BMLL Technologies, the award-winning data and analytics provider, today announced two appointments to its growing team. Neil Mackenzie and Phiona Tam have joined BMLL as sales directors in response to increasing demand for BMLL’s historic data and analytics offering and to support the firm’s Go-to-Market strategy. 

BMLL unlocks the predictive power of pricing data by providing granular Level 3 order book data and advanced analytics to help clients understand how markets behave and make more informed decisions. Leading institutions across the capital markets ecosystem, from banks and brokers, to asset managers, global exchange groups, hedge funds and quants, use BMLL insights to enhance their analytics.

Neil Mackenzie joins BMLL from Societe Generale, where he served as Director of Quantitative Electronic Sales trading. Previously, he was Execution Specialist for Global Equities and European Head of Equity Trading at MF Global, and before that he was a Sales Trader at UBS. 

Mackenzie said: “BMLL’s cloud-based data and analytics offer our customers a range of solutions depending on whether they are a bank or broker, asset manager, exchange or vendor. I am delighted to be joining an ambitious firm that brings cutting-edge data and analytics engineering to the market, allowing clients to analyse historical data in order to provide insight on trading performance and optimise existing workflows.”

Phiona Tam joins from Liquidnet, where she was Product Manager for Electronic Trading, specialising in algo and block trading products. Prior to that she was a Business Analyst, Technologist and Developer at Credit Suisse. 

Tam commented: “BMLL’s unique data sets and analytical capabilities play a key role in improving the efficiency of the market for all participants. The BMLL team’s passion to evolve their data product and service model is unmatched. I look forward to working with them, supporting the go-to-market strategies and making their insights available to a wider audience.”

Ben Collins, Head of Sales & CRM at BMLL, said: “The last few months have clearly shown that granular data and analytics are crucial in making sense of market movements at times of heightened volatility. As a result we have seen increasing demand for our data products across the spectrum.”

Collins added: “We are delighted to welcome Phiona and Neil to the BMLL team. Working with the wider Go-to-Market team, their industry expertise will be invaluable in making our data and analytics capabilities available to a much wider segment of the market.”

Israel-based Coralogix, provider of leading ML-powered log analytics and monitoring solution, today announced it has raised a $25 million Series B funding round, bringing the company's total amount raised to $41.2 million. New investors such as Red Dot Capital Partners and O.G. Tech VC (backed by Eyal Ofer) co-led the round with participation from existing investors  Aleph VC, StageOne Ventures, Janvest Capital Partners, and 2B Angels. Barak Salomon of Red Dot Capital partners and Roy Oron of O.G. Tech Partners will join the board of directors.

Coralogix, today also announced the launch of its real-time analytics solution. The announcement comes on the heels of Coralogix’s recent expansion into India. The company recently established its office and operations in the region and provides local customers with local Amazon Web Services (AWS) regional server support and data storage capabilities. The funding and new analytics solution will help further establish Coralogix's local presence and help better support its local customers.

"Over the last few years, companies have had to forgo observability due to prohibitive costs,” said Ariel Assaraf, CEO and co-founder, Coralogix. “As a result, monitoring and log management has become increasingly difficult, not to mention it has forced companies to compromise on stability and security. By creating a real-time pipeline that analyzes and queries logs using the Elasticsearch syntax, and powering it with our ML engine, our customers can benefit from all the great visualization and alerting capabilities Elasticsearch offers without its limitations and massive storage costs.”

Already thousands of Coralogix customers, including leading India-based companies such as BookMyShow, Postman, Jupiter Money and CRED, are seeing cost savings of up to 70 percent.

“We’ve integrated the Coralogix webhooks with our Kubernetes deployments to automatically tag new versions as they’re deployed,” comments Pranav Kapoor, DevOps Lead, BookMyShow. “I love that I can archive logs to an S3 bucket for later retrieval without affecting the daily quota,” he added.

The newly launched analytics solution, challenges the cost model of observability by allowing customers to pay according to data priority instead of solely on volume. By re-engineering the Elasticsearch engine, Coralogix is able to offer queries, alerts, and its ML capabilities without the use of storage.  

"Coralogix gives us a highly customizable SIEM solution that addresses the very specific needs of our FinTech environment," said Jayesh Sidhwani, Vice President of Engineering, Jupiter Money. 

“As an organization that caters to 10 million users, Coralogix has scaled to meet our accelerated growth seamlessly and has demonstrated extreme focus on their customers' needs,” said Shamasis Bhattacharya, Chief Software Architect, Postman. 

Appian (NASDAQ: APPN) will host AppianEUROPE20, a combination live and on-demand, free event on 14 and 15 October 2020. Held virtually, every attendee will have the best seat in the house to hear directly from industry experts as they share their real-world experiences of transforming enterprises through the best of low-code and process automation. Register at appianeurope.com.

Over the course of two days, industry leaders will discuss the latest advances in low-code development and process automation. This includes automating routine tasks with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), eliminating forms and paper with intelligent document processing, and applying Artificial intelligence (AI) to make smart decisions, faster. Learn why low-code automation is critical to staying agile during times of change.

Hear directly from European and Middle Eastern business leaders, and Appian product experts, interacting with them during live Q&As. Keynote speakers include:

• Garry Kasparov, former World Chess Champion, political activist, writer and advocate for AI technology
• Miguel Traquina, CIO Operations, Santander UK
• Lulu Zhang, Head of Enabling Technologies, and Pasi Wiklund, Head of Intelligent Process Automation, KONE
• Luca Verducci, Head of Operations, Governance and Transformation, Poste Italiane
• Matt Calkins, CEO, Appian

Presenting Appian customers include Santander UK, KONE, Bexley Health, Poste Italiane, Abdul Latif Jameel (ALJ), Gulf Agency Company (GAC), Marquard & Bahls, and Cambridge Assessment. Customers will share their stories and learnings from transforming their businesses and solving real-world challenges. Attendees can also get deeper insights by booking a meeting with an Appian product expert or taking part in hands-on, practical sessions.

On Day Two of the conference, join the Appian community as it collectively takes on legendary chess Grandmaster (and keynote speaker) Garry Kasparov at a game of chess. The match will be conducted in a virtual chess environment, built on the Appian platform by Diamond conference sponsor Vuram.

AppianEUROPE20 also features Diamond sponsors Infosys and KPMG, as well as Platinum sponsors Coforge, Cognizant and Procensol, and Gold sponsor Convedo.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted that it’s vital to innovate fast during unforeseen circumstances. Explore how Appian’s full-stack process automation, delivered at the speed of low-code provides the best-of-breed capabilities your organisation needs to stay ahead of the curve at AppianEUROPE20. Find out more and register at appianeurope.com.

Cappitech, a leading provider of regulatory reporting, best execution analysis and business intelligence solutions for the financial services industry, has been announced as the “RegTech Platform Platinum” winner in the Juniper Research Future Digital Awards for Fintech and Payments.

The awards recognise: “organisations that have made outstanding contributions to their industry and are positioned to make a significant impact in the future,” and according to Nick Maynard, Lead Analyst at Juniper Research and member of the judging panel: “Cappitech was noted as offering a highly broad platform which supports compliance for a high number of critically important regulations, with its specialisations in insights and seamless integration also being noted as highly positive and adding significant value to regulatory reporting operations for financial institutions.”

The award is further evidence of Cappitech’s commitment to excellent client service and innovative product development for the regulatory reporting industry, particularly at a time of significant upheaval as key players exit the market and new regulations come into force. It follows the firm recently being awarded “Best Regulatory Reporting Service” in the HFM European Technology Forum awards.

Ronen Kertis, Cappitech CEO and founder, comments: “This is a wonderful validation of our work. We’ve been focused on listening to customer requirements to ensure that our services meet their needs and that we are offering accurate, efficient, cost effective products that add value on a daily basis. This approach is driving strong growth for our business and we’re pleased to have been recognized by the Future Digital Awards.”

In 2020, key enhancements to Cappitech’s service include:
• Global reporting: Expanding global reporting services across the North America, Australia, and Singapore on top of our strong European presence. Clients highly value our ability to provide a single one-stop-shop in a user-friendly manner across global regimes.
• Reconciliation: requests to compare the FCA MDP XML files with MIFIR submissions resulted in a three-way reconciliation system to track trades between front office systems, Cappitech and regulators.
• Best Execution: Cappitech’s Best Execution tool has been enhanced and adapted following customer feedback to include features that best capture slippage and latency statistics.
• Completeness, Accuracy and Timeliness (CAT) insights: most new features included in Cappitech’s “insights” tab were built based on customer feedback on what best supports CAT monitoring.
• Master Accounts: Cappitech’s Master Accounts dashboard allows firms to review all reports on a global level as well as at a per entity basis, supporting customers providing delegated and assisted reporting to their own customers or groups with different entities.

Cappitech’s efforts across the regulatory reporting space have been enhanced with the launch of the “Cappitech Academy” in which the firm has centralised learnings on global regulations and transaction reporting, available free to anyone via the Cappitech website. "As thought leaders in the industry, we believe in bringing value to the market not only through innovative products but also through easily accessible knowledge-sharing that will educate, inspire and advance the industry one step at a time," concluded Kertis.

Cassini Systems, the leading provider of pre- and post-trade margin and collateral analytics for derivatives markets, today won Global Investor Group’s Investment Excellence Award for Post-Trade Solution of the Year. A panel of judges composed of senior market participants selected the winners from shortlists identified by the Global Investor editorial team.

The Investment Excellence Awards celebrate outperformance, innovation and achievement in asset management and fund services. This year’s awards also recognise organisations continuing to put clients first and adapting best to uncertain times.

Luke Jeffs, managing editor of Global Investor Group, said: “Collateral efficiency and optimisation became crucial in the volatility that followed the escalation of the COVID-19 pandemic as firms struggled to find the resources to meet their significantly increased margin calls. Cassini Systems helped clients weather this period of heightened activity and won many plaudits as firms look to reshape their businesses to insulate themselves against future market shocks.”

Liam Huxley, CEO and founder of Cassini, said: “It’s a great honour for us to earn this award among a field of strong competitors that provide a wide range of valued post-trade solutions. We have seen significant increased traction globally – particularly since we’ve expanded our presence in the Asia Pacific and North American regions – as asset management firms and hedge funds  seek to achieve efficiencies and make trading decisions that factor in the entire lifecycle cost of each trade.”

Cassini’s platform provides the only full front-to-back solution covering margin, collateral and cost analytics for all classes of cleared and uncleared over-the-counter derivatives as well as futures and options. It integrates into post-trade collateral management, treasury and risk systems – enabling clients to bring post-trade cost analytics into the pre-trade process. Cassini is also integrated into key asset management platforms to facilitate leveraging analytics with little implementation overhead.

Created in April 2017, the Global Investor Group incorporates the Global Investor, FOW and ISF brands and offers news, data and in-depth analysis across derivatives, securities finance, custody and fund services and asset management. Global Investor has been publishing for 34 years.

Huawei, in cooperation with digital payment entity, Mondia Pay (www.Mondia.com), now offers Direct Carrier Billing service (DCB), for seamless, contactless payments for users in the MEA region through HUAWEI Mobile Services (HMS).

Mondia Pay is a leader in the digital payment space and provides a simple, fast and secure way for consumers to pay for services using their mobile phone. Huawei has been working closely with Mondia Pay, the MEA region’s top digital payments fintech company, as part of its commitment to supporting developers in the MEA region. This strategic partnership will allow for increased DCB coverage and IAP (In-App Purchase) kit capabilities for global developers.

As a result, Huawei and smartphone HONOR users in almost 20 countries including, Egypt, South Africa, Tunisia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Madagascar, Liberia, and Botswana, will be able to make cashless payments securely without the need for bank cards by downloading the app from Huawei’s Application Store, AppGallery. In addition, Mondia Pay will also market Huawei’s games content in Egypt.

The number of mobile internet subscribers in Sub-Saharan Africa has quadrupled since the start of 2010 (World Bank Data) and, for many consumers, it's the only way they can get online. With low credit card penetration rates in most markets, contactless, online payment solutions can reach wider audiences looking to consume digital content.

“This new partnership with Huawei is an endorsement of Mondia Pay’s industry expertise and deep routed knowledge of Africa. Customers across the continent will benefit from our fully integrated digital payment technology to make frictionless payments in a fast, safe and secure manner. We also support the natural progression towards cashless societies, fast-tracked by current affairs such as COVID-19,” said Simon Rahmann, CEO Mondia Pay.

Mondia Pay is available on Huawei’s AppGallery as direct carrier billing and e-wallet services to facilitate online consumer payments. Huawei’s AppGallery allows users to explore the best local and global apps.   

Adam Xiao, Managing Director, HMS and Consumer Cloud Service for Huawei Consumer Business Group MEA, said: “We welcome the opportunity to partner with Mondia Pay to provide our users across the MEA region with even more payment options. Mondia Pay allows for contactless payment without the need for bank cards in a safe and secure manner that protects the privacy of users. This partnership is part of Huawei’s ongoing commitment to make it easier for local and global developers to offer their services to millions more people in the MEA region.”

eKeeper has successfully integrated DocuSign’s eSignature functionality into its intermediary focused CRM, MortgageKeeper. The feature allows new and existing brokers to sign-up with DocuSign directly and use their own credentials within eKeeper through a wide range of API Plans.

As part of the integration, eSignatures can be made mandatory for every document or used for specific documents and clients. All documents that are generated as part of the MortgageKeeper workflow system also support eSignature capability, meaning that documents can be automatically generated and delivered through DocuSign to clients.

The inclusion of eSignatures aligns with research from DPR Group’s recent ‘Mortgage Industry Digital Engagement survey’ of 1,400 consumer respondents which found the vast majority were open to using technology to speed up the mortgage application process. The survey found that 80% of consumers would be comfortable electronically signing documents if provided from a broker.

David Bennett, commercial director at eKeeper, commented: “Electronically signing documents is fast becoming a hygiene factor for intermediary CRM platforms and research from our parent group validates this. We were naturally keen, as with other integrations into eKeeper, for the broker to control the third-party relationship, choosing the plans that are relevant to their business and their client base.

“We’ve hit a perfect storm of eSignature functionality and uptake thanks to greater exposure and adoption of eSignatures across different sectors. The need is particularly pertinent given the new realities of remote and social distanced interactions. With our customer lead qualification platform, recent AML and Credit Report capabilities and now this integrated eSignature functionality our flagship CRM product is fast becoming the complete future proofed platform that advisers need.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant increase in customer queries globally, Avaloq’s banking and wealth management clients are to benefit from Enterprise Bot’s intuitive email and conversation solution.

Enterprise Bot, a startup providing conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and automation tools, and Avaloq, a leader in digital banking solutions, have today announced a new partnership which will see Avaloq offering Enterprise Bot’s conversational customer service software to its banking and wealth management clients.

More than 150 financial institutions globally rely on Avaloq’s award-winning core banking software and wealth management technology. They now have the possibility to access Enterprise Bot’s cutting-edge software, which is already connected with Avaloq’s core banking platform through the open banking marketplace Avaloq.one Ecosystem. This allows the end-clients to interact with the conversational AI which helps to respond to questions in an intuitive and efficient manner, leading to increased customer satisfaction over any channel, including email.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant increase in customer requests across all sectors, with banking hit particularly hard as customers are navigating the confusion of pandemic payments, rising unemployment and volatile markets. A recent report by Deloitte highlights how effective bots are at reducing the pressure on call centers, with data reported from some AI service providers showing a 250% increase in chatbot usage since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic.

Enterprise Bot uses a pre-integrated system to establish an AI customer service agent for Avaloq’s banking and wealth management clients. Developing an effective conversational AI for a business traditionally takes up to 12 months, but Enterprise Bot’s use of historical data allows it to have the bot up and running within 12 weeks. This cost- and time-efficient system makes innovative AI-based customer services more accessible to all businesses, large and small.

Speaking on the partnership, Co-Founder and CEO of Enterprise Bot, Pranay Jain said: “Our partnership with Avaloq is an opportunity to provide their customers with enhanced service features while reducing the burden on their human customer service representatives. Our AI represents your best agent, fielding often repetitive queries that have previously taken up a significant amount of employees’ time. While similar services take up to a year to fully implement, we use historical data that allows us to have your system up and running smoothly in under three months. We want this type of software to be accessible to companies of all sizes. With so many companies experiencing significant increases in customer service requests the ability to implement conversational AI quickly is critical. The future of customer service is artificial intelligence, and every business should have the opportunity to be at the forefront of quality customer service and technology.”

Martin Greweldinger, Group Chief Product Officer of Avaloq, said: “We are impressed by Enterprise Bot’s sophisticated AI solutions, and are pleased to offer this intuitive email and chatbot function to our clients in the Avaloq.one Ecosystem. Through our open banking platform, we are connecting financial institutions with up-and-coming fintechs and third-party providers, such as Enterprise Bot. The aim is to create a collaborative environment in which established players benefit from the best-of-breed technologies and startups can accelerate their growth.”

Planixs, the leading provider of real-time, intraday cash, collateral and liquidity management software solutions, is thrilled to announce that it has been voted as the number one Enterprise Fintech in the UK as part of BusinessCloud’s 100 FinTech Disrupters ranking for 2020.

The banking technology provider Planixs was voted #1 in its category of Enterprise Fintech and #22 in the overall ranking across all Financial Services after making BusinessCloud’s shortlist of innovative FinTech firms. Planixs was also the highest-ranked company in Manchester, further enhancing the region’s reputation as a home for innovative and growing technology companies.

The annual ranking highlights the most innovative FinTech companies across the United Kingdom. Each year, Business Cloud – a UK media firm that runs a monthly technology publication - shortlist 250 firms that are voted on and selected by an expert judging panel in order to make the top 100.

This year, the judging panel included Steve Chown, FinTech Accelerator Manager at NatWest; Tribeni Chougule, Head of Change Management at Visa; Gavin Brown, Senior Lecturer in Financial Technology at the University of Liverpool and Julian Wells, Director at Whitecap Consulting, FinTech North & FinTech West.

The accolade follows a successful period for Planixs, with significant customer wins including SIX – the group that operates the infrastructure for the Swiss financial centre, and Banque Internationale à Luxembourg – the oldest bank in Luxembourg. The firm also successfully launched a Partner Programme this year – enabling complementary technology vendors to resell Planixs’ treasury solutions to banking and corporate organisations all over the world.

Founded in 2011, Manchester-based Planixs works with some of the world’s most prominent global financial institutions such as Lloyds Banking Group, Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW), Scotiabank and Zenith Bank amongst many, in providing its market-leading product suite Realiti® - a cloud-based and on premise technology solution suite that delivers real-time intraday cash, collateral and liquidity management capabilities to the financial services industry.

Last year, recognising that smaller banks have similar regulatory needs as larger banks but with budgetary constraints preventing their investment in an enterprise liquidity solution, Planixs launched Realiti® Essentials - an ‘out-of-the-box’, all-inclusive software solution that enables any bank or financial institution of even the smallest size to become regulatory compliant and manage liquidity using the lowest cost solution in the marketplace.

Neville Roberts, founder and CEO at Planixs, said: “We are beyond thrilled to be ranked as the number one Enterprise FinTech in the UK. We continually strive to be the leading technology provider to financial services and banking firms, so to be recognised for our efforts is a real honour. We would like to thank everyone that voted for us and the judging panel for selecting us.”

The full list of the 2020 100 FinTech Disrupters can be found here.