Cassini Systems, the leading provider of pre- and post-trade margin and collateral analytics for derivatives market participants, today won the 2020 FTF News Technology Innovation Award for Best Margining Solution.

Presented by Financial Technologies Forum (FTF) and FTF News, the award recognizes the solution that has helped industry participants, including investors and brokerages, vastly improve the margining process that is essential to meeting the new rules for uncleared derivatives transactions. Other criteria for the honor included helping firms effectively navigate capital, margin and segregation regulations.

Cassini’s platform provides the only front-to-back, pre-trade to end-of-day margin, collateral and cost analysis across the entire lifecycle of a trade, for any asset class and for cleared or uncleared derivatives transactions. Buy-side firms can leverage the platform to monitor, optimize and ensure transparency on their margin, as well as achieve collateral liquidity and efficient utilization, lowering the carry cost of derivatives.

Qualified industry participants selected this year’s award winners through public voting after an online nomination process in which FTF and the FTF News editorial team approved those included on the shortlist.

Liam Huxley, CEO and founder of Cassini, said: “We’re honored to receive this important recognition from Financial Technologies Forum and particularly appreciative that the win was determined by market participants. As the award attests, Cassini has achieved significant growth and adoption since early 2019, and this year, we have accelerated that expansion even further. Our recent establishment of an on-the-ground presence in the ASIA Pacific region, with a Sydney office and new client in Australia, was followed by product enhancements including the addition of Chinese exchanges to our coverage. Even during the recent unprecedented market volatility, in the past two months alone, we signed five new asset management, hedge fund, insurance and bank clients in the U.S. and Europe. The market demand for comprehensive margin and collateral analytics is clear, whether firms are preparing to address the Uncleared Margin Rules or looking to bolster their trading strategies and achieve cost efficiencies in these uncertain times.”

Maureen Lowe, President, Founder and Publisher of FTF and FTF News, said: “It speaks volumes to our nominees and winners that despite the current environment, clients, peers and FTF readers took the time to vote in this year’s FTF Awards — even surpassing the number of votes we received last year. We have seen some real innovation from FinTech companies such as Cassini Systems over the past 12 to 18 months, and we expect that despite current challenges, the innovation will continue.”  

The FTF honor is the latest among several awards Cassini has earned over the past few years, including Best New Technology and Best Derivatives Solution at the HFM US Technology Awards in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and a platform of the year award at the 2019 HFM US Hedge Fund Technology Awards.

Financial Technologies Forum created the awards in 2011 to recognize excellence in post-trade processing within the securities operations industry. The 2020 awards honor firms for their achievements in 2019. This is the first year FTF included a category for Best Margining Solution.

Objectway, a leader in the software and services for the Digital Wealth & Investment Management sector, won the XCelent award for the leading Depth of Service score in Celent report “Wealth Management Client Onboarding Platforms”.

This report examined eight major vendors offering digital onboarding capabilities in Europe and North America, focusing on trends, technology and functionalities, and client preferences.

According to the renowned research and consulting firm, Objectway “stood out in several key areas, most notably the staff’s vast experience, SLA features, and client satisfaction with the implementation process”.

Celent also recognised that Objectway Client Engage and Conectus Onboarding provide “a comprehensive front-to-back Client Lifecycle Management offering allowing clients to identify prospects as well as onboard, with a user-friendly UI”.

Further elements noted in the report were Objectway’s interactive collaboration model, whereby the solution is easy to use and integrate as it offers customization capabilities that can be configured with low code changes, compared to those offered by other vendors evaluated by Celent.

Its robust AML capabilities, since uniquely stringent EU Compliance rules, give the firm a content advantage over vendors focused in other areas of the world.

Luigi Marciano, Objectway’s CEO and founder, commented: “We are glad and proud of this award recognition from Celent. As one of the first parts of the client interaction lifecycle, an effective onboarding workflow is critical to starting the client relationship on a strong footing. This acknowledgment testifies how we successfully help wealth managers achieve their digital client onboarding and engagement strategy to enhance their whole client lifecycle management.”

Awaad Aamir, analyst at Celent and co-author of the report, affirmed: “The Depth of Service award is particularly relevant as it derives from the high evaluation received in aspects related to clients concrete experience with the implementation of Objectway’s Client Lifecycle Management and Onboarding solutions.”

To save money faster, you can select more than one option or choose to implement the above four options at once.

• No brokerage or depositary fees. The fund’s costs (0.99% of the average annual asset value) are included in the investment unit value on the exchange and are not charged back to the customer. Tinkoff will only charge a fee (RUB 1.00) for closing the account. However, customers will still be liable for the earnings tax, so the government will typically deduct an annual 13% tax on funds withdrawn from Investment Box.

Ruslan Muchipov, CEO of Tinkoff Capital:

“Many people are keen to start investing, but they typically face two types of hurdles, according to our surveys. They do not know where to begin and what company to turn to with their money. To resolve this, people need to gain a deeper understanding of finance and find a specialized service to help them invest. Micro investing addresses these issues and has been gaining popularity abroad with such services as Stash and Acorns, which serve some five million clients each.

To address this in Russia, we came up with Investment Box, our new tool for easily tackling these challenges. Our customers won’t need to download additional applications, fill in countless documents, add more cards or open new online accounts. The Tinkoff mobile app allows users to set up Investment Box with just a couple of clicks and begin investing automatically. After getting started, customers can earn investment income by simply buying their morning coffee or purchasing food for dinner at a supermarket.

The Investment Box gives customers an opportunity to save tens of thousands of roubles each year. We estimate the number of Investment Box users will exceed 300,000 by the end of 2020, growing to more than 1 million active users in 2021.”

How to enable the service

Investment Box is available to holders of Tinkoff Black debit cards and Tinkoff Black Metal premium debit cards. To start using this tool, customers need to launch their Tinkoff mobile app, select “Apply for new product” and then “Apply for Investment Box”. They will then receive an SMS to confirm the account has been opened.

Investment Box will be displayed on the home screen of the Tinkoff mobile app among other accounts. Customers can open the Investment Box screen to check their account balances and transactions, set up a top-up option (automatic or manual), select or switch their automatic top-up currency, withdraw money, or download legal documents (e.g. daily depositary report on assets flow).

For more details about Tinkoff’s Investment Box visit Tinkoff Help. The Investment Box is available on iOS (one will have to upgrade the Tinkoff app to version 5.4) and will be accessible from Android devices by the end of June.

Boomi™, a Dell Technologies™ business, today announced a new global survey, commissioned with Vanson Bourne that reveals although organizations are reaping the rewards of IT modernization, digital transformation and innovation, there’s still more work to do. Now more than ever, technology supports and drives every business, from banks to retailers, whether customer-facing or internally focused. Companies that find ways to maximize their budget when investing in digital strategies and technologies have the opportunity to improve their ROI – read about how one company improved by more than 1,000%.

The report, “The State of Modernization, Transformation, and Innovation in the Digital Age,” outlines that 59 percent of survey respondents said effectively using technology has been the key to transformational success. However, 1 in 2 decision makers admit their company isn’t innovating at a competitive rate. Organizations still face multiple challenges to more quickly and efficiently roll out their modernization, innovation and transformation programs. 

The top barriers for digital transformation and innovation efforts include insufficient in-house skills (41%) followed by a restrictive budget (33%).

“The next decade will undergo an even more rapid pace of change than the 2000s and 2010s,” said Chris Port, Chief Operating Officer for Boomi. “Though modernization, transformation, and innovation have paid dividends in recent years, organizations can’t afford to rest on their laurels. Especially now. Not when business priorities, drivers of change, and technology needs are rapidly converging, as reflected in this survey.”

The Vanson Bourne survey went on to uncover:

• Businesses turning to low-code to drive transformation initiatives: Companies are trying to do more with employees who have less technical expertise. That’s why investing in low code platforms is a big focus for more than half of enterprises that don’t have one already. Almost 50% anticipate they will introduce a low-code development platform before the end of 2020. 

• Companies hone in on customer experience and employee productivity: Today’s transformation efforts are focused primarily on customer experience (54%) and employee productivity (50%). Both of these areas are crucial for supporting more modern, agile customers and workforces. Business and IT decision makers agree the biggest benefit they’ve seen from modernization is improved customer experience (49%). 

• The CEO currently drives innovation among C-suite, but within three years innovation will be companywide responsibility: Organizations still need to modernize, transform and innovate, and it will take a companywide shift to make that happen, with everyone participating. Currently, innovation is led from top down by the CEO (65%), CIO (58%), and department heads (54%), while only 12% said the workforce as a whole is leading it. However, 56% of respondents anticipate that innovation will be everyone’s responsibility in three years — and not just that of the leadership.

Additional data revealed:

• 39% agree that their organization is regularly “out-changed” by its competitors and industry peers. 
• IT decision makers see more benefits to modernization overall than business decision makers, especially when it comes to streamlining processes (48%). 
• 59% of organizations agree they have to get technology “right” over the next 12 months to ensure continued success. 
• 86% say that technology will dramatically change the way their organizations operate over the next 10 years.

“Employees drive every business process and interaction. Investing in your workforce today by improving their training, workflow, and resources with technology will position your company as the one to beat,” continued Port. “It takes the right kind of culture and the right people to continuously out-change and get ahead of the competition. Modernization and innovation needs to start today and then never stop.” 

To view the study in its entirety, visit www.boomi.com/content/ebook/vanson-bourne-report/

Methodology

Boomi partnered with Vanson Bourne to survey more than 1,200 IT decision makers and business decision makers from 19 countries across North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. Respondents represented eight key sectors and companies ranging from 500 to more than 3,000 employees.

On June 4, 2020, the National Settlement Depository (NSD) and the Taiwan Depository and Clearing Corporation (TDCC) signed a Memorandum of Understanding. 

The partnership between NSD and TDCC is aimed at forming a long-term cooperation that will help simplify the process of implementing business innovations and will contribute to the development of the capital markets of Taiwan and Russia.

The parties have agreed to support constructive dialogue and cooperation in the field of electronic voting, the use of financial technologies, servicing investors, providing information services, training specialists of companies through joint seminars, as well as strengthening bilateral ties.

NSD actively develops cooperation with foreign central securities depositories, both in a bilateral format and within the framework of regional associations. Both organizations pay considerable attention to the development of high-tech services for market participants, which will allow cooperation in this area to achieve a synergistic effect.

Sherman Lin, Chairman & CEO of TDCC, noted: "The signing of this MOU is the symbol of a new beginning for both sides to work together in the future. The value and the purpose of the MOU will be to utilize the two entities’ advantages and expertise of core businesses to drive innovation and respond to the opportunities and challenges due to the technological impacts on the market infrastructure."

“This memorandum’s signing is the first important practical step towards building infrastructural channels of interaction between our markets. Judging upon our experience in this area there is a significant demand for such form of cooperation among market participants. In the future it will create additional value for investors of both markets.” – added Eddie Astanin, Chairman of NSD’s Executive Board.

Specialist RegTech provider Shield is proud to announce it has been selected by Microsoft to join it’s One Commercial Partner (OCP) program, which provides best-of-breed Cloud-based solutions. The partnership means the Shield platform is now available on Microsoft's App Source and Azure Marketplace enabling a closer working relationship and collaboration between Shield and Microsoft, benefitting financial industry customers looking to leverage the combined power of both platforms.  

Eran Noam, Global VP Sales and Marketing at Shield states, “We are delighted to join the Microsoft OCP program. Our powerful financial communications capture and surveillance platform already features a compliance layer for all MS Teams interactions and Office 365/Exchange emails, offering the most enhanced, field proven, and scalable compliance hub for the Microsoft communication and collaboration suite. This partnership enables us to further promote the benefits of integration between our systems to enhance the value to our clients.”

Shield joining the Microsoft OCP program is a further demonstration of the company’s commitment to supporting Microsoft’s platform deployment throughout the financial sector. Shield was one of the first compliance platforms to provide full surveillance as well as record management and search of Microsoft Teams interactions, providing the ability to extract, review and analyze specific conversations to assist with any investigation process. In addition, the Shield platform is optimized for full MS Azure cloud deployments.

Eran adds, “With increased remote working and ongoing disruption to many business operations because of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, many firms are looking at their options for maintaining regulatory compliance and surveillance during these challenging times. As an early supporter of the Microsoft platform in the RegTech sphere, Shield is highly experienced and perfectly placed to help Regulated firms meet these needs, as they switch to Microsoft Teams as a key part of their journey towards cloud services.”

Leading information technology company CWG, today announced that it has partnered with Banking Enterprise Financial Crime Risk Management products company Clari5 to jointly help African banks combat enterprise fraud and money laundering.

Through this strategic partnership, CWG and Clari5 will provide solutions to African banks to counter enterprise-wide fraud and money laundering risk. Banks across Africa can now benefit from the unparalleled advantages of Clari5’s extreme real-time, cross channel, enterprise-wide fraud risk management capability.

“We are tremendously excited to partner with Clari5,” said Adewale Adeyipo, Group CEO, CWG. “The pan-African fraud and money laundering landscape has become alarmingly sophisticated over the last few years and clearly banks are seeking more efficient solutions to combat the scourge. But dealing with the new reality is beyond the league of conventional, siloed anti-fraud solutions. With Clari5, banksnow the power of a world-class enterprise-wide real-time financial crime management solution that has been changing the way banks fight financial crime.”

Clari5 CEO, Rivi Varghese, added, “We believe that the best way to combat fraud and money laundering is with a solution that can behave like the human central nervous system to synthesize intelligence from across all channels of the bank in that very moment when it matters most. Clari5’s provenreal-timeproduct capability in thwarting financial crime, coupled with CWG’s unparalleled market reach and rich legacy of engagement successes makes it a compelling value proposition for innovative African banks to prevent bottom-line losses to financial crime. We are both proud and delighted to partner with CWG – the legendary African technology leader.”

Solidatus, the leader in metadata management, is announcing the latest update of its award-winning platform, incorporating a freshly enriched and fully integrated Data Catalog, providing improved data management functionality.

Alongside enhancements which further reinforce the industry-leading platform’s functionality and enterprise-scale visualisation, the optimised Data Catalog allows business and technology users to speak the same language by linking business glossaries, data dictionaries and data lineage models together. It effectively increases the understanding, insights and impact analysis an organisation can gain from its data by defining and mapping terms against complex data flows within their business.

In this latest version of the platform, Solidatus’ lineage-first approach to effective metadata management integrates and elevates the Data Catalog and business glossary to optimum operational relevance. It seamlessly links the business to the technical, and the physical to the logical or conceptual.

Through the improvements to the Data Catalog and overall software functionality, the platform’s highly interactive model means users can more easily trace the impact and interplay of terminology, data and technology throughout all organisational connection points.

Additional advanced features in the updated functionality include:

• Enhanced graph analytics and new mathematic capabilities for data aggregation and visualisation
• Applied Machine Learning to accelerate and automate glossary term assignment
• Additional third-party connectivity for easy integration in data ecosystems
• Enhanced configurable, audited, versioned workflow providing governance and control
• Extended collaboration and socialisation of data assets, models and taxonomies
• Increased dashboard functionality and customised access to models to suit user personas

This fourth-generation update was made available to all users at the end of May, with automatic updates for cloud access, and simple on-demand upgrades for non-cloud systems.

Philip Dutton, co-founder of Solidatus, comments, “We’ve listened to the modern metadata challenges faced across all industries - ease of use, scale, performance, sustainability and flexibility with demonstrable control that’s affordable - version four delivers on all of these.

“In this evolution, we transformed Solidatus to include our enriched Data Catalog, becoming a feature in its own right. Our industry-leading visual scale, performance and functionality has been enhanced, delivering users an enterprise-scale, easy to use, flexible, performant and tightly integrated solution. The new features work seamlessly together allowing organisations to automate, manage and understand how their data, people, process and technology interact.”

AvaTrade, an award-winning forex and CFD broker, has announced the opening of its latest office in Warsaw, Poland. This expansion adds to AvaTrade’s growing international presence, including offices in Dublin, Milan, Tokyo, and Sydney, and is a significant step forward in the broker’s aim to accommodate the needs of traders internationally.

The establishment of the new office, which follows another recent opening in Abu Dhabi, will mean AvaTrade’s Polish clients can enjoy a localised trading experience – with enhanced customer support and training in their native language and under local regulation. The new office will be led by Branch Manager Patryk Schulmeister, who brings over a decade’s experience in the online media, marketing and sales fields.

Dáire Ferguson, CEO at AvaTrade, comments: “AvaTrade is committed to empowering people from across the globe to trade in a safe, innovative and reliable environment. The opening of our Polish office will see local traders benefit from a richer trading experience, backed by our best-in-class service, dedicated support and custom-made solutions to fit their trading requirements in their local language. Under Patryk’s direction, I have no doubt this new endeavour will see our Polish business go from strength to strength.”

Schulmeister adds: “I am thrilled to be leading AvaTrade’s Polish branch and very much look forward to contributing to the business’s growth here in Warsaw. Given AvaTrade’s success across the globe, I have no doubt its products will resonate similarly in Poland and anticipate an exciting year ahead.”

Find out more about AvaTrade’s global presence at https://www.avatrade.com/about-avatrade.