The chargeback specialist for financial institutions (FIs) and sister company of Chargebacks911, Fi911, has launched a new report to support FIs in their preparation for full PSD2’s Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) enforcement. 

The report, Strong Customer Authentication: The State of SCA Adoption in 2021, shares actionable advice and insights for acquirers supporting their merchants with compliancy, as well as issuers getting ready to filter transactions under the new regulations.

Craig McClure, Director of Relationship Management at Fi911, commented: “SCA is a controversial beast that merchants and FIs are approaching slowly and with great caution. Handled incorrectly, it can cause low acceptance rates, increased abandonments, and more friction during the checkout process." 

“However, it also has the potential to be hugely positive for the ecommerce space – providing we see a rapid collaborative effort across the payments industry and a response in the form of data-driven decisions, solutions and tools.”

In the first instance, Fi911 recommends issuers optimise their risk-based decisioning processes to help standardise them across the sector. 

It also advises acquirers to consider SCA-compliance as just a starting point in fraud management, urging them to look beyond the 3D Secure 2.0 protocol (the main security tool being used to ensure compliancy) as a precedent for their anti-fraud and authentication processes. 

Tracy Cray, Director of Card Scheme Compliance at Fi911, added: “SCA is a great basis for an FI’s multifaceted fraud management, but it is not the be-all and end-all. Especially since fraud attack rates are soaring at unprecedented rates (25%+) across all transactions due to COVID-19 and the subsequent boom in ecommerce activity.”                           

Cray explained that while SCA-compliant tools like 3D Secure 2.0 are a strong way to protect against fraud pre-transaction, it will not prevent post-transactional threats such as illegitimate chargeback (otherwise known as friendly fraud).  

She continued: “We’ve recorded a major escalation of friendly fraud and chargeback claims in recent years, and this has grown dramatically since the pandemic began – some industries have seen 10 times the amount of chargebacks than before COVID-19. While SCA can help reduce issuances caused by merchant error and criminal activity, friendly fraud is set to represent an even greater share of future chargeback rates.” 

Data from Fi911 suggests that global chargeback issuances will see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.3% annually between 2018 and 2023. The majority of these cases will be instances of friendly fraud, accounting for 61% of all chargebacks in North America and 73% in Europe.

Cray elaborated: “Fraudsters may gravitate further towards claims of packages not arriving, packages being damaged, or goods not being as described, since these can be submitted/filed 120-days after a transaction has been completed and authorised through SCA.”

 QUO, the execution management and workflow solution from TradingScreen (TS), the all-asset class execution and order management system, has launched a new web solution for the Private Bank and Wealth Management divisions of sell-side institutions to distribute to their buy-side clients. A cloud based high-touch execution management system, the web application is a workflow solution and trading platform now available to banks and brokers.

Initially launched in 2019 for the buy-side wealth management community, QUO’s expansion into the sell-side recognises the sell side demand for superior technology and connectivity.

Sell-side firms can now white-label and distribute the QUO platform as a privately branded online trading platform in less than three months from initiation. The ease and speed follow on from the banking sector’s push to encourage more clients into digital workflow solutions. QUO merges data, all asset class positions, pre-trade checks, P&L, and referential positions with an execution management system.

Will Lawton, Head of QUO, commented: “Following the success of QUO with our primary wealth management client base, we have enhanced the QUO offering, expanding it to the private banking and wealth management divisions of sell-side institutions to help them service their end clients. With greater market demand for automation and connectivity, QUO can be utilised by not only our clients but their clients – allowing for greater digitalisation across the board.”

To date, over 65 QUO clients have already gone live with the white-labeled system. The sell-side launch of QUO follows the continued success of TradingScreen’s all-asset class execution and order management system, TradeSmart – which enables asset managers and hedge funds to meet today's market structure challenges.

SmartStream Technologies, the financial Transaction Lifecycle Management (TLM®) solutions provider today announce the expansion of its Innovation Lab, with the recent opening of its new workspace in Mariahilfer Strasse in Vienna, Austria. This doubles the footprint and supports the company’s growth in client innovations – where SmartStream spends a quarter of its revenues on R&D.

SmartStream’s Innovation Lab is a collaboration of highly skilled mathematicians, applied data scientists and IT specialists. The innovation team has partnered with a number of Tier 1 banking customers to investigate the use of AI, machine learning and blockchain. These partnerships assess how advanced technology can be used to re-engineer traditional processes to boost efficiencies, cut costs, and enhance business plans.

Andreas Burner, CIO, SmartStream, states: “It is a logical step in our business growth to move to a larger workspace in Vienna. In addition, it is a city with highly skilled data scientists and experts who provide the necessary skills and support to accommodate our ongoing expansion, and partnerships with our banking clients.”

SmartStream increased its global headcount by eight percent last year and since the start of 2021 it has been recruiting for a further 100 open positions.

Today, Ohpen announces the addition of Leni Boeren to its supervisory board. Boeren will join Leonard van Loon (NPM) and Michel Vrolijk (Amerborgh) to supervise Ohpen’s international growth as it brings its cloud-native combined savings, investment and lending platform to the market. Boeren continues to hold non-executive board seats for, amongst others, Air France–KLM and Tata Steel Nederland. 

Boeren has over 20 years of board experience, including seats on the executive board of the Amsterdam Exchanges, Euronext, the Dutch Fund and Asset Management Association (DUFAS),  Robeco Groep, Van Lanschot Kempen and was most recently CEO of Kempen Capital Management. In 2011, Robeco, with Boeren as its COO, became Ohpen’s first client. Boeren was instrumental in Ohpen’s initial success; working with Ohpen to coordinate the Dutch Central Bank’s approval of the use of AWS for storing financial data, and AWS’s approval for the Dutch Central Bank’s right to audit–both of which had never been done before. 

Matthijs Aler, CEO of Ohpen, said, “Leni is one of the rare powerhouses of Dutch supervisory boards, and I am extremely proud to welcome her to this role. She brings a unique combination of both experience in the finance sector with a focus on technology and operations, and as an executive and supervisory board member in an international setup. Leni was the first person to take a chance on us–so we’ve seen first-hand her ability to take calculated risks, and push for innovation, whilst keeping a close eye on customer experience. We have no doubt that she will be of enormous value to Ohpen and its clients.”

On her appointment, Leni Boeren commented, “Ohpen has always been at the forefront of innovation. When I first met Ohpen 10 years ago, I knew that its truly unique cloud-based platform would be the future. Since then, we’ve seen more companies wake up to the benefits of using a cloud-native core banking provider. This change in attitudes, coupled with Ohpen’s acquisition of Davinci last year, means this is an opportune moment for Ohpen to change the industry once again with their combined cloud-native savings, investment and lending platform. I was excited to work with Ohpen all those years ago; seeing that more financial institutions are recognising the freedom that Ohpen’s platform can give them to innovate rather than maintain makes me excited about what the next decade holds.”  

Ohpen plans to bolster its supervisory board in the near future by adding a fourth supervisory board member with in-depth technical knowledge and experience.

Contact info@ohpen.com for more information

ikigai, the new premium fintech bringing self-care to personal finance, has today announced its official launch in the UK. 

Founded by Maurizio Kaiser and Edgar de Picciotto, who met whilst working at McKinsey, ikigai empowers its clients to spend well, save well and invest well. Offering all the personal financial tools now expected of a digital bank, ikigai also provides wealth management features that allow clients to invest in fully-managed portfolios of exchange traded funds, built and managed using asset allocation guidance from BlackRock.

Maurizio Kaiser, co-founder of ikigai, says: “ikigai is about empowering people, aligning their finances with their sense of self and purpose. Technological advancement has touched nearly every aspect of our lives. But when it comes to wealth, incumbents and challengers keep chasing the same audience with their same one-size-fits-all offerings. It doesn't make sense. There’s a growing number of young and affluent people who are currently overlooked by banks of all sizes and platforms. That’s why we’ve built ikigai. Our clients are people focused on the purpose of wealth, not it’s mindless accumulation. They associate self-care and financial wellbeing with success and self-confidence. And they’re entering their prime earning and spending years, but the tools available right now simply don’t meet their increasingly complex financial needs. They’re underserviced and underestimated, but ikigai is here to change that.” 

Spend well, save well, invest well 

ikigai aims to give clients complete visibility of their money as well as high-level access and control over their financial lives. 

Distinctively and elegantly designed at every touch point, from app to site to card, with a subscription model that is flat, fair and transparent, new clients can sign up within just a few minutes after downloading from the Apple App Store. Every new client is set up with a relationship manager who provides a high-touch, human connection that digital banks and fintechs today don’t offer. Once onboarded, the app has a simple, clean design that easily separates money into accounts for spending, saving and investing through the Everyday, Nest, and Wealth features.

The “Everyday” account is where clients see all their day-to-day details, including how their money is flowing in and out of their account. Transactions are automatically categorised, providing high levels of financial clarity when it comes to spending. Money can be added to the Everyday account through a bank transfer from another bank, or if a client’s ready to spend some of their savings, with an easy tap and transfer from their ikigai Nest.

Savings are put aside in the “Nest” section of the app, this is a separate account with it’s own account number, International IBAN and BIC codes. This can be topped up from the ‘Everyday’ account with just a couple of taps, or similar to the ‘Everyday’, have transfers made directly from another bank account. 

ikigai also provides fully managed, globally diversified investment portfolios, found under ‘Wealth’. Believing in the power of goals-based investing, clients can define their ambitions and select these ready-made portfolios that take into account both risk appetite and the nature of what they want to achieve. From buying a property, growing their wealth, building a business or starting a family, there’s a portfolio designed to meet their needs. 

All portfolios are built and managed by ikigai in collaboration with BlackRock, the largest global asset manager, who provide insights and asset allocation guidance. This means that busy clients don’t have to spend time following the markets, learning all the financial jargon or analysing companies to know which stocks to buy. Instead, all they have to do is set a goal and let ikigai put their money to work to help them achieve it. When investing, capital is at risk and the value of investments can go down as well as up.

All of ikigai’s features are available for a flat-fee that’s designed to be completely fair and transparent. Usually, with investing platforms, the more money in a portfolio the more a customer is charged, despite the same amount of work going into managing a smaller portfolio as a larger one. ikigai’s flat-fee structure removes this issue as well as any question of upsells, hidden fees or surprise costs (such as additional management, entry or withdrawal fees) that can eat up big chunks of investments over time.

Edgar de Picciotto, co-founder of ikigai, comments: “We’ve redesigned banking for the future of affluence with a product that truly provides self-care for your money. It’s about creating a fair, easy, and holistic product where wealth meets a sense of purpose. 

“We are ruthlessly client-centric. This comes through at every touch point - not least our holistic approach to personal finance and our flat-fee pricing model. We’ve combined banking and wealth management to allow high levels of access, control, simplicity and balance. We’re values-driven, just like our clients, with a focus on goals-based investing and empowering clients to achieve their financial and personal ambitions. We are always thinking of the client first and building to ensure the best experience and to meet their needs on a more personal level. The fact is that the way people feel about money has changed - it’s not just about spending power, but living power. And that presents an historic opportunity.” 

Unlike the original neobanks, ikigai has not built its tech from scratch, instead focusing on providing the best user experience for its clients by partnering with best-in-class technology providers including Railsbank and WealthKernel. 

Previously, ikigai raised £2 million from private and angel investors in a pre-seed round completed in 2020. 

“Our statistics confirm that there is an increasing demand for alternative lending among the population. In the markets of our operation, many people still lack access to traditional financial services. For example, in Russia, Kazakhstan and Spain, the share of the underserved population varies from 44% to 53%. In Southeast Asia, around 75% of adults are either underbanked or don’t have a bank account, and in India 54% do not have full access to finance. The pandemic resulted in the underconsumption and further restrictions introduced by traditional banks, so people started using non-bank loans more frequently. We are glad to be able to partially satisfy their needs and contribute to the development of financial inclusion across our footprint,” - said Sergey Sedov, CEO of Robocash Group.

Yseop, a pioneer in Natural Language Generation (NLG) and world-leading AI software company, today announced the launch of ALIX, an immediate discovery application to showcase how quickly and easily financial institutions can transform and grow their business through intelligent report automation using Yseop’s Augmented Financial Analyst solution.

Financial analysts spend 48% of their time writing and updating reports. This falls to 9% when using Yseop’s Augmented Financial Analyst, a significant Return on Investment (ROI).

Language Artificial Intelligence has made incredible progress in the last several years, with many Tier 1 financial institutions deploying the technology at scale to automate report writing. Despite this, it has been difficult for many business end-users to understand which reports can be automated without technology specialists’ help.

With ALIX, business end-users can determine in less than a minute what portion of their reports – such as annual financial statements, fund performance or risk and compliance reports – can be automated. Based on Yseop’s pre-trained algorithm, ALIX provides an immediate analysis of the uploaded financial report and identifies what can be automated on the Augmented Financial Analyst platform.

ALIX is publicly available on Yseop’s website. To try the application, click here.

Yseop’s powerful industry-leading patented platform encompasses Natural Generation Language, Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Machine Learning capabilities to draw insight from structured data, translating them into clear and high-quality written reporting narratives.

Key benefits for automating financial reports include:

• Empowering analysts: enable teams to focus on more valuable and strategic work, empowering them with more insights to drive better decision making.
• Reducing cost: automatically generate data-driven reports, saving time and resources.
• Improving accuracy: remove the risk of manual human errors in reporting, ensuring high-quality and accuracy as standard.
• Increasing efficiency: streamline processes and produce high volumes of reports faster whilst maintaining consistency

Emmanuel Walckenaer, CEO of Yseop, says: “We are excited to launch ALIX – a milestone in our delivery of end-to-end intelligent automation. Financial reporting remains an intense weight for big, global organizations but it comprises mostly repetitive tasks that can be easily automated. To boost AI adoption, it is critical to enable business users to see benefits and deploy it – without intensive, specialized tech support. ALIX proves intelligent report automation is within their reach – the first step to adopting solutions such as Augmented Financial Analyst.”

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that stc pay has chosen Red Hat to help it expand its fintech services. stc pay uses Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, along with Red Hat integration and cloud storage technologies, to enable the portability of applications across any cloud to help accelerate the delivery of innovative applications and features to users.

Launching the wallet of the future

stc pay, a subsidiary of stc Group, was launched in late 2018 with a focus on providing a faster, easier, and more secure customer experience to individuals and business owners, enabling them to send, receive, and manage money seamlessly through their mobile devices. stc pay is already Saudi Arabia’s largest and leading mobile wallet, with 5 million customers.

stc pay recognised the need to be adaptable in order to achieve growth in a dynamic market characterised by ongoing disruption from new entrants, continuous change in consumer behaviour and expectations, and evolving regulatory requirements such as those governing data storage and access. stc pay set out to build a flexible enterprise architecture that would support this business agility, and sought a Kubernetes platform that would enable cloud-native development and a hybrid cloud strategy that includes on-premises, private cloud and public clouds.

Open source leads the way

To meet its goal of becoming a fintech industry pioneer, stc pay wanted a cloud-agnostic platform that would provide abstraction from the underlying hardware and automated provisioning across hybrid infrastructure and found this in Red Hat OpenShift. On OpenShift, stc pay is running Red Hat AMQ, a messaging platform that helps enable real-time integration, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage. Red Hat Consulting helps accelerate the implementation with hands-on training to support stc pay teams in embracing agile practices such as DevSecOps.

stc pay engaged Red Hat in the design and build phases of its platform, with close collaboration between the teams to optimise both the tools and the processes as it introduces its API-based microservices architecture. stc pay and Red Hat are also working closely with Temenos, a banking software provider that is relied on by more than 3,000 banks around the globe, to run Temenos Payments, a suite of payment processing solutions, and Temenos Transact, a digital core-banking solution, on OpenShift.

With its OpenShift-based platform that helps streamline application development and scalability, stc pay expects to improve time to market and employee productivity and anticipates an improvement in the availability, uptime and recovery of applications to enhance the user experience. Through continued collaboration with Red Hat, stc pay’s plans for future innovation include growth into new regions using multiple public cloud providers and expanding its work with ecosystem partners to introduce open finance into Saudi Arabia. 

Supporting Quotes

Kelly Switt, senior director, Financial Services strategy, ecosystem and strategic partnerships, Red Hat

“stc pay is looking to shake up the financial services market with its digital business model and growth strategy through the stc Group mobile subscriber base, all of which relies on cloud-native agility. Red Hat is excited to collaborate with stc pay as it builds out a hybrid cloud platform from which it can offer more secure and frictionless services to merchants and consumers in the Kingdom and beyond. Our deep relationship with stc pay and Temenos is built on openness, as we are working closely to achieve joint strategic goals, laying a great foundation for long-term success.”

Abdulrahman Almutairi, vice president of Technology, stc pay

“To support our ambitions to be the pioneer in fintech in Saudi Arabia as part of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030, we were looking for best-of-breed robust, scalable, and trusted vendors to ensure a strong risk profile for delivering financial services. We were attracted to Red Hat’s enterprise open source model offering support and security features in combination with access to a global pool of talent for rapid development. With great proactiveness on all sides, we have formed a strong working relationship with Red Hat as with Temenos. We are excited to be building a hybrid cloud based on Red Hat OpenShift to power next-generation digital technologies that will help us bring innovative experiences to users while enabling greater financial inclusion in the region and closing gaps in fintech services and digital payments.”