Vulnerable consumers dealing with the death of a loved one will receive speedier and fairer treatment from financial service providers following a new partnership by two free nationwide services.

The tie-up between the Vulnerability Registration Service and newly launched end-of-life account closure service Settld creates a stress-free ‘one-stop’ vulnerability and bereavement facility, which will help banks, utilities, insurers and other service providers to better identify those in difficulty.

The link-up follows recent guidance from the Financial Conduct Authority which aims to improve the way firms treat vulnerable customers and ensure better understanding of the needs of those experiencing negative life events, such as the death of a loved one.

Helen Lord, Director of the Vulnerability Registration Service (VRS), said: “There are some great synergies between the VRS and Settld - we are both passionate about reducing unnecessary stress and unfair treatment towards those who are already suffering and may be vulnerable."

“Dealing with the loss of a loved one is devastating enough, but having to explain the same painful situation to multiple organisations can add significant stress. This partnership will make a real difference to those people giving them a safe place to disclose their circumstances just the one time. Through the VRS, service providers can then instantly see that a vulnerability exists for a customer, and put in place appropriate treatments.” 

The Vulnerability Registration Service is a ‘not for profit’ organisation that gives people a single place to register their vulnerable status. It includes those in financial distress, perhaps because of a death in the family; those with mental health problems, at risk of financial abuse, victims of fraud and their representatives, such as those with power of attorney. The service is free for them.

When individuals use Settld’s free, online bereavement notification and account closure service, they are invited to declare whether they consider themselves in a vulnerable state - be it financial or emotional.

Under the new partnership with the VRS, their vulnerability can automatically be signalled to financial service providers. That means consumers won’t  have to repeat the same difficult conversation with each company.

Settld’s CEO, and co-founder, Vicky Wilson said: “When users come to Settld for help in notifying a death, and to close or transfer accounts, we make sure that they only have to say it once and we take over the rest of the process, informing service providers."

“Now that we’ve partnered with the Vulnerability Registration Service, our most vulnerable users will have their status notified to service providers immediately, with those individuals only having to say it once. This means they should receive quicker, fairer treatment from those companies. With VRS, we have created a stress-free, one-stop shop, for the most vulnerable consumers.”

Online startup Settld, removes much of the hassle associated with having to individually contact banks, insurers, mobile and broadband providers, TV subscription services and others, to inform them of the death of a friend or family member. The secure and simple service now has the added benefit of alerting companies to the vulnerability of its users.

Settld and VRS will also signpost users to each other’s websites. 

Guardicore, the segmentation company disrupting the legacy firewall market, today announced that Amit Serper has joined the Guardicore Labs cyber research team as Area VP of Security Research for North America. In this role, Serper will be conducting cutting edge research into the latest tactics and techniques used by today’s most sophisticated attackers to improve Guardicore threat hunting and detection capabilities and help keep customers protected. Serper today unveiled his first research with Guardicore Labs - demonstrating how the Purple Fox rootkit now propagates as a worm.

“Amit is one of the industry’s most respected security researchers and we’re very excited to have him join the team. His work on identifying some of the world’s most sophisticated ransomware has helped countless businesses minimize risk,” said Ofri Ziv, Head of Guardicore Labs and VP of Research, Guardicore. “Amit’s contributions to the InfoSec community have had a long-lasting impact on enterprise security. We look forward to collaborating with him to help companies protect their critical assets.”

Prior to joining Guardicore, Serper served as VP, Security Strategy and Principal Security Researcher for Cybereason. During his time at Cybereason, Serper was responsible for leading the research team and collaborating with the product and global security practice teams to provide the best security value possible for customers. Serper led groundbreaking research on some of the world’s most devastating cyber campaigns, including the identification of a vaccine for the massive NotPetya ransomware outbreak that cost global businesses billions of dollars in damages. He was also instrumental in the discovery and dismantling of Operation Soft Cell, a global APT campaign targeting telecommunications providers.

“As the recent SolarWinds attack campaign demonstrates, today’s attack landscape has vastly expanded as attackers look to exploit cloud environments, supply chain partners, applications and more. As the sophistication of attacks increase, Guardicore’s unique approach to micro-segmentation helps customers rapidly deploy Zero Trust architectures that directly address the TTPs of today’s most sophisticated attackers,” said Serper. “Guardicore and its excellent team of researchers take a fundamentally different approach from most security research teams. By focusing on the critical techniques that attackers utilize to access an organization’s crown jewels, Guardicore is able to identify advanced campaigns and disrupt them before they cause damage to customers. I’m excited to join what has rapidly become one of InfoSec’s most elite research teams.”

Guardicore Labs is a global research team consisting of hackers, cybersecurity researchers and industry experts that publishes cybersecurity research and provides deep analysis, insights and response methodologies to the latest cyber threats. Research from Guardicore Labs helps shape the product direction of the company’s micro-segmentation platform Guardicore Centra, developing new capabilities to stop the latest hacker techniques for lateral movement.

Guardicore Labs has been responsible for the development of Infection Monkey - the industry leading open source breach and attack simulation tool - and has identified several malicious campaigns and vulnerabilities that attackers exploit, including:

• FritzFrog: A New Generation of Peer-to-Peer Botnets
• WarezTheRemote: Turning Remotes into Listening Devices
• PLEASE_READ_ME: The Opportunistic Ransomware Devastating MySQL Servers
• Purple Fox Rootkit Now Propagates as a Worm

About Guardicore

Guardicore is the segmentation company disrupting the legacy firewall market. Our software-only approach is decoupled from the physical network, providing a faster alternative to firewalls. Built for the agile enterprise, Guardicore offers greater security and visibility in the cloud, data-center and endpoint. For more information, please visit www.guardicore.com or go to Twitter or LinkedIn.

Contour, the global trade finance network, has partnered with international software consultancy ThoughtWorks in China. This marks Contour’s latest milestone in its expansion in the region and in the digitisation of international trade.

Through this partnership, Contour will leverage ThoughtWorks’ software expertise and familiarity with the enterprise solutions landscape in China to help its local clients integrate seamlessly with the Contour Network.

Clients can expect Chinese language-supported integration services specific to their enterprise systems and enhanced user experience and connectivity while using Contour. At the same time, ThoughtWorks will bring the blockchain-based trade finance solution to its clients to help them overcome challenges arising from digitisation and internationalisation. The partnership will also help clients extend their business reach abroad and stay competitive in the global economy.

China - as the world’s largest exporter and one of the top three letter of credit (“LC”) markets globally – is a strategic target for Contour. This partnership will further expand Contour’s existing presence in China and offer Chinese banks and corporates greater accessibility to cross-border trade on the network. Recently, Contour signed its first Chinese production bank, and a leading iron ore company, Xiamen ITG, announced a successful cross-border RMB-denominated LC transaction with Rio Tinto on the Contour Network.

ThoughtWorks is a global leader in digital transformation with over 25 years of software consultancy and delivery experience worldwide. ThoughtWorks also has extensive experience in software development and innovative applications of blockchain technology in finance, providing customised end-to-end services for consulting and delivery to its clients.

The trade finance industry continues to face inefficiencies due to its reliance on paper-based processes. Previous digitisation attempts to solve this have failed due to the lack of a scalable, interoperable global network. Contour is overcoming this challenge by building a blockchain-based network to facilitate more efficient cross-border and domestic LC transactions. To date, Contour members have benefitted from vast efficiency gains, with transactions on the network reducing LC processing times by up to 90%.

Carl Wegner, CEO at Contour said: “We’re excited to expand our footprint in China and are eager to connect more Chinese corporates and banks with their foreign trade counterparts. Since 2019, we have successfully facilitated multiple RMB-denominated LC transactions on our pilot and beta networks. We’re definitely seeing a voracious appetite for trade digitisation in China. By combining our innovation with ThoughtWorks’ experience in the banking sector in China, we strive to deliver the full value of the Contour Network in China and to help local corporates and banks realize their full potential in the global trade ecosystem.”

Song Zhang, CEO at ThoughtWorks China said: “We’re keen to help Contour realise its vision of digitising global trade. The traditional, paper-based trade finance industry is more than ripe for a thorough digital transformation. As global trade begins its steady recovery from the pandemic, this also presents an opportunity for the industry to build back with fewer barriers and greater efficiency.”

Aunalytics, a leading data platform company delivering Insights-as-a-Service for enterprise businesses, today introduced its next generation of DaybreakTM for Financial Services designed for mid-sized banks and credit unions. The enhanced solution empowers community financial institutions with advanced analytics and valuable business insights to improve customer relationships, strategically deliver new products and services through data-driven campaigns and drive competitive advantage with Aunalytics’ side-by-side digital transformation model.
As with many businesses, financial institutions have a plethora of data that is typically siloed across many systems throughout the organization. Aggregating and integrating this data is a major challenge that can be difficult and time-consuming, if not nearly impossible, such as with transactional data. According to leading analysts, 70 percent of big data and analytics deployments will fail to meet cost savings and revenue generation objectives due to skill and integration challenges.   
“We have data; every bank has data—tons of it. What we didn’t have was a way to integrate all this data into something useful,” said John Kamin executive vice president and chief information officer, Provident Bank. “We embarked on a journey that would not only allow us to turn data into information but enable us to look forward with predictive analytics and AI capabilities. Aunalytics helped us jumpstart that vision.”
Built from the ground up for mid-sized banks and credit unions, Daybreak for Financial Services is a cloud-native data platform with advanced analytics that empowers users to focus on critical business outcomes. The solution cleanses data for accuracy, ensures data governance across the organization, and employs artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) driven analytics to glean customer intelligence and insights in focus from relevant business information. With daily insights powered by the Aunalytics® cloud-native data platform, industry intelligence, and smart features that enable a variety of analytics solutions for fast, easy access to credible data, users can find the answers to such questions as:

- Who are my current customers that have a loan and not a deposit account?
- Who are my most profitable members?
- Who are my customers at risk for churn?
- Which loans were modified from the previous day?
- Who are my current members with a HELOC that are utilizing less than 25% of their line of credit?

“As customer interactions become increasingly digital, community banks and credit unions are losing the competitive advantage that local, personalized, white-glove service has traditionally afforded them and, at the same time, they lack valuable business insights that untapped data could provide to improve their operations,” said Katie Horvath, VP of Marketing and Communications, Aunalytics. “Daybreak for Financial Services offers an opportunity to turn that around and regain advantage with the ability to target, discover and offer the right services to the right people, at the right time.”

New features in Daybreak for Financial Services include:

Golden Record Assurance:

- Daybreak cleanses data for accuracy and governance and transforms disparate data forms and formats into a common language for building data models. Data fields and records are matched and merged into a golden record for a single source of truth, ready for analytics.

- The industry-intelligent data mart is designed specifically for banks and credit unions, allowing them to automatically find customer data across the organization such as lending, mobile banking, ATM, CRM, wealth and trust. Extracting company data from all business units that is accurate and streamed in real-time, enables better decision making. Aggregated data reveals a 360-degree view of customer behaviors and insights for data-driven campaigns and greater customer and product targeting capabilities.


Smart FeaturesTM :
- Aunalytics data scientists create high value data fields derived from a company’s internal data and added to data models capable of answering industry and functional questions. Business users have access to actionable data, enriched with Smart Features, to answer impactful questions for the first time. For example, if a banking customer has improved a credit score and is now in the “excellent” range, the bank can take action and let the customer know that if interested in a home equity loan, s/he qualifies for low interest rates.

- In addition, Daybreak offers a significant advantage with automated data enrichment and pre-built connectors to most major core systems such as CRMs, loan and mortgage systems, and other heavily utilized financial industry applications. Mid-sized banks and credit unions now have access to external data, allowing them to understand more about their customers’ relationships with other companies and identify products and services that customers might be interested in. This presents opportunities that may have otherwise been missed - learning that a customer has outside investment and mortgage accounts might prompt outreach to the customer to make a switch.


Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Insights:

- Daybreak is built for the non-technical business user to query data using natural language searching, and visually display golden records of data, analytics results, and insights. Users do not need to know SQL, computer coding, database technical knowledge or IT expertise to find answers to their most important business and IT questions.

- Insights allows users to better understand the information in their data by creating visualizations of their query results. Visualizations can be easily configured and viewed as intuitive graphics, not through complex database filtered lists of endless fields, so users can answer important business questions about customers.   

Team at table top retailer Rogue Games play with Bitcoin values to show how insane the value of cryptocurrency is

For most of us, Monopoly is our first introduction to the wonderful world of finances and capitalism. It’s where we learn that money does make the world (or top hats and thimbles at least) go around, and that, sometimes, it's actually kind of fun to bankrupt your friends and family.  

But what Monopoly really does is put the financial world into context in a way we understand. We learn the true value of savings, investment, how the crippling reach of rent and how unforeseen circumstances can either help you succeed or end with jail time.

While Monopoly comes with a game book that explains how things work -  cryptocurrency doesn’t. For many, top valued currencies like Bitcoin, Dogecoin and Etherium are complex and nebulous -  what are they? How do you get them? HOW do you spend them, And what are they worth?

So, to put cryptocurrency values into context, the team over at Rogue Games decided to smash Monopoly and Bitcoin together. 

They took the standard values for properties found in the game, transplanted them for Bitcoin values and then converted them BACK into real currency, just to see how much they’d be worth.   

For example: 

£60 = B60 = £2.4 Million  

So what does that look like?

Well, by today's valuations...

• Bitcoin Monopoly’s total bank is worth £830 Million
• Players now start with £60.6 Million
• Mayfair, the most expensive property on the board costs £16 Million to buy, with a £81 Million price tag to build a hotel.   

Interestingly, the converted numbers are completely playable, offering a level of variation that matches with the original game. But instead of hundred or even thousands, now you’re playing with millions. 

Want to see the complete list? Follow this link for the complete Bitcoin Monopoly Breakdown.

Omnio, a leading innovator in Banking-as-a-Service, has announced a EUR 30m funding led by pan-European venture fund GrayBella Capital. Omnio is a fast-growth pre-IPO banking infrastructure leader based in London, England.

Omnio builds on its pioneering Banking-as-a-Service offering, with the growth of Sercle, its credit union platform that serves 135 small financial institutions and over 1.5 million members of its credit union and bank customers. Leading FinTech’s such as NIVO and Credit Kudos trust Omnio’s platform to deliver their products and demonstrate continued confidence in the Omnio business model. 

Building on this foundation Omnio supports smaller financial institutions and non-regulated enterprises with its proven Banking-as-a-Service model, which manages the complexity of ‘banking’ operations and regulation.  Omnio is delivering a modular end-to-end solution that supports the accounts of record all the way through to regulatory reporting and compliance.   It means that smaller financial institutions can compete with the bigger banks, and non-banks can deliver financial services embedded in their ecosystem or in parts, as our clients see fit.  This innovation delivers FinTech for all and supports diversity in the supply of financial services.

Richard Kivel, Managing Director at GrayBella Capital, says,  “Omnio has secured a significant market position, that will allow it to be a critical player in the Banking-as-a-Service market. The quality of the team, technology and speed of its market roll-out is truly impressive. We are thrilled to be leading this financing.”

Adrian Cannon, CEO of Omnio, continues, “Omnio has built the future of services for these banks with its Banking-as-a-Service model and lets them offer competitive digital financial services that allow them to compete and grow in their local markets. Our mission is to empower small and mid-sized FI and non-regulated corporates to deliver great digital financial services and this convertible bond issue is an important step in providing Omnio with the resources it needs to scale quickly across the whole of the UK and Europe.”

LiquidityBook, a leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based provider of buy- and sell-side trading solutions, today announced the hire of Sumit Kumar as Senior FIX Specialist. He will be based in the firm’s London office.

Mr. Kumar will play a key role in ensuring clients have a smooth and seamless experience with LiquidityBook, from onboarding to day-to-day connectivity, collaborating with both internal developers and external clients to help create more robust processes to match the growing client base adoption of the latest FIX-based trading tools Wall Street has to offer. This hire comes at a time of tremendous growth for LiquidityBook. In 2020, the firm added 30 new broker-dealer partners to LBX Connect, its proprietary managed global FIX network, a 38% increase from 2019, while revenues increased 34% year-over-year.

Mr. Kumar spent the last four years at Refinitiv, where he began as a FIX Connectivity Specialist and rose to positions such as Director, Global Head of FIX Onboarding for the Redi EMS. He managed a global team that operated a 24/7 model for FIX connectivity onboarding that followed the sun from his home base in London, through the teams in New York and Bangalore, India. Prior to that, he spent a large portion of his career rising through the ranks in Goldman Sach’s electronic trading division and stayed on with the REDI platform as it spun out in 2014. Earlier in his career, he was an analyst at CLSA and Indus Valley Partners. Mr. Kumar holds a B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology.

Commenting on Mr. Kumar’s hire, LiquidityBook Chief Revenue Officer Sean Sullivan said: “As the number of firms that work with us specifically to take advantage of advancements in FIX trading strategies increases, adding talent to ensure a well-integrated OMS offering and a seamless onboarding process has become a top priority. Sumit is one of the most knowledgeable professionals in the FIX space, bringing vast project management experience and success at every stop on his resume. We are thrilled to have him on the team and know he will enable us to continue providing the level of service clients have come to expect from LiquidityBook as we further scale the business and develop new offerings.”

Mr. Kumar added: “Over the course of my career, I’ve learned that there’s nothing more gratifying than helping clients solve complex problems. With a robust sales pipeline and a proprietary managed FIX network, as well as white-glove client service, LiquidityBook offers a unique environment in which to do so. Ultimately, a firm’s solutions are only as good as clients’ ability to access them, and I look forward to helping clients start leveraging the LBX suite with ease and efficiency.”

About LiquidityBook

LiquidityBook is a leading SaaS-based provider of buy- and sell-side trading solutions, including order management, portfolio management, execution management, FIX network connectivity, compliance and pre- and post-trade processing. Founded in 2005, the LiquidityBook platform is trusted by many of the industry’s most sophisticated buy- and sell-side firms globally to power their trading workflows. For more information please visit www.liquiditybook.com or contact sales@liquiditybook.com.

Organisations across industries need “always-on” business continuity and disaster protection to get the most from their enterprise and service provider cloud deployments, while also maintaining the lowest possible total cost of ownership. To address these needs, Scality has strengthened its scale-out file system (SOFS) and streamlined management and monitoring of its RING8 file and object storage system.

This release delivers significant operational improvements for production deployments at petabyte scale. It provides geo-distributed solutions for the most performance intensive file-based application workloads and simplifies tasks for storage administrators with “point-and-click” functionality.

With these RING8 updates, other benefits include:

• Business continuance and disaster protection: Enterprise customers have large-scale, file-based application workloads for big data analytics, backup/data protection and healthcare medical imaging (PACS/VNA) that demand maximum system and data availability, thereby requiring geo-distributed solutions. Enhancing its already powerful geo-distributed file system capabilities, RING now gives these customers the high-availability business continuance and disaster protection needed for these massive file workloads.
• Detailed utilisation metrics for billing and chargeback: This release offers newly-enhanced utilisation monitoring and reporting for performance (ops/sec, bandwidth) and capacity metrics for multi-tenant deployments. Service providers and enterprises that deploy RING to provide cloud services now have access to consumption-based metrics and reporting for detailed billing/chargeback capabilities. 
• Improved speed and ease of use: For administrators, this release further simplifies common NFS and SMB volume provisioning, shared ACLs management and monitoring tasks through automation and UI-driven actions. New support for the popular open-source Prometheus system monitoring tool and API is introduced. These capabilities save time and further reduce operational costs associated with managing large-scale data storage.

Paul Speciale, chief product officer, Scality, said: “Given the rapid growth of data and the rising costs of storing and managing data at petabyte-scale and beyond, Scality has invested significantly in further simplifying and reducing the operating costs of RING. We offer the only integrated scale-out file system in an object storage solution, and we will continue to innovate to meet our customers’ changing needs at a price they can afford.”

Aiven, a software company that combines the best open source technologies with cloud infrastructure, today announced it raised $100M in its Series C, bringing the company’s total investment to $150M at a valuation of now more than $800M. The round was led by Atomico, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and World Innovation Lab as new investors. Lead investors of Aiven’s Series A (Earlybird Venture Capital) and Series B (IVP) also significantly increased their capital commitments to Aiven. 

Aiven will use the proceeds from the round to bring new products to market, increase contributions to developing open source technologies and continue the company’s international expansion. Aiven’s products are universally applicable, and the new investment and new investors will help the company better address underserved markets. The company plans to double its headcount over the next year and launch a formal open source program office. 

“Aiven’s mission is to champion open source, making the lives of developers better in all that we do,” said Oskari Saarenmaa, CEO and co-founder at Aiven. “The most recent funding will enable us to continue adding new service capabilities, grow our team and expand into new markets, as well as more significantly contribute to the open source community.” 

For the first time ever in January 2021, the use of open source database management services outstripped that of commercial services. Open source powers every part of our global economy from home automation and retail analytics to energy metering and more. Many existing tools impose a heavy operational burden if managed in-house. Democratizing access to the best open source technologies, Aiven offers fully-managed services for popular open source projects like Apache Kafka and Cassandra, Elasticsearch, M3 and PostgreSQL in the public cloud. 

With Aiven, companies of all sizes, from innovative startups to global leaders like Comcast, Fiverr, Vidio, Wolt and more, can have a modern, fully-functional open source data infrastructure from different regions in the world in minutes based on their needs with end-to-end security, set-up, maintenance and 24/7 monitoring across all major public cloud platforms. 

“We believe Aiven will be the global category winner in providing beautiful open source data infrastructure that just works. Globally and in minutes,“ said Hiro Tamura, Partner at Atomico.

“The open source tools that Aiven offers are now the dominant choice for the data needs of global companies, because they are simple, scalable and transparent. Aiven provides a vital service to solve the headaches that come with managing some of these incredible tools in-house and on the cloud, so developers and teams can focus on building apps, not infrastructure.”