Ziglu, the challenger and cryptocurrency platform, has launched after completing a successful pilot phase; customers can now download its app from the Apple App Store, an Android version will follow soon. 

Ziglu was founded by Mark Hipperson, best known as the co-founder and CTO of the pioneering challenger, Starling Bank. Hipperson has successfully built the business based on the premise that customers deserve a smart, accessible and fair way to access crypto and fiat currencies. 

Cryptocurrencies have long been the preserve of the expert, however, at a time when consumers are seeking greater financial inclusion, accessibility and control Ziglu’s vision is to open up access to cryptocurrencies for all.

With Ziglu, users can instantly and effortlessly exchange their money into digital currencies, including Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin & Bitcoin Cash at competitive prices and monitor their balances in real-time. 

This is the first time that Ziglu has been available beyond its beta testers and friends & family. Ziglu has already engaged their waitlist to welcome them on board and is ready for new members to join the Ziglu community.

Ziglu is one of a handful of account providers in the world that has designed and built a financial platform in the cloud with flexible, scalable and bank-grade technology. Ziglu offers fair and fully transparent pricing with user funds held in a segregated account.

Mark Hipperson, Ziglu Founder and Chief Executive Officer said: “This launch marks the beginning of an exciting journey for Ziglu to deliver transformational financial services for our customers. By offering immediate and safe access to best-price crypto, customers can spend, exchange and send their money, regardless of the currency, where, when and how they want.”

Wirecard, the global innovation leader for digital financial technology, is collaborating with Bulgarian Fintech Payhawk to launch a new Visa corporate card to provide companies with an easy solution to manage corporate expenses. Payhawk will benefit from Wirecard’s tailor-made corporate expense card solution including end-to-end card infrastructure as well as Wirecard’s expertise in the payment industry.

Founded in 2018, Payhawk offers an all-in-one corporate expense and spend management service for small and medium sized companies, including the new corporate card, which is issued by Wirecard. Payments, invoices, expenses, and card issues are automated and digitized. The Fintech provides a mobile app and web interface to give their corporate clients a comprehensive dashboard for complete control and transparency over employees’ spending, travel expenses or other transactions.

In 2019 Payhawk won the Start-Up Challenge at the Paris Fintech Forum, where they received a package of benefits, including implementation support and consulting services from Wirecard and Visa. This latest collaboration is a sign of Wirecard’s continued support for this young start-up, who also recently secured a seed financing of EUR 3 million in March, led by the renowned VC Earlybird. “Wirecard began as a start-up 20 years ago. Even as a DAX company, we still have that start-up culture in our DNA, and are always looking to foster other young and exciting companies. Payhawk is one such start-up, innovative with a solid business plan and we are delighted to be supporting such a promising Fintech on their path to success,” said Leonard Coen, Head of Sales and Project Management, Financial Institutions, at Wirecard.

The cooperation between Wirecard, Visa and Payhawk will enable the Bulgarian start-up to address new target groups in Europe with a particular focus on small and medium-sized enterprises who currently lack digital solutions for expense management and need to address the complexities of managing company cards. “The constant feedback we got from finance leaders in SMEs is how much time they waste reconciling card statements, tracking expenses, handling paper, manually entering data and trying to enforce spend policies and budgets on cards. Together with Wirecard and Visa, we are happy to provide an efficient and compliant solution to manage company spend end-to-end and enforce spend policies and budgets directly on cards,” added Hristo Borisov, Co-founder and CEO of Payhawk.

Wirecard’s solution and end-to-end card infrastructure also includes an e-money license, issuing license, fraud and risk management, issuing processing, and card management platform. Each card, which will be available in both virtual and physical form, can be individually controlled by assigning monthly budgets, spend limits or by being part of a more complex request and approval workflow. Managers can monitor budgets in real time and have full transparency over all company cards in use, all the time. Payhawk Visa Business Cards are available in 13 European countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Bulgaria. Payhawk’s integrated payment account can be combined with any existing bank giving an efficient and flexible platform for finance teams to manage company spend.

NatWest is developing behavioural biometrics technology which could replace banking passwords.

Next year, an additional form of authentication will be required for some transactions when Strong Customer Authentication comes into force. However, the technology, which has been customised in partnership with Visa for the purpose of increased transaction security, could replace passwords and helps to make payments more secure.

Strong Customer Authentication is part of the PSD2 regulation and is an extra layer of security designed to prevent payment fraud and check that it is the cardholder making the payment.

Behavioural biometrics works by analysing the unique ways a customer interacts with their device when making an online purchase. The technology uses this information to confirm who is making the purchase and does not access or share any private data held on a device.

Working in the background of a transaction, the technology is able to deliver a seamless experience for customers while ensuring a high level of security.

The development represents a major breakthrough in the application of biometric technology, with NatWest the first bank to test the technology specifically for the purpose of SCA compliance.

Georgina Bulkeley, NatWest Director of Strategy and Innovation said: “We continue to explore biometrics and how they can be used to make payments easier and simpler for our customers. The success of a pilot of this new technology demonstrates our ongoing commitment to developing innovative ways of enhancing customer experience while prioritising security.” 

Jeni Mundy, Managing Director, UK & Ireland, Visa, said: “Visa is committed to working with its partners to develop innovative technologies that remove friction for cardholders, increase security and satisfy regulatory requirements. Behavioural biometrics has already been deployed successfully for the purpose of fraud prevention, and now, following work between regulators and industry partners including Visa, has been approved as a second layer of security to be used alongside one-time passcodes in the context of Strong Customer Authentication.”   

Visa will be offering commercially available behavioural biometric technology to its clients via VCAS, Visa’s end-to-end authentication solution.

The new behavioural biometric technology follows on from NatWest’s successful pilots of biometric fingerprint technology with debit and credit cards which allowed payments of up to £100 to be verified using a fingerprint instead of PIN. The bank was the first in the UK to pilot the technology and is looking to develop it further this year.

Allica Bank, the business bank with a focus on empowering small and medium sized businesses to succeed, has today formally announced the appointment of Richard Cameron as Head of Asset Finance.  

In his role, Richard is leading on the delivery of a fully integrated Asset Finance proposition that is transparent, easy to access and enables businesses to secure the finance they need to realise their ambitions. 

Richard joined Allica Bank from RBS, where he was Head of Asset Finance Products and was accountable for their performance, design and development. Richard brings with him nearly 30 years’ experience in the financial services industry. Before RBS, he worked for Lombard, NatWest and Lloyds Banking Group. 

Richard Cameron, Head of Asset Finance, Allica Bank said:  

“Joining Allica Bank has provided a fantastic opportunity to help continue building a bank that values both local relationships and leveraging modern technology in order to be ultra-responsive to the needs of its customers. Our Asset Finance proposition, once launched, will work alongside Allica Bank’s existing proposition to small and medium businesses to expand our offering of expert banking for business Britain. We’re fortunate not to be confined by decades-old computer systems or lengthy product specifications. Real-time data feeds, paperless technology and the use of Open Banking will be central to Allica Bank’s service quality and allow us to deliver the tailored expertise, speed and simplicity that smaller businesses and brokers both ask for.” 

Mark Stephens, CEO of Allica Bank said: 

“At Allica Bank, our core values are focused on being straightforward, acting with integrity and working collaboratively. In Richard, we are confident we have someone leading the development of our Asset Finance proposition who embodies these values, and who will work tirelessly to ensure that they are at the core of what we deliver to our customers and brokers.”. 

Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the IT pioneer that delivers storage as-a-service in a multi-cloud world, announced Purity 6.0 for FlashArray™, the latest version of Pure’s flagship suite of software. Engineered with the modern organization in mind, these new agile data services provide customers with an efficient way to store, safeguard, manage, access and mobilize their data with strategic consumption models custom-tailored to their needs. 

Purity 6.0 further simplifies modern infrastructure with a unified block-and-file solution designed to help solve infrastructure challenges, including storage silos and sprawl, which impact modern business across every industry. With a host of new agile data services, Pure customers can immediately leverage two key new capabilities -- unified protocol support with NFS and SMB, along with active disaster recovery built on brand new continuous replication technology. As part of the Evergreen Storage™ subscription model, these new features require no additional licenses, no added support costs, and zero added complexity.

“Flexible consumption models represent the bedrock of Pure’s modern data experience,” said Prakash Darji, General Manager, FlashArray. “We’ve had the tremendous advantage of being purpose-built for the modern era -- our solutions are designed for massive amounts of data, to be fundamentally upgradeable without disruption, and to be compatible with future innovation so that our customers never have to wait for the latest tools. Purity 6.0 represents the next and most logical step in delivering that continued value to our customers -- services that can be consumed in whatever way best fits the customer need at any given moment.” 

Pure’s new unified block and file capabilities on FlashArray save customers the trouble and expense of running two incompatible environments. They are designed to simplify operations for organizations that primarily run block storage but still require or utilize separate network-attached storage. This enables customers to run all workloads within the Purity operating environment, leverage the same data layer, user-interface, pool of capacity, and benefit from Pure’s industry-leading global data reduction. 

Similarly, the new continuous replication feature, ActiveDR, helps Pure customers improve their business resiliency without the cost and complexity of third-party disaster recovery software add-ons. This new active-passive replication technology addresses a major business requirement by protecting critical applications with a near-zero recovery point objective (RPO). Now customers have the ability to leverage synchronous, active-active, replication with ActiveCluster™, snapshot-based asynchronous replication, and now continuous replication all on the same Purity platform.

“Pure Storage enables us to offer entirely new areas of service for our faculty, staff and students by continuously innovating with our modern set of IT problems in mind,” said James Kelly, Senior Systems Administrator for Research Support at Chapman University. “The challenges we face are diverse, and require a diverse set of solutions. Purity 6.0 will allow us to solve critical problems in more—and more creative—ways. The unified SAN and NAS capabilities of this new FlashArray OS represent a game-changer for our highest-performance file-based workloads that otherwise need to run in all-block environments. It offers us a great way to cost-effectively run VDI or performance-critical file-based applications right alongside our key enterprise and research workloads in Pure's familiar, reliable, cloud-like operating environment.”

Enterprises with big data or machine learning requirements will still assign those workloads to FlashBlade^®, but for other use cases and for many smaller businesses FlashArray now addresses all data storage needs.

“Managing each file server and its data in a consistent way can be cumbersome without shared storage between them. Compromising on performance or making similar infrastructure tradeoffs is not an option for modern organizations,” said Jeff Fonke, Global Technical Solutions Architect, WWT. “We worked with Pure to beta test the file implementation in the WWT Advanced Technology Center (ATC), where we rely on a wealth of resources for testing OEM integration for new features. FlashArray affords our joint customers an uncompromising converged block and file solution capable of handling critical workloads and daily-use unstructured data.”

Purity 6.0 delivers additional enhancements, capabilities and solutions that customers can adopt immediately, non-disruptively, and as part of their Evergreen subscription to innovation. Highlights from this release include:

• Expanded backup to cloud options with CloudSnap for Google Cloud Platform: A technical preview, this capability adds cloud storage targets on the Google Cloud Platform where Pure Storage’s space-efficient snapshots can be replicated for offsite storage and reuse.
• Categorize data sets for easier identification with public volume tags
• Ensure data is safeguarded and access is controlled using RSA’s two-factor and multi-factor authentication
• Effectively plan for capacity expansion with Pure1^® click-to-quote
• Protect critical workloads using ActiveDR with the following validated designs:
  • Virtualized workloads using ActiveDR support for VMware Site Recovery Manager
  • Business critical applications such as: Microsoft SQL, Oracle, SAP, and MongoDB
• Protect unstructured data on Purity’s new file services with Veeam and CommVault backup solutions 

“For Pure Storage, the introduction of native file system support on its FlashArray will be a boon for existing and new customers alike,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president, IDC. “Now customers can cost-effectively consolidate multiple file servers onto this unified storage platform and get the all-flash performance, ease of use, and differentiating customer experience around which the vendor built its reputation with block-based workloads over the last decade.”

For more information about how your organization can leverage the benefits of the agile data services delivered by Purity 6.0, visit https://www.purestorage.com/.

Overseas Filipino Workers – to pay Social Security System with no fees. Among other important financial services provided online such as remittance, a European bank account and a debit card, SSS payments through an app have never been easier for migrants. Rewire has recently partnered with a Philippines government authorized company to offer the needed infrastructure for the deposit. 

Paying SSS is now easier than ever before 

Other than the payment being extremely secure, it is completed instantly and available 24/7. Filipino customers can pay the SSS payment at 4pm or 4am and the outcome will be the same. The way it works is that this service is only offered to users for whom the SSS payment can be relevant for. It can easily be found on the website or app once logged in to the account. The SSS payments section is found in the menu bar. After that, Filipino migrants only need to tap on the screen and enter information for less than two minutes.

Managing finances in more than one country

Moving to a new country is quite an adventure. Alongside the empowerment and opportunities, there are also some financial challenges to overcome. For example, migrants may need to pay taxes and relevant fees for the new home, as well as for the home in the country of origin. In addition, Filipino migrants need to learn how to manage finances in more than one country until they retire.

Filipino migrants know that they need to pay SSS to prepare for an extra when needed in life. Continuously, making SSS payments will ensure a monthly pension from the SSS. The Filipino migrants will receive retirement funds from the insurance, which will help cover the basics such as utility bills, healthcare and more. Obviously, while the SSS provides financial aid, it is not a substitute for life insurance or any other type of insurance that people may want to have.

“Being able to contribute to the lives of Filipino migrants, to unburden those professionals and to show them that they can lean on us when their lives change drastically, is a privilege. We tend to forget that migrants are not only contributing to the generation of new wealth. They are also pioneers in an informal social movement towards emancipation. Often, migrants wish to improve the quality of life or seek professional development and better living conditions in general. We are proud of our technical offer and infrastructure for the deposit, in order for Rewire to support them in their lives and in giving access to finances that will help their families,” says Meril Weber, Head of Filipino Community at Rewire.

“Many migrants that move from the Philippines to Europe for work rely on Rewire for digital banking. Those OFWs are very much needed in different countries across Europe such as Germany, Ireland and Finland, not just in times of COVID-19, but more on a sustaining basis. Our main mission with Rewire is to make banking stress-free for migrants, which is why enabling SSS payments is important. SSS payments ensure that migrants will be taken care of on happy occasions such as maternity leave or retirement and in cases of illness, disability, or even passing. Rewire is devoted to its customer base and continuously works to develop innovative features that support migrants’ financial stability on their paths to build a better future for themselves and their families.” says Guy Kashtan, CEO Rewire.   

The Board of Directors has decided to launch a Long Term Incentive Programme (LTIP) including the CEO and eight other members of the Group Leadership Team (GLT) in accordance with the remuneration policy for governing bodies adopted by the Annual General Meeting.

- The Board considers that a share-based, long-term incentive programme further aligns top management’s interests with those of shareholders. We believe this will enhance value creation. Our ambition is that the Board will decide on a similar annual programme expanding the selected number of leaders included over time, says Torbjörn Magnusson, Chair of the Board of Directors of Nordea.

The LTIP has a three-year performance period from 2020-2022 and deferral and retention periods according to regulations.

The total maximum number of shares, that can be granted under the LTIP, is 675,000 Nordea shares, which will be nominally distributed among the participants in 2020. In 2023, based on Nordea’s performance from a shareholder perspective, the maximum number of shares or a proportion of the shares will be granted to the participants. The potential grant is delivered so that the first portion of the shares  is delivered in 2023, and the rest of the shares are deferred and delivered annually in five equal portions during 2024-2028. Each share delivery is subject to a 12-month retention period. The nominal allotment of shares in 2020 corresponds to, on average, 75 per cent of the annual base salary of the participants in the LTIP.

The aggregate maximum gross value of the LTIP, estimated based on the average share price on Nasdaq Helsinki of the last trading day preceding the date hereof, is approximately EUR 4.6 million, however subject to performance.

In order to rebalance variable pay remuneration for GLT members to long-term performance, the maximum possible outcome of the present annual short-term incentive programme has been reduced by 25 per cent.

The LTIP performance requirements have been set so that maximum outcome will require achieving exceptional performance from a shareholder perspective. The assessment of performance during the LTIP performance period will be based equally on the following performance criteria:

•   Relative Total Shareholder Return (rTSR) measured against selected Nordic and European peer banks,
•   Absolute Total Shareholder Return (Absolute TSR), and
•   Absolute cumulative Earnings Per Share (Absolute EPS).

No shares will be granted if the participant’s employment terminates before the end of the performance period, however, subject to local regulations and leaver provisions. Share grants may be reduced in part or full subject to risk and compliance adjustments.

The LTIP shares will be delivered to the participants either through transfer of own shares held by Nordea or by issuing new shares. Thus, the share delivery may have a marginal dilutive effect on the Nordea share.

Darby said: “I'm thrilled to join the highly skilled and well-respected group of professionals at CQG in an effort to build out both a comprehensive institutional algo suite and a new, faster spreader platform.  Licensing the BTS code affords us a familiar low-latency foundation on which to pursue this exciting endeavor.”