Etrading Software (ETS), global provider of technology-led solutions, acting as exclusive Registration Authority for the new International Organization for Standardization’s (ISO) standard for Digital Token Identifiers (DTIs), announced the DTI Registry which will assign ISO’s DTI Identifiers to digital tokens globally, goes live today.

Etrading Software’s Digital Token Identifier Foundation (DTIF), a non-profit division of the company, is responsible for the DTI Registry. The foundation’s mission is to provide the golden source reference data for the unique identification of digital tokens based on ISO’s new standard for digital assets, ISO 24165. The launch is ahead of the ISO standard that is scheduled to be published in Q3 2021 to meet urgent industry and any regulatory need.

Sassan Danesh, Managing Partner of Etrading Software, said, “The purpose of the DTI is to address the demands of exchanges, custodians, financial institutions, and regulatory authorities for a registry and identifier assignment process for digital tokens, to mirror the use of ISINs and UPIs in the digital asset space. DTIs will bring many benefits to users of this burgeoning asset-class, from improving liquidity, allowing for easier identification of counterparties, facilitating price discovery and improving the operational efficiency of post-trade processing. We are pleased with how the DTI is being received by industry.”

“Global Digital Finance (GDF) welcomes the launch of the ISO Digital Token Identifier”, said Lawrence Wintermeyer, Executive Co-Chair of GDF, adding, “This new industry standard, when adopted by digital asset service providers, data providers, and regulators, will contribute, alongside the GDF Code of Conduct, to the mainstream adoption of digital assets in an orderly and standardized way.” 

Dominique Tanner, Chairman of ISO TC 68/SC 8, said, “ISO TC 68/SC 8 is glad to see this exciting development, meaning over a 100 digital tokens can now be uniquely identified based on objective, verifiable information. The underlying data used to assign identifiers has been made public on the DTIF website. This is an important step for the industry in being able to unambiguously identify digital assets, in a standardised way.”

Rudolf Siebel, MD, BVI German Investment Funds Association, said, “Standardising the identification of digital assets will bring a host of benefits for industry, by reducing ambiguity, increasing transparency and consistency, and lowering the bar for greater institutional investment in this burgeoning asset class. We are pleased the next stage of the DTI process brings this standard closer to helping the market.” 

Tony Pettipiece, Global Digital and Cryptocurrency Association’s (Global DCA) Board of Directors,  Policy and Regulation, said, “This standard will create a foundation for growth while also providing for straight-through-processing and global interoperability across the ecosystem for the registration, classification, issuance, trading, settlement, accounting and regulatory reporting of the nascent asset class. The Global-DCA is excited to be working with the DTI, ISO/TC 68/SC 8, and the broader, digital asset community to help shape this and other standards, because standards are a necessary step toward realizing the societal benefits of cryptocurrencies and digital assets.”

The DTIF has pre-seeded the registry with 100 tokens, and over 70 fork records associated with these tokens. It will continuously be adding and verifying the normative and informative token data in preparation for the full launch. The scope of DTI issuance is all fungible digital assets which use distributed ledger technology for their issuance, storage, exchange, record of ownership, or transaction validation and are not a “fiat” currency (as defined by ISO 4217). More information is available by subscribing to the DTIF newsletter to follow the DTI registration progress. Please contact us if you have any questions on the data in the registry.

Industry veteran and Founder Manish Patel to continue as Managing Director

India’s leading independent financial services platform for MSMEs, Mswipe, today announced the appointment of Ketan Patel as the Chief Executive Officer. Founder Manish Patel, who has built the company over the last one decade as India’s largest POS player and leading end-to-end digital enabler of MSMEs, will move into the role of Managing Director.

Ketan, who brings close to 20 years of entrepreneurial and corporate experience in fintech and BFSI industry, will lead the company through a strategic transformation - by accelerating its operational excellence to provide seamless digital payments and by building value-added financial services including credit, insurance among others for MSMEs.

Commenting on the appointment, Mswipe Founder Manish Patel said, “I am excited to welcome Ketan to the Mswipe family. Ketan is a seasoned leader with a proven track record of delivering operational excellence, achieving revenue and profitability for our business. I am a firm believer of constant evolution and adaptability and I am confident that Ketan will spearhead Mswipe on to an exciting, high-growth journey as Mswipe expands to provide credit and other financial services in addition to our core payments services to our customers.”

“Mswipe has been a market leader in transforming digital payments for MSMEs and is credited with bringing several industry first innovations in the last 10 years. I am excited to be a part of the journey ahead that seeks to transform the financial services landscape for the smallest of businesses in India. We will continue building a superior financial platform for MSMEs that is built on the tenants of accessibility and affordability,” Ketan added on his new role.

In his role as the Executive Director & CEO of CASHe, Ketan led the company in becoming India’s largest digital lending company for salaried millennials. Prior to his entrepreneurial venture Ketan worked with Kotak Mahindra Bank for over 18 years where he had an illustrious career heading some of its key portfolios ranging from Private Banking, Wealth Management, Composite Business Solutions and E-commerce. He was also instrumental in setting up the Private Banking Business for the Kotak Group in the UK.

Ketan has received several industry recognitions for his leadership. He was bestowed with the Young Entrepreneurs Award by The Economic Times in 2020 and recognised as India's Most Trusted CEO 2020 by WCRC- The Malcolm McDonald Academy. Ketan was recognised for his excellence in Finance – Leadership at the Finext Conference in Dubai 2019 and received the ‘CEO of the Year’ award at the Asia Leadership Awards in 2019.

UBL, Pakistan's fastest-growing digital bank, has signed an agreement with Temenos (SIX: TEMN) and National Data Consultant (NdcTech) to provide and implement a next-generation digital banking solution. As a pioneer of innovation in the Pakistani Banking industry, UBL, earlier this year, launched Pakistan’s first Islamic Digital Account and the first of its kind ‘UBL Pay’ where customers can use their phones as debit cards. Through this agreement, the bank has embarked on a digital transformation journey across all channels, products and segments, including retail, SME and corporate, for its domestic and international markets.

Once executed, the bank expects to hyper-scale its digital footprint and provide a modern online banking platform with an integrated, seamless customer experience, covering the entire customer lifecycle from customer onboarding, deposit, loan originations, and digital servicing.

Temenos Infinity is the leader in driving customer acquisition and digital banking engagement with its scalable platform, deep analytics, and AI scoring models. The platform enables banks to increase digital revenues and reduce customer onboarding time significantly. Built on a micro-services architecture, Temenos Infinity is the most open and agile cloud-native product allowing banks to continuously extend and expand their solution for all or portions of the customer lifecycle.

Mr. Jean-Paul Mergeai, President for APAC and MEA, Temenos, said, "UBL is leading the way in digital banking, and we are proud to support the bank in the next phase of its digital journey. With Temenos Infinity, UBL can take customer experience to the next level, delivering digital experiences that delight customers and make banking better across every channel. Temenos Infinity is the world's best-selling digital banking platform and our selection, together with NdcTech, reflects our market leadership but also our success working with banks in Pakistan to deliver a rapid implementation and time-to-value."

At the event, Ms. Ammara Masood, CEO & President from NdcTech, said, "We look forward to this collaboration which will allow UBL to make incredible leaps forward in its Digital Banking transformation and customer experiences across various segments. The Temenos Infinity platform and NdcTech expertise will provide the bank new capabilities and a great platform for future innovation".

Mr. Shazad G Dada, President & CEO UBL commented, "Customer centricity is at the heart of everything we do. This partnership with Temenos and NdcTech is a great catalyst in our digital transformation journey. We are very excited to make this a part of our strategic objective of becoming more agile and tailor our platform to better serve the rapidly changing needs of our customers”.

The agreement was signed virtually with UBL & NdcTech at the UBL Head Office in Karachi and Temenos at their Head Office in Dubai, UAE.

ZebPay, India’s oldest and most widely-used crypto asset exchange, today announced the launch of ZebPay Earn, a new feature enabling ZebPay customers to earn returns on crypto available in their spot and trading wallets. ZebPay is the first cryptocurrency exchange in India to offer this feature to its entire customer base.

On launch, ZebPay Earn will support earnings on Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Tether (USDT), Polygon (MATIC), Binance Coin (BNB), and Dai (DAI). Returns can be earned on the balance in an investor’s spot or trading wallet and even in pending ask (sell) orders. The earnings will be calculated based on the daily eligible balance as at midnight UTC (or 5.30 am IST) every day. The earnings cycle will be for the span of a whole month and the monthly earnings will be credited by the 7th of the following month. The minimum earnings paid will be 1 Satoshi per coin. All users will be able to see the list of coins they can earn returns on and their earnings on the ZebPay website, iOS app, or Android app in the coming few days.

All registered ZebPay customers who have completed their KYC will be eligible to earn returns on their trading wallet balance by default via ZebPay Earn. In May, ZebPay launched ZebPay Lending Platform, a first-of-its-kind crypto lending model in India allowing users to lend their crypto to ZebPay and earn returns based on the coin and its lending period. ZebPay Earn allows users to continue trading their coins, whereas users cannot trade the coins lent with the ZebPay Lending Platform before maturity.

Avinash Shekhar, Co-CEO, ZebPay, said, “At ZebPay, we are constantly ideating on ways to encourage our users to invest in crypto for the long-term to get the best possible returns. Recently, we introduced the ZebPay Lending Platform to allow users to earn passive returns on their crypto holdings. With ZebPay Earn, an easy-to-use feature, we are removing the threshold of having to lend one’s crypto for a certain amount of time. We are now enabling ZebPay users to not only continue holding but also continue trading while earning returns on their balance. We want our customers’ coins to continue to earn for them in more than one way as they sit in their wallets. We want to look out for every customer HODLing their coins for long-term returns as well as those short-term customers trading on our exchange daily. We value our customer's trust in ZebPay and are constantly innovating with new features and product offerings for the crypto community in India.”

This weekend, Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority announced that Binance Markets Limited is currently “not permitted to undertake any regulated activity” in the United Kingdom. Last month, Binance Markets Limited withdrew its 5MLD application, and all parties seem to agree that the latest developments did not come as a surprise.

“This is a situation where size doesn’t matter,” said Richard Gardner, CEO of Modulus, a US-based developer of ultra-high-performance trading and surveillance technology that powers global equities, derivatives, and digital asset exchanges. “Traditionally we think that the biggest entities have the easiest time dealing with compliance issues, thanks to significant legal resources at their disposal. While that may be true, they’re still bound to the same rules and regulations as others face. A small investment in compliance on the front end can save exchange operators significant losses on the backend.”

Additionally, the company must post the following notice on its website and apps for users originating from the United Kingdom:

BINANCE MARKETS LIMITED IS NOT PERMITTED TO UNDERTAKE ANY REGULATED ACTIVITY IN THE U.K. Due to the imposition of requirements by the FCA, Binance Markets Limited is not currently permitted to undertake any regulated activities without the prior written consent of the FCA. (No other entity in the Binance Group holds any form of U.K. authorisation, registration or license to conduct regulated activity in the U.K.).

“In essence, while Binance Markets Limited is banned from offering regulated services, Binance is still allowed to allow those living in Britain to trade cryptocurrencies via Binance.com. What’s interesting about this is that the company is said to have withdrawn its application to register with the Financial Conduct Authority because of anti-money laundering requirements. Binance is the largest crypto exchange on the planet, and, yet, compliance became an issue,” noted Gardner.

According to CNBC, an CFA spokesman offered that “Binance Markets Limited withdrew their 5MLD application on 17 May 2021 following intensive engagement from the FCA. The action taken today on Binance Markets Limited has been in train for some time.”

“As regulators continue to grapple with how they treat cryptocurrency exchanges, it is more important than ever for exchange operators to deal with regulatory issues, including anti-money laundering and terrorism financing, on the front end. So often, operators are in a mad dash to market, trying to launch their exchange quickly, and they don’t see the forest through the trees. Compliance issues and security should all be part of the conversation as operators begin to build out their technology. Compliance is more than a nuisance to procrastinate on. Failure to comply with budding regulations could shut an enterprise down before it even begins,” explained Gardner.

Modulus is known throughout the financial technology segment as a leader in the development of ultra-high frequency trading systems and blockchain technologies. Over the past twenty years, the company has built technology for the world’s most notable exchanges, with a client list which includes NASA, NASDAQ, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Barclays, Siemens, Shell, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago.

“Currently the market is such that compliance and security are thought of as costs to be avoided. However, the exchanges which invest in their security, and those which invest in their ability to meet or exceed regulatory requirements --- those are the entities that will succeed over the long-haul,” opined Gardner.

AxiomSL, the industry’s leading provider of regulatory reporting and risk management solutions, today announced the launch of a new Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) solution to automate compliance with new sustainability and social impact reporting requirements being developed by the European Banking Authority (EBA), the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and other regulatory bodies. The new solution standardizes the process of integrating ESG data attributes, such as counterparty exposures, climate risk reference data and social impact data, with existing financial reference data in a common data dictionary to streamline ESG reporting for financial institutions.

The EBA has led the way on ESG reporting requirements for financial institutions with its proposed draft technical standards, which provide a framework for disclosing how climate change may exacerbate other risks within institutions’ balance sheets, how institutions are mitigating those risks, and their green asset ratio on exposures financing taxonomy-aligned activities, such as those consistent with the Paris agreement goals. These disclosure requirements are expected to be applicable starting in June 2022. ESMA has also begun to develop a taxonomy for financial institution ESG reporting. To meet these requirements, financial institutions will need to be able to consistently and accurately disclose their climate-related exposures in addition to traditional financial risk data.

“Creating a sustainable future is about more than just reducing emissions and committing to global initiatives. Financial institutions need to be able to accurately measure and report on their exposure to ESG risks to track progress and drive improvement,” said Alex Tsigutkin, Founder and CEO, AxiomSL. “By integrating essential climate risk and social impact data with our existing financial data in a common data dictionary, we are making it possible for institutions to automatically capture and report ESG exposures in the same manner in which they’ve been reporting traditional financial risks, bringing some much-needed rigor and standardization to ESG reporting.”

The AxiomSL ESG solution ingests proprietary, bank-reported and third-party ESG data from all major data vendors, reducing that information down to granular data attributes that can be tagged with reference data required for regulatory disclosure. By integrating these individual ESG attributes with existing financial data in a common data dictionary, the solution makes it possible to automate ESG risk disclosures using an appropriate methodology that ensures both accuracy and consistency. In addition to fulfilling regulators’ disclosure requirements, this consistent data flow also makes it possible for institutions to continually benchmark their progress against stated sustainability and social impact improvement goals.

For more information about the AxiomSL ESG solution, please visit www.axiomsl.com/new-esg-disclosure-requirements/

Red Hat and KPMG LLP today announced an ongoing collaboration to augment the KPMG Ignite AI platform with Red Hat OpenShift as a foundational technology. Building on Red Hat OpenShift, KPMG Ignite provides the agility, scalability and flexibility needed to deploy AI at scale, and enables Ignite to be deployed more consistently across the hybrid cloud.

According to the KPMG recent AI study, “Thriving in an AI World”, the rate of AI adoption skyrocketed in many industries because of COVID-19, but many leaders feel this uptick is moving too quickly. The study indicates however, that organizations who prioritize AI in their operations can better know and serve their customers, automate repetitive operations, better inform business strategy and drive greater innovation. To capitalize on these benefits, many of KPMG clients as well as KPMG itself seek to embed AI through multiple IT functions into their overall organizational technology fabric providing better management and analysis of their AI data.  

To help meet this need, KPMG offers the Ignite AI platform. Ignite is a U.S.- patented portfolio of AI capabilities that brings together machine learning, document ingestion and optical character recognition capabilities to help analyze and decipher both structured and unstructured data. Ignite focuses on automating, accelerating and enhancing existing AI solutions so organizations can achieve real value from data to make better business decisions across an entire organization.

KPMG chose Red Hat OpenShift as an enabler of AI across a broad set of modern footprints, providing more flexibility for clients to work across the hybrid cloud, from private clouds to multiple public cloud environments. As the underlying Kubernetes platform, Red Hat OpenShift is a key element for Ignite, based on its ability to provide greater agility, flexibility, portability and scalability for nearly any AI workload in almost every enterprise IT deployment. OpenShift also provides security features and application controls, along with robust, native continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) capabilities, helping to more quickly operationalize AI capabilities into production with greater security.

This flexibility is necessary to more rapidly develop, deploy and run machine learning (ML) models and associated intelligent applications in production while mitigating risk of being locked into a single cloud provider or hardware stack. Additionally, with the foundation of Red Hat OpenShift, data scientists using the platform can focus on ML modeling and deployment without having to act as IT operations teams or systems administrators.

KPMG has also formed a strategic alliance with Red Hat to provide and enhance these hybrid multi-cloud experiences for clients, bringing greater choice, control and freedom of open source to fuel digital acceleration. This innovative technology approach affords organizations the flexibility of working with and across several of its cloud alliance partners.

Supporting Quotes

Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager, Cloud Platforms, Red Hat
“AI solutions are changing the way we do business, enabling organizations to better serve their customers and get more done quicker - but they must be built on a hybrid cloud platform that can help deliver stable, production-ready innovation. With Red Hat OpenShift, KPMG Ignite has a hybrid cloud platform with the flexibility and scalability required to accelerate AI/ML initiatives from pilot to production, helping advance their clients' digital transformation initiatives.”

Kevin Martelli, principal, software engineering, KPMG LLP.

“When determining the underlying technology platforms for Ignite, we needed technology that was flexible and easy-to-use that offers enterprise-grade security across a hybrid cloud. With Red Hat OpenShift, containers and Kubernetes are at the center of Ignite, providing data scientists and developers the much-needed agility, flexibility, consistency, portability, and scalability to train, test, and deploy machine learning models anywhere.”

Some elements of trade finance – such as checking the key documents underlying the trade – have been slow to digitalise. But that hasn’t prevented innovation: it’s facilitated it. Just ask ING Bank, says Conpend’s Founder Marc Smith and CEO Torben Sauer 

ING Bank has a strong reputation as a trade finance bank, as well as an innovator. Given this, it was a matter of time before the bank cracked one of the most intractable concerns preventing the full digitalisation of trade finance: the fact the documentary evidencing of the underlying trade (including bills of lading and letters of credit) remained paper based. Supply chains often involved countries and companies with sub-optimal connectivity that rely on paper-based documents being physically posted to the bank for manual checking. The checking is usually undertaken at a service centre, often in a third country: all of which generates delays as well as raises concerns over human errors and – in the worst-case scenarios – illegality.  

Attempts to digitalise the supply chain have been met with only partial success: there remaining a high percentage of trade-related documents that are printed originals requiring the human eye to ensure compliance (with all the imperfections and dangers this entails). Yet ING’s propensity for innovation has led them in a different direction. First, it accepted that electronic documentation is simply not viable for certain supply chains, which led it to focus instead on automating the process of checking the paper-based documents. 

Working with Conpend – a trade finance artificial intelligence (AI) automation specialist – ING deployed AI for the mundane aspects of documentary processing, which includes checking for compliance against International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) rules, as well as against anti-money laundering (AML) guidelines. A further check involved sanctions screening, including against America’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) regulations. 

Integrating Conpend’s TRADE AI app, which automatically checks documents against inputted rules and regulations, the process has not only been made more efficient, it has freed up the operatives in the service centres to undertake the more meaningful work of checking the anomalies spotted by the app’s AI reading. 

The documents arrive by envelope and are scanned and securely sent to the operatives, who apply the TRADE AI app. The documents are scanned for key words and phrases against input rules and stipulations. If an anomaly is spotted, a query is raised and one of the operatives checks the document.  

The app has the power to convert all documents – whether they are copies, originals, clear or unclear papers – into machine readable words through optical character recognition. Yet the app is also self-learning from all previous transactions. Applying the learning to all future documents, the result is a process that is faster, more accurate and more precise than any human checkers can achieve – allowing it to produce analysis as well as recommend actions and solutions – all while constantly improving. 

Faster turnaround times, reduced errors and improved interaction with clients for day-to-day activities were ING’s aims, all achieved by the TRADE AI app that has now been adopted by the bank as part of their Digital Bank and Robotic Process Automation strategies. 

“The partnership has been a journey, and it has been approached as one right from the start, with no expectations that TRADE AI would be installed and immediately save time,” said Dermot Canavan, Trade Operations Manager at ING Bank. “That said, the app has delivered more than we expected quicker than we expected.” 

The partnership between Conpend and ING Bank – forged through the development of trade documentary checking – is now entrenched, opening up other bank processes that could benefit from AI.