients. As seen in the SolarWinds breach last year and the Kaseya VSA attack earlier in 2021, one successful attack means they can breach hundreds or thousands of SMBs downstream.

At Black Hat 2021, Wüest will provide an in-depth look at how supply-chain attacks against IT service providers pose a particular threat to SMBs in a session titled Ransomware Attacks Against MSPs – A Nightmare for SMBs.

Additional takeaways at the mid-year mark

Beyond the high-profile attacks that have dominated the headlines during the past six months and the concerns Acronis is raising about the impact on MSPs and small businesses, the Acronis Cyberthreats Report Mid-year 2021 also noted:

• Phishing attacks are rampant. Using social engineering techniques to trick unwary users into clicking malicious attachments or links, phishing emails rose 62% from Q1 to Q2. That spike is of particular concern since 94% of malware is delivered by email. During the same period, Acronis blocked more than 393,000 phishing and malicious URLs for clients, preventing attackers from accessing valuable data and injecting malware into the client’s system.
• Data exfiltration continues to increase. In 2020, more than 1,300 victims of ransomware had their data publicly leaked following an attack, as cybercriminals look to maximise the financial gain from successful incidents. During the first half of 2021, more than 1,100 data leaks have already been published – which projects a 70% increase for the year.
• Remote workers continue to be a prime target. The reliance on remote workers continues in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two-thirds of remote workers now use work devices for personal tasks and use personal home devices for business activities. As a result, attackers have been actively probing remote workers. Acronis observed more than twice the number of global cyberattacks, with a 300% increase in brute-force attacks against remote machines via RDP.

Creating the Acronis Cyberthreats Report Mid-year 2021

The Acronis Cyberthreats Report Mid-year 2021 is based on examining attack and threat data collected by the company’s global network of Acronis CPOCs, which monitor and research cyberthreats 24/7. Malware data was collected by more than 250,000 unique endpoints around the world running Acronis Cyber Protect (either as a client of an MSP using Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud or a business running Acronis Cyber Protect 15). The mid-year update covers attacks targeting endpoints detected between January and June 2021.

The full report provides in-depth insights into the top security/threat trends the CPOCs observed during the first half of 2021, a review of malware families and related statistics, a deep dive into ransomware’s most dangerous groups, the vulnerabilities that contribute to successful attacks, and Acronis’ security recommendations for the remainder of 2021 and beyond.

You can download a copy of the full Acronis Cyberthreats Report Mid-year 2021 here.

·         Media buying: £271b spent on digital ad spend every year, BLKBOX has set out to disrupt the way advertisers and agencies buy and manage digital media as spend

·         Speed: Using BLKBOX, companies can leverage intelligent automation to acquire high-value retained users faster, while reducing campaign management from 6 hours down to 6min. 

·         Scale: Having delivered profitable ad campaigns for established brands and SMBs, BLKBOX has proven to help companies quickly scale their ad spend 3x   

·         Recognition: BLKBOX tops Facebook Business hackathon which looks for technologies that can help companies scale their business. Announced as winners alongside Microsoft and SAP in June 2021. 

Over £270b is spent every year on digital ad spend as companies seek to engage consumers online using the latest technology to enhance their user experience and make purchases. AdTech business BLKBOX  is launching their intelligent media platform to help companies make this ad spend go further and faster for them. Their SaaS-based intelligent and automated media buying platform generates profitable campaigns and scale ad spend 3x while reducing the time taken to manage end-to-end media buying from 6 hours to just 6 minutes.

The platform offers enterprise businesses, large corporates and SMBs the ability to accelerate their digital campaigns using just three inputs: the creative assets, budget and KPIs. The platform automates the heavy lifting in campaign creation, audience creation, creative testing, advanced analytics, determines the winning bids, and also allocates budget against the best performing campaigns. Critically, BLKBOX acts as a growth enabler, frees time for media buyers to focus on outcomes, think strategically and take a wider view on spend as they target growth. 

Athar Zia, CEO and co-founder at BLKBOX commented: “Advertising and buying media serves as the growth engine for so many companies and we’ve seen how technology has enhanced creative outputs on so many levels. Yet there has been no innovation in large parts of the wider industry, especially for media buyers. It still remains a manual and time consuming affair and prone to human error. Our intelligent automation will quickly remedy this and deliver our express purpose, to help companies scale profitable ad campaigns. Just as the end creative is a growth hack for brands, BLKBOX exists to be the power supply to deliver that growth for all companies.”

BLKBOX was established in May 2020 by ex-Facebook industry pioneers Athar Zia and Jay Shah who managed over £1b in ad spend for companies using the social media giant. BLKBOX has been growing revenues 50% month-on-month while operating a gated experience for multi-million dollar worth private and listed billion-dollar worth companies in the gaming industry over the last 12 months. Having helped them scale their ad spend 3x, BLKBOX is now opening their intelligent media buying platform to every company globally. 

“We have seen, at close quarters, how ad spend has worked for companies. The process is just not fit for purpose. Advertisers are judged on driving successful, profitable ad campaigns and fundamentally company growth. We are here to help. Using our experience and expertise in algorithms, we will improve operational efficiency, while removing human error and helping companies scale profitably” add Athar Zia. 

The BLKBOX intelligent media buying platform will initially focus on social media ad spend, chiefly on Facebook ads. Their reach will broaden over the coming year to encapsulate Google, TikTok, Snapchat, Apple, Twitter and Ad Networks.

Athar Zia added: “We’re initially competing in a £271b annual digital ad spend marketplace but will broaden this quickly. We are democratising the media buying space, making it easier and faster for people to make ad spend decisions. Our overall aim is to turn anyone, regardless of experience, into a best in class media buyer. This will enable companies to scale faster, focusing on making products and creating experiences that their customers want.”

In June 2021 BLKBOX were announced as one of three winners of the Facebook Business Hackathon which sought technologies that help companies scale growth. They were judged on our four criteria points - Innovation, Impact, Socially Postivitiness, Shippability. BLKBOX was announced as a winner alongside Microsoft and SAP.