Qumulo, the breakthrough leader in radically simplifying enterprise file data management across hybrid cloud environments, today announced the expansion of its executive team through the appointment of Jonathan Maltos as Vice President of People, effective immediately. In this role, Maltos is responsible for expanding global hiring and spearheading employee engagement and development initiatives at Qumulo, and will play a key role in accelerating the company’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives (DE&I).

Maltos brings more than 20 years of human resources leadership experience with talent acquisition, learning and development, retention, employee relations, and more. He joins Qumulo from gaming company, Big Fish Games, where he served as the Vice President of HR and led the company’s people operations through several business transformations and acquisitions. Jonathan has also held numerous HR leadership and consulting roles at distinguished corporations such as Aon Hewitt, Darigold and Washington Mutual Bank.

“Jonathan’s wealth of employee development experience will be a key addition to our global leadership team,” said Bill Richter, CEO of Qumulo. “His passion for building creative, culture-driven and diverse teams and scaling globally make him a natural fit to scale Qumulo in service of our customers. With his track record of empowering and developing people, I know he will make a great impact here.” 

“I look forward to building upon the incredible culture and people team that already exist within Qumulo,” said Maltos. “Qumulons are passionate – they like rolling up their sleeves to build a great company, a great culture and a great product. My interest in joining the team was immediate because these are things I’m also very passionate about. I’m thrilled to start my next chapter at such a mission-driven company.” 

Maltos holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations and Political Science from the University of Washington. 

Clearwater Analytics, a global SaaS solutions provider, announced today that it was named Best Client Reporting Solution in the 2021 FTF News Technology Innovation Awards. According to FTF News, the award recognizes solutions that have advanced the complex process of client reporting with customization, look and feel, automation, and data quality. 

Clearwater is the premier solution for client reporting for investment management firms. Clearwater provides a high-quality digital experience that enables investment managers to report on client portfolio performance with an intuitive interface featuring clean, accurate, and timely investment data.  

“At Clearwater, we are highly focused on helping investment managers tell their story,” said Subi Sethi, Chief Client Officer at Clearwater Analytics. “Investors have greater expectations and are more sophisticated than ever before, with increasingly complex asset allocations and a hyper focus on knowing more about their portfolios. Consequently, we have seen our investment manager clients successfully increase AUM and hone their investment strategies with Clearwater’s reporting tools. We are honored to be recognized by the FTF News Technology Innovation Awards.” 

Clearwater provides flexible solutions for client reporting with an expanding number of tools devoted to performance, attribution, composites, projections, compliance, billing, and more. Using automated reporting tools, investment managers and their clients create, customize, and share easy-to-read reports to transform their data and go beyond holdings reports and simple portfolio summaries. Users can also create customized, professional-quality reporting packages using Clearwater’s Enhanced Statements tool. 

“As we celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of the FTF Awards and the 15th Anniversary of FTF, it has proven to be one of the most competitive to date. Not only did we get more than 220 nominations, but we also had a staggering number of voters from the industry — 20,000+,” said Maureen Lowe, founder and president of FTF and FTF News. “Congratulations to all of the nominees and especially to the winners who continued to innovate, stay connected and work so incredibly hard to keep their clients moving forward and adapt during not only very challenging period professionally, but personally. We are continually impressed with the dedication of so many in a highly competitive and rapidly-changing industry. And many thanks to our clients who have worked with us over the past 15 years and helped shape FTF today. We hope everyone stays in good health and we look forward to a joyous reunion when we can safely meet again in person.”   

Slovenia-based SKB banka (SKB) has today announced its partnership with Engagement Banking technology provider, Backbase, to accelerate its digital transformation and ensure a seamless banking experience for all new and existing customers. The partnership will see SKB adopting Backbase’s Engagement Banking Platform, enabling it to provide digital banking and digital sales solutions to its retail, SME and corporate banking customers, enabling frictionless self-service and digital onboarding capabilities.

As a member of the OTP Group (OTP), a Hungarian-based banking group providing services across Central and Eastern Europe, SKB will be the first of many collaborations between Backbase and other members of OTP – with plans to expand across eight countries. This partnership will lay the foundations for a single, unified Engagement Banking Platform that will support the harmonization of multi-channel architecture across OTP’s various subsidiaries in Central and Eastern Europe. Deployment across further banks within the group will enable accelerated time to market for new digital solutions, as well as a lower cost of technology ownership. All while operating on a secure, efficient, and sustainable platform that is agile and scalable.

Backbase’s Engagement Banking platform will further enable SKB to unify its online and mobile experience onto a single platform, creating a frictionless and highly personalized experience for its customers, while simultaneously empowering its employees to deliver improved service through increased efficiency, transparency and connectivity.

In addition, the partnership will enable SKB to realize its goal of achieving greater control over the development, optimization and customization of its entire digital banking offering, helping it to provide an enhanced end-to-end journey for its customers, and allowing it to orchestrate every step of the customer lifecycle across all touchpoints – from seamless, instantaneous online onboarding to enhanced customer service and personalized offers.

Anita Stojčevska, Chief Executive Officer at SKB banka comments: “We were looking to partner with a trendsetter in the digital banking world to help us achieve our goal of providing the best digital banking experience in the market – and Backbase was the natural fit. With Backbase as our partner, we will be able to provide the solutions our customers expect and continuously meet their needs as they grow. We are confident that this is the beginning of a longstanding relationship with Backbase, and that the partnership will be crucial to not only our evolution and expansion, but also that of many other OTP Group member banks.” 

Matthijs Eijpe, Regional Vice President EMEA at Backbase: “SKB banka consistently strives to maintain its best-in-class status, as evidenced by repeated external recognition of its outstanding business results. We are delighted that SKB selected Backbase as its partner to support the seamless growth of its digital banking solutions. We look forward to supporting not only SKB, but also the wider OTP Group, to help them to continue to provide the outstanding banking services that customers have come to expect”.

Lumi, the global specialist in delivering compliant shareholder and member Annual General Meetings, today announces a key new appointment to the senior team following an unprecedented period of growth. 

Lumi works with over 5,000 businesses around the world and all the FTSE100, including BP, HSBC, EasyJet, IBM and Marks and Spencer, to deliver member and shareholder events with patented virtual AGM technology. The Lumi service delivers authenticated attendance, live polling and managed Q&A sessions for virtual and in-person AGMs, enabling organisations to run compliant meetings that improve transparency and increase engagement. Lumi supports the full gamut of shareholder and member events, including investor days and results presentations.  

The first half of 2021 has been the busiest ever period for Lumi, with its team hosting over 2,600 virtual or hybrid meetings globally for more than 128,000 stakeholders, more than double the number of events and attendees from the same period in 2020.  

This follows the widespread shift from the world’s largest companies to run virtual meetings and AGM events online due to the pandemic. This change, as well as a growing focus from businesses on reducing their carbon footprint, means many organisations are rethinking the format of AGM and member meetings and shifting to virtual events.  

Marc Harper joins the company’s UK head office as CTO to develop further technology innovations for Lumi’s customers, expanding Lumi’s offering beyond AGM and member meetings into the broader investor relations landscape. Marc brings extensive experience leading technology strategy and programmes for Motorola and The White Company, delivering new business-enabling technology and security solutions.   

Richard Taylor, CEO of Lumi, comments: “I’m thrilled to be announcing our new CTO at such an exciting time for the business. The role of shareholder and member meetings is more important than ever, and as a business we are investing heavily in our service. As the leader in the market, it’s a perfect time for Lumi to capitalise on the increased digitisation of compliance meetings. 

“We are going through a time of exponential growth, and the shift to virtual and hybrid meetings shows no sign of slowing. With Marc bolstering the team, our focus will be on positioning Lumi as an integral part of any large company’s operations, as well as continuing to be the standard for compliance meetings.” 

Marc Harper, CTO Lumi, comments: “I am delighted to be joining Lumi at a period of unprecedented growth as companies and governments alike embrace digital solutions as a new way of conducting critical and compliance-driven meetings. This shift creates fantastic opportunities for the business - gone are the days where executives would fly across the world for meetings, and the Lumi digital solutions can offer a service to achieve this in an engaging way, whilst helping companies to reduce their carbon footprint. 

“The company demonstrates passion, commitment and desire to deliver an outstanding service for clients, always prioritising attention to detail.” 

• 08.06.2021 -- 05:49 pm

Financial IT Interview with Alexey Zverev, Co-founder and Co-CEO at Exactpro

Exactpro is a leading independent provider of software testing services for mission-critical technology that underpins global financial markets. The firm is experienced with trading, clearing and settlement platforms, market surveillance systems, market data systems, collateral and risk management systems, and post trade infrastructures. Exactpro provides functional and non-functional testing services to exchanges, clearing houses, securities depositories, trade repositories, digital exchanges, central banks, brokers and investment banks worldwide. Headquartered in the UK, Exactpro employs over 630 members of staff. Learn more at exactpro.com.

Chris Lewis, Head of Solutions at Synectics Solutions

“Criminals will undoubtedly be targeting users of sites affected by the Fastly outage, particularly those offering a subscription service. If you recall TSB’s botched IT upgrade back in 2018, this caused a surge in phishing attacks across the finance industry with a 10,000% uptick in the weeks after their IT failure.  

"Giants like Amazon and Spotify will have significant security processes in place to protect themselves and their customers, so my concerns lie with smaller organisations who offer subscription services and whose customer data may not be subject to similarly robust security measures. Here, the onus is on those companies to contact their customers with a reminder of security best practice and how to spot phishing attacks while also preparing internally for any potential attack, which in my view should be expected as a guaranteed outcome. Additionally, the importance and value of disaster recovery services to ensure a rapid return to action while preventing substantial data loss cannot be underestimated.  

"Within banking there is a mega-trend towards operational resilience to prevent losses from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems or from external events. This means ensuring that banking institutions have – amongst other policies and processes - resilient ICT systems that are subject to regularly tested protection, detection, response and recovery programs and that they convey relevant and timely information that enable risk management and decision-making processes to fully support and facilitate critical operations. However, banks can be as robust as possible but if there are weaknesses in other areas of the ecosystem, their strength is diminished.”

Tassat Group Inc., a global provider of financial technologies and products for digital payments, today announced the appointment of David Koch as Managing Director, Sales & Business Development. As Tassat continues its aggressive growth, Koch will lead the Company’s overall sales and distribution strategy to seize market opportunity and meet growing client demand. He will report to Chief Executive Officer, Ron Totaro.

Koch brings over 20 years of experience driving revenue across payments and commercial banking. His expertise spans blockchain payments, open banking and APIs, digital payments, ERP connectivity, real-time payments, and automation of the customer onboarding process. Koch joins Tassat from Ninth Wave Inc., where he served as Head of Strategic Accounts. He previously spent 10 years at Mastercard in various roles, ultimately serving as Vice President, Member Relations. Throughout his career he has held executive roles including Chief Commercial Officer at FISPAN, Director at CGI’s payment IP group, Vice President for Business Development at Earthport and Vice President for Marketing & Business Development at Promereo.

“B2B payments are a $23 trillion market that has yet to benefit from meaningful digital transformation, which presents immense opportunity for banks. When banks join TassatPay® Network, they’ll solve the problems their commercial customers experience with antiquated payment rails. We’re thrilled to welcome David to our team to support our market leadership in the space and ensure a seamless, efficient journey for our customers,” said Ron Totaro, Tassat CEO. “Our growing executive team is a testament to Tassat’s unwavering commitment to delivering blockchain-based real-time payments to the banking industry. David’s in-depth industry knowledge and extensive experience bringing payments technology to market is the perfect fit to help drive Tassat into its next growth phase.”

“Tassat is uniquely positioned to lead the banking industry to B2B digital payments because of its blockchain technology expertise and its track record running a high-volume B2B payments platform. I’ve long admired Tassat’s technology and forward-looking vision, and I’m excited to bring my decades of expertise to enable banks to bring the full complement of digital payments capability to their commercial customers,” said David Koch. “I look forward to driving rapid business growth as the company enters a burgeoning market.”

SEON, the fraud fighters, today announces its partnership with IDVerifact, the advanced digital identity solution. Last year it was reported that nearly half of companies experienced a fraud in the past 24 months. Recognising the increasing surge in fraud and digital identity theft, IDVerifact sought to strengthen their capabilities by partnering with SEON to extend its comprehensive suite of solutions. 

IDVerifact removes the challenges associated with a traditional approach to onboarding, maintaining and optimising multiple digital identity partners. It achieves this with a complete suite of continually evolving digital identity solutions, allowing organisations to rapidly capture the data attributes required to complete trusted business transactions with their clients. As part of the deal, IDVerifact will integrate SEON’s cloud-based machine learning platform, Intelligence Tool, into the IDVerifact platform to provide inputs for user profiling decisions on transactions, all in real-time.  

Built for data enrichment, SEON’s Intelligence Tool scans open-source databases and gathers extra information about users based on an email address, phone number or IP address. In addition, it enables users to simply check if an email address is valid or not and instantly get background information to create a complete user profile, flag fraudsters, confirm suspicions or remove doubts.  

George Colwell, Sr. Vice President at IDVerifact, commented: “The issue we are seeing is that fraudulent activity is only increasing, yet there is no one size fits all standardised method for digital identity. But, no matter who you are or where you’re transacting, it should be secure. That’s why we developed a one stop shop for digital identity solutions, enabling customers to choose from a menu of data attributes that uniquely suit their organisation. We believe that SEON is an ideal partner to support us in reaching our goals.  

He added: “Not only was it a meeting of minds when it comes to approach and our complimentary offerings, but the team at SEON also understand that there is no space for standing still so we all must continually evolve. We know that as our partners grow, so too will we.”  

Tamas Kadar, CEO and Co-Founder at SEON, said: “By integrating SEON’s Intelligence Tool, IDVerifact has assembled a next-level toolbox for fraud protection, including digital identity verification, compliance, risk assessment, data capture, tokenisation and encryption. Together we are helping organisations to create safe environments to conduct transactions at the speed of today’s business.” 

To learn more about SEON and the services it provides, visit: https://seon.io/   

 QuantaVerse, which uses AI and machine learning to automate financial crime identification and investigations, is offering HRER Fast Start to banks interested in cutting costs and improving the accuracy and consistency of their high-risk entity review program. In no more than 60 days,* QuantaVerse can launch HRER and return the first month of QuantaVerse High-Risk Entity Reports.

The QuantaVerse High-Risk Entity Report documents risk discovered by the QuantaVerse Financial Crime Investigation Platform. The platform automates the research work required to accurately assess entity risk, such as adverse media, jurisdiction, transactional relationships, and typologies that indicate potential money laundering. QuantaVerse offers HRER Fast Start so customers can quickly realize the benefits associated with automating this area of their AML process.

In just two months, QuantaVerse High-Risk Entity Reports can be launched in an institution and begin returning reports that cut HRER costs while improving the accuracy and consistency of their high-risk entity efforts. There are five steps to improving HRER outcomes for AML/BSA teams with QuantaVerse:

• Configure bank-specific risk settings (jurisdiction, line of business, etc.)
• Review bank file formats and build mapping if necessary
• Accept secure file transfers of high-risk entities and relevant KYC data
• Run analytics and produce reports
• Return monthly HRER reports for each analyzed entity

“The new HRER Fast Start makes it easy for banks to improve the accuracy and consistency of their high-risk entity review program,” explained David McLaughlin, CEO and Founder of QuantaVerse. “QuantaVerse HRERs make the entity review process more efficient while getting complete analysis with fewer errors.”

The manual nature of high-risk reviews make them a time-consuming cost sink for AML/BSA teams. Human investigators manually sift through customer data and a multitude of disparate databases, then conduct research on the web in an attempt to accurately evaluate customer risk. The process is especially laborious when evaluating highly active customers, but even dormant or declining accounts deemed high-risk demand regular attention. In addition to being costly, the HRER effort demands the attention of more experienced and higher-compensated members of AML/BSA teams.

CCOs and AML/BSA leaders using the QuantaVerse Automated Investigation solution have experienced first-hand how the QuantaVerse platform and Financial Crime Investigation Reports (FCIRs) were streamlining and creating consistency across their alert investigations. With some modifications, they recognized that QuantaVerse FCIRs could also make their HRER efforts more efficient.

One QuantaVerse customer conducting approximately 1,200 high risk entity reports each year was averaging 10 hours on each high-risk review. Leveraging QuantaVerse, the average time required for HRERs was reduced to three hours per investigation. Not only did automating HRER investigations cut 60% of the time allocated to high-risk entity reporting, but it also improved accuracy and enabled experienced investigators to be deployed to their highest and best use in the organization.

To learn how to improve HRER efforts and demonstrate that your organization is employing the innovations that regulators and FinCEN are expecting, please visit: https://quantaverse.net/try-ai/#HRER.

Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the world’s digital infrastructure company™, today announced a strategic collaboration with GNX — a global provider of managed underlay and WAN networks — to bring bespoke connectivity solutions to Equinix’s enterprise clients in its International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data center HH1 in Hamburg. GNX is now an official Reseller Partner within the Equinix Partner Program. 

Companies deploying at HH1 and utilizing interconnection services such as Equinix Fabric™ and Network Edge, can now access over 4,000 carriers and Internet service providers (ISPs) through GNX, thus benefiting from enhanced connectivity at the digital edge. 

By leveraging Equinix Fabric in combination with GNX’s managed first- and last-mile services, customers are able to access the entire global Equinix ecosystem of nearly 10,000 customers, including more than 1,800 networks and 2,950+ cloud and IT service providers. This enables companies to deploy their digital infrastructure effectively, with secure access to their own infrastructure, customers, ecosystem, and clouds, across regions. 

According to the Equinix 2020-21 Global Tech Trends Survey, IT leaders in Germany are working to digitize their IT infrastructure, with 78% of respondents citing this as a priority of their organization’s technology strategy. In addition, 69% are focused on improving network optimization and moving their infrastructure to the digital edge – both of which are supported by this new partnership.

With the newly increased number of carrier network providers available in the Equinix Hamburg IBX, customers can now optimize their networks based on price, quality of service and service offering, and integrate the Equinix interconnected ecosystem in their global WAN. 

Highlights/Key Facts

• As a major European industrial and trade hub, Hamburg is home to a growing technology community, including many e-commerce companies which require low latency, increased bandwidth and connectivity to industry-leading networking and cloud services providers. Equinix’s growing presence in the metro further supports the city’s position as a leading German digital hub: The Smart City Index by Bitkom measures major German cities in terms of digitization, and Hamburg achieves top scores in all areas examined. 

• Opened in 2019, HH1 is Equinix’s first data center in Hamburg—the company’s fourth metro in Germany. HH1 enables Equinix customers to evolve from traditional businesses to "digital businesses" whereby they can interconnect with thousands of customers, locations, clouds and service providers, through one of the largest global interconnection ecosystems.  

• HH1 provides access to Platform Equinix®, including Equinix Fabric, allowing customers to leverage interconnection services at the digital edge. Enterprises and service providers use Equinix Fabric as a single interconnection approach to connect between all their physical and virtual devices within Equinix IBXs and the world's largest digital infrastructure ecosystem. This includes connecting physical devices located within Equinix colocation, and automated bare metal servers available with Equinix Metal™, with virtual devices such as routers, firewalls and SD-WAN gateways available on Network Edge. This helps enterprises to seamlessly bridge the distance between their distributed digital infrastructure for future-proofed business success.

• GNX is carrier-neutral and provides first- and last-mile connectivity, in addition to integrating with any SDWAN, SASE or traditional network WAN, GNX delivers this full suite within a single contract, providing customers with a single point of contact from provisioning to pro-active 24x7 support. 

Quotes

• Jens-Peter Feidner, Managing Director, Germany, Equinix:

“Through this new collaboration with GNX, we are further enhancing connectivity options for our customers in Hamburg. Enterprises benefit from the numerous carrier network providers now available, enabling our customers to leverage a neutral connectivity network combined with Equinix’s interconnection services such as Equinix Fabric. This partnership further underlines Hamburg’s growing importance as a digital hub, and one of Germany’s leading digital capitals.” 

• Jan-Willem Meijer, CCO, the Netherlands, GNX:

“Supporting businesses that need a more agile, flexible and global approach to connectivity, GNX provides a unique, carrier-neutral model that enables clients to source solutions that best fit their requirements. We help to extend the Equinix ecosystem, including Equinix Fabric and cloud integration capabilities, to the customer premise using private or public connectivity options. This partnership has enabled us to offer access to the global Equinix ecosystem through our carrier-neutral connectivity, reducing the hassle of multi-vendor, multi-contract environments for our customers.”

• Rutger Bevaart, CEO, the Netherlands, GNX:

“I'm very excited about the new possibilities we can offer together with Equinix in the Hamburg HH1 IBX. Through our partnership with Equinix, customers of the HH1 IBX gain access to over 4,000 global carriers and ISPs. Our next-generation approach to global connectivity brings together these carriers into our LARA platform, simplifying the sourcing of connectivity by being a virtual extension of our customers’ global network teams.”