In the UK, over the past 12 months, the share of Square businesses that are cashless has risen by more than 4x. This time last year only one in 10 UK businesses using Square were cashless, whereas now nearly 5 in 10 are cashless. This is according to Square’s Cash and the Pandemic 2.0 report which takes a look back over the last year at what’s changed, what’s new, and what could be here to stay when it comes to how small businesses in the UK manage payments. 

UK businesses pivot to reach more customers online 

The report found that when comparing February 2020 to February 2021, the share of businesses accepting online payments with Square has nearly doubled. Of all the businesses that are currently taking online payments with Square, 21% began doing so in March 2020 or later.

Whilst some doors opened briefly last summer, selling online still remained a priority for businesses over the last 12 months with the percentage of businesses using Square to sell online only dipping by only 2%. Over the same period certain industries shifted towards handling less cash with nearly two quarters of retail sellers and nearly half of food and beverage sellers going cashless. 

Emma Beattie, who runs Mrs Macs Sweet Treats, a bespoke cake shop in Woburn Sands, Milton Keynes, is one small business owner who has made this shift to online: “Before the pandemic we’d never sold online before and within three minutes of offering deliveries we sold 300 boxes of our treats. Selling online means we can reach customers nationally, not just locally, and continue to stay open during the pandemic. Adopting digital payments has helped us double our turnover which we’re re-investing to get our treats to more customers.”

Consumer payment preferences

The pandemic has more generally accelerated a shift in consumer payment preferences. This is according to consumer research, commissioned by Square to supplement its report, which found nearly a fifth of consumers have also used an entirely new payment method when buying goods or services that they hadn’t used before, of which 33% pointed to contactless as this new payment method. What’s more, with the single payment contactless limit rising to £45 from £30 last year, contactless payments also became the preferred payment method for 44% of consumers (up from 32% prior to March 2020), with 58% using contactless payments over the last year more than they did prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Despite this shift in payment preferences, 53% of Brits would still like cash as a payment option to exist. That’s because when it comes to buying goods or services on a day-to-day basis, 65% of consumers feel they would be impacted by an entirely cashless society. Looking ahead for businesses looking to encourage repeat purchases will benefit from accepting multiple forms of payments.

“The pandemic has been an unprecedented challenge for small businesses across the UK. It has forced many to make dramatic changes to the way they operate, whether that’s pivoting to sell online or choosing card over cash to sell more safely,” said Felipe Chacon, Economist at Square. “With the UK’s roadmap for easing lockdown restrictions now underway, businesses nationwide will be looking to adapt once again. This will include a bit of a balancing act between looking at how they keep open new revenue streams discovered during the pandemic whilst also meeting potential customer expectations around a renewed interest in paying for goods or services with cash. 

As every sale is going to count once things open up again, the key here will be to offer a broad range of payment options, so that customers are able to pay in a way that is convenient to them.” 

Spectra Logic today announced that Imperial War Museums (IWM) deployed Spectra StorCycle^® Storage Lifecycle Management Software to enhance its existing storage infrastructure, which supports its audio-visual and exhibitions departments to preserve invaluable data, including thousands of films, videotapes, audio recordings and photographs that would otherwise disintegrate and be lost forever were they not digitised. StorCycle software is being used to manage a large amount of unstructured data that resides on expensive SAN and NAS storage outside of IWM’s existing DAMS (digital asset management system) platform.

IWM has five sites across the UK, IWM London, IWM North, IWM Duxford, Churchill War Rooms and HMS Belfast, and is home to approximately 750,000 digital assets, representing a total of 1.5PB of data as uncompressed files. This volume is constantly growing, with new scans in the Museums’ film collection generating an additional 10TB of data per month, and its videotape scanning project expected to create more than 900TB of data over the next four years.

A Spectra customer since 2009, IWM has implemented a large-scale data archiving solution to reliably preserve and manage its substantial digital archive pertaining to UK and Commonwealth wartime history. IWM’s current archive infrastructure consists of two Spectra^® T950 Tape Libraries, one with LTO-7 tape media and drives, and one with IBM^® TS1150 tape media and drives, along with a Spectra BlackPearl^® Converged Storage System, BlackPearl^® Object Storage Disk and BlackPearl^® NAS solution.

IWM is on track to realise significant long-term cost savings by deploying Spectra StorCycle Storage Lifecycle Management Software to optimise their primary storage capacity through the offloading of inactive data to the Museums’ archive infrastructure. Spectra StorCycle identifies and moves inactive data to a Perpetual Tier of storage, consisting of object storage disk and tape. StorCycle scans the IWM departments’ primary storage for media file types older than two years and larger than 1GB, and automatically moves them to the IWM archive, maximising capacity on the primary storage system.

“When we set out on our search to find a storage solution capable of preserving Imperial War Museums’ substantial digital archive, there were specific criteria on which we were not willing to compromise,” explained Ian Crawford, chief information officer, IWM. “Spectra met all of our requirements and then some, and now continues to deliver with StorCycle’s storage lifecycle management capabilities.”

Rob Tyler, IT infrastructure manager (DAMS) at IWM said, “Spectra’s StorCycle storage lifecycle management software has empowered us to move our data into reliable, long-term storage, offloading our primary storage and preserving media files and unstructured data -- all with the push of a button.”

Craig Bungay, vice president of EMEA sales, Spectra Logic, added, “IWM preserves invaluable historical data and it is vital that their data storage infrastructure be failsafe and reliable in addition to providing flexibility and affordability. This is achieved by storing multiple copies of the museums’ data on different media, and by automatically offloading inactive data from expensive primary storage to its archive solution using StorCycle.”

Announced today, UniCredit has made several key appointments to further strengthen the bank’s GTB expertise and client service offering. The appointments are as follows:

• Simone Del Guerra has been appointed Global Co-Head Working Capital Solutions while continuing with his current role as CEO of UniCredit Factoring SpA.
• Pietro Campagna has been appointed Global Co-Head Working Capital Solutions.
• Daniele Beggiato has been appointed Co-Head GTB Italy.

All 3 appointments succeed Adeline de Metz, who in November 2020, became Head of Group Regulatory Affairs after several years as Global Head of Working Capital Solutions in GTB.

In 2010, Simone joined UniCredit Leasing as Head of Vendor Italy before his appointment as Head of Trade Products Italy. Since April 2020, he was CEO of UniCredit Factoring S.p.A. Previously, Simone had worked for IBM Italy before joining GE Capital, where he held various positions in the commercial area in Italy, France and the UK.

Pietro Campagna joined UniCredit in 2004, working in the HR management of UniCredit Leasing. In January 2010 he was appointed as Head of HR of UniCredit’s bank in Kazakhstan until he moved to Vienna to take over the role of Head of HR CEE CIB. From 2015, Pietro has been in CIB HR as Head of HR for GTB and the International Network.

Daniele Beggiato joined UniCredit in 1987, as Area Manager, working in the Corporate Banking Sales/Distribution department for more than 15 years. He has solid experience in credit risk, heading the Transactional Risk Management unit up to the responsibility of the Centro-Nord Region Credit Hub.

With their professional backgrounds, as well as their profound and long-dated experiences across products and sales at UniCredit, Simone and Pietro are bringing the right set of skills to further promote the GTB franchise and Working Capital. At the same time Daniele, with his deep experience in corporate banking, will be further strengthening the plug-in of GTB along the commercial banking value chain in continuity with the valuable efforts of Alfredo and Pietro in the past few years.

Danish-owned cryptocurrency investment fund ARK36 has participated in a private sale of GTU tokens issued by Concordium, a new, state-of-the-art blockchain project built for business and focused on regulatory compliance and privacy.

Concordium, which is run by a team of Danish innovators and led by CEO Lone Fonss Schroder, has recently completed the second private sale round where they raised $15M and thus secured additional funding for further development. ARK36 saw the sale as an opportunity to further broaden its portfolio, recognizing Concordium’s groundbreaking potential and a promising, asymmetric risk-to-reward ratio it may carry as an investment.

Concordium is a compliance-ready blockchain that meets the most critical regulatory demands of today. With inbuilt ID at the protocol level and zero-knowledge proofs, Concordium maintains a balance between compliance, identity, and privacy, where parties are identified in a private way and data is public but encrypted. Thanks to these mechanisms, which ensure Concordium’s operational stability in the increasingly tight regulatory landscape, the company has created perfect conditions for broad adoption of its blockchain by the business sector.

Concordium combines a strong emphasis on governance with rigorous technology development. The Concordium Advisory Board includes Former Vice-chair of NASDAQ and FCSE Chair Hans-Ole Jochumsen and Former Skype COO Michael Jackson. Lars Seier Christensen is Chairman of the Swiss non-profit Concordium Foundation; he was previously Co-CEO at Saxo Bank for over 20 years. Concordium’s team has been working closely with members of the RustLang Foundation to deploy its Dev Rel strategy, which is based on the ethics of reciprocity. Concordium has seen some early market traction, signing a joint venture agreement with Geely Cars of China.

The strong emphasis on regulation speaks to ARK36’s own philosophy and has been one of the crucial factors in the decision to participate in Concordium’s private sale. Since its inception, compliance has been a top priority for ARK36 and one of its main value propositions for regulatory-conscious investors. While actively looking to maximize the RoI for clients, ARK36 considers the regulatory risk of any given investment and Concordium’s stable regulatory foundation convinced ARK36’s team that such an investment would make a good addition to the fund’s already balanced portfolio of different crypto-assets.

Lone Fonss Schroder, CEO at Concordium said: “We are always looking for smart participation and by smart, we mean collaborative participation. With the ARK36 Team, we are confident we have found not only a participant in our private sale but a partner that shares the same ethics and values, as we look forward to our mainnet launch in Q2.”

Ulrik Lykke, Co-Founder at ARK36 commented: “Thanks to the national ties that ARK36 and the Concordium Foundation both share with Denmark, we noticed the project early on and have been following its development for over a year now. Not only are we happy to see how Concordium has progressed, but we are also proud that we have been able to support it, providing additional value for our own investors.”

Qumulo, the breakthrough leader in radically simplifying enterprise file data management across hybrid-cloud environments, has seen a significant increase in both the file data needs of media and entertainment (M&E) customers and in customer adoption. As global enterprises dramatically accelerate their digital transformation, the company today revealed it is managing more than an exabyte of data and more than 235 billion files for customers around the world. Qumulo customers create over 1 billion files and perform over 200 billion operations each day, 90% of which take less than one millisecond to execute. With 7 of the top 10 media and entertainment companies leveraging Qumulo, the company saw impressive growth  in customer adoption as the industry rapidly adopts cloud and virtual collaboration. Cutting edge studios including Industrial Brothers, Cinesite, Jam Filled Entertainment and FuseFX use Qumulo to produce television shows, animated feature films and world-renowned VFX projects, such as the James Bond franchise, the Avengers and “American Horror Story.” 

Media and entertainment companies are grappling with the skyrocketing demand for producing high-quality digital content. According to a recent report by Research and Markets1, over 116 exabytes of new digital storage will be used for digital archiving and content conversion and preservation by 2025. Advancements in computer imaging for visual effects and animation as well as the increasing popularity of 4K UHD content are driving the inevitable need for massive data storage. The report also states that producers are experimenting with innovative methods for cinematography that require rendering terabytes of raw footage, making it essential to have the ability to scale up as needed over the course of a production period. 

The past year produced a new set of challenges for media and entertainment enterprises. Creative teams around the world had to quickly pivot their business strategies by shifting production processes from on-premises to remote platforms, ensuring animation and creativity were not impacted by infrastructure limitations, all while increasing collaboration and productivity to ensure business deadlines weren’t missed.  

“Since moving our storage infrastructure over to Qumulo, we no longer need to have someone dedicated to storage. It becomes a shared role that a few people in our team can help with,” Jason Burnard, IT Director, Guru Studio. “As our studio grows, we love that we do not need to re-think our storage solution, it’s simple enough to pop another node in the cluster. To expand the cluster we just scale it up!”  

Studios are turning to Qumulo for support throughout the full data lifecycle of creative work streams, storing petabytes of raw footage and animation sequences while managing virtual collaboration in the cloud. Even as special effects, animation, and HD capabilities continue to rapidly advance, Qumulo provides reliable, high-performance data access to streamline creativity and collaboration. Robust management, storage, and protection for petabyte levels of HD, 4K, and 8K content across cloud environments provide support and visibility for billions of files. By enabling this radical simplicity, customers can easily scale to advance editorial and video production workflows and keep creative productivity on track and meet media production deadlines.  

“The post-production schedule provides a very short timeline to create quality effects,” said Farnia Fekri, Director of Marketing, MARZ. “We chose Qumulo because its software allows us to deliver higher quality visual effects on a shorter timeline, and ensures that we fulfill our promise to our customers.”

The Qumulo File Data Platform, meets the needs of today’s in-house and remote creative teams by providing dynamic scalability, increased efficiency and cost savings:

• Animation studio Industrial Brothers went from downtime of almost 2,000 annual labor hours, to zero downtime by switching to Qumulo File Data Platform — saving approximately $80,000 a year.

• Jam Filled Entertainment, a Canadian animation studio known for its work with Nickelodeon, realized its IT service was receiving more than 780 uptime and performance-related support tickets a year with its prior system. By moving to Qumulo, Jam Filled reduced that number to zero. Jam Filled Entertainment animation studio immediately improved user productivity, safeguarded customer deadlines, and minimized stress as a result of Qumulo’s strong reliability and high performance platform. 

• VFX studio FuseFX, which creates visual effects for popular productions like “American Horror Story” and “The Flight Attendant,” leveraged Qumulo Cloud Q to render 32,000 core frames across 1,000 machines in under an hour. FuseFX now uses Qumulo as a long-term solution for fast, clustered storage management. 

“Qumulo is leading a data revolution in the media and entertainment industry. We are helping the world’s leading creative teams including animators, visual effects creators and post production teams, evolve and transform their businesses to deliver the highest quality projects,” said Ben Gitenstein, Vice President of Product at Qumulo. “By providing a modern infrastructure that can scale to meet the most demanding performance requirements, our customers can focus on accelerating innovation and increasing collaboration, knowing that the leader in this market is helping them manage, store and protect exabytes of file data, whether they have on-prem or cloud environments.”   

Qumulo Enables Media and Entertainment Customers to:

• Integrate seamlessly with existing applications leveraging the Qumulo® File Data Platform. Qumulo’s file system creates a single pool of storage which supports SMB and NFS file protocols. 

• Dynamically scale with Qumulo Scale, to serve petabytes of content on-prem and cloud to support collaboration, post production, file sharing, burst rendering, and/or storage/archive.

• Utilize Qumulo’s all-NVMe or hybrid flash-first platforms, which enable flash-first writes and predictive caching to ensure the data needed is always rapidly available. Low latency and ultra-fast performance accelerate collaboration, creativity, management, and delivery. 

• Optimize creative environments through simplified resource management and cost reduction with real-time analytics.

• Leverage multi-protocol support and permission management for mixed SMB/NFS environments where the workflows utilize asset management platforms and non-linear editing systems on the same shared data.

• Advance editorial and video production workflows with high-performance remote collaboration, enabling both production and editorial teams to maintain high performance across multiple remote locations.

• Leverage cloud-native software to allow creative teams the ability to work anywhere in the world, providing multiple editors and artists the opportunity to read-write and transform data across protocols, locations, and applications with unmatched scalability, speed and reliability. 

• Distribute file data globally with ease. Editors and animators can ingest raw content and footage directly from many types of applications directly to Qumulo and publish the data for people to easily use across multiple regions and various machines including Linux, Mac, and Windows.

SEI (NASDAQ:SEIC) has announced today it has extended its contract with leading UK wealth manager Brewin Dolphin for a further three years. The new agreement will extend the current strategic partnership between the two firms until November 2023. 

The re-contract builds on an existing strategic relationship that began in 2012, continuing to provide the SEI Wealth Platform^SM (SWP) as an integrated wealth management infrastructure to a digital, consumer investing platform called Brewin Portfolio Service (BPS). The re-contract reflects significant collaboration between SEI and Brewin Dolphin over the last 12 months to enable the company to deliver an improved digital end-client experience for BPS clients by integrating with SEI’s wide range of application programming interfaces and web services.

SWP is part of SEI’s Global Wealth Management Services business, comprised of market-leading, innovative solutions designed to support the future growth of investment and wealth managers globally.

Commenting on the partnership, Gareth Johnson, Head of Digital Channels for Brewin Dolphin, said:

“The digital channels business is a key focus for us, and we are delighted with the work that has been done by SEI to support the development of our digital client experience. In the current environment, front-end digital tools are more important than ever for our business, and SEI’s resilience and partnership in delivering this project remotely over the last 12 months has been imperative in achieving our strategic objectives. Crucially, we were able to deliver the project on time and on budget." 

“Our strong and positive relationship with SEI, built over the last nine years, is an important partnership for Brewin Dolphin, and we look forward to continuing to work with them over the coming months and years.” 

Brett Williams, Managing Director of UK Private Banking for SEI, said:

“The last year has presented a number of challenges and opportunities for wealth management firms in the UK and globally. Our significant strength and resilience has meant we have been able to continue to partner with Brewin Dolphin to support them not only in delivering high-quality service to their clients, but also in enhancing their Brewin Portfolio Service proposition and supporting their strategic goals. I am proud of our team who have remained focused and committed to our business and to supporting our clients during this time."

“Our open and respectful relationship with Brewin Dolphin has allowed us to continue to collaborate on important projects despite the challenging pandemic environment, and as a leader in the UK wealth management market, we continue to value their insight and market-leading perspective. This contract extension demonstrates the mutual commitment to our continued partnership.”

Alan Cubbon brings over 35 years of quantitative finance and risk management experience to CAIM, and will play a pivotal role in bolstering the firm’s efforts in investment solutions, asset allocation and advisory and product development for its central bank network and other institutional clients.
After 26 years at J.P Morgan, Alan’s experience of working on both buy and sell sides gives him unparalleled insight into some of the risk-related concerns that CAIM’s client base are facing. As Investment Director for fixed income at JP Morgan Asset Management, Alan was responsible for overseeing the risk management process for portfolios managed in London. At J.P. Morgan Securities, he headed a team split between London and New York, and was principal developer of a US Treasury trading system for a key central bank client – a tool that proved pivotal to the institution’s activities. Alan has worked with central bank and other official institution clients in CAIM's focus markets, as well as a broad range of other institutional clients. He was also Founding Partner and Head of Research at Trinity CapM, where he was responsible for the development and running of asset allocation and risk management software to underpin Trinity’s process of forecasting and investment in fixed income markets. From 2016 to 2020, Alan joined FTSE Russell as Managing Director.

Roberts Grava, CEO of Crown Agents Investment Management, comments: “We are delighted to welcome Alan at such a key moment for CAIM, and have every confidence that his extensive experience in risk management and quantitative research will strengthen our business as we move CAIM on into its next exciting stage. I am confident that Alan’s personal motivation and work ethic will be an attribute to our newly created QRA team and undoubtedly contribute towards our longer-term plans to strengthen our offering.”

Alan adds: “I’m thrilled to be joining CAIM at such an exciting juncture in the firm’s growth trajectory. I look forward to working with the strong leadership team, including the newly-appointed CEO, Roberts Grava, and leveraging my expertise to deliver on CAIM’s strategic growth objectives. I am sure it will be a fruitful year ahead.”

Luminor Bank, the leading local bank in the Baltics, has selected a cloud-based balance sheet management solution from financial technology leader FIS^®(NYSE: FIS) to help the bank optimize liquidity and better manage risk as it continues its rapid expansion in the region.

Luminor Bank AS, which has nearly 900,000 clients, is the third largest provider of financial services in the Baltic banking market, and operates in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

The bank has selected the FIS Ambit Focus, an integrated, best practice balance sheet management solution. Based in the FIS private cloud, the solution provides versatile simulation and stress scenario capabilities to manage risk and regulatory requirements across profitability, liquidity and solvency.

The solution will provide the bank with advanced tools for assessing the market risk of its financial instruments and enhancing stress testing capabilities, while helping Luminor Bank comply with regulatory requirements, including Interest Rate Risk in the Banking Book (IRRBB).

“With its advanced functionality, this innovative cloud-based solution vastly improves our ability to manage risk and maximize our liquidity. It also supports continuously evolving regulatory requirements,” said Olof Sundblad, Head of Treasury and ALM at Luminor Bank AS. “We are excited to work with FIS as we continue to grow our business across the Baltics.”

“The way banks measure and report on market and liquidity risk is changing quickly, with a growing percentage of capital markets firms now placing an increased reliance on cloud and managed services,” said Nasser Khodri, Head of Capital Markets Sell Side at FIS. “FIS is committed to helping our clients stay ahead of the rapidly changing market. This solution will provide Luminor Bank with the functionality, flexibility and visibility it needs in order to support its business well into the future.”