Transcend, a leading provider of inventory, funding and liquidity management and optimization solutions, expands its best-in-class solution suite with the launch of CCP Central. CCP Central is the first platform to connect and automate margin and collateral management activities across a global network of Central Clearing Counterparties (CCPs). 

With Initial Margin posted at CCPs reaching record highs in 2020 and cleared OTC derivatives margins alone up by 22.8% year over year1, it is no longer feasible, let alone scalable, for firms to manually process CCP margin requirements. CCP Central addresses the risks and inefficiencies of manually funding growing CCP exposures. 

“CCP margin and collateral management is key to a capital markets workflow, but the lack of transparency and disconnected, manual processes that firms have relied on up until this point have created a high degree of risk that is only growing as CCP margin pressures increase,” said Bimal Kadikar, CEO of Transcend. “Our CCP Central solution delivers a control framework that seamlessly addresses one of the industry’s largest pain points while also creating process efficiency and improved financial performance.”

Transcend’s CCP Central solution specifically targets the many challenges associated with manual and siloed CCP margin activity. The platform provides pre-built connections to CCPs, eliminating a reliance on internal development resources to set up multiple complex integrations. By offering advanced optimization capabilities and straight-through collateral processing, Transcend provides an end-to-end solution to connect, standardize, optimize and automate CCP funding.  

Transcend’s innovative CCP Central solution seamlessly addresses some of the industry’s greatest margining challenges by providing:

• Out-of-the-box connectivity and harmonized data across CCPs, exchanges, and internal platforms for client and house collateral

• Comprehensive analysis of margin calls and balances, collateral schedules, positions and transactions, and RQVs to satisfy margin requirements

• Sophisticated collateral optimization not only across CCPs, but also across the enterprise to identify the smartest collateral movements

• Straight-through-processing (STP) to automatically execute funding decisions without the need for manual oversight 

• Monitoring and alerting frameworks to tightly control risk exposures 

“Transcend’s clients have been asking for a single place to monitor, manage and automate funding activities across their global network of CCPs,” explained BJ Marcoullier, Head of Business Development at Transcend. “Transcend is proud to deliver a solution that not only addresses these needs, but also integrates with our clients’ broader enterprise framework for true scalability.” 

As cleared derivatives CCPs become a growing proportion of collateralized exposures, Transcend’s CCP Central solution presents an opportunity for firms to implement best-in-class capabilities and integrate cleared derivatives into their enterprise-wide collateral management strategy.

 Nebulon, Inc.®, the pioneer of smartInfrastructure™, server-embedded, infrastructure software delivered as-a-service, today announced that SYSDBA has deployed the Nebulon smartCore™ solution to bring management simplicity to its internal and hosted data centre infrastructure. With this deployment, SYSDBA has achieved a 50% reduction in infrastructure costs by eliminating external array purchases and improving application infrastructure density.

SYSDBA is a South Africa-based managed service provider and reseller with customers around Africa and the United Kingdom. Largely coming from the financial services and healthcare sectors, the service provider’s customers have a variety of requirements: short term, transactional requests from customers who require flexibility for a wide range of application types, as well as larger strategic projects from customers who need data centre solutions aimed at serving digital transformation projects.

SYSDBA had been using 3-tier architectures for years. However, when it came time for a refresh, the service provider sought out an innovative solution that would enable it to both consolidate racks of expensive storage and idle hosts, and also predictably and smoothly scale its internal and hosted customer environments.

SYSDBA chose the Nebulon smartCore solution to reduce infrastructure costs and bring cloud-simplicity to its on-premises infrastructure. To achieve this, the service provider deployed HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 servers with Nebulon smartInfrastructure to host its customer environments as well as internal operations. The solution is ideal as it has allowed SYSDBA to meet its immediate needs, and easily, quickly, and cost-efficiently scale the solution as customer demand increases.

Nebulon smartInfrastructure was especially attractive to SYSDBA because it offered an opportunity to simplify and accelerate application deployment, control its environment from anywhere and reduce infrastructure maintenance efforts through behind-the-scenes software updates. These features are especially critical for certain customers in Africa who may lack skilled resources to manage large infrastructures as well as others located in areas with difficult or limited access.

“Having to be onsite for a 4:00am firmware update isn’t safe or ideal in some customer settings, so the fact that Nebulon smartInfrastructure can be provisioned, managed and maintained from anywhere gives significant flexibility in terms of control,” said Marc Pratt, Strategic Alliances Manager at SYSDBA. “What made Nebulon even more attractive, however, was the fact that we cut our costs in half versus purchasing disaggregated storage and compute solutions. And because the solution doesn’t consume any server CPU, memory, or networking resources like hyperconverged infrastructure alternatives, we are able to use 100% of our server for the applications we run. Based on this alone, choosing Nebulon was a no-brainer.”

“Service providers like SYSDBA rely on solutions to help them address key time-to-value and management challenges they experience in their core and hosted data centres,” said Siamak Nazari, Nebulon CEO. “With Nebulon smartInfrastructure, not only can they address these challenges, but they can save infrastructure costs doing it.”

FICO, a global analytics leader, today released the Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Study of FICO® Decision Modeler, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of FICO. A central component of the FICO® Platform, Decision Modeler is a decision rules management system that allows companies to author, test, and optimize decision logic across their business.

FICO® Decision Modeler empowers business users to orchestrate digital decisions at scale. It unleashes the power of data, analytics and artificial intelligence to enable businesses to uncover insights in real time, take immediate action and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

“Digital decisioning is active and anticipatory,” said Bill Waid, general manager of FICO® Decision Management. “It moves you to act by showing you the bigger picture of your business, your products and your customers. With digital decisioning, split-second actions are continuously optimized for the best outcomes. In essence, digital decisioning enables radical, customer-focused change because it gives you two things: clear visibility into and across your business and the power to act on that insight.”

"Unfortunately, most analytic projects never end up being used to actually drive digital decisions,” continued Waid. “The unrealized opportunity and resource expenditure is significant; the real business value of highly complex analytic models manifests when they're placed in the hands of the business users and become an integral part of their operations. This is what Decision Modeler is designed to do."

The Total Economic Impact of FICO Decision Modeler

Commissioned by FICO and conducted by Forrester, the TEI Study is based on in-depth interviews with FICO customers and provides a cost-benefit analysis to determine the economic value and impact the FICO Decision Modeler can have in any organization.

Based on the analysis of a composite $10 billion financial services organization, the study demonstrated a 356 percent return on investment.

The TEI study found that organizations using Decision Modeler on the FICO Platform could leverage more informed, simulated, and proven customer decisioning – faster and more often. This allowed the organizations to realize improvements against key metrics such as customer approvals, non-payments, fraud, and personnel costs while creating the flexibility to govern a facilitated decisioning process throughout the entire lifecycle.

The study uncovered additional benefits of implementing the FICO® Platform, including:

• Improved customer experience (CX) delivery. Organizations can improve their CX delivery by offering near-instantaneous, personalized decisioning to their customers.
• Improved confidence through increased visibility.  Additional visibility into customer criteria or decisioning logic provides enhanced confidence to decision-makers, especially with respect to audit and compliance.
• Ability to scale. Organizations can scale their deployments across additional channels, regions, and product lines or expand on the FICO Platform.
• Increased revenue and profit from more loan approvals.  Organizations can implement more nuanced, pre-simulated, and profitable approval decisioning strategies in hours or days rather than weeks or months. This improves customer acceptance rates, representing tens of millions in revenue and millions in profit to the organizations.
• Reduction in loss rate and instances of fraud. Simulated, nuanced, and more frequent decisioning strategies also allow organizations to reduce loss rates and losses associated with fraud.
• Productivity impact for decisioning personnel.  FICO Platform improves the productivity of staff tasked with risk strategy and decisioning by providing them with improved visibility into decisioning from across the organization. FICO Platform empowers users with a no-code platform that greatly reduces the time and level of manual work required for compliance and to implement changes to decisioning strategy from inception through iteration across the entire lifecycle.

According to an executive vice president of a financial services firm interviewed for the TEI Study, “With Decision Modeler, we get much more sophisticated than what we could have through our own internal development process to more finely segment risk. For us, that’s a benefit in the million-dollar range.”

More About the FICO® Platform and Digital Decisions

• Listen to this webinar with guest speaker Mike Gualtieri, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research and Bill Doyle, vice president of FICO® Decision Management Suite, as they cover the results of TEI study of FICO® Decision Modeler.
• Read about FICO’s position as a leader in a recent Digital Decisioning Platforms Report by Forrester.
• Learn more about how the FICO Platform helps enterprises make data-driven decisions that drive better business results and amazing customer experiences.
• Read Bill Waid’s blog post, Digital Decisioning Enables Radical, Customer-Focused Change.

About FICO

FICO (NYSE: FICO) powers decisions that help people and businesses around the world prosper. Founded in 1956 and based in Silicon Valley, the company is a pioneer in the use of predictive analytics and data science to improve operational decisions. FICO holds more than 195 US and foreign patents on technologies that increase profitability, customer satisfaction and growth for businesses in financial services, telecommunications, health care, retail and many other industries. Using FICO solutions, businesses in more than 120 countries do everything from protecting 2.6 billion payment cards from fraud, to helping people get credit, to ensuring that millions of airplanes and rental cars are in the right place at the right time.

Learn more at https://www.fico.com

FICO is a registered trademark of Fair Isaac Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.

 Cynerio, the leading provider of Healthcare IoT cybersecurity and asset management solutions, announced today that it secured $30 million in Series B funding. The investment round was led by ALIVE Israel HealthTech Fund, Israel's pioneering HealthTech investment fund, headed by former health system officials, medical professionals, and veteran medtech entrepreneurs. Existing investors, global VC Accelmed, RDC, Elron’s joint venture with Rafael, and Swiss-based growth investor, MTIP, also participated in the funding round. ALIVE co-investors, CBG London investment company owned by Vincent Tchenguiz, also participated in the round and additional co-investors will join as well, including a leading UAE based investment group.
Cynerio will use the funding to fully realize its vision of being the healthcare industry's go-to cybersecurity and asset management solution by expanding its channel program, forming strategic partnerships with leading solution providers and expanding its clinically-intelligent toolbox of preemptive and proactive Zero Trust solutions into a full-service, responsive security platform. The funding will further support the acceleration of technological development and enhance support to Cynerio’s existing customers, while reinforcing its leading position in North America as well as its global expansion.

“It’s critical to have partners who intimately understand the healthcare industry and its exceptional needs, especially now with the unprecedented pressures COVID-19 has introduced. Cynerio is extremely grateful for the continued faith and support of Elron, Accelmed and MTIP,” said Leon Lerman, CEO and co-founder of Cynerio. “With the additional backing of ALIVE and their expertise in the US healthcare system, we’ll be able to continue advancing our product offerings to support healthcare providers, with unparalleled threat detection, preemptive security and response capabilities, while alleviating healthcare’s coinciding operational challenges.”

Cynerio grew substantially in 2020, concluding the year with a 300% year-over-year revenue increase. The company was recognized as the industry Leader in Forrester’s Connected Medical Device Security, Q2 Report and named a Gartner Cool Vendor in the 2020 Security Report, further highlighting the strength of Cynerio’s solutions and its unique approach to Healthcare IoT cybersecurity.

"We're very excited to lead this investment round in Cynerio, the industry leader," said Dudi Klein, Managing Partner at ALIVE. "As a team of veteran healthcare leaders, we know the importance of healthcare cybersecurity first-hand. Cynerio’s exceptional team has created an intuitive, cost-effective and high-quality suite of solutions that healthcare professionals can rely on to protect their patients, staff, and business integrity with confidence."

As COVID-19 continues to strain the global healthcare industry, barrages of cyber attacks accentuate the need for robust healthcare-specific security and automated asset management solutions. To meet and exceed those needs, Cynerio scaled from a security solution focused only on medical devices to a full-suite, one-stop-shop Healthcare IoT cybersecurity platform that covers every threat vector on every connected device. The clinically-intelligent platform automates asset discovery and risk reduction, and takes the evolution of IoT security one step beyond visibility, providing healthcare teams with the ability to not just identify more problems on their network, but to actually solve them and secure their organization to ensure patient safety, data integrity and operational continuity. 

Monneo, virtual IBAN and eCommerce bank account provider, has unveiled an innovative new look logo and website design this week, as the brand expands across Europe and beyond. 

With the help of strategy-led design agency fst, the experienced banking and FinTech team behind Monneo worked together to create the rebrand as the firm enters an exciting next phase.

Formed in 2018, with headquarters in London, UK, the Authorized Payment Institution is licensed by the FCA. 

With Monneo, every virtual IBAN is linked to a safeguarding bank account so client’s funds are safe and secure. With a private banking approach, Monneo supports B2B international transfers from merchants to suppliers and vendors. 

The new branding reflects the virtual IBAN and eCommerce bank account providers technology drive forward across Europe, and internationally, as it enters an exciting new era of e-commerce.

Monneo’s MD, Lilia Metodieva, said: “As Monneo is growing in the digital banking space and extending across Europe, we recognized the need to adapt our branding to reflect our strength and positioning. 

“We are really pleased with the new, innovative and fresh look design and delighted to work with design agency FST who really understood our brief.”

2021 is set to be an exciting year for Monneo as they enter the next phase of growth in the e-commerce sector.

For more information visit Monneo at https://www.monneo.com/.

oneZero, a global leader in multi-asset enterprise trading technology solutions, today announced that Marc Reider joined the company as Director of Hub Product Management. Marc will be responsible for building the advanced execution and risk management capabilities of oneZero’s Hub technology to meet the needs of institutional clients.

Marc has spent the last 10 years at Refinitiv (formerly Thomson Reuters), where he most recently served as Development Manager for the FXall product. He worked on a number of applications including building the FX Options product for FXall and the multi-asset callouts platform. Marc also spent 15 years at Credit Suisse, where he was Director of Foreign Exchange IT and developed FX systems for cash and derivatives for risk management, transactions processing and e-commerce. Marc earned his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Throughout my career, I’ve been focused on using technology to improve the way the financial industry trades FX. Now at oneZero I’m thrilled to be a part of a team that’s developing cutting-edge solutions for the institutional market,” said Marc Reider.

“Marc’s background in product development for the institutional market is impressive. There is no doubt he will be a tremendous leader as we continue to bolster oneZero’s institutional offering,” said Andrew Ralich, Co-Founder and CEO of oneZero. 

This news comes as oneZero has been making substantial enhancements to Institutional Hub, the company’s flagship technology platform for brokers and banks. oneZero recently launched the Algorithmic Pricing Module, an advanced price creation tool that facilitates the formation of  customized pricing using brokers’ own data constructs and algorithms.

MPowered Mortgages, brought to you by MQube, offers to lend for buy-to-let individual, limited company and portfolio landlords, is now available to PRIMIS members as part of the network’s lender panel.    

MPowered Mortgages’ product offering comes alongside the innovative in-house platform, MPowered, driving automation and innovation across the mortgage application process. PRIMIS advisers will benefit from a simple and intuitive system that enables cases to be submitted with ease, with a simple document upload and a streamlined application process for brokers. 

The platform ensures fewer delays, less back-and-forth and a legally-binding decision in a meaningfully shorter timeframe. An automated and intuitive application process means a faster process for advisers and ultimately customers. MPowered Mortgages aim to deliver lending with certainty and control. The application process has been built alongside advisers to give them the tools they need to better serve their clients.   

Additional highlights of the partnership for PRIMIS brokers include:  

·         Range of fee-free re-mortgages up to £1m  

·         2 and 5 Year fixed periods up to 80% 

·         CCJ – 1 satisfied up to £250 in last 3 years 

·         Defaults over 2 years ignored 

·         Local Authority flats up to 70% 

·         HMO – up to 6 

Emma Hollingworth, distribution director at MPowered Mortgages, added: “We’re delighted to be launching with PRIMIS Mortgage Network today, and look forward to supporting their members. We want to ensure that advisers have access to the best mortgage lending for their customers. We believe combining a competitive product range with an innovative tech offering to PRIMIS members will help achieve this.” 

Vikki Jefferies, Proposition Director at PRIMIS, comments: “Technology has proven its benefits throughout the mortgage advice process, and it is for this reason that I am excited to announce PRIMIS’ partnership with MPowered today. In today’s busy climate, first and foremost, advisers need tech-driven solutions that are going to give them time back to focus more on their clients – which is exactly what the MPowered proposition will provide them. I look forward to seeing the results that our AR firms can start generating for their customers following today’s news, and supporting MPowered on its growth journey.” 

Bitex Founder and CEO Monark Modi said: 

"Price volatility in Bitcoin has been observed for a while now and the drop from previous high of $63k down to $40k was expected. Some other factors contributing to the drop are also recent U-turn of Tesla in accepting the most popular cryptocurrency as payments. The investment scenario across the global too has been subdued owing to either government regulations like the ban on crypto trade by China or even closer home in India where investors are facing deposit and withdrawal challenges owing to rumours of financial institutions restricting transactions. A strong remedy to repose investor faith in alternate investment class will require government to frame regulations to safeguard investor money. As a global exchange Bitex has always voiced need for positive regulation and also advised retail users to make informed decisions while investing in cryptocurrencies. A systematic Investment plan will definitely average out repeated cycles of volatility."

As one of the most important innovations to come out of the cryptocurrency boom, blockchain technology completely changed the way companies across various industries operate, manage their assets, and make transactions.

According to data gathered by AksjeBloggen.com, the global spending on blockchain solutions is expected to soar by 188% and hit $19bn by 2024.

Cross-Border Payments and Lot Lineage Account for 27% of Blockchain Technology Market

By allowing digital information to be distributed but not copied, blockchain technology created the groundwork for the new type of internet. Although initially invented for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, by improving online security and streamlining fundraising and payment options, blockchain technology was adopted by many companies across different industries.

Between 2017 and 2019, the global spending on blockchain solutions jumped from $950 million to $2.7bn, revealed the IDC`s Worldwide Semiannual Blockchain Spending Guide.

Like all technology investments, spending on blockchain projects has also been affected by the COVID-19. Nevertheless, global spending on blockchain solutions still surged by 66% year-over-year and hit $4.5bn in 2020. Statistics show this figure is expected to increase by $2.1bn in 2021 and then jump by another $12.4bn in the next three years.

The IDC report also revealed that cross-border payments and settlements were the largest individual blockchain use case, accounting for nearly 16% of the global blockchain technology market in 2021. Lot lineage and provenance ranked as the second-largest use case with a 10.7% market share this year. Trade finance and transaction settlements and asset and goods management follow with a 10% and 8.8% share, respectively.

The Number of B2B Cross-Border Transactions to Soar by 345% and Hit 1.2B by 2024

The 2021 Juniper Research revealed the number of B2B cross-border transactions finalized on the blockchain is expected to increase dramatically in the following years. Last year, there were 122 million B2B cross-border transactions worldwide. This figure is set to double and hit 280 million in 2021. By 2024, the number of transactions is forecast to soar by 345% to over 1.2 billion by 2024.

Statistics show that the Asian market accounts for 109 million or nearly 40% of total transactions in 2021. By 2025, the number of B2B cross-border transactions on the blockchain in the region is expected to grow seven times and hit 745 million.

Europe ranked as the second-leading region with 81.3 million transactions in 2021. This figure is forecast to rise to 466 million by 2025. As the third-leading region, North America is expected to witness almost a 550% growth in the next four years, with the number of B2B cross-border blockchain transactions surging from 39.2 million to 254.3 million.

The full story can be read here: https://aksjebloggen.com/global-spending-on-blockchain-solutions-to-soar-by-188-and-hit-19b-by-2024/