Gala Tent, the UK’s largest manufacturer and supplier of commercial marquees and gazebos, has launched an open banking application programme interface (API) for payments. This new solution will provide their customers with an alternative digital payment option, in addition to traditional card payments and bank transfers.

The application will be powered by their sister company, Gala Technology, the innovative development team behind the multi-award-winning payment solution, SOTpay in conjunction with leading open banking specialists, Nuapay.

Despite the disruption caused by Covid-19, open banking and the fintech ecosystem have been boosted by the period of lockdown. According to an Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) survey of 2,000 UK adults, one-in-five started using online banking apps during lockdown for the first time, 54% of whom now using them regularly, with the UK user base increasing to 2 million.

Interestingly, Gala Tent have also seen a significant rise in the demand for their products, as commercial clients look to utilise outdoor space and shelter to adhere to government guidance and social distancing legislation.

This new open banking service will allow Gala Tent to initiate a payment request to their client, enabling them to make an account to account payment, whilst remaining in constant communication with the contact centre agent.

The frictionless payment journey is secure, quick and efficient for the customer, whilst the business does not have to worry about PCI DSS compliance, as they do not process, store or transmit sensitive payment card information. With instant settlement of funds, Gala Tent will also benefit from increased cashflow and a reduction in their merchant service processing fees with their acquiring partner.

CEO of Gala Tent Jason Mace said: “It's a fabulous system. We have historically had an issue with our call centre personnel unable to track the progression of traditional bank transfers, especially now working from home, which can delay the despatch of goods to our loyal customers.

Open banking is the missing piece of the jigsaw for Gala Tent as our team can now take a real time payment over the phone, via webchat or even social channels, when the customer’s preferred method of payment is a bank transfer. This is especially good for our commercial client base, although we have also seen an increase in the number of private customers who want to use account to account payment technology, because it is so impressively smooth and efficient.”

Mace’s business partner Mark Thompson concurred: “Because of the increase in demand for bank transfer payments, our accounts team, were constantly badgered by the call centre asking for updates to ascertain whether the payment had landed to enable them to release the products from our warehouse for despatch. I'm pleased to say this interruption has now been resolved with the deployment of this extended service using SOTpay.”

Partnership with Nuapay

Gala Technology has partnered with Nuapay so it can make the new payment channel available to its existing client base.

Founded in 1999, Gala Tent has grown to sell over 15,000 tents and marquees each year, along with around 90,000 event accessories and furniture products in the UK.

In the UK, Gala Tent is a preferred supplier for organisations including the military, NHS, the South Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service, South Yorkshire Police Service, St John’s Ambulance and AA, as well as to thousands of homeworkers nationally.

Keepit A/S, a global leader in cloud-to-cloud backup of SaaS data, today announced the opening of its first UK data centre*, making it the only vendor to physically move a data centre to the UK, in response to demand from British clients' ahead of Brexit. 

Following a recent investment round of $30 million from One Peak, which has enabled expansion into new markets, Keepit is partnering with Equinix – one of the world’s leading, green by design digital infrastructure companies – to run the data centre, guaranteeing that all customer data remains on UK soil. This avoids any data spill-over into other countries, as permitted by EU law, offering peace of mind to Keepit's Government and compliance-driven clients.

Frederik Schouboe, CEO of Keepit A/S, said: “Over the last 12 months we have been on a strong growth trajectory and we are excited to be officially entering the UK market and prioritising our investment here ahead of Brexit. The rules for data storage might not be clear going forward, but we can confidently guarantee that our infrastructure ensures all customers' data will remain in situ, with no middleware transmissions outside regions – as is common with other data centres. We are proud to be the first and only vendor with that claim.

“There is a growing demand for our unique back-up and data recovery offerings from both global enterprise and regional businesses, and the pandemic's effect on the economy has further escalated migration to the cloud. We look forward to making sure that our flexible, scalable and secure (backup) services are fully available to our UK customers during these uncertain times.”

The opening of the data centre recognises the importance of providing the fastest and most efficient (and secure) service to Keepit’s growing UK customer base, in addition to demonstrating significant expansion of its global network. It will also greatly increase the company’s ability to offer seamless low latency data back-up and recovery services across leading platforms such as Office 365, Google G-Suite, and Salesforce. 

Keepit’s new data centre investment tracks with the wider growth in the data backup-as-a-service (BaaS) and recovery sector, largely being fuelled by the exponential increase in data volumes, resulting from the increased adoption of connected technologies and digital transformation drives. The UK's Home Office department also reported a 120% rise in data loss incidents during the financial year 2019-20, while the latest market research report by Technavio puts the global data centre back-up and recovery market on a CAGR of more than 4% during the period 2019-2023.

*Keepit’s new UK data centre is located in Slough, west of London.

EBANX, fintech specialized in local payment solutions for Latin America to global merchants, and Tinder®, the world’s most popular app for meeting new people, today announced a partnership for subscription payments in Latin America. The partnership will first launch in Brazil, giving local Tinder members the ease of using familiar payment methods when purchasing their desired subscription. EBANX and Tinder will also expand the availability of local payment methods to  Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Peru over the coming weeks.

Through the initial partnership in Brazil, Tinder will offer members the option to pay for subscriptions via local credit cards and/or via debit in deposits account, as well as the option to pay in up to six installments. 

"We are thrilled to announce this partnership with EBANX, which will give members in Brazil and Latin America the security and ease of using familiar forms of payment to purchase their desired subscriptions and continue enjoying their journey on Tinder,” said Sabrina Zaremba, Director of Business Development for Tinder in Latin America. 

"Tinder's continued investment in Latin America shows the importance of the region and that there is much room for growth. We are very happy to partner with Tinder in Brazil and later expand this throughout LatAm, easing the connection between the company and their clients through our localized payment solutions," said Henrik Nilsmo, CCO of EBANX. 

Onfido, the global identity verification and authentication provider, today announced it has recorded exceptional Q3 2020 sales results, including an 82% increase in global sales over Q3 2019 and more than doubling sales from net new customers (103 new clients). The significant growth was fueled by new customers switching from other providers, with 237% growth in U.S. sales over the same period.

Onfido digitally proves a user's real identity using artificial intelligence and human experts. According to Husayn Kassai, CEO and Co-founder of Onfido: “Our mission is to create a more open world, where identity is the key to access. This starts with widening access, creating opportunities for everyone to connect with the services they need and making sure that it’s as inclusive as it can be. We made significant strides over the last quarter to make our product offering not only more conducive to enterprise-level organizations but also fairer when it comes to verifying people from different ethnicities. We believe these changes will only accelerate our growth further.”

Onfido’s strategy of partnering with Identity Access Management (IAM) industry leaders has led to increased demand from enterprise-level customers. This was spearheaded by new deals with ForgeRock’s leading reseller, HubCity Media, as well as deals with Salesforce and Okta customers. Joint marketing activities with leading IAM vendors included  an e-voting roundtable with Okta and integration  into Auth0’s Marketplace (the leading identity platform for enterprise developers). Onfido’s new Salesforce AppExchange release enables Salesforce customers to easily integrate onfido’s digital identity verification  into their existing workflows.

Identity proofing vendors have a responsibility to make sure everyone has fair and equal access to services. In Q3, Onfido’s FaceMatch algorithm, which establishes proof of identity document (ID) ownership, achieved market-leading accuracy with a 10X improvement on its previous algorithm while being the fairest it has ever been across all ethnicities. The technology was recognized by CogX as the “Best Innovation in Algorithmic Bias”.

Onfido was recently recognized in Gartner’s 2020 Market Guide for Identity  Proofing and Affirmation as a Representative Vendor, which reported: “Clients are now far more interested in understanding how vendors measure demographic bias, and whether they are working to address it.”

Key Business Wins / Partnership Highlights:

• Alior Bank - a large universal bank in Poland, partnered with Onfido to power fast and user-convenient digital onboarding allowing users to remotely open personal accounts 
• Hub City Media - a premier Identity and Access Management (IAM) consultancy and ForgeRock’s 2020 America’s Partner of the Year, partnered with Onfido to resell and distribute Onfido’s identity verification and authentication services
• Deliveroo - the leading online food delivery company, expanded its partnership with Onfido to accelerate its global onboarding process for drivers
• Curve - the banking platform that consolidates multiple cards and accounts into one smart card, partnered with Onfido to speed up, simplify, and unify its Digital Identity and Know Your Customer (KYC) processes
• SwissBorg - leading Swiss wealth management platform, partnered with Onfido to provide a seamless customer onboarding experience while achieving regulatory compliance 
• Delfin Health - a leading digital health solutions provider, partnered with Onfido on Klarity, an app that predicts, monitors and tests the health and safety of workforces, without compromising employee privacy
• MyCash - the e-Marketplace and remittance service driving financial inclusion for migrants in Malaysia and Singapore partnered with Onfido for a secure and seamless onboarding experience
• Bondora - one of Europe’s biggest peer-to-peer lending platforms, Onfido partnered to streamline the onboarding and KYC processes to its 125,000 investors across 37 countries
• Voima Gold - a Finnish fintech company that offers gold-backed digital accounts for global clients, Onfido partnered to allow customers to securely buy, sell, and store physical gold 
• EstateGuru - the leading pan-european marketplace for property financing and investing, Onfido partnered to automate KYC and AML compliance processes
• £5M Grant - awarded from the Capability and Innovation Fund Pool to focus on advancing identity solutions, improving access to financial services for SMEs to simplify access, promote account switching, and reduce fraud. 

Recognition:

• FinTech50 - ranked 1st out of 2,000 on this list of most innovative Fintech companies for the second year running
• CB Insights’s FinTech 250 - placed on this prestigious list of emerging private companies working on groundbreaking financial technology
• CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards - awarded ‘AI-based Cyber Security Solution of the Year’
• Sunday Times Sage Tech Track 100 - ranked 32 out of 100 on this list of fastest growing private companies
• Deloitte Technology Fast 500 - ranked 46 out of 500 on this list of fastest growing technology companies in Europe
• British Entrepreneur Awards - ‘Young Entrepreneur of the Year’ awarded to Onfido CEO and Co-founder, Husayn Kassai

Request a demo of Onfido’s award-winning Identity verification technology and experience how the company digital proves a user’s real identity using AI.

Global consulting firm Protiviti has released the findings of its annual Finance Trends Survey, which reveal CFOs and senior finance executives are facing a growing list of responsibilities and demands from internal stakeholders as the pandemic has stress-tested the finance labor model in real time. More than 1,000 finance leaders participated in the global survey conducted in July and August 2020. 

According to the study, the pandemic has served as a wake-up call to finance departments that were not already investing – or not investing enough – in cloud infrastructure as they struggled to shift to the remote and fragmented work environment. The study finds they did not have enough of their processes and data based in the cloud to support a seamless transition to remote work. Of those respondents who are CFOs and VPs of finance, 72% ranked cloud-based applications as a top priority to address over the next 12 months, and 17% ranked cloud-based applications as the most important finance priority for their organizations to address – a jump from 8% of respondents who indicated so in the 2019 survey.  

“Having the right technology infrastructure and cloud capabilities is now considered a baseline in order to operate effectively and efficiently and will continue to be as organizations move into a hybrid work environment,” said Chris Wright, a managing director and global leader of the firm’s Business Performance Improvement practice. “COVID-19 disruptions underscored the critical nature of a truly digital finance workforce and companies without advanced technologies and digital processes faced a difficult transition to remote work. We’re now seeing an increasing number of boards and CEOs tap their finance leaders for guidance about whether their organization is allocating enough resources to their technology infrastructure.” 

In addition, the survey identifies a shift toward CFOs embracing a new ‘future labor model,’ leveraging a blend of internal staff with external experts and services to better perform various finance activities. CFOs are increasingly outsourcing processes to managed services providers in order to equip their finance departments with the resources they need to be nimble and meet their growing responsibilities. According to CFOs and vice presidents of finance who participated in the survey, 18% of their finance organizations are relying on managed services providers and 29% are leveraging staff augmentation to support greater speed and agility for financial planning and analysis. 

“As organizations face unprecedented disruption, we are seeing finance departments increasingly turn to external partners to help deploy advanced technologies and provide in-depth expertise to meet the growing needs of their internal stakeholders amid a challenging and often disconnected environment,” said Wright. “CFOs will continue to play an integral role in developing a future labor model and ensuring their departments have the right talent and skills in-house, combined with the support of external service providers.” 

Top Five Priorities for CFOs and VPs of Finance 

Survey respondents were asked to rate 17 finance areas on a 10-point scale, considering the importance to improve knowledge and capabilities in each of them over the next 12 months. Of those, the top five priority areas for finance organizations to improve were identified as the following: 

1. Security and privacy of data 
2. Enhance data analytics 
3. Changing demands and expectations of internal customers 
4. Cloud-based applications 
5. Challenges with regulations 

The Protiviti survey report, titled “Finance Priorities in the COVID Era: Digital Dominance and Flexible Labor Models,” is based on a survey of 1,057 finance leaders worldwide, including CFOs, VPs of finance, directors and managers at both public and private companies across a range of industries. 

Survey Resources Available 

Key findings of the 2020 Finance Trends Survey are available for digital exploration on the survey’s web site – click here to access. Also available on the site is a PDF of the full survey report for complimentary download, in addition to an infographic and audio and video commentaries from Protiviti experts. On October 28 at 1:00 p.m. EDT, Protiviti will host a free one-hour webinar to discuss the most important survey takeaways and share finance leaders’ thoughts about the future, featuring Protiviti Managing Directors Andrea Spinelli, Ken Thomas and Wright. To join the webinar, please register here. 

TIBCO Software Inc., a global leader in enterprise data, empowers its customers to connect, unify, and confidently predict business outcomes, solving the world’s most complex data-driven challenges. Today, TIBCO announced the appointment of Rani Johnson as chief information officer (CIO), joining the executive leadership of the company. In her role, Johnson will work with customers, partners, and TIBCO’s management team to help create the connections between business, infrastructure, and sustainable innovation that modern businesses need to achieve. 

With more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry, Johnson brings with her extensive knowledge of the full IT ecosystem. With an innovative and collaborative leadership approach, she will help integrate customers’ technology solutions with strategic business outcomes. 

Prior to joining TIBCO, she served as senior vice president and CIO of SolarWinds, where she was directly involved in the development of new technologies, drove the company’s strategic GDPR transformation, and led the enterprise business applications, IT infrastructure, DevOps, and information security teams. Johnson consistently exceeded service-level objectives while delivering a 50% year-over-year increase in technology innovation and capabilities through project delivery. 

"To help customers achieve sustainable business innovation, we need to transform our business from service-led to leadership-driven,” said Matt Quinn, chief operating officer, TIBCO. “I’m very excited to welcome Rani to the team. She is passionate about innovation and transformation, and her knowledge of systems and infrastructure will be a catalyst to better collaborate with our clients to transform their business." 

"I see enormous potential for companies of all sizes looking to leverage their data and cement their relevance in a digitally transformed business landscape,” said Johnson. “It’s a passion of mine to create business environments that support positive change; develop IT leaders, women, and people of colour; and lower the socioeconomic barriers inherent in this industry. I believe TIBCO has a great story to tell, and we will continue to shake up the status quo while striving to become part of the solution by supporting our customers’ businesses." 

Johnson held senior management roles at the Lower Colorado River Authority where, as CIO, she spearheaded the organisation's research and development, the upgrade of its critical infrastructure, and the improvement of meter data and billing accuracy. She also held positions at Austin Energy, E2open, founded Guide2style.com, Intel, and received NASA’s award for outstanding contribution in connection with the development of a software program to store, monitor, and distribute electrical power among the various modules of the International Space Station Alpha (ISS-A). 

Masthaven Bank has announced the appointment of Jenna Hill as Head of Customer Services and Planning. Jenna has a wealth of financial services and operational experience and has been appointed to an expanded role as part of Masthaven’s ongoing commitment to support its growing customer base, create leading operational practices and a focus on continued improvement.

Jenna will be responsible for leading and developing the customer-facing teams as well as capacity planning to support the bank’s growth plans.

Jenna joins from Wyelands Bank where she was Head of Operations. Prior to that, she spent five years at Shawbrook Bank where she progressed from Capacity Planning, MI and Performance Manager to Head of Operational Support.

Masthaven’s latest appointment is part of the bank’s ongoing expansion, having recently grown its Servicing & Collections team with 10 new hires as well as securing an additional office in Reading.

Jenna Hill, Head of Customer Services and Planning, said: “I’m delighted to be joining the growing Masthaven team. Providing customers with the support they need, and in a personal way, has never been so important, so I’m excited to be part of an engaging and motivated team to help achieve this. I look forward to working with the team and continuing the great work they have already accomplished.”

Simon Furnell, Chief Operating Officer at Masthaven, said: “Masthaven continues to invest in hiring the best senior talent as well as developing and training our current team. With Jenna’s extensive experience and enthusiasm, she will have an integral role in developing our customer services team and delivering the personalised service that Masthaven prides itself on, especially as the industry continues to navigate uncertain times ahead.”

Today, FICO released a report from business information firm Arizent that examines the perceptions of hundreds of financial services leaders from banks and fintechs to better understand the banking industry’s progress towards digital transformation and its preparedness for digital disruption.

Conducted by Arizent and sponsored by FICO, the report and underlying survey found that a shocking three percent of traditional bank executives feel their company has taken the necessary measures to protect their businesses against digital disruption, while a majority (71 percent) voiced doubts around their company’s ability to respond to digital disruption. Just four percent are extremely confident that they can offer the level of personalized, data-driven services consumers receive elsewhere

“Consumers today are accustomed to an amazing array of highly-personalized, data-driven services from digital service providers like Amazon and Google,” said Bill Waid, vice president and general manager of Decision Management Solutions for FICO. “However, when they look to their financial institutions to provide comparable user experiences for their banking needs, most banks are falling far short.” 

The survey shows that the majority of financial services firms are struggling with digital transformation and in providing customers with the types of personalized on-line experiences they receive elsewhere. As a result, those firms risk the type of widespread customer defections plaguing the traditional banking industry today.

For example, when it comes to anticipating and proactively responding to customers’ needs in real-time, the majority of banks are woefully ill-equipped. Only 14 percent of banks rated themselves as outstanding, and less than half (42 percent) rated themselves as very good at being able to anticipate and respond to customers’ needs.

Likewise, omni-channel delivery is a major pain-point for banks with almost two-thirds (62 percent) struggling with consistency-of-services across all channels (e.g. in-bank, online, mobile, call center). This is a stark contrast to fintechs, where 63 percent of respondents are highly confident in their delivery of services across multiple channels as very good. Despite these disparities, banks appear to be narrowing the gap with fintechs when it comes to delivering personalized products and services. 40 percent of banks believe they are extremely or very good at it, versus 55 percent of fintechs.

“Consumers today expect highly-personalized interactions that predict their needs, surprise them and delight them. They expect to feel valued and treated as the most important customer. At the same time, financial institutions want to efficiently acquire customers and keep them for life. However, the survey shows that most financial services firms are struggling to deliver the personalized, digital experiences consumers expect and would be required to to keep them for life,” said Nikhil Behl, chief marketing officer at FICO.  “Without a customer-centric approach to digital transformation, that uses data and analytics to predict consumer behavior and optimize interactions, customer defections in financial services will continue to hover near the all-time highs we are seeing today.”

While the financial services sector is largely struggling to adapt to the new realities, there are banks that have embraced a digital-first approach to delivering personalized experiences to customers, while navigating future disruption. The report highlights best practices two forward thinking leaders in the banking industry; Canada’s Bank of Montreal (BMO) and Brazil’s Banco Bradesco – are employing to meet the shifting needs of their customers. 

Those interested in obtaining detailed information about these important trends can visit www.fico.com/ABresearch.

Those interested in in-depth educational materials on digital disruption and digital transformation can also visit www.fico.com/DTeducation.

PXP Financial, the global expert in acquiring and payment processing services, today launches its ‘Supporting Businesses and Payments through COVID’ report, advising businesses in gaming, retail and hospitality on best payments practice throughout the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Split into three designated sections and led by an in-house expert in gaming, retail and hospitality, it provides these sectors with a deeper understanding of some of the problems they are currently facing. Utilising the knowledge and experience of PXP Financial’s expert team, the report tackles some of the biggest challenges brought about by COVID-19, and in turn lockdown – from its impact on consumer behaviour and sacrifices to customer experience, as well as how to reshape the payments process by utilising innovative payment technology to overcome issues.

Retail

Koen Vanpraet, CEO of PXP Financial commented on the issues facing the retail sector: “The retail sector has undoubtedly been strongly hit by COVID-19, not only through the closing down of in-store operations but also by changing customer spending habits, expectations and preferences. The retail industry is accelerating into a different era than the one we saw only one year ago, and retailers need to keep up if they want to survive the change."

Hospitality

Adding to this from the perspective of the hospitality sector, Franco del Basso, Director at PXP Financial, said: “Understandably, the hospitality sector has suffered as a result of COVID-19 and the restrictions put in place to keep the public safe. Restaurants, hotels and cruise ships have been forced to stop or limit their services, disrupting travel and making eating out far more complicated. Now that we are moving out of lockdown and these businesses are being allowed to reopen, they are faced with a need to radically change how they operate, and this is being supported by technology.”

Gaming

While gaming expert and Board member at PXP Financial Kamran Hedjiri contributed: “In line with all the other industries, physical and in-store, gaming and betting was massively effected during the initial phase of the COVID-19 lockdown. However, there is still a great opportunity to support this sector as the slow down to gaming was more limited than with other sectors.”

To download the full report, head to https://info.pxpfinancial.com/supporting-businesses-and-payments-through-covid-19-guide.

Finastra today announced the availability of its next-generation data offering, Fusion Data Cloud. The suite of solutions is designed to help financial institutions improve customer engagement, grow revenue, digitize processes for efficiency, and manage risk.

Underpinned by the FusionFabric.cloud open developer platform, Fusion Data Cloud provides:

·         A data ecosystem: Supported by secure Microsoft Azure technology, Fusion Data Cloud enables banks to share their data with leading fintechs, as well as ingest data from external data sources, to create innovative new data solutions in weeks, instead of months. These solutions are pre-integrated with Finastra core products to drive scale, enable fast delivery, and provide flexibility to help institutions grow and increase customer value. 

·         Actionable insights: Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms create predictive and prescriptive analytics and delivery of real-time decision-making and insights as a service. For example, institutions can detect potential churn and better understand customer behavior to recommend the Next Product To Buy (NPTB) based on retail banking data. This equips financial institutions with intelligent insights to mitigate risk and optimize operational efficiencies.

·         Connected experiences: Business Intelligence (BI) tools provide analytics visualization and omnichannel interaction. With six AI- and ML-driven BI solutions available today, financial institutions can, for example, gain an operational and 360-degree view based on payments data, and optimize loan processing and application conversion based on mortgage data.

“Finastra is uniquely placed to connect fintechs, financial institutions, and third parties to accelerate the creation of innovative data solutions for our customers and our partners. Those that embark on this data journey with us can kick start their move towards deeper customer insights and business growth. Our open ecosystem revolutionizes the innovation process – advanced analytics can generate crucial insights for financial institutions to help them personalize and transform the customer experience, reduce risk and amplify business results,” said Eli Rosner, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Finastra.

Fintechs using Fusion Data Cloud gain a unique opportunity to train and deliver their solutions with sample financial institution data. One such fintech tapping into the data sharing capabilities is Vector Risk. The Vector Risk Service uses data from Fusion Opics, and is designed to help financial institutions meet the requirements of the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB) regulation. It uses HPC (high performance computing) for extreme computational performance to analyze data, carrying out portfolio analysis and valuation in minutes rather than hours.

Justin Taylor, Managing Director at Vector Risk, said: “Without access to Finastra’s Fusion Data Cloud, we would need to take each institution’s unstructured data, understand it, clean it, and apply a structure. This could take many months, if not years to achieve. With Finastra managing the data securely for all, it’s a win-win for all parties. We’re excited to be live in the FusionStore with our app.”

Finastra also uses the Fusion Data Cloud to produce AI and ML related data apps that are already live, including Mortgagebot Data Insights (LOS and POS) to optimize loan processing and application conversion, Fusion Payment Insights to provide payment customers with an operational and 360-degree customer view, Fusion Analytics to enable churn detection and next best product recommendations for North American community markets and Fusion Retail Analytics for international and top-tier banks.

For further information on these apps visit the FusionStore here. To learn more about Fusion Data Cloud click here.