Centage Corporation (www.centage.com), the leading provider of cloud financial software that transforms how businesses budget, forecast, analyze and report, announced today its 2020 goals for its Centage Gives Back community outreach program, which has been expanded with new organizations and opportunities. Throughout 2020, teams of Centage employees look to donate at least 300 hours to local organizations that serve area residents in need.

Some of these organizations include:

• Natick Service Council. Teams of five Centage volunteers will work in the food pantry of this nonprofit organization which supports those experiencing hardship through their food pantry, financial assistance, holiday programs and many other activities. Centage plans to send its teams to help the pantry organize food donations and anticipates donating approximately 60 hours of volunteer time.
• Ashland ReStore, Habitat for Humanity. Beginning in March 2020, teams of 10 Centage employees will volunteer to help staff of the Ashland ReStore with various store tasks, including customer service, cleaning, testing and pricing. Centage anticipates donating about 140 hours of volunteer time.
• Community Harvest Project. Throughout the year, Centage employees will perform a variety of tasks as needed by the Community Harvest Project, a non-profit farm that engages volunteers to grow fresh fruits and vegetables to provide to those experiencing hunger. Centage plans to donate at least half a day and 5-10 volunteers for this program.
• Birthday Wishes. New to the Centage Gives Back program, Birthday Wishes provides birthday parties for homeless children and their families. Teams of seven Centage employees will participate in “wrapping parties” in preparation for the birthday celebrations. Centage anticipates donating 56 hours to this organization.

This is on top of the Thanksgiving Food drive and Holiday Toy drive that Centage participates in on a yearly basis for Pathways Family Shelter, and the multiple local food pantries that employees collect donations for and volunteer time to serve throughout the year. Centage’s commitment to giving back has been a primary focus for the company, as it understands the importance and value that comes from fostering a sense of engagement with the community and providing for those less fortunate.

“We are proud of our employees and their commitment to serving those in need. We embarked on this program as a way to give back to the community in which we live and work; a community that has given us so much in terms of talent and resources. We realized over the past 12 months that volunteering offers many benefits in return, especially with regards to team building, creating a more inclusive corporate culture, and making Centage a better place to work. We look forward to getting out into the community and working side-by-side with these incredible organizations throughout the year,” said John Murdock, CEO of Centage.

At its 2020 Conference, InvestCloud announced the launch of InvestCloud White, a digital platform for wealth management and turnkey asset management programs (TAMPs).

InvestCloud White is a complete solution for the wealth management space, designed and built on a single unified platform for IFAs to run their entire business, or for turnkey asset management programs to support dozens of others. It provides wealth managers and TAMPs the opportunity to truly scale, supporting front to back-office operations with functions such as research, portfolio construction, rebalancing, reconciliation, billing, performance reporting, tax optimisation, and client reporting.

Founded in 2010, InvestCloud offers world-class digital solutions to the financial industry through its proprietary set of hyper modular apps and supports more than $2 trillion in assets across more than 700 diverse clients. With the addition of InvestCloud White, the platform’s suite of apps covers all areas of a wealth manager’s business. InvestCloud White reinforces the hyper-modularity of the company’s products. It combines InvestCloud’s Blue™ (client communication, automation and management), Orange™ (digital warehouse, aggregation, and content management), Black™ (performance and risk) and Green™ (trade processing and accounting) products.

“The launch of InvestCloud White marks a new opportunity for our clients to instantly gain access to our hundreds of hyper modular apps, with a complete front to back turnkey solution,” said Yaela Shamberg, co-founder and chief product officer of InvestCloud. “We successfully deployed all components of InvestCloud’s end-to-end digital platform for Westwood, an InvestCloud strategic partner and foundational client. From there, we partnered with Westwood to envision this approach to license the full product suite into one integrated platform. Westwood had found that tech stacks in this space are generally an amalgamation of disparate systems that are difficult for wealth managers to navigate. Not only is InvestCloud one of the few products built in the last decade but is by far one of the most innovative, proven by the volume of new client mandates.”

Brian O. Casey, president and CEO at Westwood Holdings Group NYSE: WHG commented, “At Westwood, we have embraced integrating major technological innovations and tools for several years with an eye toward the future. Designed from the ground up to be an intuitive and seamless experience for advisors and clients alike, InvestCloud White will help move us closer to our goal of creating a leading, holistic, digital client experience that can be accessed anywhere, any time on all popular devices.”

Speaking at the InvestCloud Conference in Miami, FL, John Wise, co-founder and CEO of InvestCloud, said, “Today, at the InvestCloud Conference in front of more than one hundred and fifty clients, we’re proud to introduce InvestCloud White. It fulfils a vision that we had when we created InvestCloud in a garage in California 10 years ago. This is a product that serves a real market need – wealth managers and IFAs are spending far too much time and money managing dozens of different and outdated pieces of expensive technology that are poorly integrated and provide inflexible information. InvestCloud White gives managers an opportunity to focus on their core business - so they can spend their time where it matters and stop fighting last century’s technology problems.”

The completion of an initiative to break the barrier of gender bias preventing women from becoming leaders in technology has been announced. With 32% of women still believing a gender gap exists, placing a major hurdle between them and their future careers, Compass Plus  introduced an educational programme specifically for women.

Designed to empower women to enter the IT sector and to equip them with a comprehensive IT skillset, Compass Plus launched IT4EVA.  Women in the programme were allocated a dedicated mentor, to help them gain professional qualifications and upskill them for their future careers.

“Women have been underrepresented for so long when it comes to careers in technology,” said Victoria E. Mialovskaya, IT4EVA Graduate and Software Engineer at Compass Plus. “I am thankful to Compass Plus for giving me the opportunity to have access to this kind of tuition. We hope to become role models for the next generation - it’s time that women had the opportunity to shine as experts in tech and to eliminate the imbalance we see so often.”

With comprehensive IT based training modules, including sessions on mobile and web development and JavaScript, IT4EVA students were exposed to an extensive knowledge network and the use of the latest high tech equipment as they undertook their studies.

“Encouraging diversity is a top priority for us,” said Vyacheslav Arkadiev, Head of Applications Software Directorate at Compass Plus. “IT4EVA allows us to translate our extensive software development expertise into becoming an important access point to take women into top jobs in IT. We look forward to seeing how this cultural transformation evolves, as more and more women become highly skilled computer programmers.”

Compass Plus employs a total of 248 women within its Group of Companies, with 32 in management positions.

Avelacom, the high-performance global connectivity and IT infrastructure provider for the financial services industry, has deployed a new point-of-presence (PoP) in Ashburn, Virginia, with direct connectivity to Amazon AWS US – East–1 region. Its AWS Ashburn to AWS Dublin, one of the most popular routes for cryptocurrency arbitrage, is now the fastest line available in the market at a guaranteed 65.3ms round-trip latency.

The new connection to AWS Ashburn provides greater geographical coverage and increased predictable performance for arbitrage strategies for Avelacom clients such as cryptocurrency hedge funds, asset managers, broker dealers and proprietary trading firms dealing with multiple global exchanges.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is known for hosting the world’s leading cryptocurrency trading venues, making it essential for latency-sensitive firms to have close physical proximity to exchanges’ matching engines and fast and reliable connectivity between them. To keep up with this growing demand Avelacom has previously setup low latency connections to AWS locations in Dublin, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Hong Kong. These connections support improved price discovery and order execution.

Aleksey Larichev, CEO of Avelacom said: “Cryptocurrency trading is a very dynamic market, with high growth rates and is a key focus for Avelacom this year. A key driver of institutional adoption is IT infrastructure, which our solution portfolio and ready-to-go infrastructure provides. Our goal is to make markets more accessible and pave the way for greater number of market participants.”

Avelacom currently has more than 80 PoPs globally and connects all types of exchanges. Every aspect of the network architecture is optimized for law latency operations to meet the high standards required by capital markets.

AccessFintech, which delivers collaboration, transparency and control to the financial services industry, and Cappitech, a leading provider of regulatory reporting, best execution analysis and business intelligence solutions for the financial services industry, today announced they will collaborate to deliver greater governance and risk controls for market participants by providing their combined solution to clients across the financial ecosystem.

The new collaboration is an extension of the firms’ existing partnership announced in late 2017 to deliver MiFID II solutions to the market.

The enhanced services include AccessFintech’s exception management solution across trading workflows, as well as Cappitech’s platform which offers multi-jurisdiction transaction reporting and analytics, covering the regulatory evolution from EMIR through North America and Asian governance, to MiFID II and SFTR. AccessFintech recently launched its Global Exception Network with a settlement workflow solution with Citi, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and J.P, Morgan. Cappitech is addressing regulatory challenges efficiently in order to reduce operational risk and costs while simultaneously providing instant intelligence on business operations for users. 

The data distribution capabilities of AccessFintech can drive the regulatory processing provided by Cappitech, providing banks with a seamless way of accessing new technologies using the same workflow engine.

Roy Saadon, CEO of AccessFintech commenting on the partnership, said: “I am excited by our alliance - the technology delivery of our products with those of Cappitech’s is seamless across the whole lifecycle. We want to eliminate context switching: the industry has too many screens, too much switching. We want to provide a much smoother interaction, and a frictionless flow of data. I believe there is huge appetite for this new type of collaboration, with shared domain and knowledge transfer.”

Ronen Kertis, CEO of Cappitech, added: “We have a similar approach, and moreover a similar user experience, making  it attractive for our clients to be able to access both suites of solutions. Our goal is to help companies perfect reporting and one way we do this is by leveraging the “wisdom of the crowd” derived from our experience in servicing over 100 financial firms.”

Founded in 1923, Vantage Bank Texas (Vantage) — the family-owned community bank operating across Texas and Mexico — today announced that it has selected Backbase’s digital platform to develop dynamic user journeys across its entire client base.

Following a successful merger with Mcallen-based Inter National Bank in 2018 and an expansion into North Texas in 2019, Vantage wants to unify and enhance the banking experiences of each of its business lines. Vantage’s goal is to make each of its touchpoints uniform and introduce a more innovative development process that will meet changing customer demands quickly and build tailored products as needed. This ability to customize the customer journey is particularly crucial to Vantage due to the opportunity they see in providing business banking and private banking in Texas and Mexico. Vantage recognizes that Backbase’s modular and microservice-based architecture best facilitates the personalized approach they seek to provide.

Vantage Senior Executive Vice President, Jeff Sinnott, commented: “After an expansive assessment of the options available to us to help us become the remarkable community bank we seek to achieve, we concluded that Backbase unquestionably checks all the boxes. They provide a ‘one-stop-shop’ for us, firstly to implement a standardized online experience across all channels and then to design specific features for our various customer segments. The needs and preferences of each of our customer segments must always be front of mind. To create these personalized user journeys, our process has to be deeply collaborative and, with Backbase, we now have significantly more control over our customers’ digital experiences. For example, we can leverage all historical data about each customer to suggest channels and solutions which work best for their specific needs to enhance their experiences and reduce their costs, thus adding real value. Soon, we’ll be rolling out a series of new features starting with an updated portal for our business customers followed by a retail experience and deposit account opening.”

Jouk Pleiter, CEO of Backbase, added: “Vantage Bank Texas’s vision for Backbase implementation is particularly exciting. Their requirements were so specific against the backdrop of the recent growth and expansion of their footprint, and their customer-focused company vision. It speaks volumes that Vantage opted for our flexible platform – our solution is not just for big banks, but can be implemented with a bank of any size, for any business function, in any region as long as they have the right ambition. Like Vantage Bank Texas, there are many community banks across the country who serve a niche client base that have a precise strategy in mind but lack the internal development engine or capital weight of global banks for their new technology. Our platform acts as the perfect innovation partner for all banks to achieve those digital objectives and better serve their clients.  We are confident that Vantage customers will be thrilled with the results of this decision.”

Masthaven Bank has launched a digital development programme for its female leaders which aims to hone their leadership skills, develop as professionals and help them build stronger peer support communities at work.  The announcement follows research from the bank which suggests brokers feel that gender diversity - while still an issue for the financial services sector – has improved over the past five years.

The bank, which is delivering the programme in collaboration with WDI Consulting Limited, which specialises in culture change and inclusion, will see eight female members of its leadership team engage in a personalised development programme over a six-month time period.

News of the launch follows a research report from Masthaven which suggests brokers feel that gender diversity in the industry is improving.  According to Masthaven Bank’s Broker Beat research survey, more than a third of brokers surveyed (37%) who said gender diversity was a problem for the industry also said it has improved over the last five years. 

Tricia Halpin, chief people officer at Masthaven Bank and leading the Women in Leadership scheme said:

“We’ve worked hard to ensure all of our colleagues have equal opportunities to grow in their roles and realise their career ambitions.  The Women in Leadership programme is about enhancing the skills of our female leaders and empowering them to influence change in the wider industry.  However, while we have achieved a good gender balance in our leadership teams at Masthaven, we recognise that there is always room to improve and will continue our recruitment and development drive for more diverse teams across the bank.  

“Brokers feel gender diversity in the industry is improving, and that is a positive sign.  However, it is clear the market still faces challenges in getting more women into senior roles and attracting new talent – almost seven out of ten (69%) brokers we surveyed feel the market needs to do more to improve its image to appeal to younger people, for example.  We’re working with our leaders to help inspire the industry – whether that be through speaking at events, digital networking or in conversation with brokers – to continue striving for positive change.”

Women on the development programme will take part in a series of digital workshops, one-to-one coaching sessions with WDI Consulting specialists and have access to an online networking group for women leaders.

Lynn White, founder at WDI Consulting and specialist in women’s leadership development said:

“Extensive research shows that having more diverse teams leads to more profitable, sustainable businesses where teams are encouraged to thrive.

“Our digital programme is based on our extensive research into gender balance and more than a decade’s experience of one-to-one coaching in this space.  Collaborating with Masthaven on this programme for their leaders has been hugely rewarding.  They are taking a pro-active approach to diversity in a sector where there is a huge opportunity to build a differentiating inclusive brand.  We’re looking forward to continuing our work with the Masthaven team in their mission to lead from the front in the drive for gender diversity across the industry.”

Masthaven’s Broker Beat research also suggested that more than three quarters (77%) of intermediaries are confident about the market’s prospects for 2020, citing remortgaging, second charge finance products and later-life lending as key areas for potential growth. 

Following a competitive tender process, Ikano Bank, an international consumer finance bank, has chosen Nets, a European payment services provider, to provide a full-scale lending platform, issuer processing and related services. The four-year contract significantly extends Nets’ existing card processing relationship with Ikano Bank and reflects Nets’ continued expansion to support banks and issuers across Europe.

Under the terms of the contract, Nets will provide a full-scale lending platform to support Ikano Bank’s consumer finance services in all markets.

Peter Axemo, Head of Products, Ikano Bank comments: “We chose to build on our existing relationship with Nets because it offers a simple, innovative and competitive solution that would support the evolving needs of our customers. Nets worked hard to tailor an end-to-end solution specifically to Ikano Bank’s needs.”

Torsten Hagen Jørgensen, CEO of Issuer and eSecurity Services, Nets adds: “This expanded partnership is an important milestone for Nets’ expansion into Europe. By consolidating our range of services under an innovative commercial model we will enable Ikano Bank to grow in both existing and new geographies through utilising Nets’ modern, digital and open technologies. Our goal is to help issuers like Ikano Bank refocus their valuable internal resources on core business objectives, unburdened by complexity and the weight of making it all work together.”

With the contract now signed, the product implementation phase can begin, with the aim of launching the first accounts and products to Ikano Bank’s customers in autumn 2020.