Amdaris is pleased to announce the appointment of Dawood Khan to the role of Sales Director, joining the company from Oracle where he served as UK and Ireland Sales Director (CX Marketing Cloud).

Having previously worked at Demandware and Adobe, Dawood brings with him a wealth of successful software sales experience gained from 24 years in the business, with a proven background in driving growth and supporting enterprise businesses with complex, ambitious sales environments.

He said: “Amdaris’ clear trajectory of growth attracted me to the role. It has grown 40% year on year for the last four years, and the investments made in the company validate it as a strong contender in the market. It’s an exciting time to join this progressive company, and I’m looking forward to bringing my enterprise skills and experience to this environment.”

Dawood will be responsible for bringing a more structured and rigorous way of regulating the sales pipeline and adopting a more mature sales methodology, helping Amdaris to broaden its proposition in all directions and support its continuing expansion.

Vlad Nanu, Co-CEO, Amdaris said

“We are pleased to welcome Dawood to the Sales team, with Dominic Bridgman having recently being promoted to Group Commercial Director it was key that we found the right person to take on this role. Dawood is ideally placed to help us grow our sales operation and expand our services into new sectors. He will be heavily involved in solidifying our sales processes, driving growth and broadening our sales proposition.”

 Scienaptic, the world’s leading Artificial Intelligence-powered credit decision platform provider, announced its partnership with Urjanet, the global leader in utility account aggregation. This alliance will enable Scienaptic to tap Urjanet’s global telecom and utility data to enhance its credit decisioning platform with consumer-permissioned alternative spending data.

By combining Scienaptic’s AI-driven credit underwriting platform with 12 months of payment history from thousands of utility, telecom and cable providers worldwide, powerful credit risk signals will be generated for SME and retail lenders.

"Integration of AI with alternative data is radically changing credit underwriting," said Mark Dreux, Head of Growth and Strategy at Scienaptic. "Through this partnership, Scienaptic and Urjanet will combine resources and expertise to focus on building a ‘best-in-class’ credit inclusion solution for India, as well as North America.”

“Using alternative credit data, lenders are empowered to make more informed decisions while safely extending credit to new applicants,” said Erik Becker, SVP of Corporate Development at Urjanet. “Scienaptic’s AI-driven credit underwriting platform, paired with our consent-based alternative data, will allow businesses to uncover new revenue streams, mitigate risk, and deliver sharper credit decisions. We are pleased to partner with Scienaptic to close the lending gap and reach emerging markets.”

About Scienaptic

Scienaptic is on a mission to increase credit availability by transforming technology used in credit decisioning. Over 150 years of credit experience is embedded in Scienaptic's AI native credit decision platform. Our clients across banks, credit unions, fintech, and other lenders use the platform to constantly improve the quality of underwriting decisions. This enables them to say ‘yes’ to borrowers more often and faster. For more information, visit www.scienaptic.ai.

About Urjanet

Utility data solves global challenges, from ESG reporting for accountable climate action to credit risk assessment and identity verification for the underbanked. Urjanet is the world's leading utility data aggregator, delivering data from more than 6,500 utility, telecom, and cable providers across 48 countries. Urjanet's cloud-based platform and powerful suite of APIs provide a secure and scalable way for businesses to access consumer-permissioned data for better visibility into underserved borrowers. To learn more, visit urjanet.com.

NYMBUS®, a leading provider of banking technology solutions, today introduced Nymbus Labs to the financial services market. Built and operated to systematically remove barriers to digital banking innovation, Labs brings together Nymbus’ world-class development, marketing and user experience teams to amplify the capabilities of traditional institutions and extend their reach to new niche segments for next-generation growth.

With Nymbus Labs, partnering banks and credit unions have three unique opportunities to leverage a digital bank brand and explore new revenue streams, attract new market segments and expand their reach NOW:

Today, Nymbus Labs is already working with over a dozen customers across a variety of institutions. This includes established brands creating a fintech solution to drive customer loyalty, to traditional brick and mortar institutions looking to purchase a niche bank for growth. Among the Nymbus Labs portfolio of pre-built banks to choose from, Hitched is the latest concept ready for launch. It opens for pre-sign-ups today, tailored for newlyweds and their unique needs. 

“Challengers don’t own digital. Rather, growth opportunities exist for any size financial institution willing to pursue new paths using flexible technology and innovative new approaches,” said Jeffery Kendall, Chairman and CEO of Nymbus. “We believe niche is the new local for banks and credit unions. Nymbus Labs was created to help institutions innovate beyond the boundaries of traditional banking and strategically compete in new niche spaces, spur disruptive growth, and build lifetime value for customers.”

Recently appointed to lead the Labs team is Liz High, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at Nymbus. For nearly three decades, Liz has used data and insights to create elevated customer experiences for some of the world’s most enduring brands. By bringing her own marketing perspective, thought leadership and proven customer-centric and data-driven approaches to Nymbus, her role is pivotal in empowering banks and credit unions with a powerful combination of technology, people and processes that delivers meaningful customer experiences to drive loyalty and sustained growth.

"In a digital-as-default world, the new growth model is not about technology or adding more features. It’s about understanding the customer and delivering value. Nymbus is not simply building digital banks, we’re launching and supporting successful banks set up for growth through dynamic customer experiences,” said High. 

From the end of March, the new platform is ready to enhance security, privacy, data protection and personal identity. It has been developed as part of the "DEFeND - Data govErnance For Supporting Gdpr" (General Data Protection Regulation) Project. The initiative is funded by the Commission under the "Europe Horizon 2020" programme. Abi Lab, the Banking Research and Innovation Centre promoted by the Italian Banking Association, participated in the implementation of the initiative for the specific area of ​​the banking and financial sector. 

The project is aimed at developing a system to identify potential security aspects and flaws of personal data. The aim is to identify gaps in the protection of this critical information and to create a decision support system, which allows any identified issue to be analyzed and corrected immediately and effectively. Hence the goal of DEFeND is to define, design and develop a platform to support organisations representing industries and sectors towards compliance with the operational guidelines of the General Data Protection Regulation (Gdpr). Banking and financial sectors are also involved. 

DEFeND's main objective is the improvement of existing software tools and structures, through the development of a scalable and modular integration solution to provide a single governance platform for organisational data privacy. 

The initiative was developed by a consortium of ten European public and private entities from Italy, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom. 

The DEFeNd platform has been tested in operational environments in various areas: healthcare, banking, energy and local public administrations. 

Abi Lab, contributed to the analysis of the operational and technological needs that are necessary for the implementation and implementation of the project in the banking sector. A specific group of banks was identified to analyse and verify the main results of the initiative by carrying out a pilot case. Abi Lab has also provided concrete support to dissemination activities, playing a key role in promoting the project at European level with reference banks and financial institutions. 

mPokket – an Instant Loan App providing loans to college students and young working professionals – has appointed Mr. Sanjoy Kumar Agarwal as their new Chief Financial Officer (CFO).  

Mr. Agarwal will manage the financial operations at mPokket. He will be responsible for creating robust, iterative development plans for long-term strategy while resolving key financial issues. His role will be critical in achieving core business objectives, while supporting the company’s growing presence and expansion.

With over 19 years of experience, across companies like ICICI Bank, Srei Equipment Finance and Rupeek Capital, Sanjoy has a strong foundation in maintaining relationships with stakeholders, fund raising, financial planning, regulatory compliances, risk management, and process re-engineering.

Speaking on the appointment of Mr. Sanjoy Kumar Agarwal as the CFO, Gaurav Jalan, CEO & Founder- mPokket said “Having Sanjoy as part of our team, will greatly help us in the next phase of our growth as an organization. I am sure that with Sanjoy’s vast experience & expertise in the domain, will help revitalizes strategies, introduce innovation, and facilitate solutions-driven team collaboration for us.” 

RankedRight, the new platform which has been predicted to supercharge the efficiency of IT security teams across the world has secured $500,000 in seed funding.

Created in the UK, RankedRight is a triage system that follows an IT security team's pre-set rules to automate the time-consuming yet crucial process of ranking vulnerabilities in order of impact to the business. With teams reportedly wasting an average of 76% of their day remediating low priority risks, RankedRight enables them to divert their attention towards tackling the most critical issues and keep the company safe.

The investment round was led by angel investor John Yeo and a number of private investors including Founder of eLearnSecurity and Managing Partner of Romeo Capital, Armando Romeo, and VP Sales, EMEA at Deep Instinct, Brooks Wallace. Impressed that the founding team had identified a credible solution to the known gap in vulnerability management, the investors were keen to be involved in RankedRight’s pursuit of an estimated £9.3bn market opportunity.

RankedRight’s leadership team comprises former IBM Associate Partner and vulnerability management specialist Thomas MacKenzie, technology operations expert Peter Yeo and former managing director of Piksel – consultancy to BSkyB, Virgin Media and Channel 4, Kristan Bullett. They plan to use the funds to accelerate the product’s development and implement the company’s go to market strategy. This will include commencement of the pilot phase which will involve a select list of companies who signed up to the scheme late last year upon hearing of the new technology.

The board also intends to create a Customer Advisory Board to ensure that the company’s brand promise Less Admin, More Action and its key value to Always Put The Users’ Risk Appetite First are reflected in the system’s ongoing development. Details of the board will be announced in the coming months.

John Yeo, Lead Investor of the Seed Round, commented: “Cyber is an industry that has no shortage of solutions to edge-case problems. So it's refreshing to see a credible founder team focussed on building an elegant and simple-to-use solution that solves one of the most widespread cyber security challenges affecting businesses”.

Commenting on the funding, RankedRight’s CEO, Thomas MacKenzie, said: “We have a solution to one of the biggest and fastest growing problems facing information security teams and this funding will ensure companies across the world can benefit from it."

“Identifying risk is no longer the problem; where organisations struggle is tackling their outstanding weaknesses. RankedRight simplifies the process, helping organisations of all sizes to fix their vulnerabilities faster and more efficiently."

As part of the raise, Chartered Accountant, Kirsty Bushrod, is to join the company as Investor Director.

For more information on RankedRight and to register your interest in the platform, visit https://www.rankedright.com.

VoxSmart Ltd., a global leader in communications surveillance, has successfully closed a $25 Million Growth Equity financing round to expand its multi-award-winning markets surveillance technology suite, enhancing enterprise supervision and controls for regulated employees that work at home, remotely or in the office.

Building on strong support from UK Investment Manager Deepbridge Capital, the lead investor in this investment round is multi asset fund management firm Toscafund Asset Management LLP and is one of the largest fundraises conducted for the RegTech and Compliance sector, negotiations of which have been held entirely virtually during the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic.

VoxSmart provides global firms with innovative voice and electronic communications analytics and remote compliance solutions, enabling businesses to supervise communication conducted on a range of different voice and digital platforms for risk and compliance purposes.

Demand for cloud-based surveillance technology has grown significantly as employees are required to adhere to increased compliance and reporting standards irrespective of where they chose to work. This trend to “work from anywhere” is becoming standard market practise for many firms as they adjust to the post-pandemic economy. VoxSmart’s unparalleled expertise in unstructured data processing and indexing allows clients to ensure best practice and accountability of their employee communications in the event of audit, dispute, or misconduct.

VoxSmart first introduced compliant WhatsApp surveillance to the market in 2016 and their proprietary technology now captures 3 messages a second for Tier 1 financial institutions across capital markets, commodity trading and the broker-dealer market. VoxSmart continues to transform capital markets with the capability to proactively perform real-time reconstructions of communication, trade and RFQ data which significantly reduces time and operational cost for market participants.

Through strategic partnerships and a strong focus on M&A activity, VoxSmart is setting the standard for an integrated markets surveillance model that offers a consolidated solution to capture and supervise all communications and trade data under one platform.

The investment will fund further expansion and growth particularly into North America and the emerging markets as well as product development in key areas such as instant message capture on emerging channels such as Telegram and Signal as well as enhanced employee risk and productivity analysis.

Oliver Blower, CEO of VoxSmart: “As market practitioners we have always been acutely aware of market developments and working with market participants to shape our product development and innovation. As such it was important, we found a partner who shared our vision within financial services. We believe that Toscafund’s global expertise and impressive market connectivity will be of tremendous benefit to VoxSmart in our next stage of growth.”

George Koulouris, Partner at Toscafund: “With this investment, Toscafund has assembled an extremely attractive portfolio of fast-growing businesses that are all contributing their technological skills to the digitization and evolution that is currently taking place in the financial services sector. The opportunities to invest in this fundamental industry shift are hugely attractive for those with sufficient experience to recognise the genuine leaders in the space. We look forward to working with Oliver and his team.”

Ian Warwick, Managing Partner at Deepbridge Capital; “We have been working with VoxSmart since 2017, via our EIS fund, and are immensely proud of what the team have built. VoxSmart is exactly the type of business the Enterprise Investment Scheme is designed to support, being a growth-focused unique technology with global reach. We look forward to working with Toscafund to help the business continue to grow”.

About VoxSmart

VoxSmart Ltd. is a UK headquartered communications surveillance provider with offices in New York, London, Singapore and Madrid. VoxSmart designs, develops and deploys cloud-based mobile recording and communications surveillance technology for global financial institutions to manage their business risks and regulatory requirements. Its rapidly evolving technology, with proven accuracy in financial voice transcription and real-time instant message capture, supports over 100 clients with regulatory requirements to monitor and reconstruct all trade communications from voice, mobile, email and chat.

VoxSmart has unparalleled expertise in unstructured data processing and indexing for complex technology environments and believes that by harnessing this data, a business will build a strong foundation for intelligent risk and control analysis. VoxSmart’s goal is to become the global reference for risk and compliance surveillance technology and offer end-to-end remote conduct and employee monitoring that connects a firm’s people, processes, and technology to drive significant operational efficiencies and enable smarter business decisions.

About Toscafund

Toscafund Asset Management LLP is a London based multi-asset investment management firm with offices in London, New York, Manchester and Melbourne.  Founded in 2000 by Martin Hughes, Toscafund has firmly established itself as one of Europe’s leading investors in the financial services sector across both public and private markets.

Toscafund has a long track record of supporting management teams and providing growth capital to private challenger and fintech companies.  The total amount invested exceeds $700m with notable investments that include Aldermore Bank, Hoist, Atom Bank, OakNorth, esure, Plurimi Wealth, LIQID, Caravela Companhia de Seguros, Lemonway and Elinvar.

Acronis, a global leader in cyber protection, today released Acronis DeviceLock DLP 9.0, a significant update to the company’s signature data loss protection (DLP) solution. With 69% of all data breaches resulting from internal sources, both accidental and intentional, this release enables organisations to secure their data against the most prevalent leakage threats.

Given modern businesses’ reliance on data for day-to-day operations, data breaches can lead to heavy financial damages in the form of regulatory fines, litigation, business continuity interruptions, and reputational harm. Independent research conducted by the Ponemon Institute reveals that the average cost of insider-related incidents is now $11.45 million, having climbed 31% over the past two years.

“Data protection is a basic need of every organisation,” said Jan-Jaap “JJ” Jager, Chief Revenue Officer, Acronis. “From intellectual property and trade secrets to sensitive customer and employee information, it is mission-critical for modern businesses to protect themselves from accidental or intentional data loss. Acronis continues to expand our integrated cyber protection solutions to ensure that more workloads are safeguarded against all forms of data breach.” 

With Acronis DeviceLock DLP 9.0, administrators can exercise granular control over allowable actions and processes while maintaining regulatory compliance, regardless of where they operate. Built-in auditing and analysis tools make it simple to turn activity logs into actionable insights.

Acronis DeviceLock 9.0 features a modular architecture that allows businesses to control their total cost of ownership: the standalone Acronis DeviceLock Core module can be supplemented with several add-on components to enable additional functionalities. Another standalone product, Acronis DeviceLock Discovery, further reduces the risk of data loss by automatically discovering exposed data-at-rest and protecting it with configurable remediation actions.

New capabilities introduced in Acronis DeviceLock DLP 9.0 include:

• Acronis DeviceLock User Activity Monitor add-on, an optional component that enables trigger-based recording of end user actions — including keystrokes, active processes, and entire screens — and provides built-in tools for administrators to view and analyse these activities. This add-on expands the evidence base for IT security incident investigations and simplifies the detection and mitigation of suspicious or dangerous behaviour. Flexible start/stop recording rules support both event- and state-based criteria.
• User Dossiers, which ease information security auditing and increase visibility over data flows and related activities by collecting end-user action statistics and presenting them in easily understood graphical representations. User Dossiers can be complemented with additional user account data taken from Active Directory or an LDAP directory.
• Elasticsearch database scanning support for Acronis DeviceLock Discovery, further extending the add-on’s reach and allowing administrators to gain visibility and control over sensitive data-at-rest across their entire IT environment.

Pires Investments plc (AIM: PIRI), the investment company focused on next generation technology, is pleased to provide an update on its investment in Pluto Digital Assets plc ("Pluto"), a technology company that is operating in the exciting digital assets sector.

Since Pluto's recent equity funding, which raised in excess of £20 million, the company continues to make excellent progress. It is now involved with a further nine digital asset projects and is also in discussions with several other early-stage decentralised technology projects; some of which the company expects to be signed in the coming weeks.

In particular, Pluto recently participated in the latest FTX (a cryptocurrency exchange) project, Oxygen Protocol ("OXY"), a decentralised finance ("DeFi") Prime Brokerage Protocol. The new OXY token created as part of this project has recently successfully listed. Pluto holds 2,000,000 OXY tokens, acquired at a price of US$0.10 per token.  Currently, OXY tokens are trading at around US$3 per token. 

In addition, YOP, one of Pluto's other projects, has announced the addition of non-fungible tokens ("NFTs") to its launchpad aggregator.  This will also allow YOP holders to gain access to new token projects.  Furthermore, YOP NFTs can now be purchased on the secondary market or farmed by staking YOP tokens.  This demonstrates the continuing innovation of decentralised technology and new ways of using digital assets. 

As announced on 9 March 2021, Pires holds 32,518,876 shares in Pluto which, prior to Argo Blockchain plc's further investment of circa £7 million, represented a circa 6.4% shareholding in Pluto. In addition, Pires has warrants over 24 million new ordinary shares in Pluto.

Peter Redmond, Chairman of Pires, commented:

"We are very pleased to note Pluto's progress following its equity fundraise earlier this month. Pluto is extremely well-positioned to capture early-stage opportunities within the decentralised technology sector, which is growing rapidly."

"We look forward to updating the market on Pluto's growth and the developments relating to its pipeline of projects in due course."

State Street Corporation (NYSE: STT) has announced that it has appointed Vincent Georgel-O’Reilly as regional segment head for alternatives in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). 

In this new role, O’Reilly covers hedge funds and private markets and is responsible for advancing the investment services strategic direction, product structuring, sales and operations in EMEA. He reports to Paul Fleming, global head of alternatives and Joerg Ambrosius, chief executive officer of EMEA.

State Street has a strong history of innovation in the alternatives industry and is committed to supporting alternatives clients with best-in-class expertise, processes and technology. O’Reilly will work closely with Fleming and Ambrosius, to ensure strategies are well-coordinated at a global level, while also tailored to the local market in EMEA to meet clients’ needs and bring market-leading solutions to clients.

“Vincent is an excellent leader who has a deep understanding of the market and our business, and brings with him an impressive track record of delivering results across various asset classes,” said Fleming. “He is strongly positioned to lead our alternatives business in EMEA, and work together with clients to be a true value-added partner as they look to expand into new markets, asset types and attract different investors.”

During his 14 years at State Street, O’Reilly has held senior positions including global head of the financial institutions group, global head of strategic initiatives, chief operations officer for the EMEA sales team and international head of the mergers and acquisitions group. He has been the driving force for several key initiatives across the business including building strategic vision, securing external growth and driving new revenue. Prior to joining State Street, he held positions at Aéroport de Paris Management, Rothschild Nomura JV and AXA IM.