In February, the number of registered investors on the European P2P platform Robo.cash reached 10,000. Remarkably, last year the geographical distribution of its users changed significantly, due to a large influx of investors from Bulgaria, Spain, Italy and Portugal.

Currently, the P2P investment platform Robo.cash serves users across the EU and Switzerland. The five largest countries by the number of investors are represented by Germany (34.6%), Spain (12.7%), Bulgaria (5.7%), Portugal (5.3%) and Italy (4%). While Germany and Spain have always been the leaders, the rest of the countries in the TOP 5  previously included Austria, Latvia, the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic. 

For a long time, German investors remained the main audience of the platform, however, the situation is changing. Over the past year, the number of Robo.cash users from Bulgaria increased 9.7 times, from Italy - 3.4 times, Spain - 3.2 times, Portugal - 2.3 times. 

Sergey Sedov, CEO of Robocash Group commented: “Historically, P2P investments have been more developed in the north-east and central Europe. Yet, based on our statistics, today, we observe a shift towards its other regions. Apart from the growing popularity of P2P throughout Europe, there may be other factors in each case. For example, in Bulgaria, the interest of investors in fintech can be fueled by the rapid development of the segment. The country is an evolving fintech hub in Southeast Europe with the largest number of companies in the sector, 12% of which focus on personal finance. Today, investments in P2P are available for any resident of Europe regardless of their experience, level of income and other factors. In the future, we can expect a wider presence of investors from other European countries on our platform as well.”

Since the launch of the platform in 2017, investors of Robo.cash have funded 1.5 million loans totaling €146 million. Their total income has amounted to €1.5 million. 

National Bank of Yemen (NBY), one of the largest commercial banks and a prominent contributor to the economic and social development in Yemen; has gone live with ICS BANKS Universal Banking Software from ICS Financial Systems Limited (ICSFS), the global software and services provider for banks and financial institutions, to grow its operations domestically and internationally.

The National Bank of Yemen (NBY) provides banking services ranging from Retail to Trade Finance, Treasury and Project Finance to individuals, corporates, and governmental institutions. Over the past fifty years, NBY has spread its presence in remote areas as well as major cities and towns of Yemen. On Sunday 02^nd February 2020, NBY announced the go-live and rollout of ICS BANKS Universal Banking Software from ICSFS.

Managing Director of National Bank of Yemen; Dr Ahmed Ali Ben Sanker said:

“I am privileged to announce on behalf of our bank’s entire team, the successful rollout of ICS BANKS banking software which was carried out within our bank's development and modernisation project framework. ICS BANKS’ innovative and best-in-class technologies introduced – for the first time in NBY’s history – a major paradigm shift in our banking services. We have replaced our old legacy system with ICS BANKS comprehensive banking software solutions, which significantly saved time. We are astounded with the software’s integrated design and ease of data inclusion. It is without a doubt, ICS BANKS will allow us to provide excellent and distinguished banking services to our large customer segments.”

Robert Hazboun, Managing Director of ICSFS said;

“NBY possesses a strong banking and financial position in Yemen, the bank was looking for banking software that will support them in maximising their profitability, whilst cutting operational costs. Our ICS BANKS software offers real financial clarity, with maximum financial efficiency, scalable features to support NBY’s growth and lead them through a successful lifetime business. We greet our new customers with open arms to innovation, highest quality and professionalism standards and deliver real value to their customers. Our journey with NBY has just started, we are looking forward to being their technology and business partner, driving a powerful and fruitful joint success.”

ICSFS invests in its software suites by utilising modern technology in launching new products, constructing a secured and agile integration, and keeping pace with new standards and regulations worldwide. ICS BANKS software suites future-proof banking activities by providing a broad range of features and capabilities with more agility and flexibility, to enrich customers' journey experience, hence improving the trust and confidentiality between the customer and the bank. ICS BANKS has always been a pioneer in utilising the latest technology to serve financial institutions. In addition to its embedded Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA), the system can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud.

Wolters Kluwer’s Lien Solutions business has won four major accolades from Finance Monthly magazine. The awards, all decided by an independent editorial panel, recognize the company’s leadership, as well as its leading technology solutions. Finance Monthly is a global publication from the Universal Media stable, providing news, comment and analysis, distributed to more than 195,000 people each month.

Raja Sengupta, Executive Vice President & General Manager of Wolters Kluwer Lien Solutions, has been named as one of the publication’s Game Changers for 2020. According to Finance Monthly’s editors, recipients of these awards help “to shape and transform the corporate landscape…a Game Changer introduces new ways of working and new methodologies that can revolutionize business and transform the customer experience.”

Meanwhile, Suzanne Konstance, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing for Wolters Kluwer Lien Solutions, has been honored with inclusion in the magazine’s Women in Finance Awards series. “The finance experts which feature in this year’s edition of the Finance Monthly Women in Finance Awards are women who consistently go above and beyond of what is expected of them, despite the challenges which the industry poses,” the magazine notes.

Finance Monthly has also recognized the product superiority of the company’s technology solutions. Both iLien Motor Vehicle and Portfolio Sync have been named “Product of the Year” in the magazine’s hotly contested FinTech Awards, 2020.

iLien Motor Vehicle delivers a single point of management for processing and managing motor vehicle titles. It helps automate, streamline and connect lenders’ organizational workflows, improving the vehicle titling process and the ongoing management of vehicle titles. Supported by Lien Solutions’ extensive experience in commercial lien management, the solution simplifies vehicle lien and title management for vehicle and equipment lenders.

Portfolio Sync is a first-of-its-kind automated lien management solution designed for lenders and financers who use multiple methods to submit Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) filings. Overlooked or incorrect filings can lead to vulnerabilities; Portfolio Sync provides full visibility into a lender’s lien portfolio, identifies potential issues that may require action to maintain and protect security interests and allows the lender to take any actions needed all from one powerful dashboard.

Wolters Kluwer Lien Solutions, part of Wolters Kluwer’s Governance, Risk & Compliance division, won a record 14 awards in 2019. This market-leading company provides award-winning solutions for lenders, including its flagship iLien offering, which gives lenders the ability to conduct public record searches, retrieve and view Uniform Commercial Code and corporate records, create filings, and manage their entire lending portfolio. iLien offers comprehensive analytics, reporting,  real-time debtor monitoring and lien auto-continuation capabilities, improving lenders’ ability to holistically view lien portfolios, help them mitigate risk, and improve the quality and efficiency of their operations.

Tyl by NatWest is a merchant payment platform developed by Pollinate, working together with RBS over an 18 month period. It was launched in September 2019 in the UK and will launch in other markets in 2020. 

Pollinate is a software company that helps banks innovate their payments businesses. The platform is cloud based – hosted in Azure – and powers merchant and consumer digital experiences.  These include onboarding, portals and loyalty programs, which can be deployed without costly and distracting platform migrations. The Platform allows merchants to more effectively manage their businesses with digital tools and data integrations, grow their businesses by connecting with their consumers, and give back to their local communities.

Al Lukies CBE, Founder and CEO of Pollinate, said: “We are hugely proud to have worked hand in hand with RBS to create Tyl. We are committed to supporting SMEs – a critical part of all local economies.  Successful collaboration and innovation between fintechs and banks is critical to create the customer solutions of tomorrow, and we are delighted with what we are achieving with RBS.”

EquiLend, the global technology company for the securities finance, collateral and swaps industries, announced the addition of five new counterparties to its NGT securities finance trading platform: DZ Bank AG, E*Trade, Janney Montgomery Scott, Matsui Securities and TD Ameritrade.

NGT is EquiLend’s multi-asset class trading platform for the securities finance marketplace, on which more than 100 firms worldwide are now actively trading.

Average daily transaction notional on NGT exceeded $80 billion in 2019 across more than 50,000 trades each day. NGT users are based in more than 30 cities globally.

Brian Lamb, CEO of EquiLend, says: “We are pleased to welcome these five valued new clients from around the globe to NGT, the securities finance industry’s only true trading community. Firms that conduct their trading on NGT reap the benefits of fully automated, algorithmic trading leveraging our artificial intelligence technology.”

Paul Lynch, Global Head of Products, EquiLend, says: “We have seen explosive growth in electronic trading in the global securities finance market in recent years as market participants recognize the value NGT brings in workflow efficiency. Additionally, especially as regulators are requiring more transparency into market activity, firms are increasingly finding manual, bilateral trading to be a barrier to profitability. NGT offers firms not only streamlined workflow but unrivaled access to their lending and borrowing counterparties.”

NGT, which launched in 2015, reinvented the securities finance trading paradigm by offering centralized access to unparalleled liquidity. NGT increases trade-level transparency, improves workflow automation and generates efficiencies market wide. NGT supports all types of securities finance instruments, including securities lending, repo and collateral transactions.

A recent analysis showed that trades executed on NGT have a far greater matched rate than those booked manually and have less risk of input errors, which will support firms’ Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR) and Central Securities Depositories Regulation (CSDR) requirements.

EquiLend has a long history of bringing automation to traditionally bilateral finance markets, having first launched automated securities finance trading in 2001. Swaptimization, EquiLend’s swaps trading platform, went live in December 2019, and EquiLend’s Collateral Trading platform is set to go live in February 2020.

Linedata (Euronext Paris: LIN), a global provider of credit and asset management technology, data and services has released its new generation platform for credit origination and risk management, Linedata Capitalstream 2020. This cloud-based platform is built with the latest technologies and offers continuous delivery of new features and enhancements. 

“Linedata is helping financial institutions accelerate their digital transformation,” said Jamil Jiva, EVP of Lending and Leasing North America at Linedata. “Already known for its unmatched flexibility and rich functionality, Linedata Capitalstream 2020 will put our clients at the forefront of digital transformation and drive their growth.” 

The platform significantly lowers clients’ total cost of ownership while not sacrificing industry-leading depth of functionality. The continuous delivery of new features and enhancements is made possible by containerization, which enables components to be updated without requiring changes to the platform or testing of the entire system. Because of this important technology, clients will derive immediate benefits from Linedata’s continuing investments in R&D. 

Linedata Capitalstream 2020 is compatible with market leading public cloud platforms. The solution will continue to offer easy integration with third-party and legacy systems with powerful APIs and microservices. 

Diebold Nixdorf, a global leader in driving connected commerce for the banking and retail industries, announced today it signed an ATM as a Service agreement with JoFiCo, a joint venture created in November 2019 by four Belgian banks (Argenta, AXA Bank, Crelan and vdk bank) and bpost, to manage their ATM network from end to end.

Over the next few years, Diebold Nixdorf will gradually replace older units with new DN Series ATMs that include a mix of cash out and cash recycling units, and upgrade the remaining ATMs to Windows® 10. DN Series provides seamless connectivity by leveraging IoT technology and was designed with the most robust security innovations as well as the smallest footprint in the industry.

Elke Hendrix, president of JoFiCo, said: "The ATM as a Service strategy enables us to join forces and continue to offer a high-quality service to our clients in the long term optimizing cash management. JoFiCo awarded the full span of services to our long-time partner Diebold Nixdorf because their approach allows us to continually evolve the consumer experience."

Xavier Bianne, vice president of Banking, Eurasia West at Diebold Nixdorf, said: "Our ATM as a Service program enables each of the banks participating in this joint venture to optimize internal operations and minimize the total cost of ownership all while ensuring their consumers remain delighted with their self-service experience. Each of the partners participating in the joint venture will retain its own commercial strategy and brand identity, while providing consumers with the convenience, security and access to cash they require."

Beyond.pl (www.beyond.pl), a leading international provider of Cloud and Colocation Solutions and Services in Poland and Eastern Europe has appointed Aman Khan as its new CEO.

“I am honored to take this role at Beyond.pl”, says Aman. “Our objective remains to increase our market share in Poland and to grow faster than the competition in our key markets. We operate two most state-of-the-art Data Centers in Poland and our service portfolio ranges from Colocation to Private and Public Cloud. Polish IT services market is very competitive.

However, our Hybrid Cloud offering, including Microsoft Azure as well as VMWare based Cloud solutions, make Beyond.pl a unique and leading provider for enterprise, financial institutions, as well as public sector, including healthcare, for both Polish and international customers”- underlined Aman Khan.

Aman holds MBA degree and has worked for the IT sector for 30+ years. He has held several international senior board level functions in the IT solutions and services market, while working for companies such as Global Switch, Dimension Data, Star Alliance, PSINet and General Electric (GE).