Stahl, the world leader in the specialty chemistry of coatings, processing and treatments, has engaged leading blockchain group Finboot to supply its blockchain middleware solution MARCO to improve the way it shares and verifies its products’ sustainability credentials with brands that use materials treated with Stahl chemicals.

Stahl specialises in the production of surface treatment and coating solutions for flexible surfaces, such as leather, synthetics and fabrics. Its direct customers are tanneries and other small manufacturers that supply their materials to brands predominantly in the fashion and automotive industries. Leading brands require that their suppliers only use chemicals from approved providers and so Stahl works closely with them to share relevant data about its products’ sustainability properties.

In the first blockchain implementation of its kind for the flexible surface chemical industry, MARCO creates immutable digital assets of Stahl’s products to deliver transparency and traceability within Stahl’s supply chain in a way that no other digital technology can. This means that the end-brands have direct and easy access to accurate and verified information about the overall properties of Stahl’s products so that they too can verify the sustainability credentials of their own supply chains. These properties include documentation such as bill of materials, bill of substances and the provenance of the raw materials.

Stahl’s adoption of MARCO is part of the company’s ongoing strategy to focus on improving the environmental sustainability of its products in order to further solidify its position as the global leader in its sector. As part of this, the company has sought to increase the amount of renewable raw materials used in its manufacturing processes. The revolutionary transparency provided by blockchain will play a key role in substantiating Stahl’s move away from petrochemicals to new, more sustainable raw materials.

Following successful implementation and scaling of the solution, Stahl could potentially connect with brands’ existing blockchain ecosystems in the future, or alternatively the brands could plug into this new ecosystem developed by Stahl and Finboot. Further down the line, there is also scope to provide end-to-end traceability along the entire supply chain for the full manufacturing process of the flexible surfaces that use Stahl products. This means that brands will eventually be able to provide end-to-end visibility on the entire manufacturing process and supply chain behind the creation of their goods (for example, a leather handbag), down to the raw materials that make up the chemicals used during production.

John Fletcher, Chief Innovation Officer at Stahl, said: “Providing customers with transparency of our sustainability and supply chain due diligence efforts is extremely important to us as we further cement Stahl’s position as an ESG leader in our sector. By integrating Finboot’s MARCO middleware & application suite into our digital ecosystem, we are able to demonstrate that we are actively seeking to drive positive change in our industrial processes. This is not just for the benefit of the brands which use materials that have been treated by our chemicals but their customers too, who are becoming increasingly conscious about the provenance and sustainability credentials of the products they are buying.”

Nish Kotecha, Chairman and Co-founder of Finboot, added: “Industrial businesses are facing increasing pressure from regulators, investors and consumers to adopt more sustainable practices.

Empty claims are no longer tolerated, which means companies are now obliged to provide reliable and transparent data that verifies the changes they are making to their supply chains. Brands are even backlisting suppliers that are not providing sufficient data, and this requirement is only expected to become more rigorous. We are delighted to be partnering with Stahl to help the company deliver on its strategy of improving the sustainability of the chemicals it uses. MARCO’s ability to securely record and verify data along the entirety of manufacturing supply chains brings further trust and transparency to the work that Stahl is doing and we look forward to working closely with the team to help the business remain the preferred choice for many of the world’s leading luxury brands.”

Lightico, pioneer of next-generation digital customer interactions, welcomes Rich Corriss as its new Director of Customer Success. A banking and technology veteran with nearly 30 years of experience, Mr. Corriss will help lead Lightico’s continued growth in the banking, auto finance and credit union space following rapid growth in 2020 including a number of regional banks and credit unions.

Lightico helps its clients improve customer experience and efficiency, through faster turnaround times, higher completion rates, and higher NPS––significantly impacting bottom-line results. Clients include leading financial institutions, insurance providers, including companies like Capital One and Westlake Financial. The solution integrates into businesses via an open API or through integrations into business systems like Salesforce and Nice InContact. 

“I’m excited to be joining Lightico on the front line of helping our clients, particularly in the banking industry, to become more efficient and digital at this critical time,” said Corriss. “Not only is Lightico’s tech incredibly effective in saving time and money for businesses, it’s making everyday life for consumers easier and safer by enabling many more interactions to be completed remotely on their phone.”

Corriss joins Lightico following two years as senior sales engineer at Lytics as well as nearly a decade at LivePerson focusing on building out their financial services vertical and standing up an operational excellence consulting group for Fortune 100 clients.  Prior to that, Corriss spent 19 years holding a variety of roles at JP Morgan Chase and Citi.

“Rich is a professional with significant experience in implementing technology in some of the largest and most complex enterprise companies in the world, both on the customer side and vendor side,” said Gilad Komorov, Chief Revenue Officer at Lightico. “We’re growing faster than ever and ensuring that our customers get the most out of Lightico and are able to maximize their digital toolset is key to future success.”

Lightico recently raised nearly $13m from Oxx, Capital One Ventures and Harmony Partners.

Key transaction terms and governance principles

The key transaction terms and governance principles are the following:

• ANZ merchant acquiring business enterprise valued at AUD 925 million (c.€ 570 million), corresponding to an EV/EBITDA multiple below Worldline’s current multiple;
• Worldline to control the joint-venture with a 51% shareholding;
• CEO and COO to be appointed by Worldline in a shared approach with ANZ;
• Long-term partnership signed, with a minority buy-back mechanism through a call option exercisable by Worldline (10 years after closing);
• Closing expected in Q4 2021.

Industrial alliance fully in line with Worldline’s strategy to expand its Merchant Services business globally leveraging Merchant Services - Financial Institutions repeatable blueprint business model

This alliance is a landmark operation confirming the relevance of Worldline’s ambition to be the partner of choice for banks through the newly created Financial Institutions go-to-market, under the leadership of a dedicated team fully engaged to roll-out our bank partnership model.

Indeed, Merchant acquiring activities are critical for the banks but come along with challenges such as customer engagement, reach and scale, innovation, and ability to find the right partner to develop their activities. Merchant Services - Financial Institutions repeatable blueprint leverages the compelling combination between Worldline and Ingenico to provide to banking partners:

• Worldline’s global reach with scale and competitive cost structure,
• Best-in-class digital payment products and services,
• Recognized sales and marketing capabilities,
• Successful track-record in integration and migration, and,
• Support to leverage their payment assets.

Through this dedicated go-to-market, Worldline will continue to respond to the growing appetite from financial institutions for tailored partnerships and to develop market winning banking alliances and joint-ventures.

1 Credit, Debit and Chargecard turnover, ANZ internal and RBA data

NICE Actimize, a NICE business (Nasdaq: NICE) today announced that FACEPOINT, which launched an industry-leading biometric risk screening engine, has joined the X-Sight Marketplace, bringing its cutting-edge facial recognition technology for advanced KYC and watch list risk screening to the ecosystem. NICE Actimize’s X-Sight Marketplace, which has grown to include more than 60 technology partners, is the first financial crime and compliance ecosystem that connects financial services organizations with data, applications, tools and service providers, providing both the value of choice and the ability to reduce integration timelines. 

Until recently, financial services organizations relied on alphanumeric matching to screen their customers against watchlists to fulfill their Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering / Counter Terrorism Financing (AML-CTF) regulatory obligations. Common names, transliteration issues, missing secondary identifiers, identity theft and impersonation contributed disproportionately to the high number of alerts, making it difficult not to miss true positives without a corresponding snowballing of false positives. 

FACEPOINT complements and enhances NICE Actimize’s AML screening and KYC solutions by offering an alternative to traditional name-based screening. FACEPOINT uses facial recognition to disambiguate potential matches, reduce false positive rates and identify emerging threats such as those posed by unnamed persons of interest that are not covered by watchlists. In the context of KYC screening processes, FACEPOINT’s “picture intelligence” maintains a worldwide image database of "people of interest", and offers a real-time risk mitigation solution thanks to cutting-edge image analysis. Biometric identification offers greater precision, accuracy and speed and therefore enormous potential for improved operational efficiency and reduction in compliance costs. 

“Financial crime evolves continuously. Financial institutions must face numerous sophisticated  challenges with targeted applications that solve these problems efficiently and effectively,” said Craig Costigan, CEO, NICE Actimize. “The X-Sight Marketplace offers dozens of highly specialized capabilities which support best-in-class financial crime, risk and compliance management and which, in the case of FACEPOINT, complement our integrated AML solutions suite with enhancements to our AML and KYC risk screening capabilities.” 

“FACEPOINT has truly disrupted the industry’s risk screening operations with its picture intelligence capabilities designed to enhance risk screening tools, understanding that identifying high-risk individuals is a growing challenge for financial institutions,” said Damien Martinez, CEO and Co-Founder, FACEPOINT. “Our unique biometrics risk engine is an ideal fit with NICE Actimize’s suite of anti-money laundering solutions, providing additional advanced capabilities to its robust lineup.” 

The NICE Actimize Integrated AML solution suite uses advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as its domain expertise and robotic process automation, to provide complete customer lifecycle risk coverage – from onboarding to ongoing CDD, EDD and transaction monitoring processes. Intelligent automation, AI and machine learning are combined with KYC-AML domain expertise to continuously assess risk and provide a holistic view of the customer across all business lines and products. 

NICE Actimize’s X-Sight Marketplace partner offerings address such categories as customer and counterparty intelligence, data management, device and channel intelligence, identity verification, screening and adverse media, user authentication and fraud, CDD/KYC, transaction monitoring, and alert and case management.  

For more information on the X-Sight Marketplace, please click here. 

Distributed ledger technology (DLT) provides powerful solutions to achieve decentralized operations, but running a DLT platform securely remains a challenge. One critical problem in such platforms is the secure management of the keys that are used in the DLT operations. Using a cryptographic technique called secure Multiparty Computation (MPC), it is possible to overcome the key management problem in DLT platforms.

An area of MPC, which is called threshold cryptography, facilitates the distribution of a secret key to multiple parties, which eliminates the risks of a single point of failure. ING has released a version of Multiparty Computation Threshold Cryptography that can be used, for instance, on digital signatures. 

Pyctor, an ING-led initiative, in collaboration with ABN AMRO, BNP Paribas Securities Services, Citibank, Invesco, Société Générale – Forge, State Street, UBS and others, is a digital assets post-trade market infrastructure for global custodians, institutional issuers and other capital market actors. It empowers customers to securely issue, access and manage digital assets in a regulatory compliant manner.

The solution utilized MPC Threshold Signatures to decentralize the management of private keys, for a greatly improved security.

Explore the library for MPC-TS here: ing-bank/threshold-signatures: Threshold Signature Scheme for ECDSA

Download the whitepaper here: threshold-signatures-using-secure-multiparty-computation.pdf (ingwb.com)

Find out more about Pyctor here: Pyctor - Institutional Grade Digital Assets Post-Trade Infrastructure

Today Chase, the largest co-brand card issuer, and Air Canada, Canada’s largest airline and a Star Alliance founding member, announced a strategic partnership that will make Chase the exclusive issuer of the airline’s Aeroplan U.S. credit card. As a part of this partnership, Mastercard will become the exclusive payments network for the new offering in the U.S.

The announcement comes one month after Air Canada launched its transformed Aeroplan loyalty program, which brings more value, increased flexibility, unparalleled access to Air Canada, and flight rewards with over 35 partner airlines.

“We are delighted to partner with Chase and Mastercard to relaunch our U.S. co-brand credit card. Chase’s many strengths, including digital innovation, customer service excellence and a world-class brand, will help us deliver a best-in-class product for US-based Aeroplan members,” said Mark Nasr, Vice President, Loyalty and eCommerce, Air Canada. “The strength of the newly transformed Aeroplan program combined with this partnership will drive significant growth and engagement—focusing on the over two million U.S. residents with strong ties on both sides of the border.”

“We are thrilled to be partnering with Air Canada, a company we greatly admire, on a new credit card for U.S. consumers,” said Ed Olebe, President of Chase Co-Brand Cards. “We look forward to jointly offering innovative perks and flexible rewards delivered as part of the transformed Aeroplan loyalty program.”

“Mastercard, Air Canada, and Chase share the same commitment to putting the cardholder at the center – providing meaningful experiences that support everyday spending and passion points,” said Linda Kirkpatrick, President, U.S. Issuers at Mastercard. “We look forward to working with these terrific partners to deliver a compelling value proposition that resonates with cardholders.”

Aeroplan will also become a transfer partner in Chase’s Ultimate Rewards program, starting in late 2021.

The new Aeroplan Credit Card from Chase is expected to launch in late 2021.

Leverate, an innovative software as a service provider for foreign exchange brokers, is today announcing its collaboration with Sumsub, an identity verification platform that covers KYC/KYB/AML needs. Both companies will work together to provide quick and reliable KYC and chargeback protection checks for Leverate’s SaaS based trading platforms worldwide.

Leverate is a leading Cyprus-based brokerage technology and services provider with over 10 years of experience, over 200 clients, and 65K traders who are using their solution. Spreading across Cyprus, the UK, China, Israel, Bulgaria, and Romania, Leverate provides their international Forex brokers and financial institutions with electronic trading platforms and back-office software, minimizing possible risks and accelerating growth. Their comprehensive solution provides everything, from a ready-to-use trading platform, to CRM and beyond, striving for transparency and a premium user experience. 

While producing software for regulated trading brokerages, Levarate reached out to Sumsub for a solution that would complement their product and remove the need for their clients to search for a KYC/AML provider elsewhere. Partnering up with Leverate, Sumsub was able to provide their clients with quick KYC checks and AML screening for their users, securing access in line with regulatory demands. Sumsub has also supplied Leverate’s clients with fraudulent chargeback protection mechanisms, defending their platforms from fraudulent attacks, which  have significantly increased since the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

"We were looking for a solution to go hand in hand with our platform, in addition to one that would remove the need for our clients to worry about identity verification and anti-fraud checks. Sumsub covered this need in full, providing our clients with fully automated, people-friendly onboarding mechanisms, a quick processing speed, and international document coverage. Our clients now don’t have to waste time on regulatory headaches and can focus on persistent growth, while Sumsub covers all of the necessary KYC/AML compliance demands for any region. Not to mention that traders will have a great time onboarding," said Tal Laitner, VP of Innovation at Leverate.

"Compliance is a vital aspect of the trading businesses—nobody wants to pay substantial fines for incomplete checks and risk their platform’s safety. For that, we are happy to supply Leverate’s clients with robust and friendly checks, built in line with regulatory requirements, and those that fulfill their need for a trustworthy ally. Leverate’s clients will be able to quickly onboard more happy traders, while we will be making  sure to double check their intentions," comments Jacob Sever, Co-founder of Sumsub.

Salesforce, [NYSE: CRM], the global leader in CRM, today announced SalesforceHyperforce, a reimagination of the company’s platform architecture built to securely and reliably deliver the Salesforce Customer 360, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Industries and more, on major public clouds.

Salesforce is the world’s #1 CRM, providing hundreds of thousands of global companies with a single source of truth that connects customer data across systems, apps and devices to help them sell, service, market and conduct commerce, from anywhere. On any given day, Salesforce customers deliver an average of 2.6 billion marketing messages, create 4 million leads and log 19.7 million customer service conversations, while Salesforce Einstein delivers more than 80 billion AI predictions. And on Black Friday 2020 alone, Commerce Cloud powered more than 10 million orders.

Hyperforce is a complete re-architecture of Salesforce designed to deliver an even more powerful and scalable platform to support the growth and success of Salesforce’s global customer base. Hyperforce will empower Salesforce customers to securely deploy Salesforce apps and services from anywhere, while using the scale and agility of the public cloud.

“Every company right now is facing an imperative — to go digital, fast,” said Bret Taylor, President and COO, Salesforce. “Salesforce Hyperforce is a quantum leap forward in how Salesforce can accelerate our global customers' digital transformations and empower them to grow, fast and at scale, on our trusted platform.”

Hyperforce delivers:

• Performance at B2B and B2C scale. With the elasticity of public cloud, customers can more easily access compute capacity as required to be more flexible and efficient. Hyperforce allows resources to be deployed in the public cloud quickly and easily — reducing implementation time from months to just weeks or even days.
• Built-in Trust. Hyperforce’s security architecture limits users to appropriate levels of access to customer data, protecting sensitive information from human error or misconfiguration. Encryption, at rest and in transit, comes standard, ensuring the privacy and the security of data.
• Local Data Storage. Through Hyperforce, customers around the world can choose to store data in a particular location to support compliance with regulations specific to their company, industry and region.
• Backwards Compatibility. Every Salesforce app, customization and integration, regardless of Cloud, will run on Hyperforce.

Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the world's digital infrastructure company, has launched a report: ‘The Future of Banking-as-a-Service’. It includes in-depth analysis and findings on how industry attitudes towards BaaS have changed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Business leaders have been talking about disruptive technology for many years, but few could have imagined the catalyst for disruption that 2020 had in store for them when the pandemic hit. As a result, the pandemic only accelerated the digital transformation journey, which was already underway within the sector.

As the digital economy continues to evolve, merchants, consumers and businesses are changing the way they interact. This has resulted in a rising demand for personalised experiences which offer an opportunity to leverage an ecosystem-based value chain that supports a frictionless user experience.

To take full advantage of this opportunity, increasing numbers of non-finance digital brands are embracing BaaS. At the same time, this allows banks to attract new customers and offer a greater range of services to existing clients. Thus, BaaS is increasingly seen as a way to complement banks’ core businesses.

Report insights include:

• 76% of businesses are more likely to use BaaS as a route to market since the pandemic hit.
• 91% of respondents view BaaS as a faster way to bring products to market.
• 80% of businesses now see BaaS as a way to extend their reach into new geographical markets.

Adrian Mountstephens, Senior Manager, Business Development for Banking & Payments, Equinix, said: “It’s clear that the global pandemic has brought into focus what businesses really need to do to go digital. As BaaS promises a fast and effective route to market for financial services products embedded in digital channels, we expect to see adoption increase through 2021. However, there are significant macroeconomic headwinds across the globe, making conditions challenging for everyone.”

Adam Cox, Co-founder and Director, Open Banking Expo, and joint author of the report: “COVID-19 has magnified the long-term digital shift that has become a permanent feature of everyday life, particularly as e-commerce has become more widely accepted by consumers. Until recently, brands would have partnered with banks to build an application for their customers, often a frustrating and laborious process. But BaaS—through the use of APIs and licensed banks’ secure and regulated infrastructure has now removed much of the time and cost previously associated with the process and made it much easier for brands to embed services into their own offerings.”

LINK TO DOWNLOAD THE REPORT: https://assets.openbankingexpo.com/reports/2020/FINALBanking%20as%20a%20Service%20Survey%20Results_2020.pdf.

LINK TO RECORDED WEBINAR: https://youtu.be/ybdvQTuADDo.

Leading UK anti-money laundering (AML) firm SmartSearch expanded its senior team with three new appointments in November. The recruitment reflects the continuing growth of the Ilkley-based business which has also broken into new international markets this year.

The roles of vice president of customer success, head of sales and enterprise development manager have been created in response to the increasing demand for the award-winning solution.

SmartSearch’s anti-money-laundering verification platform conducts individual and business searches, both for the UK and international markets. It includes automatic worldwide sanction and politically exposed person (PEP) screening and ensures users are compliant with Know Your Customer (KYC) regulation.

Chris Clayton-White has been appointed vice-president of customer success and will be responsible for overseeing the client services team. With a background at established fintech businesses, Clayton-White brings a wealth of expertise along with significant experience of leading an enterprise client management team.

Lee Carter has joined as head of sales and will be responsible for delivering new business sales targets. Carter’s main focus will be on developing SmartSearch’s enterprise business solutions and sales methodology. Carter is a leading industry expert in KYC and fraud and has held senior sales and business development roles over the last 10 years.

Finally, Matt Bevan joins as enterprise business development manager and will be responsible for enterprise sales to large financial services firms, as well as introducing SmartSearch to new markets in gaming, telecommunications, insurance and retail. Bevan has experience working for a global IT company and has a background in identity and fraud business.

The new senior appointments follow SmartSearch’s recent hiring of international development director Martin Turvey to oversee expansion into US and European markets. Reflecting the global demand for the market-leading AML solution.

John Dobson, CEO of SmartSearch, said: “Having made good progress this year, our sights are now set on accelerating our success in 2021 and beyond. Our award-winning solution already serves around 40,000 users every day and this senior recruitment will support our growth into new sectors in the UK.

“Many of our clients enjoy the unique simplicity and comprehensive functionality delivered from our SmartSearch ‘plug & play’ platform, however, we are experiencing more demand from businesses that require an enterprise solution that they can tailor and integrate into their own technology.  

“With the invaluable collective experience, Lee and Matt will help drive our expansion in to new and existing markets with our enterprise solutions whilst Chris will focus on the continued development of our extensive 4,500 client firms and oversee the delivery of our new enterprise solutions. They each bring new ideas and skillsets which will be invaluable in helping us to achieve our long-term aims. 

“There is a huge market for anti-money laundering solutions in the UK and the events of 2020 have brought issues such as ID verification to the fore. This has generated great demand for our product, as we recorded our busiest ever month in September. These three new appointments will build on the success so far and help us achieve our goals in 2021.”