The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released two reports today showing that more work needs to be done to help mortgage borrowers coping with the COVID-19 pandemic and economic downturn. The first report documents that Black and Hispanic mortgage borrowers are much more likely to be delinquent or in a forbearance program than white borrowers. In a second report, the CFPB reports that overall mortgage complaints to the CFPB have risen to their highest level in three years.  

“More borrowers are behind on their mortgage than at any time since the height of the Great Recession,” said CFPB Acting Director Dave Uejio. “Communities of color have been hit hard by the pandemic, and the latest data show that many borrowers are still hurting. The CFPB will continue to seek and actively respond to developments in the market, doing everything in our power to help families stay in their homes.  As we warned mortgage servicers last month, unprepared is unacceptable.”

The CFPB is seeking comments on a proposal intended to help prevent avoidable foreclosures for borrowers affected by the COVID-19 emergency.  That proposal, if finalized, would temporarily require servicers to enhance communications with borrowers who are delinquent or in forbearance, allow servicers to offer certain streamlined loan modification options to borrowers with COVID-19-related hardships, and require servicers to afford all borrowers a special pre-foreclosure review period.  The comment period closes May 10th.

Refinitiv today announced a new strategic agreement with FinTech Studios, an AI-based news, market intelligence and analytics provider, to provide industry, local and regional news, and research to wealth management professionals across Latin America and beyond.

Latin America continues to be a key focus market for Refinitiv, supporting investment professionals, financial advisors, and their clients.  According to the International Monitory Fund (IMF), the region experienced stronger than expected performance in 2020 and is projected to exceed 4 percent GDP growth for 2021. Refinitiv’s agreement with FinTech Studios further demonstrates its commitment to provide content and analytics that drive insights for financial professionals across local and global markets.   

FinTech Studios utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to separate the signals from the noise, providing users with insights, news and research about markets and companies globally. The new partnership with Refinitiv will empower financial professionals with news and information that can support securities research and trade ideation, and access to breaking stories and market events. Users will be able to view trending topics across industries and companies, sort by specific companies and key words, and explore knowledge graphs to interpret impact on related companies and individuals. Wealth management and other investment firms will be able to tailor the solution to deliver local language capabilities, desired sources, and preferred analytics and views.

Charles Smith, Head of Digital Solutions, Wealth at Refinitiv, said: “We are excited to leverage FinTech Studios' AI-based market intelligence, analytics and insights to support our growing Latin America business. Latin America continues to be an exciting emerging market for our Refinitiv Wealth Solutions products, and this partnership will strengthen our ability to provide content and services curated for financial professionals throughout the region.”

Jim Tousignant, CEO and Founder of FinTech Studios said: “We are very excited to partner with Refinitiv, one of the world’s leading providers of solutions for the Wealth Management industry. Financial advisors and wealth managers today need more advanced AI-based tools and information to provide their clients with the best advice. Our partnership with Refinitiv will provide Refinitiv clients with access to millions of global sources of relevant news, events and market intelligence in 48 languages.”

To learn more about Refinitiv Wealth Management solutions and advisor tools, visit: https://www.refinitiv.com/en/wealth-management-solutions/automate-advisor-workflow.

Refinitiv has a rich history of servicing the Wealth Management industry from front to back office. Over the last two years, the firm has invested heavily in the business and is committed to bringing the most advanced solutions to market. The ongoing transformation includes building out the firm’s solutions through strategic acquisitions such as Scivantage and the launch of Refinitiv Digital Investor and Refinitiv Workspace for Wealth Advisors. Refinitiv wealth management solutions empower firms with faster time to market for digital properties while offering a flexible framework consisting of web-based components, pre-built pages, APIs, mobile apps, and collaboration tools such as video, co-browsing and secure chat that can be precisely configured for clients. A developer toolkit provides an additional level of control for in-house teams to design new and enhanced digital solutions.

Kubernetes, supported by a vibrant open source community, can drive outstanding innovation. To help in Kubernetes adoption, Red Hat and IBM Research have created Konveyor, an open source project aimed at helping modernize and migrate applications for open hybrid cloud by building tools, identifying patterns and providing advice on how to bring cloud-native transformation across IT. Konveyor also supports a growing number of tools, such as Crane, Forklift, Move2Kube, Tackle, and Pelorus, designed to accelerate Kubernetes adoption. 

Across industries, system administrators and developers are often the point teams driving digital transformation, helping the overall business benefit from modernized IT infrastructure, applications and services.

Frequently, this transformation leans on Kubernetes and Linux containers as a foundation. But taking this containerized leap requires a fundamental change in configuration and architecture. It’s like looking at a before and after renovation photo without directions to show you how to get from one to the next. What happens in between? And how can you pull that off too? 

Kubernetes Operators power Konveyor

We believe in using the power of Kubernetes Operators to embed operational knowledge and functionality into Kubernetes. Konveyor's subprojects are developed as Kubernetes Operators so that we can take advantage of their flexibility and to make deployment and management simple for admins already familiar with Operators.

Rehosting Workloads with Crane and Forklift

There are two primary rehosting needs within the Kubernetes community – migrating virtual machines unaltered to Kubernetes, and migrating already containerized applications between Kubernetes clusters.

KubeVirt allows developers and operations teams to obtain the benefits of Kubernetes orchestration and the surrounding ecosystem without requiring code or configuration changes.

While rehosting doesn’t provide the same benefits as replatforming or refactoring, it’s often useful in cases where development teams may not have the ability to change or modify code, such as with vendor-provided software. Rehosting also helps teams adapt to a new platform with less friction between process and culture.

The Konveyor subproject Forklift focuses on migrating virtual machines to Kubernetes and provides the ability to migrate virtual machines to KubeVirt with minimal downtime.

The second need is addressed by the Crane subproject, which concentrates on migrating applications between Kubernetes clusters. There are many times when developer and operations teams want to migrate between older and newer versions of Kubernetes, evacuate a cluster or migrate to different underlying infrastructure.

In an ideal scenario, this would be a redeployment of the application, but we have found that many users need a solution for migrating persistent data and the objects within Kubernetes namespaces continuously.

Replatforming with Move2Kube

Replatforming involves changing an underlying technology used by an application while minimizing the need for code change. One area in which replatforming is taking place is in the consolidation of container orchestration platforms to Kubernetes.

The Move2Kube subproject was initially launched to help accelerate the replatforming of Swarm and Cloud Foundry-based applications to Kubernetes. The tool translates existing artifacts into Kubernetes-native concepts, increasing an organization’s speed and ability to run applications on Kubernetes.

Refactoring Applications with Tackle

Refactoring is perhaps one of the most challenging yet most beneficial strategies for users looking to move applications to Kubernetes. Refactoring involves making fundamental changes to application architecture and development in order to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities.

The Tackle application aims to provide tools to help assess and analyze applications for refactoring into containers and provide a common inventory. The team behind Tackle uses their experiences with tools such as Pathfinder and Windup to inform their work on the application, bringing existing best processes and strategies into the cloud-native space.

Measuring Improvement

The final subproject within the Konveyor project, Pelorus, enables metrics-driven transformation and measures the keys to software delivery performance, including lead time for change, deployment frequency, mean time to restore, and change failure rate.

The community feels strongly that being able to measure the impact of rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, and changing processes and culture is vital to proving value.

Learn More

Developers and sysadmins need open source tools and practices to help accelerate their applications and infrastructure to Kubernetes.

The Konveyor project’s goal is to deliver the tools and applications within Konveyor via OperatorHub.io for easy consumption and lifecycle management over time to do just that. To receive invitations to Konveyor meetups, propose a talk, or get started contributing to the community you can subscribe to through the Konveyor Project's site.

Today, Curve and Cardlytics announce a new partnership to launch Curve Rewards, a new programme available for customers in-app. The partnership will connect Curve’s 1million+ UK customers with Cardlytics’ growing roster of over 100 recognised high street brands, including Pret a Manger, JustEat, FatFace, Harvey Nichols and Cult Beauty, offering an extensive range of rewards.

Curve’s new Rewards programme will feature exclusive offers of up to 20% cashback on much loved high street and online brands for many customers. Introductory offers include up to 20% cashback at Hussle, 5% cashback at Harvey Nichols and Cult Beauty.

Offers have been carefully selected to add value to Curve customers, by reflecting the predicted spending habits of the nation over the coming weeks as coronavirus restrictions lift. 

New Cardlytics data, based on the purchasing habits of more than 12 million active UK bank card customers, finds consumer demand for eating out and shopping for clothing and homewares rose significantly, following the easing of lockdown restrictions on 12 April.

Spend in pubs and restaurants rose by 215% week-on-week as the public enjoyed new freedoms, many braving the brisk weather to socialise outside with friends and family. With consumers hitting the high street once again, pent-up consumer demand spurred a 97% week-on-week increase in spend on fashion, as shoppers spent a total of £129 million in the first week of retail reopening.

Homewares, interiors, and gardens were also top of the list for consumers returning to the shops; spend rose 24% week-on-week across home, furniture and DIY retailers, as consumers focused on sprucing up their homes and gardens ahead of hosting visitors indoors from May 17^th.

Available through the Curve app, Curve Rewards helps customers earn while they spend. Built on Cardlytics’ real-time purchase intelligence data, the cashback offers available to Curve customers will be tailored around their everyday spending habits. 

Nathalie Oestmann, Chief Operating Officer, Curve: “We’re delighted to be working with Cardlytics to refresh Curve’s Rewards programme and deliver more value to our customers. Whether you are looking forward to hitting the high street again or prefer to  order online, or a mixture of both, Curve Rewards programme will help you earn while you shop, with discounts on a huge range of some of the UK’s best loved online and high street brands.”

Campbell Shaw, Head of Bank Partnerships at Cardlytics, said: “Today’s consumers want a reward scheme that is tailored to how they shop and why they shop. We’re pleased to have built a reward scheme for Curve that does just that, putting customers back in the driving seat while building loyalty and engagement for Curve.

“Partnering with Curve to deliver their new-look rewards programme is fantastic proof of the value Cardlytics’ purchase-led marketing approach brings to banks, their customers and brands.”

Curve is the first digital-native brand to partner with Cardlytics, whose customers include traditional banking brands Lloyds Banking Group and Santander. Cardlytics facilitates card-linked offers to save customers money and drive more meaningful engagement and loyalty for both brands and banks.

Wolters Kluwer’s Finance, Risk & Regulatory Reporting (FRR) business has appointed Donna-Maree Vinci as a strategic advisor for Australia. Wolters Kluwer FRR counts major Australian financial institutions, as well as international banking groups active in the country, among its clients.  The multi award-winning company is now scaling up operations in the country, helping banks to navigate the complexities of regulatory compliance obligations. 

Vinci’s 30-year financial experience includes senior positions at Tier One global and Australian banks. For 12 years she was CIO and Global Head of Technology Risk Management for Citigroup and between 2015 and the end of 2019 was Chief Operations, Digital & Information Officer for The Bank of Queensland. Other senior experience includes being Chief Information and Operations Officer for Westpac Institutional Bank. She holds a number of non-executive director position, including for New South Wales-based Greater Bank.

“This is a key advisory role that will help fuel the next phase of Wolters Kluwer’s growth in the country, as we continue to expand across the Asia Pacific region,” commented Rainer Fuchsluger, Managing Director of Wolters Kluwer FRR APAC. “Donna’s impressive senior experience means she is uniquely positioned to advise our growing client base on how best to avoid operating in siloes, instead taking an integrated approach to finance, risk and regulatory reporting. Her vast industry knowledge also enables her to talk at the most senior levels on how banks should be thinking strategically post COVID-19, building a solid Basel IV strategy.”

Wolters Kluwer FRR, which is part of Wolters Kluwer’s Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) division, is a global market leader in the provision of integrated regulatory compliance and reporting solutions. It supports regulated financial institutions in meeting their obligations to external regulators and their own board of directors.

“It’s an honor to join Wolters Kluwer FRR, a company famed for its regulatory compliance and technology prowess,” Vinci said. “I look forward to working with the talented experts here to raise knowledge of the importance of taking an integrated approach to managing ever changing and all-important regulatory obligations.”

Earlier this year Wolters Kluwer FRR announced that it had won four prestigious industry awards, “based on evidence of ongoing excellence and innovation in the regulatory reporting and RegTech space.”

The Center for Financial Professionals (CeFPro™) named Wolters Kluwer FRR #1 in Regulatory Reporting, as part of its 2021 FinTech Leaders report, with the results based on its highly regarded end-user based industry survey. Bobsguide named Wolters Kluwer’s OneSumX for FRR its Best Regulatory Reporting System, based on its assessment of the “strength of tech updates and their impact on the client experience.” Finance Monthly magazine, meanwhile, named the company both RegTech Firm of the Year and Regulatory Reporting Firm of the Year in its hotly contested FinTech Awards, 2021, with these awards decided by its expert editorial panel.

All four awards recognize the positive industry impact of OneSumX for FRR, Wolters Kluwer FRR’s best-in-class integrated regulatory compliance and reporting solution suite that establishes a single source of data for finance, risk and regulatory reporting that is enriched with value-added content from in-house experts.

Riverbed today announced the availability of new capabilities that dramatically improve the visibility and performance of SSL/TLS-encrypted applications, enabling organizations to expand Work-from-Anywhere, SaaS and Cloud initiatives with confidence.

LinkedIn: Riverbed delivers breakthrough visibility and performance of secure and encrypted apps for the modern enterprise:  https://rvbd.ly/3nO55fh

The modern IT landscape has grown more distributed, hybrid and complex, which has created visibility and performance challenges and significantly expanded the risk perimeter for cyber-attacks. Additionally, as organizations continue to drive more traffic to the Web, of which 85% is encrypted, the process of managing encryption certificates is far more burdensome for IT. Riverbed’s unified visibility solution, which already plays a crucial role in enabling organizations to identity and mitigate cybersecurity threats, now provides greater visibility and insight into encrypted traffic, and new application performance software will automate the acceleration of encrypted applications to improve business productivity and user experience in a secure manner. Today’s enhancements include:

Visibility to Bolster the Fight Against Security Threats Before, During, After They Arise Riverbed AppResponse – part of Riverbed’s unified visibility solutions portfolio – now provides: Certificate Insights that highlight which SSL/TLS certificates are being used, by whom, or close to expiring; Handshake Insights that show which SSL/TLS versions and ciphers are being used, by whom, and to track session renegotiations or errors; and support for PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) to retain deep packet visibility and analysis while preserving a hardened security posture. Deeper inspection of SSL traffic allows IT to properly troubleshoot and respond to security incidents more comprehensively. 

Accelerate Encrypted Apps by Up to 10X or More: Any User, Network, App, Anywhere  

New software updates to Riverbed SteelHead and Riverbed Client Accelerator provide zero-touch acceleration of any SSL/TLS encrypted applications with no manual collection, creation or distribution of the growing number of encryption certificates and keys; and deliver an up to 10X performance boost of SSL/TLS encrypted applications with up to 99% less bandwidth.

Watch Global Launch Webcast: Breakthrough Visibility & Performance for Encrypted Apps & Traffic

“With business initiatives expanding the threat plane – and cyber-attacks like the recent SUNBURST on the rise – our public sector and enterprise customers have a heightened concern regarding security,” said Vincent Berk, CTO and Chief Security Architect at Riverbed. “While encrypted applications protect a company’s data, they previously reduced visibility and blocked inspections, and significantly complicated acceleration. The latest updates to Riverbed’s Unified NPM and Application Acceleration solutions deliver the visibility organizations need into encrypted traffic, and enable them to securely accelerate that traffic with an automated approach instead of unwieldy, manual processes. Only Riverbed offers solutions that can be used collaboratively by both network and security teams to address security, visibility and performance challenges in a hyperconnected and hybrid world. This is essential to building secure and high-performance enterprise networks.”

“In today’s hyper-connected world, the quality of the user experience and the integrity of network exchanges are two critical determinants of digital success. Organizations must be both precise and proactive in managing the performance and security of their networked environment. With product offerings like those introduced by Riverbed, IT gains high-value insights that drive improvements in problem resolution, threat mitigation, and performance management. These insights not only boost service levels, but also the effectiveness and teamwork of network and security operations.” said Mark Leary, Research Director for Network Analytics at IDC. “Complete visibility enables comprehensive analysis, resulting in rapid and accurate identification of root causes, detection of network anomalies, and optimization of traffic movement. As organizations continue to drive more traffic over the Internet and across cloud services, the ability to fully view and accelerate encrypted traffic is crucial, and assures there are no trade-offs between security and performance – for IT or the business.”

Expand Insights Into the Security of the Network

Visibility is a cornerstone of any good security practice, and providing a persistent, unified view of the complete IT network is table stakes for combatting sophisticated cybersecurity threats. Riverbed helps break through modern IT complexity with full-fidelity, unified network performance management (NPM) that collects every packet and every flow from every device (on-premises, remote or in the cloud) 100% of the time, collates this and provides a holistic portal view for deep analysis and insights. Riverbed’s visibility solutions bolster the effectiveness of threat hunting, incident response and forensics to help organizations maintain a hardened security posture.

Expanding upon recent AppResponse updates that give operators the ability to track, report and validate the integrity of SSL/TLS sessions, certificates and cipher suites, Riverbed AppResponse now provides new insights into SSL/TLS certificate expiry status to bolster network security and assure user experience. Riverbed is widening this analysis to include SSL/TLS Certificates Insights and informing IT what kinds of certificates are being used within the network, their expiry status, and where they are used.

Boost Performance of Encrypted Applications and Pave the Way for Productive Hybrid Work

With the new releases of Riverbed SteelHead and Client Accelerator, accelerating encrypted applications is far simpler for IT to manage and more secure. Now, IT can simply enable SSL/TLS acceleration once and select which apps to accelerate to initiate zero-touch acceleration of encrypted apps for their teams and eliminate the burden of manually collecting, creating or distributing encryption certificates. 

Client Accelerator improves productivity and user experience by accelerating the connections of laptops and their applications. As employees increasingly work from anywhere, Client Accelerator helps reduce network data congestion by up to 99% and offers up to 10X faster and more reliable performance for business-critical SaaS apps, on-prem applications and cloud workloads for users anywhere.

This new capability to automate the acceleration of encrypted applications is available at no additional cost to existing and new SteelHead and Client Accelerator customers with active service agreements.

For more information, visit: https://www.riverbed.com/solutions/security.html

A record number of venture capital (VC) partners and firms within the European market were valued at over €1bn in 2020, reaching unicorn status, investment monitoring platform Pitchbook has reported.

The news follows a decade of sustained growth, and multi-billion valuations flooding the European VC market in 2020, despite economic and social disruption by COVID-19. 

And the report backs early-stage VCs for long-term growth, as all four quartiles in 2020 outperformed 2019, with COVID-19's impact enhancing the appeal of specific sectors such as emerging tech.

Disruptive tech-based start-ups also built on their valuations and maintained growth while rapidly evolving new angel and seed start-ups secured capital from investors seeking the next big opportunity. 

An increased variety of start-ups attracted non-traditional investors (NTI) in larger numbers too, with NTI deal sizes expected to continue rising this year.

And while the report notes subdued VC-backed exit values at the start of 2020, many companies have since been exiting at loftier valuations, with the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors being the catalyst for that growth, notching a record $28.5 billion of capital across 1,073 deals, representing the most significant year-on-year increase to date at 60.5%.

The driver here was COVID-19 revealing weaknesses in healthcare systems across Europe, proving that long-term, innovative solutions are needed to upgrade our technology and prevent future pandemics; this was backed up by the record development and rollout of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines in 2020. Pitchbook expects this trend to continue, as start-ups could play a key role in developing essential healthtech.

World Nano Foundation Co-Founder Paul Sheedy was pleased to see the rising investment in emerging tech at a most critical time for healthcare and pandemic protection:

"Early-stage investors aware of the knowledge and expertise within emerging tech start-ups, and notably healthcare, will benefit most from the current environment. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology markets show there is still an appetite for late-stage investment too.

"COVID-19 exposed our pandemic vulnerability and the weakness of our global healthcare systems, so investment must continue to grow to deliver the technological advances needed to avoid being caught out again.”

Sheedy is also a general partner in the Luxembourg-based Vector Innovation Fund, which recently launched a sub-fund raising an initial $300m for pandemic protection and future healthcare, focusing on precision medicine, advanced point of care, and AI technologies that support sustainable healthcare, the global economy, and human longevity.

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced Amazon FinSpace, a purpose-built analytics service that reduces the time it takes FSI organizations to find, prepare, and analyze financial data from months to minutes. Amazon FinSpace aggregates, catalogs, and tags data across an organization’s data silos, making the data easily searchable by the entire organization. The service includes a purpose-built managed Apache Spark analytics engine that contains over 100 data transformations commonly used in the capital markets industry to prepare data for analytics at petabyte scale. To make it easier for FSI organizations to meet their compliance requirements, Amazon FinSpace ensures that data access controls are enforced and usage is tracked at all times. Amazon FinSpace provides an easy-to-use web application that gives analysts at hedge funds, asset management firms, insurance companies, investment banks, and other FSI organizations access to the information they need and the ability to run powerful analytics on demand across all of their data. There are no upfront costs or commitments to use Amazon FinSpace, and customers only pay for the data stored, the users enabled, and the compute used to prepare and analyze data. To learn more about Amazon FinSpace, go to https://aws.amazon.com/finspace.

Today’s FSI organizations are generating and collecting hundreds of petabytes of data every day from internal data sources like portfolio management systems, order management systems, and execution management systems—as well as third-party data feeds like high-volume historical equities pricing data, employment figures, and earnings reports. These organizations want to use the petabytes of data they possess to gain insights that help identify new sources of revenue, attract and retain customers, and reduce cost or risk. However, before data can be analyzed, FSI companies typically spend months finding the right data and getting it prepared for analysis. Discovering and preparing data is time-consuming because FSI organizations have data in silos distributed across departments that specialize in particular assets or geographies and generate specialized data (e.g. equities, options, bonds, European mutual funds, Asian currencies, etc.). Furthermore, data access is tightly controlled by regulation and policy, meaning analysts must justify to compliance officers how their access will conform to data use policies before they can access the data. Once they are granted access to the data, analysts must prepare it for analysis by iteratively performing data transformations to discover new insights within the data. For example, capital markets traders often use technical indicators like Bollinger Bands, Exponential Moving Averages, and Average True Range to identify undiscovered trends and patterns. Many of the data analytics tools available to analysts today were built to run on a single computer and were not designed to take advantage of the cloud’s scale and the ability to compute heavy analysis on-demand. As a result, analysts either have to use small representative datasets that limit predictive ability, or the data has to be manually broken up into many subsets, transformed piecemeal, and manually recombined. Neither approach is ideal or effective.

Amazon FinSpace solves the challenges FSI organizations face by vastly simplifying the steps needed to find, prepare, and analyze data, reducing the time involved from months to minutes. Customers begin by ingesting data into Amazon FinSpace from internal data silos or third-party data feeds via the service’s Application Programming Interface (API) or a drag-and-drop interface in the web application. To find data, customers simply browse a visual catalog and search for familiar business terms like options trades for the last three years or U.S. automotive bonds from within the web application. Amazon FinSpace includes built-in classification schemas for common FSI data sources (e.g. trades, corporate actions, and economic data) that customers can customize to their needs, so the data can be organized in a way that is easy to find and share. Amazon FinSpace records the daily updates and corrections received for datasets and processes them to create point-in-time views to validate modeling assumptions and to show what data was used to inform past decisions for historical analysis. Customers can use built-in Jupyter Notebooks to access data stored in Amazon FinSpace and can then choose from over 100 built-in functions to prepare their data for analysis (e.g. Bollinger Bands, Exponential Moving Averages, and Average True Range)—or they can build and use their own functions to prepare data for analysis. Amazon FinSpace provides managed Spark clusters that can be scaled up or down on demand so organizations can benefit from the elasticity, scale, and cost savings provided by cloud computing. Customers define their data access policies within Amazon FinSpace, and the policies are automatically enforced across data search, visualization, and analysis. Amazon FinSpace records data access, tracks data usage, and generates compliance and activity reports indicating who accessed data at what point in time.

“FSI organizations generate and purchase massive amounts of data, but using this data is very difficult because of the time and effort it takes to collect and prepare data for analysis,” said Saman Michael Far, VP of Financial Services Technology, AWS. “Amazon FinSpace is a game changer for FSI organizations. Amazon FinSpace radically reduces the time it takes for FSI customers to do analytics across petabytes of data, making it significantly easier for them to identify new sources of revenue, attract customers, and reduce cost and risk.”

Amazon FinSpace is generally available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), and Europe (Ireland), with availability in additional regions coming soon.

Legal & General Reinsurance (L&G Re) is the global reinsurance hub of the Legal & General Group with a specialty in the reinsurance of annuities, particularly pension risk transfer business. “At Legal & General, our mission is to guarantee the long-term financial security of our clients’ customers around the world,” said Thomas Olunloyo, CEO of L&G Re. “Our reinsurance specialists work with a broad range of data to measure asset performance, mortality, and longevity risk. Today, this data is distributed and stored across many teams, systems, and structures. We are excited about the release of Amazon FinSpace and its ability to help us unlock the full power of our data to enable our team and efficiently give new insights to our clients. Amazon FinSpace will transform how we use data by giving our analysts the ability to instantly and easily access all the company’s data to carry out analysis faster and immediately share the results across the business, while ensuring our data governance and access control policies are met in full.”

Deloitte is helping transform organizations around the globe. The organization continuously evolves how it works and how it looks at marketplace challenges so it can continue to deliver measurable, sustainable results for its clients and communities. “In working with financial services industry clients, we have found that cloud-based analytics and AI/ML allow us to answer questions that we couldn’t answer several years ago and drive value in new ways. Data, analytics, and AI/ML will continue to be key and become even more important to financial institutions’ decision making and business outcomes over the next decade,” said Jojy Mathew, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Deloitte’s Financial Services Data and Analytics Leader globally. “When companies are building algorithmic, stochastic and predictive models, large data sets are key. Amazon FinSpace will allow users to process petabytes of data at the scale demanded. In addition, FinSpace enables ‘analytics sandboxes’ to be created quickly and brings advanced analytics capabilities to citizen data scientists.”

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Procensus, the opinion sharing community for institutional investors, today launched a premium service which extends access to the platform’s benchmarking data to corporates, capital markets bankers, alternative asset managers and regulatory authorities, providing them with enhanced market intelligence.

Procensus provides access to the highest quantity and quality of buy-side opinion data in the market, and the first-of-its-kind platform leverages advanced technology to capture a measurable score of investor sentiment against stocks, transactions (IPOs and M&A) plus ESG metrics with a proven track record for enhancing investment returns.

“We are delighted to extend access to the Procensus platform beyond institutional investors to a wider universe of market participants who will benefit from our unique source of transparent, unconflicted and unbiased market intelligence while protecting the anonymity of its members,” said Ed Allchin, Founder of Procensus and Autonomous Research.  “Procensus is a transformational data-driven platform generating insight into market sentiment – we expect it to become a de facto industry utility for centralising investor opinion, particularly around IPOs where we currently have a leadership position.”

“Procensus leverages a polling capability, data engine and rating system to capture and benchmark buy-side consensus, and to generate alpha, in a significantly more efficient way than the current human interface that is prevalent in the capital markets,” said Alastair Walmsley, CEO of Procensus.  “With a fast-growing community of more than 5,500 members from almost 1,500 institutions and with most of the world’s largest asset managers already active on the platform, we believe this innovative tool will become a critical component in the way information is shared across capital markets.”

Members of the Procensus community submit their views to the platform anonymously – offering a secure way of benchmarking opinions and framing consensus.  Pro-Ratings are generated from this opinion data to provide an aggregated, live gauge of stock sentiment.  In turn these are scored and ranked against peers.  Where opinions are adequately liquid and extreme these are synthesised into Pro-Signals or actionable recommendations (Buy, Hold, Sell). Using these Pro-Signals, the Procensus Market Neutral Pro-Folio returned +10.1% absolute return in 2020.

Procensus is now available to corporates, capital markets advisory teams, private equity and venture capital investors, and regulators, as well as institutional investors.

Featurespace, the leading provider of Enterprise Crime Prevention software, has received the Queen’s Award for Enterprise: International Trade.  

This is the second time the company has received a Queen's Award, the first being in 2018 in the Innovation category for its pioneering work in fraud prevention technology.   

One of 205 organisations to be honoured, Featurespace secured the Queen's Award for Enterprise - now in its 55th year - for its outstanding commitment to protecting organisations around the globe from financial crime with its award-winning fraud prevention and anti-money laundering software. 

“Having studied and founded a company out of Cambridge, as well as witnessing our expansion to the Americas and Asia-Pacific, this is a tremendous honour and underscores our commitment to excellence and to our customers,” said Dave Excell, founder of Featurespace. 

The award follows Featurespace’s launch of Automated Deep Behavioural Networks for the card and payments industry, which provides a deeper layer of defence to protect consumers from scams, account takeover, card and payments fraud, which cost the financial services industry an estimated $42 billion in 2020. 

Featurespace was recognised in The Sunday Times’  Sage Tech Track 100, which celebrates Britain’s private technology companies with the fastest-growing sales. The company also recently received a Business Culture Award for “Culture in a Crisis” by demonstrating strength in its strong culture before and during the pandemic.