Virgin Money continues to build its business banking proposition, adding FinTech partner, Trade Ledger, which specialises in data-driven lending technology. 

Trade Ledger is a leading global technology provider for the commercial banking and financial services industry, supporting banks by enabling lending products to be created and offered at the right time, over the right channel. Its platform has a lending-as-a-service (LaaS) capability, supporting secured and unsecured lending, to unlock all types of working capital and business lending products for businesses that otherwise find access to finance difficult. 

The partnership with Trade Ledger allows Virgin Money to deliver a quicker and more user-friendly experience for business customers applying for lending. By using Trade Ledger’s platform, which analyses data and automates a wide range of key lending processes, Virgin Money will be able to provide a quicker, more efficient service to its customers while reducing risk. The initial Trade Ledger products in scope for the Virgin Money Working Capital Health proposition include business term loans, asset finance and invoice finance.

Virgin Money’s partnership with Trade Ledger is part of its commitments to the £35m award from the Banking Competition Remedies (BCR) Capability and Innovation Fund in 2020. 

Gavin Opperman, Group Business Director at Virgin Money, said: “Customer experience is key as we prepare to bring our business banking proposition to the market in the Autumn. Our FinTech partners are allowing us to create something completely new for businesses, and lending is an important part of the conversation. We have seen first-hand the impact the Covid-19 pandemic has had on our business customers and we want to be able to support SMEs as they seek opportunities to recover and grow. 

“With its flexible architecture and ability to cater for the widest range of commercial lending products, our partnership with Trade Ledger complements our digital proposition and will help us to support customers more effectively.”  

Roger Vincent, UK Managing Director at Trade Ledger, said: “Trade Ledger’s technology has been purpose built to support banks and lenders who are looking to take the lead with data-driven lending product innovation and technology-led transformation. 

“We’re thrilled to be working with the team at Virgin Money because they recognise the value in using data to reimagine working capital for the digital economy. Our partnership will help to get capital to the businesses who really need it at a critical time.”

• Product Reviews
• 29.04.2021 05:26 pm

What does the product do?

BlueSnap’s All-in-One Payment Platform is a global payment technology with a focus on helping businesses increase sales and reduce costs. Through a single integration, BlueSnap customers have access to a global acquiring network, over 100 transaction currencies, and local payment methods. 

By having a global acquiring network, BlueSnap is able to apply intelligent payment routing to ensure conversion optimisation. This means higher conversion and lower payment costs.

BlueSnap also has an in-build fraud engine powered by Kount, chargeback management, and an Avalara tax solution.

Reporting and reconciliation are standardised across all regions, payment methods, and currencies. They are available either through the BlueSnap console or via a reporting API.

Who needs the product?

B2B and B2C global businesses who are selling online and on mobile, via a marketplace, subscriptions, invoice payments, and manual orders using a virtual terminal.

Global businesses selling in multiple regions often benefit the most from the global acquiring and cross border benefits that come with using BlueSnap.

What is special about the product?

BlueSnap specialises in helping businesses increase sales and reduce costs.

The All-in-One Payment Platform is the market’s only global payment platform that supports multiple sales channels (online & mobile checkout, invoice payments, subscriptions, marketplaces, manual orders). It also provides businesses with a direct connection to multiple global acquiring banks to achieve more sales with higher conversions, and eliminate cross-border fees. Merchants can sell anywhere in the world with just one contract, one integration, one unified account, and receive one payout.  Merchants no longer have to struggle with multiple integrations, an account in every region, multiple payment providers, and reconciliation issues.   

 BlueSnap’s global banking network allows transactions to be routed via local acquirers. Which means US transactions go through US acquiring, UK goes through UK acquiring, and so on. This ensures conversion rates remain high and costs stay low.

In addition, BlueSnap offers over 100 shopper currencies, settlement currencies, and local payment methods. 

All of this is available through a single integration, a single contract, and a single account. This results in a reduction in time, resource, and technical debt.

Who is the competition?

Stripe, Braintree, Adyen

What are some real case examples?

• Outbrain Case Study | BlueSnap

• SchoolsBuddy Case Study | BlueSnap

A survey by Market Intelligence specialists, Acuiti, commissioned by Avelacom and Deribit, offers insights on how proprietary trading firms are approaching the cryptocurrency markets, both spot and derivatives. The survey also explores how this differs between those firms created specifically to trade these assets vs firms entering these markets alongside their existing business trading “traditional” assets. 

Key conclusions include:

Proprietary trading firms have been early adopters of crypto derivatives:

• 81% of those already trading crypto derivatives do so alongside the spot market.
• 40% began trading spot before moving onto derivatives, 32% started with derivatives and 28% began trading in both simultaneously.

Options are currently less popular than futures: 46% are trading futures only (although just over half trade futures and options). However, 90% of those not trading options are interested in doing so. 

The number of markets being traded varied according to the type of proprietary firm and the trading strategies being employed:

• Traditional firms tend to trade on a higher number of exchanges than specialist firms (6 for futures and 2.6 for options for traditional vs 4.9 and 1.9 respectively for specialist firms)
• Firms using arbitrage strategies trade on more markets on average (6.9 for futures, with many trading across more than 10 venues).

The survey found a strong appetite for expansion among respondents with 97% of firms planning to connect to more exchanges to trade crypto derivatives. All specialist trading firms were planning to increase the number of exchanges they traded on suggesting that they will soon narrow the gap between the number of exchanges they trade vs their traditional peers that were identified in the survey. The key drivers of connecting to new markets were to realise greater arbitrage opportunities, to interact with different market participants and to improve price discovery.

Spectra Logic, a leader in data storage and data management solutions, today announced that its entire family of tape libraries and its Spectra BlackPearl^® NAS solution have attained Veeam^® Ready qualification with Veeam Backup & Replication™ v11. As a long-time Veeam Technology Alliance Partner, Spectra Logic continues to attain Veeam Ready status for its award-winning portfolio of tape libraries and disk solutions to ensure compatibility with Veeam as customers look for easy, economical and scalable storage targets in Veeam environments. Additionally, Spectra and Veeam will present a SpectraLIVE webinar, How to Implement a 3-2-1-1-0 Backup Strategy, on 4th May 2021. Register here.

“We are delighted to continue our long-standing partnership with Veeam,” said Betsy Doughty, Spectra Logic vice president of corporate marketing. “Our mutual customers reap tremendous value when they combine our solutions. With our entire family of tape libraries qualified Veeam Ready - Tape and our BlackPearl NAS qualified Veeam Ready - Repository, customers can take full advantage of Spectra’s tape and NAS storage offerings as well as the 200 new enhancements in Veeam’s latest solution.”

The Veeam Ready Programme helps Veeam partners meet their functional and performance standards. Every Spectra tape library and BlackPearl NAS solution has achieved Veeam Ready status with V11, indicating the most current level of qualification, testing and compatibility for these storage products. 

Spectra Logic’s family of tape and NAS solutions deliver unparalleled benefits when paired with Veeam Backup & Replication:     

• Spectra’s tape library family provides the industry’s best combination of capacity, performance, scalability, reliability, support and affordability for long-term data protection, security and archive.
• With features such as integrated encryption and key management as well as media lifecycle management and local and remote management, Spectra tape libraries offer Veeam customers the ability to backup, archive, perform disaster recovery, and mitigate ransomware attacks.
• Scaling from terabytes to exabytes, Spectra’s tape libraries integrate with most channel interfaces and networking protocols. 
• Spectra’s BlackPearl NAS integrates seamlessly with Veeam with no additional configuration needed, delivering high-capacity storage that is self-protecting, flexible and affordable. The combination of BlackPearl NAS and Veeam offers fast backups, built-in deduplication, improved performance and a single interface to ensure ease of operation in a Veeam environment.

Spectra will again participate in VeeamON 2021, the world’s premier virtual event for modernising data protection, which will take place on 25th and 26th May 2021.

Scottish fintech company, AutoRek, a leading software provider to global financial services firms, is proud to announce Omnio as the latest addition to its expanding list of digital banking/payments clients.

Omnio is a high growth financial services infrastructure provider, combining the best of banking capabilities and customer engagement / loyalty together in a single platform. Headquartered in London with operations in the U.K. and Europe, it supports many of the world’s leading corporates and financial institutions in delivering innovative and effective banking, payment and loyalty solutions. 

AutoRek will be providing the core reconciliation solution, including internal and external reconciliations between Omnio’s payment processors, bank accounts and ledger system. Replacing the operations team's manual processes on Excel by providing end-to-end automation, AutoRek’s solution will facilitate  increased efficiency and control, as well as provide automated reporting and real-time Management Information to ensure the team's business users and management are provided with quality MI through a variety of dashboards to fulfil their daily activities at the optimal level.

Laurence Sproston, Head of Reconciliations and Settlements at Omnio, commented, “We approached AutoRek to provide us with a solution to help automate our reconciliation processes. Our main goal in pursuing this partnership is to save time, costs and ensure operational resilience as we move forward to a new way of working. The AutoRek team adopts a collaborative approach for implementation and have provided us with an automated solution ensuring our regulatory, data integrity, workflow and management information needs are met." 

Gordon McHarg, CEO at AutoRek, added, “We are pleased to welcome Omnio to our increasingly growing client portfolio. The payments industry is evolving rapidly and we are proud that AutoRek’s capabilities meet the challenges facing the industry including volume of data. We are looking forward to establishing a good relationship with Omnio and building upon it over the years.”

Nick Botha, Banking and Payments Lead at AutoRek, who led the deal commented, "We are delighted to be working with the Omnio team. Following the turbulent year defined by COVID-19 and with the constant changes taking place in the digital banking and payments world, we are extremely proud that Omnio have selected the AutoRek solution to be the glue between their internal and external systems."

The Oasis Foundation, an organization supporting the development of the Oasis Network and its ecosystem, announced today the successful deployment of the first major upgrade to the Oasis Network. Codenamed 'Cobalt’, this community-led upgrade brings powerful new tools for ParaTime and DApp developers. With this upgrade, Oasis is also announcing the launch of the Parcel SDK, a privacy-first data governance SDK that distills years of privacy research and expertise into an easy-to-use solution.

Founded with a vision of making privacy available to everyone, Oasis is building a new class of technologies that are able to protect the most sensitive data. By using Parcel SDK, developers can easily analyze data in a privacy-preserving environment, and unlock data that was previously too regulated or risky to use. Parcel is an extremely powerful tool and the SDK is already being used in partnership with Binance, BMW and Nebula Genomics among other organizations. 

“We’re excited to announce two major developments of the Oasis ecosystem, both furthering our mission of creating a responsible data economy and putting more control into the hands of everyday users,” said Jernej Kos, Director of Oasis Protocol Foundation. “Designed specifically for developers, Oasis now offers a suite of tools to create and deploy powerful applications which is helping to bridge the gap between complex privacy solutions and the everyday app developer.”

‘Cobalt Upgrade’ marks an important milestone for the Oasis Network, as it sets the foundation for unlocking the network’s full decentralized finance (DeFi) capabilities. This upgrade comes with a host of features including increased security and performance, as well as strengthened governance mechanisms and more decentralization. 

Network enhancement highlights include:

• Light Clients and Checkpoint Sync in order to make bootstrapping of new network nodes much faster.

• Random Beacon Support provides security for ParaTimes with an open admission policy.

• On-Chain Governance provides a simple framework for submitting governance proposals, validators voting on proposals, and once an upgrade proposal passes, having a way to perform the upgrade in a controlled manner, which minimizes downtime.

• ROSE Transfers Between the Consensus Layer and ParaTimes. This also means that ParaTimes get their own accounts in the consensus layer which can hold and transfer tokens.

• A path towards self-governing ParaTimes extending ParaTime governance options. 

• The validator pool will also increase from 80 to100, helping further secure the Oasis Consensus Layer while also increasing decentralization.

Now, developers can enjoy a powerful DApp development environment via the Oasis-Eth ParaTime which is entirely backwards compatible with Ethereum. With this upgrade, Oasis has become the ideal environment for developers to build applications as they benefit from a whole host of features including transaction fees that are 99% lower than Ethereum’s as well as a much higher throughput - 1,000 transactions per second. 

To help kickstart the development of projects that focus on privacy-enabled DeFi and data tokenization, developers can leverage the $1.5 million ROSE Bloom Grants Program. Each proposal is eligible to receive up to $50,000 USD in ROSE tokens. Please visit the developer portal to get started today. 

 IOWArocks, the global marketplace for data, tech, and services, today adds First To Invest to their established data marketplace.

First To Invest use big data and NLP technologies to collect, structure, and reveal events on public, private companies, and specific topics from news articles, press releases, and financial social media. They cover 10,000 companies globally with 400 corporate event categories including; M&A, new deals, partnerships, ESG, regulatory decisions, management and stakeholder changes, expansions to new markets or product categories, new products, price changes, new agreements, FDA decisions, financial reports related events, macroeconomics, and much more

Jordan Mizrahi, First To Invest CEO, commented, “With ongoing market volatility it is more important than ever that asset managers, hedge funds and private equity funds have a broad and accurate view of the firms they are monitoring and investing in. There is a mass of unstructured data on social media and in the news and we believe that our technologies and techniques are unrivalled in delivering consolidated and accurate alternative datasets. We have decided to partner with IOWArocks as there is a huge opportunity to deliver our data to hedge funds, asset management and the private equity community using this innovative channel. The IOWArocks engagement models are perfect for smaller or more niche firms to get the data they want; on the terms they need.”

Paul Watmough, IOWArocks CEO & Co-Founder, commented, “It’s been an interesting 18 months and without doubt all eyes have been on the economy. We have seen some of the largest firms struggle and at the same time there have been some real success stories. With a wealth of unstructured data out there on the internet growing rapidly by the day, it is great that firms like First To Invest have found smarter ways to leverage that data and turn it into consolidated and accurate insights. Day by day the IOWArocks story is developing and has become a very compelling proposition to anyone in the investment or trading community.”

Leading specialized payments platform, Paysafe (NYSE: PSFE), announces it has signed a global multi-year agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of its strategy to become a fully cloud-based payments provider. Through this collaboration, Paysafe is migrating its broad portfolio of mission critical workloads, including eCash solutions, paysafecard and Paysafecash, and its digital wallets, Skrill and NETELLER, to AWS to develop new cloud-native merchant payment and consumer wallet products for its business and consumer customers. The first milestone of the collaboration has already been completed with the transition of Paysafe’s eCash solutions to the cloud.

The move to AWS supports Paysafe to leverage data to drive customer acquisition and engagement, as well as to run and scale products and applications for its North American and European operations in a highly reliable manner. Collectively, Paysafe’s solutions are actively used by more than 15 million people across more than 120 countries and support thousands of businesses to offer popular alternative payment methods.

Paysafe’s partners will also benefit from its cloud-first approach, making it easier for merchants and other third parties to connect to the Paysafe Network using an API-based integration. The real-time transactional processing powered by AWS will allow merchants to offer a frictionless customer experience at the point of sale.

Roy Aston, Chief Information Officer at Paysafe, commented: “Deploying AWS as one of our major cloud providers will bring wide-ranging benefits to our business, both in terms of scale and innovation. Our focus is to deliver new, innovative products and features into the marketplace twice as fast as before and also to scale, and expand our geographical footprint. We’re excited by the year ahead as we leverage the power of technology across the business, through a combination of our own in-house product development as well as our work with strategic organizations, such as AWS.  We are also focused on areas such as machine learning, risk management, and customer insights.”

As part of the agreement with AWS, Paysafe is creating a centralized, curated, and secured repository for all of its consumer and merchant data using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), AWS analytics, and AWS security to build a data lake to store, protect and organize their data. This scalable data lake will use AWS’s analytics services to further enhance the consumer experience, as well as to help Paysafe quickly and cost-effectively identify, prioritize, and evaluate risks in near real-time.

“We are delighted to support Paysafe as they leverage AWS to offer frictionless customer experiences and uncover real-time insights,” said Scott Mullins, Managing Director, Worldwide Financial Services Business Development at Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Paysafe continues to bring innovative payment solutions to market that help merchants rapidly develop and implement new products and meet evolving customer needs, and we look forward to our continued collaboration with them across their digital initiatives.”