Liquidnet, the global institutional investment network, today announced the appointment of Steven Nichols as Head of NLP (National Language Processing) and Unstructured Data. Additionally, the company has added three new data scientists – Dr. Nicholas Burtch, Dr. Anthony Schramm and Yusong Liu – to its fast-growing team.

Nichols joined Liquidnet through Liquidnet’s 2019 acquisition of the NLP technology company Prattle, where he was a Director of Data Science. He has been instrumental in the development of Liquidnet’s NLP capabilities and their integration into the Liquidnet Investment Analytics product suite, combining AI tools like machine learning and NLP with traditional and alternative data to help uncover the actionable insights hidden within data and content. In his new role, he will guide the strategic direction of the NLP team while serving as one of the leaders on the Liquidnet data science team. Nichols will report to Liquidnet’s Chief Data Scientist, Tom Doris.

Over the last two years, Liquidnet has made extensive investments in its data science capabilities, with the aim of democratizing access to AI tools which empower individuals in investment and execution decision making. These investments continue to underpin the Liquidnet Investment Analytics product suite.

“We’re committed to building out the deepest data science capabilities possible to help asset managers navigate a complex trading and investment environment. With these new additions and with Steven at the helm, our NLP expertise will grow even stronger,” says Doris.

“NLP is increasingly becoming one of the industry’s favorite AI tools, especially as more managers seek to parse rapidly-growing volumes of unstructured data in an efficient manner. We’re seeing increasing demand for NLP based AI tools like our central bank and equity sentiment scoring products that quantify language patterns, providing previously unavailable quantitative signals. Our goal is not just to make NLP more powerful, but to make it more widely available to firms across various sizes and strategies,” adds Nichols.

Dr. Burtch is a former recipient of the prestigious Harry S. Truman Fellowship and NSF Graduate Fellowship; his research has been published in multiple journals. Dr. Schramm was most recently a Graduate Research Fellow at Yale University and a Fellow at The Data Incubator in New York City. Liu joins Liquidnet from the University of Washington (Seattle), where he earned his master’s degree and oversaw projects on sentiment analysis using neural methods. All three join Liquidnet with deep experience in natural language processing, quantitative analysis, machine learning, data visualization and algorithm development.

IHS Markit today announced the launch of its Sovereign ESG Dataset incorporating 41 discrete indicators across 211 countries and territories. The dataset outputs are numerical for efficient portfolio integration and include forward guidance on a one-year horizon for key Sovereign ESG indicators.

“Country level ESG indicators are increasingly important for investors as they look to build a holistic picture of ESG risk across all issuers both Sovereign and Corporate,” said Kevin Bourne, co-head, sustainable finance, IHS Markit. “More and more financial institutions are looking to build their own bespoke ESG values across a wider range of detailed country level metrics. Our data sets deliver a detailed ten-year time series combined with a one year forecast across a large number of these, enabling new perspectives being applied to ESG modelling.”

“Evaluating the impact of environmental regulation and corporate tax policies of a host country on a specific investment requires a deep understanding of existing and evolving dynamics,” said Alexia Ash, associate director, country risk consulting, IHS Markit. “ESG risks are no longer just the purview of global equities – these disclosures are becoming directly relevant to sovereign-level investing.”

Understanding sovereign ESG provides investors with the opportunity to identify emerging risks and opportunities in new geographies and sectors. The IHS Markit Sovereign ESG metrics will enable users to capture a strategic view of current and future exposure to ESG related policies and provide the opportunity to engage pro-actively and mitigate risk effectively. 

Established in 1846 and renamed in 1970, Nationwide Building Society is now the world’s largest mutual financial institution, with a heritage, culture and ethos that remain unique and built on the solid foundation of mutuality. Despite undergoing significant transformation over the years, Nationwide’s focus has remained constant: providing high-quality customer service and staying committed to its members.

However, the firm faced a common problem in today’s growing digital-first era: how to engage members during maintenance to its online services and proactively provide regular updates to those affected. In essence, it needed to communicate with its customers in the event of unplanned or planned interruptions in service, to provide a positive overall customer experience.

Dialling up customer communications 

As a solution, Nationwide chose Netcall’s ‘Liberty Create’. This enabled developers to design, build and deploy the digital banking resilience app ‘Notify Me’ – to allow customers to subscribe and receive status updates on planned and unplanned interruptions in their services. 

With Notify Me, members receive notifications when a service is available again, such as when maintenance ends. By providing the option to subscribe to such alerts, members do not have to keep checking to see if the service is available, and instead can receive timely updates straight to their phone. Subscribers are also able to receive progress updates on planned maintenance. With the introduction of this service, Nationwide has been able to reduce unnecessary calls into their contact centre.

All of this has been done taking full advantage of low-code and its ability to create apps ten times faster than having to start to code a solution from scratch. Support staff also have more time to deal with more complex member queries, enabling Nationwide to continue as a leading British financial services provider. Create has also simplified tasks for the Enterprise Command Centre IT team. 

Since implementing Netcall’s low-code technology, Nationwide has deployed many highly successful systems, including mortgages, ISAs, bereavements and specialist support designed to help members during difficult times. By doing so, it has achieved significant efficiency gains and cost savings across a range of operations. Crucially, the building society has achieved excellent customer satisfaction ratings across these services and successfully responded to the needs of today’s members.

Synthesized, today unveils details of a successful collaboration with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and a leading fraud prevention vendor, aimed at assisting the development of new solutions to detect and prevent fraud and scams exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Synthesized engaged in the FCA’s DataSprint, aimed at developing synthetic datasets to be used by participants in the Digital Sandbox Pilot, jointly launched by the FCA and City of London Corporation. The objective of the collaboration was to solve the challenge of building a better synthesised transactional bank fraud model. 

Transactional bank fraud can be a notoriously difficult and complex problem to address. Collaboration can be difficult due to the need for highly controlled records review even within the same company or government body. Given the urgency of this growing problem, it is imperative to quickly bring to market faster, safer, and more collaborative data projects.  

The result of this collaboration produced a safe-to-share synthetic dataset that will allow participants of the Digital Sandbox Pilot to analyse fraudulent digital banking transactions and apply this knowledge to better detect fraudulent activity in their own environments.

Synthesized’s Role

Synthesized, who are pioneers in automating all stages of data provisioning and data preparation, applied its cutting-edge AI data synthetisation technology. This was uniquely able to create a synthetic version of the original fraud dataset supported by the fraud prevention vendor.

The London-based AI company successfully leveraged the platform’s generative adversarial modelling, differential privacy, and other tactics in addition to a dataset from the fraud prevention vendor. The original dataset contained five million rows and 724 columns representing real bank digital payments. Synthesized automatically derived the deep statistical properties of the original dataset in order to create a highly representative version for predictive purposes. 

To help ensure data output quality, Derek Snow, a Research Associate from The Alan Turing Institute, independently assisted the FCA in ensuring that the resulting data was high quality. Among other things, Mr. Snow evaluated and tested the feature correlations, joint distributions, and predictability of the data. 

Project Benefits 

The enhanced data project produced by Synthesized revealed two key advantages for the financial industry:

• Cyber Safety by Default: The synthetisation engine creates an entirely new data project that while representative of the original, cannot be linked back to the original dataset. Hence, it is not vulnerable to linkage attacks and is safe for use by participants in the Digital Sandbox Pilot.

• High-Quality Data: Vetted by the Allan Turing Institute, the new synthetic data that the project produced was highly accurate and rendered the same properties as the original. This means all fraud solutions and tactics tested will be relevant to the original dataset and users can apply the intelligence gathered as a result of real-world transactional fraud.

Simon Swan, the lead machine learning (ML) engineer from Synthesized for this project, noted: “Datasets of this size and complexity offer interesting and insightful challenges for Synthesized’s core engine. It is always exciting to see just how powerful our platform is when we are able to successfully recreate new, highly detailed data at such scale, as was the case with this collaboration.”

Dr Nicolai Baldin, CEO and Founder of Synthesized, added: “Synthesized was delighted to be involved as development partner on this game-changing fraud initiative. It is further validation of both our product leadership and unique data capabilities in the data privacy and secure collaboration space. This provides further proof of our depth of in-house expertise employing the latest ML techniques within our platform.”

PagoFX, the low-cost international money transfer service, is now available in Spain. As the service is open to Spanish residents no matter who they bank with, anyone will have access to PagoFX’s fast and secure international payments. PagoFX is a part of PagoNxt, a new autonomous business created by Banco Santander to bring together its most disruptive payments businesses to compete with global digital payments platforms.

The service, launched in the UK and Belgium earlier this year, allows residents in Spain with any debit or credit card issued by any bank or financial entity to seamlessly and quickly send money abroad via their smartphone, with funds arriving in a matter of minutes in many cases and customer service support via in-app chat, web and e-mail. PagoFX brings together the best of fintech with the smarts and security of a bank as Santander.

Due to the pandemic and travel restrictions, PagoFX is helping Spanish residents with a no-fee programme, which lets all users to send up to €1.000 in different transactions at no fee until 28 February 2021, and higher amounts at a low cost.

From today, Spanish residents can sign up for an account once they’ve downloaded the app. In minutes, after a quick verification process, they can send their first international money transfer to any of the 50 available countries, including the euro zone, several Latin American countries, the UK, the US and others. The number of countries and currencies will continue to grow.

The PagoFX app is already known in other countries for its superior, dedicated and convenient customer service and has received very positive reviews on the app stores and TrustPilot.

Cedric Menager, CEO at PagoFX, says: "We have been looking forward to launching PagoFX in Spain since we started the project. In Spain, there are many people who often send money to family and friends from other countries. Now they will have it easier than ever with PagoFX thanks to the speed, security, transparency and low cost. Our vision is to be the world’s most trusted and loved way to send money abroad and we want all our customers to feel confident about sending money overseas.”

PagoFX is a fintech startup with more than 70 employees based in Madrid, London and Brussels. It is part of PagoNxt, a new autonomous business created by Banco Santander which will focus on accelerating growth in three business areas: merchant solutions; trade solutions for SMEs which trade internationally and want services once only accessible to corporates; and consumer digital products and services, such as PagoFX and Superdigital, the inclusive financial platform already available in five Latin American markets.

PagoFX was designed with trust, safety and the consumer in mind, featuring the extensive and thorough Santander product validation process:

• Comprehensive – but quick – verification process before making the first payment to guarantee the protection of data and money.
• Every cost shown upfront: users will know exactly how much they are paying and how much their recipient will get. This includes mid-market, real-time foreign exchange rates.
• Bank-backed security with the same product validation process as any Santander product, this means the company implements cybersecurity, financial crime and risk requirements.
• Regulated institution: as an authorised payment institution, PagoFX protects customer funds by safeguarding them in a separate bank account until the relevant payment has been sent. This ensures customers are protected.
• A dedicated support team provides PagoFX users with expert advice and assistance for any type of enquiry via in-app chat, web and e-mail from 9.00 am to 6.00 pm CET weekdays.

International payments can be made using PagoFX from Spain (EUR) to Argentina (ARS), Australia (AUD), Bahrain (BHD), Brazil (BRL), Bulgaria (BGN), Canada (CAD), Colombia, Croatia (HRK), Czech Republic (CZK), Denmark (DKK), Eurozone countries (EUR), Hong Kong (HKD), Hungary (HUF), India (INR), Israel (ILS), Kuwait (KWD), Mexico (MXN), New Zealand (NZD), Norway (NOK ), Peru (PEN), Poland (PLN), Qatar (QAR), Romania (RON), Saudi Arabia (SAR), Singapore (SGD), South Africa (ZAR), Sweden (SEK), Switzerland (CHF), Turkey (TRY ), United Kingdom (GBP), United States of America (USD). See website for fee details and cut-off times for payments to arrive the same day. Further currencies and payment options will be introduced in the near future.

More information at https://pagofx.com/en-es.

FV Bank, a global digital bank based in Puerto Rico, today announced that it has received permission from the Puerto Rico Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions (OCIF) to provide custody services for digital assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. FV Bank will begin offering custody services seamlessly integrated into its digital banking platform in early 2021. 

Institutional and retail customers will be able to open an account with fiat and digital asset balances with FV Bank, providing for secure custodial storage of digital assets and seamless exchange to fiat. The digital assets custodial service will also be compatible with FV Net, the bank’s internal real-time fiat settlement platform that opens up powerful institutional trade settlement services.   

FV Bank account holders will be provided cryptocurrency deposit addresses for each digital asset they wish to hold in their accounts. The digital assets will be managed in a secure and insured custodial account linked to their digital bank account. Services will be accessed through online and mobile banking applications.  

“We are very excited to be one of the first regulated international digital banks to offer integrated banking and digital asset custody services,” explained Miles Paschini, Chief Executive Officer at FV Bank. “FV Bank was founded to drive international banking through financial technology, as it is clear that cryptocurrencies and digital assets are going to be a significant part of global monetary expansion and investment product growth. With this milestone, our vision to offer clients a seamless, fully-regulated banking and digital asset custodial services is coming to life.” 

Nitin Agarwal, Chief Revenue Officer, added: “FV Bank is proving to be a market leader in providing leading edge banking services like our upcoming digital asset custody service, and our FV Net settlement platform. In the last few months, we have seen a great demand for our banking services and many of our existing customers are looking for an easy and trustworthy way to invest in and securely hold digital assets. These products are proving to be very attractive to our international business, institutional investors  and retail customers. I anticipate the convergence of these products will drive growth in the bank for years to come.”

FV Bank is regulated by the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions, Puerto Rico.

Zumo, the digital wallet and payments platform, has launched Zumo Smartfolio, the latest of the app’s innovative features enabling users to view and manage their overall crypto assets and track the relative position of each of their exchanges in a simple and intuitive way.  

The introduction of Zumo Smartfolio in the 2.13 version of the app allows users to access the current and historical value of their exchanges, as well as to see how much gain, or loss, they have made on them over time. The new feature includes a smart portfolio score calculated by matching a user’s buying positions with their sells, providing insights into possible exchange opportunities that could make them profit.  

In addition, Zumo Smartfolio has been designed to ensure users can view their data in an intuitive way through interactive pie and line graphs. Users can set the time frame of their Smartfolio to see how their asset values have changed with one day, one week, one month, three months, and all-inclusive timeframes.  

Paul Roach, chief product officer of Zumo, said: “By offering Zumo users this feature, we make it even easier for them to take control of their own funds and become responsible smart money savers, investors or traders. Or even all three. 

“Zumo Smartfolio is the latest of a series of innovative features we are launching in the next few months. Users will soon be able to view and download their entire exchange history, as well as their associated Smartfolio data, and spend cryptocurrency alongside traditional money in everyday situations with the upcoming Zumo convertible debit card.” 

Zumo App was launched in the UK to make the benefits of blockchain and cryptocurrencies more accessible to everyone by offering users the chance to buy, sell, spend, and send both fiat and cryptocurrencies. The launch of Zumo version 2.12 in November introduced Exchange Price Alerts, a feature that allows users to set up price alerts, notifying them when the price of Bitcoin or Ether reaches a certain level. 

As part of a commitment to help businesses and communities thrive, Tyl by NatWest has partnered with Pennies, the UK's leading fintech charity working to protect and grow micro-donations.

The partnership grants a proportion of profit to charities, meaning that Tyl customers can benefit causes offering support to UK communities by choosing to adopt Tyl as their payment partner.

The first three charities to benefit from this initiative have been Macmillan Cancer Support, The Prince’s Trust and Hospice UK who have received grants worth more than £10,000 each, enabling them to make a greater difference for their beneficiaries in this incredibly challenging year.

The impact of these grants for each charity has been significant. Macmillan’s donations are used to deliver vital services to people living with cancer, and these grants will help Macmillan continue to provide the vital emotional, financial or clinical support that cancer patients rely on. The grants will enable the Prince’s Trust to continue supporting young people across the UK to gain the confidence and skills they need to live, learn and earn. For Hospice UK, the funds received help the charity’s 209 hospice members support 225,000 people a year, providing 72,000 families and carers with bereavement support, as well as supporting the charity’s COVID-19 response this year.

Tyl is also donating a small proportion of profit to Pennies, to help the charity develop the digital micro-donation movement in the UK. Micro-donations are an increasingly important source of funding for charities as the UK shifts towards a cash-free future, and Pennies works to encourage and enable more opportunities to micro-donate as part of everyday life.

At a time where customer loyalty for business is key due to increasing cost pressures, greater price sensitivity amongst consumers and a potentially reduced consumer experience due to Covid-19 protection measures, providing businesses with the opportunity to support charitable causes – working in local communities across the UK – can be a useful tool in helping to create lasting relationships with their customers and to drive repeat custom.

Tyl is also planning a wider programme of charitable initiatives, known collectively as ‘Give Back’, which will offer support for good causes operating in local communities across the country.

Mike Elliff, CEO, Tyl, said: “Empowering small businesses to support local communities is a core aspect of our purpose at Tyl. Through our partnership with Pennies, we are proud to contribute to grants for Macmillan Cancer Support, The Prince’s Trust and Hospice UK, who each deliver vital support to communities across the UK. Being able to provide this funding in-part through our platform is a great example of the added value that the fintech and payments sectors can bring to society. We hope to continue to play a key role in helping to protect income for charitable causes as the country rebuilds for the future.”

Alison Hutchinson CBE, CEO, Pennies, said: “Pennies is delighted to partner with Tyl on their innovative Give Back initiative. It has never been more important for businesses to have true social purpose, and Tyl have shown inspiring commitment to charities and local communities by building this into their model from day one. We are pleased to have helped Tyl by granting over £30,000 to three fantastic charities so far and are grateful to Tyl for their support for Pennies’ own charitable purpose: growing more income for UK charities with micro-donations. We look forward to working with Tyl on future elements of Give Back to make an even greater impact.”

Tyl by NatWest is a new, innovative payments service designed in partnership with UK SMEs to make it easier for small business customers across the country to receive payments in-store, online and over the phone. Tyl offers next-day settlement for users, helping businesses to manage cash flow during covid-19 and beyond.

Support for all payment methods