Silverflow, a global payment technology company, is announcing a €2.6m seed funding round, led by UK-based seed-stage investor Crane Venture Partners with participation from INKEF Capital and notable angel investors and industry leaders from Pay.On, First Data, Booking.com and Adyen. With this seed round, Silverflow has now raised €3m in total funding.

Silverflow is a payments technology company building a modern and easy-to-use cloud platform for global cards processing with direct access into the card networks. Founded by long-time online payments industry veterans and seasoned startup founders CEO Anne-Willem de Vries (who was focused on card acquiring and processing at Adyen), CBDO Robert Kraal (former Adyen COO and EVP global card acquiring & processing of Adyen) and CTO Paul Buying (founder of acquired translation startup Livewords), Silverflow will launch its card payments processing technology in early 2021. 

Anne Willem de Vries, CEO and cofounder of Silverflow, commented: “Today’s card payment infrastructure is based on 30 to 40-year-old technology that’s still in use across the global payment landscape. The payment technology infrastructure costs everyone time and money: consumers, merchants, payment-service-providers, and banks. We founded Silverflow with the belief that  the payments technology stack needs an upgrade.”

Silverflow is the first card payments processor with a cloud-native platform built for today’s technology stack, with simple APIs and streamlined data flows, that is directly integrated into card networks. Silverflow is made for payment service processors (PSPs), acquirers and global top-market merchants that are seeing €500mn-10bn in annual transactions. Instead of customers needing to manage a complex network of acquirers across markets  and maintain dozens of bank and card network connections Silverflow provides card acquiring processing as a service that connects to card networks directly through a simple API.

Krishna Visvanathan, Partner at Crane Venture Partners, added: “Our mission at Crane is to back entrepreneurs who are redefining the enterprise technology stack and Silverflow epitomises this as it relates to global card processing. Whilst payments power the digital economy, existing backend processing technology is old, costly and inflexible - and ripe for reinvention. Silverflow’s founders are a powerhouse team of payments industry experts with a unique insight to building a product that transitions PSPs, acquirers, and merchants from inflexible legacy systems to a fully cloud-native modern architecture. We are proud to be supporting them as they launch and scale their card payments-as-a-service platform globally.”

Silverflow is a team of five employees based in Amsterdam. The new seed funding round will enable Silverflow to double its team by the end of 2020, adding new developers and a commercial director. Silverflow has been in development for over two years and will be ready to launch in early 2021. 

Angel investor Marcus Mosen, senior payment executive, industry advisor and  early investor in fintechs like Iyzico or N26, added: "I'm proud to support the founding team at Silverflow as they get ready to launch a truly innovative payments technology platform. Silverflow is the solution to bring innovation to the payments tech stack through intuitive card network connections and processing. Reducing the complexity and cost of managing a network of card processing solutions, Silverflow brings modern technology, smart data insights and the ability to roll out new products across markets with its new card payments processing technology."

FintechOS, the global technology provider for banks, insurance and financial services companies, today announced FinVision, a three-day virtual event that showcases successes, challenges and best practices for financial innovation. The event will run from November 17^th to 19^th and bring together impartial industry leaders, visionary speakers, and experts from the FintechOS community of banks, insurers, fintechs, investors and media.

FinVision will blend compelling content and networking opportunities to ignite relevant conversations, connections and innovation. The conference will include keynotes, panel debates, fireside chats, in-depth case studies, live Q&A sessions and 1-to-1 meetings with over 1,000 peers. Throughout the event, attendees will benefit from practical advice and use-cases from speakers that have achieved success in digital transformation, get insights on the latest trends in banking and insurance, and get a glimpse into the future of financial technology innovation.

Companies that will be speaking at the event include:

• 11:FS
• ClearBank
• Hyperion Insurance
• Mastercard
• Microsoft
• Societe Generale
• Uniqa Insurance Group

“The goal of this event is to spark discussions for curious-minds within the financial services sector,” said Teo Blidarus, Co-Founder & CEO at FintechOS. “We’ve seen firsthand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on those not digitally astute. The financial services sector needs to be less reactive and instead devise long-term proactive strategies that bring about clear change. Our industry needs to challenge the status quo more than ever and deliver more to our customers. To do this, we need to understand best practices and learn from our peers who are on the same journey. And this is where FinVision can make a very real difference.”

The first day of the event is focused on banks and will explore topics such as the shift from Open Banking to Open Finance, how to build the customer-centric bank of the future, the next generation of SME banking in the new reality, and much more. Day two is targeted and tailored for the insurance industry, with themes focusing on the importance of data-driven insurance and transformation for smarter customer strategies. The final day will focus on the technology innovations empowered by FintechOS and its ecosystem of partners and customers and feature hands-on product demos and selected customer cases across a series of virtual roundtables and webinars.

The FinVision agenda, registration details and further speaker opportunities can be found at the FintechOS website here: https://finvision.fintechos.com/.

SteelEye, the compliance technology and data analytics firm, today announced the incorporation of Refinitiv market data on the SteelEye platform. The increased volume of high quality, multi-asset and global market data enables clients to enhance their compliance and analytics.

Refinitiv provides the widest range of cross-asset data, with 7.3 million price updates per second for over 84 million instruments and 2.5 terabytes of real-time pricing daily. 

A wide range of this market data is now available in SteelEye, more than doubling the amount of reference sources used to enhance SteelEye’s market abuse algorithms and Transaction Cost Analysis services. As a result, clients can carry out investigations and analysis across multiple asset classes and regions, strengthening the coverage, accuracy, and timeliness of the entire SteelEye RegTech suite.

“We are pleased to have been selected by SteelEye as a trusted data provider and look forward to seeing how SteelEye uses our data for the benefit of its clients,” said Ian Brocklehurst, Head of Data Platform at Refinitiv. 

“With Refinitiv’s extensive breadth of high-quality multi-asset market data we can offer clients faster and more accurate investigations and analyses,” said Matt Storey, Chief Product Officer at SteelEye. “This enables compliance teams to refine alerts and build a more comprehensive picture of their trading activity, benchmarked against the wider financial markets.” 

Designed to help firms Comply Smarter™ by managing their compliance holistically, SteelEye offers solutions for record keeping, trade reconstruction, MiFID II and EMIR transaction reporting, trade and communications surveillance, best execution, transaction cost analysis, analytics and more. 

Chargeback dispute management specialist, Chargebacks911, has today announced the launch of its latest ebook, “50 Insider Tips for Preventing Chargebacks”, which provides merchants with actionable steps to prevent chargebacks filed against their businesses.

The company has launched the ebook at a time when all industries have seen a sudden increase in chargebacks due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During initial lockdowns, businesses across all sectors moved into the online space in order to survive – and an increase in online spending usually results in higher rates of online fraud and chargebacks. Consequently, the bustling online space is now fertile ground for payment disputes and some industries are experiencing 10 times the amount of chargebacks than before the pandemic.

Chargebacks911’s COO and Co-Founder, Monica Eaton-Cardone, explained: “Changes to commerce brought on by the pandemic are likely here to stay. We expect the heightened levels of chargebacks to continue as customers are more comfortable than ever shopping online, while companies new to the online space are embracing their digital capabilities. With this ebook, we aim to provide businesses with the tools necessary to manoeuvre around the new digital environment.”

The ebook will allow merchants to benefit from the insight and experience Chargebacks911 has by highlighting key errors merchants have made – and continue to make – when providing services to their customers that result in chargebacks, along with advice about rectifying these issues. This includes guidance on bolstering customer service efforts to ensure buyers are happy, improving communication with customers to make sure there are no misunderstandings, revisiting policies and procedures, and best practices for marketing products online.

At the same time, the ebook reveals today’s key fraud trends that can result in chargebacks. It explains what preventative measures must be taken against criminal fraud in order to reduce payment disputes. It also tackles the issue of chargeback fraud, also known as friendly fraud – which accounts for between 60 and 80% of all payment disputes.

Friendly fraud occurs when baseless refunds are forced upon merchants. It happens when a cardholder reports a fraudulent (or incorrect) charge to their bank, even though the cardholder purchased and received the correct product. If the merchant fails to conclusively prove the legitimacy of the sale – which is a difficult burden for digital transactions and contact-free, COVID-era front porch deliveries – the cardholder “cyber-shoplifts” successfully. This type of fraud has contributed to the total cost of chargebacks rising to over £100 billion annually, by some estimates.

What’s more, changes to consumer perception and behaviour have spurred on the growth of friendly fraud during COVID-19. Monica elaborated on this: “Panicked consumers impacted by furlough or job loss, are now turning to chargebacks to recoup money. At the same time, friendly fraud has become easier to commit as consumers are shielded by online anonymity, while there is no-one to confirm that a package arrived safely at the point of exchange. Businesses must be able to mitigate this type of fraud or they run the risk of being hit by it over and over again.”

Exacerbating the issue is that one of merchants’ biggest problems is distinguishing between friendly fraud and genuine chargebacks. This can pose serious problems for businesses as in order to mitigate chargebacks, their cause must be identified. If this isn’t done, merchants can end up refunding instances of friendly fraud, making them look like easy targets to those committing it, or they can find themselves disputing genuine claims and losing loyal customers in the process. The ebook will tell readers what the first steps are when it comes to spotting and stopping friendly fraud.

The ebook is free to download and those who do before 29^th October are automatically registered for a webinar explaining more about lowering chargeback rates. You can access the ebook here.

Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the banking software company, today announced the launch of Temenos Transact Data Hub, a real-time data platform that is integrated and embedded within Temenos Transact, the market leading core banking solution. Temenos Transact Data Hub delivers multiple essential data capabilities that are critical to modern banks leveraging the power of the data held within the core banking platform. Out-of-the box, real-time data streaming, highly performant data engineering, purpose built data stores, and over 175 banking APIs, providing banks with the highest quality data to power faster and more contextual customer experiences, accurate reporting and analytics, faster integration with internal data systems, and rapid innovation with AI-driven digital banking applications.

The data held within a core banking platform is the most important and valuable data within a bank. This data is the main source of customer, product, and transactional data, which is the lifeblood of modern digital banking and drives everything from hyper-personalized customer engagement to effective risk management. By providing real-time access to core banking data, banks can achieve better reporting and analytics, faster compliance processes, including transparency related to BCBS 239 and other data regulations, and customer personalization with the provision of relevant, contextual, timely offers. This helps banks to deliver experiences that delight their customers and drive loyalty.

Banks need access to all data within the core banking system in real-time, and in a compliant manner. Real-time data is essential for the modern digital bank as it allows them to react instantly to customer needs and risk events. Banks traditionally struggle with the extraction, cleansing, blending, and optimization of core banking data and many banks are attempting to build internal data solutions to solve these issues with high costs and high failure rates. With Temenos Transact Data Hub, banks now have an embedded data platform within Temenos Transact that provides them performant access to high quality data.

Banks also recognize the value of their data as they seek to personalize customer engagement, improve fraud detection, and mitigate risk. Temenos Transact Data Hub enables banks to easily meet strategic goals for data availability, data quality, and data governance. For instance, using Temenos Transact Data Hub, a bank can stream and transform real-time transactional data into a highly performant, cloud based data stores. This optimized data can be the foundation for digital banking APIs, which enable a many digital banking applications - from budget and money planners to context–aware notifications and predictive banking with Netflix style recommendations. Temenos Transact Data Hub is the foundation for a number of Temenos’ recently released AI driven digital banking applications focused on product personalization and customer attrition.

Temenos Transact Data Hub supports deployment on major cloud platforms and leverages many popular database platforms including Azure SQL, SQL Server, Postgres, Oracle, NuoDB, and others. Temenos Transact Data Hub is also available via SaaS from the Temenos cloud. Temenos Transact Data Hub can be deployed remotely in as little as 30 days.

Todd Winship, Product Director, Temenos, said: “Temenos Transact Data Hub provides the best embedded data platform in the industry. By combining Temenos’ 25 years of innovation, building world-class packaged banking software with the latest advancements in big data and analytics; we provide banks the foundational technologies to help them realize the power of data, analytics, and AI to transform their business and make banking better for customers. With Temenos Transact Data Hub, banks have the data at their fingertips to anticipate customer need and deliver personalized experiences and relevant content for customers in the channel they want at the time they want it.”

Craig Focardi, Senior Analyst, Celent, added: “Many banks who are renovating or upgrading their core banking platforms attempt to build internal data, reporting, and analytical capabilities along with the core banking project. These projects impact existing resource pools and may increase core project execution risk, timelines, and costs. Data hubs aim to solve data/analytics transformation goals while banks are upgrading core systems to leverage in-house data stores. Embedding a data platform within a core system and IT stack can be an effective solution for banks to optimize the value of their data asset while undertaking other major digital transformation projects.  Temenos is one of the largest banking technology and services providers globally, and is well positioned to assist financial institutions with these data management issues.”

Colt Technology Services today announced that global management consulting firm, Arthur D. Little has selected Colt’s SIP Trunking and IP Access services in Asia. By engaging Colt as its single trusted service provider, Arthur D. Little obtained a one-stop-shop and hassle-free service and a single network for delivery, operations, and payments, as well as seamless connectivity between its offices in Europe and Asia. It also overcame the inefficiencies and complexity of managing multiple suppliers, free from complications around regulatory requirements in each country.

The development of IT infrastructure removed the boundaries between countries, enabling enterprises to thrive globally. However, each country have different regulations for the telecommunication industry, with  enterprises sometimes having to use local currencies and languages with each local network provider. With Colt, enterprises can manage their whole network and voice services for all regions using one provider - one of the reasons why enterprises with multiple offices around the world choose Colt.

Arthur D. Little also engaged Colt to optimise its voice infrastructure in its Singapore office, with plans to introduce Colt’s SIP Trunking in other offices across the region.

Mr Haruya Kono, IT Manager of Arthur D. Little Japan, said: “As an organisation, we use Colt’s SIP Trunking in Singapore and business internet service in both Singapore and Japan. We have found the stability and quality of the Colt IQ Network, as well as its voice services, to be of high quality. We are delighted with the services we get from Colt, and we are now considering implementing Colt Voice services in other offices. We would recommend Colt to other enterprises.”

Colt has been providing business telephony services to global enterprises for 27 years, underpinned by a strong global footprint. Singapore and Hong Kong were added to the global footprint in 2019, expanding Colt’s global SIP trunking footprint to 26 countries and four continents which include Europe, North America and Asia.

Masato Hoshino, Head of Asia and Representative Director & President at Colt, said: “We are delighted to be serving Arthur D. Little through our recently expanded SIP Trunking and IP Access service in Asia. We look forward to helping more companies optimise and simplify their voice infrastructure and better manage their costs while meeting their global compliance, disaster recovery, and security needs – all through one point of contact.”

Contour, the global decentralized platform building the new standard for global trade, announced a partnership with Mphasis, an Information Technology (IT) solutions provider specializing in cloud and cognitive services, to accelerate the scaled adoption and extend the reach of the Contour network by banks, enterprises and partners worldwide.

With the backing of strategic investors such as HSBC, BNPP, Bangkok Bank and Standard Chartered, Contour is on a mission to revolutionize global trade and bring trust, transparency, collaboration, and agility to what has traditionally been a complex and cumbersome industry.

Through this partnership, Mphasis will leverage its proven Front2Back^TM Transformation approach and its portfolio of next generation IT and operations capabilities to help accelerate the implementation and usage of the Contour network across the global community of banks, corporates, and ecosystem partners.

“As our business continues to grow following its launch at the start of October, we are constantly looking to expand our network with technology that enhances trade processes and overcomes longstanding obstacles that the traditionally paper-based industry has been subject to. Our vision to create a global standard for trade will be achieved through our work with other technology providers that build upon the interoperability of our network and streamlines processes. With Mphasis’s global footprint and expertise in financial services, our work together will ensure that organisations can reap the benefit of improved trade,” said Carl Wegner, CEO, Contour.

“We are inspired by Contour’s vision and excited to be a partner in their growth journey. With over two decades of experience at the forefront of banking, payments, and technology, Mphasis is in a unique position to help Contour’s banking and enterprise network members – many of which are our clients as well - embrace the power of the network to catalyze and accelerate their own digital transformation,” said Srikumar Ramanathan, SVP & Global head – Industry Solutions Group, Mphasis.

“Contour provides a network foundation that is critical for the scaled re-invention of what has been a centuries-old industry,” said Andres Ricaurte, SVP & Global Head - Payments, Mphasis. “Through this partnership, we will help banks, enterprises, and ecosystem partners find new and transformative ways to transact with one another and capitalize on the vision of digital and connected global trade”.

Alfacash, an eight-year-old duly regulated cryptocurrency exchange, and Sumsub, an identity verification platform that covers KYC/KYB/AML needs, join forces to enable automatic identity verification, so a customer can start trading from the Alfacash Store platform at any time, with top-of-the-line security, staying compliant with regulatory demands. 

Sumsub’s platform is equipped with semi-automatic verification tools, as well as tools that require human review, which are all compliant with the current Estonlian legislations regarding non-face-to-face customer identification. In short, they offer expert knowledge, enhanced with AI and machine learning capabilities. 

This partnership will allow Sumsub to quickly offer its customers the best service and support, in addition to giving the confidence to trade cryptocurrency without any legal issues and effort. 

Useful new features

• Available everywhere, supporting 6,500+ types of documents from 220+ countries and territories;

• 100% automated verification, completed in less than 3 minutes;

• Only a couple of documents and requirements, accessible from your phone;

• Fully compliant with the EU’s 5th AML Directive (about virtual currencies) and Estonian AML laws;

• Secure personal data protection under European legal regulations (GDPR);

• 24/7 Support team, ready to help with verification in case of any difficulties.

What will the process itself be like?

• Easy and fast: start by completing friendly questionnaire and wait 1-3 minutes for the verification to complete;

• You’ll only need your ID, phone number, proof of address, and a selfie; 

• Once you have passed Sumsub’s automatic checks, you’ll be able to start trading cryptocurrencies almost immediately while enjoying Sumsub's special programs and discounts!

TORA, provider of industry leading trading technology, has today announced that it has integrated its order execution management system (OEMS) with MTS BondsPro, MTS Markets International, Inc.’s (MMI) ATS. The new connectivity allows market participants to electronically trade bonds from the TORA OEMS in the MTS BondsPro platform. 

MTS BondsPro, part of London Stock Exchange Group, is an electronic bond trading platform that offers access to liquidity on its anonymous all-to-all order book. MTS BondsPro supports markets in over 20,000 corporate and emerging market bonds and provides access to over 100 liquidity providers with 600+ buy-side and sell-side firms engaging with the MTS BondsPro order book.

TORA clients are able to see the full depth of the market for each bond within the TORA interface, execute orders and monitor execution progression from the system. The integration with MTS BondsPro will help all asset managers and traders experience optimal STP.

Chris Jenkins, Managing Director at TORA, commented: “The new partnership is a great addition for our clients looking to access more sources of credit bond liquidity.”

David Parker, Head of MMI, said: “Integrating with TORA’s advanced OEMS is very exciting for the MTS BondsPro business, as it makes liquidity via our platform more widely available to the market and easily accessible to TORA’s global client base.”

TORA’s OEMS provides fixed income traders with sophisticated tools to help streamline their operations and improve trade execution. The platform offers broad access to bond liquidity and dedicated fixed income OEMS trading tools such as ‘similar bond’ searches, historical analysis of trade execution and rules to create auto-routing based on bespoke information.

Built as one of the industry’s first cloud-based integrated Order and Execution Management systems over 13 years ago, TORA’s OEMS offers a wealth of functionality covering execution, allocations, risk control, real time positions-keeping and P&L monitoring. TORA OEMS is a single trading system covering global markets in equities, bonds, futures, options and FX.