Published
- 06:00 am
Steve Morgan
Senior Director, Financial Services Europe at Pegasystems
Artificial Intelligence, Robotic Process Automation, Intelligent Automation, Blockchain, Tokenisation, Machine Learning - banks are struggling to work out which technologies are most suitable for t see more
Tom Blacksell
Managing Director UKI B2B at Experian
- 02:00 am
MoneyNetint, a leading global payment solution provider, announced a strategic partnership agreement with TerraPay, a mobile-first international payment network, which will expand and enhance MoneyNetint’s reach into Asia and Africa.
The partnership, which is leveraging to move money across borders, will provide a cost-effective option for European-based clients to send funds to the specified countries. Additionally, migrants from these countries can send money to their family and friends back home, instantly by transferring it to their bank account.
“We view this partnership as essential to our company’s continued growth, and look forward to working together with TerraPay,” said Avi Starodubsky, Head of Business Development for MoneyNetint. “With this expanded service area, MoneyNetint can continue to provide competitively priced, cost-effective payment services to our clients.”
“TerraPay is excited about working together with MoneyNetint,” said Ambar Sur, CEO at TerraPay. “We fully expect this partnership to allow more people from around the world to transfer money quickly, safely, and affordably.
- 02:00 am
Uncomplicated and secure trading in cryptocurrencies on the smartphone: this is possible with BISON, Boerse Stuttgart Group’s crypto app.
New features are being added gradually to BISON since the launch. The next steps have already been planned: a desktop version of BISON and the introduction of Bitcoin Cash as an additional tradable cryptocurrency. Since January 2020, users have been able to transfer Bitcoin from their private wallets to BISON, and this facility is also planned for the other tradable cryptocurrencies. Since recently, interested citizens of the European Economic Area and Switzerland who want to use BISON can download the app. In 2019, the app was upgraded with individual price alerts and an info report showing amounts to be declared for tax purposes. Since October 2019, trading on BISON has been available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Users can trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple (XRP) on BISON, free of charge and at the prices displayed in the app. BISON makes its profit from the spreads between the buying and selling prices displayed. There are no additional costs for users. The trading partner of the users at BISON is EUWAX AG, a subsidiary of Boerse Stuttgart GmbH that is regulated in Germany as a financial services provider. Users therefore buy and sell cryptocurrencies from and to EUWAX AG in each case.
- 03:00 am
Pleo is evolving – and perhaps the most important change is our new cards.
But in order to offer a market-leading product, we pushed ourselves to go beyond that and to reimagine our card.
So we made a couple of changes - some big, some small, all good for our users.
The benefits of a new Pleo credit card
The first thing to know is that we’re moving away from prepaid cards.
Pleo will still be powered by Mastercard, but now we’ll be empowering our customers with credit cards.
It’s a collaboration with Mastercard and J.P. Morgan, seizing an opportunity that will help our customers hugely.
Tristan Attenborough, M.D. in EMEA Wholesale Payments at J.P. Morgan says: “The technology and our co-development approach means Pleo is now better placed to serve European SMEs and help them manage their expenses through a powerful combination of automatic liquidity management, real-time payments and multicurrency credit cards.”
All of that has three very obvious benefits for our customers:
A credit card is more widely-accepted than a prepaid one. That includes the ability to make payments to Google AdWords, Microsoft Azure, plus many car rental sites and hotel chains.
It’s more stable too. Nobody wants a card that doesn’t work - just as it’s their turn to pay for a team dinner. Now, Pleo cards will have an uptime of 99.9%. It’s still not perfect, but it’s a big step in the right direction.
And it’s more secure. 3D Secure payments (when you try to buy something online and need to enter in a code that’s been sent to you) can now be handled with a simple tap to approve a notification from the Pleo app.
We’re introducing credit too, something that’s going to ensure that your wallet never runs dry.
Yeah, this is a big one.
Credit when your team needs it
They say you never forget your first Pleo wallet top-up.
Managing your company spend is still straightforward with our new credit cards.
Admins add funds to a central wallet, one that every Pleo cardholder in the company has access to.
What’s changed? You’ll no longer see reference codes or waiting times.
We’ll work closer with your bank account too. Connecting with just a few clicks, you’ll be able to instantly fund your wallet and initiate automatic wallet loads.
And here’s the key thing.
Customers will also be able to use credit by Pleo to fund their wallets and ensure they never run dry.
Our state-of-the-art credit offering will enable you to get approved on the spot, with no personal guarantees, credit scoring, or security deposits required.
- 02:00 am
Organizations have invested billions into collecting and extracting value from data, yet the IDC recently found that 73% of an organization’s time-to-insight is spent searching for and preparing data, while only 27% is spent on actual analysis.
On average, data workers spend 44% of their time on repeatable and automatable tasks. Kloud.io addresses these glaring inefficiencies for enterprises by giving analysts instantaneous and reliable access to the data they need, in the tools they love using. In just three years, Kloud.io has made data access effortless for hundreds of financial analysts and has drastically increased productivity and data-accessibility at multiple prominent enterprises.
"Kloud.io dramatically increases the productivity of analysts while simultaneously freeing up a large amount of engineering and IT bandwidth - a game changing concept for large enterprises."
-Krishna Bhat, Cofounder and CEO of Kloud.io
Today, Kloud.io announced a $4M seed funding round led by Unusual Ventures, with participation from Jason Calacanis and Firebolt Ventures.
Kloud.io is a spreadsheet-based application that empowers financial analysts to directly and instantly access data from any source, such as Netsuite, Oracle, Salesforce, and hundreds more. A financial analyst can directly pull data without leaving Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Smartsheet, or Airtable and without involving the data engineering team. Kloud.io’s customers include Endurance, ICGAM, Oyo Rooms, and Rakuten Rewards among others.
For example, a video streaming giant uses Kloud.io to connect several internal and external applications directly to Microsoft Excel. Within Excel, analysts can pull up to one million rows of financial data and have it automatically refreshed as needed. Financial analysts and data analysts across the video streaming giant now rely on Kloud.io’s no-code report builder (shown below) to get business data on demand without any IT intervention. The company estimates saving 10,000 hours annually, the equivalent of 5 full-time employees, since implementing Kloud.io.
Sathish Raju and Krishna Bhat, Kloud.io’s founders, met at Oracle Corporation as data engineers and solution architects. Their careers brought them to Amazon, Cisco, McDonald’s, and Tyco where they experienced inefficient data analytics processes firsthand. They witnessed teams spend thousands of hours processing and exporting data into spreadsheets for financial analysts to do the ultimate “last mile” analysis.
“At AppDynamics we were drowning in data and I wished we had a product like Kloud.io,” said Jyoti Bansal, cofounder of Unusual Ventures and founder of AppDynamics. “One of my management philosophies is to empower my employees. Kloud.io is at the forefront of spreadsheet-based process automation. They are making sure all employees have easy access to data without intervention from the IT team.”
“Companies are collecting more data than ever due to an explosion in SaaS applications,” said Krishna Bhat, co-founder and CEO of Kloud.io. “Giving employees across different departments within an organization access to this data in a self-service manner is the next challenge. Not only do we allow any analyst to pull data with no SQL knowledge or programming ability required, we allow them to do so without ever leaving their spreadsheet.t. Kloud.io dramatically increases the productivity of analysts while simultaneously freeing up a large amount of engineering and IT bandwidth - a game changing concept for large enterprises.”
- 02:00 am
Baton Systems, a provider of "blockchain-inspired" bank-to-bank payments infrastructure for connecting multiple ledgers, has topped up its recent $12 million funding round with an extra $4 million from VC Illuminate Financial.
Founded in 2016 as Ubixi, Baton is working to simplify the "remarkably archaic" payments process in global banking, increasing return on capital, reducing processing times and driving down costs.
In November, the firm revealed that it has been enlisted by JP Morgan to develop a DLT-based platform that helps automate derivatives margin payments.
In a blog on its investment, Illuminate's Luca Zorzino stresses that Baton's value proposition is not blockchain, and is "barely" a distributed ledger.
"The way we think of the proposition is that it’s an orchestration layer between existing ledgers that forces a synchronous workflow," he writes.
Blockchain initiatives may offer great potential but require participants to agree on protocols or standards.
"The team at Baton understood that the path of least resistance was to keep the assets in existing ledgers, connect to them and build a distributed overlay that would offer a number of the advantages that come with blockchain technology," says Zorzino.
- 02:00 am
Citi's consumer business has introduced a digital wealth investment tool for clients with as little as $1500 to invest.
Once the account is open, Citi Wealth Builder takes it from there, monitoring and automatically rebalancing diversified ETF portfolios designed and managed by investment experts. Customers may follow their accounts online or in the Citi Mobile App, with live support available 24/7.
“Citi Wealth Builder makes it easy for clients to start investing so they can reach the next level of their financial journey,” said John Cummings, Head of Citi U.S. Consumer Wealth Management. “It’s part of Citi’s holistic approach to banking and wealth management. In just a few minutes, customers can start building a solid foundation for years to come.”
Citi customers can start using the new digital platform with a low initial investment of $1,500 and no advisory fees for Citi Priority and Citigold clients on their initial portfolio. Additional accounts have a low advisory fee of 0.55%.
The digital advisory tool was developed in concert with Jemstep, a subsidiary of Invesco.
“Jemstep is proud to partner with Citi to provide personalized, goal-based wealth advice to their clients,” says Simon Roy, president and CEO of Jemstep. “We have worked closely with Citi to configure the Jemstep digital advice platform to provide a compelling client experience that supports Citi’s unique value proposition, omni-channel delivery capabilities and robust operational and compliance requirements.”
- 09:00 am
Ian Smith, Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Virgin Money UK PLC, will join Nordea as Group CFO and Head of Group Finance. He will also become a member of the Group Leadership Team.
Ian Smith, 53, currently serves as Group CFO of Virgin Money UK PLC. He has an extensive background in the financial services sector in the UK and has held senior positions as Banking audit partner and later as Financial Services M&A leader at Deloitte. Ian has also served as Director of Group Finance at Lloyds Banking Group plc and at Halifax Bank of Scotland plc. He has a degree in Economics from the University of Aberdeen.
- I am pleased to welcome Ian to Nordea. He brings leadership, expertise and a strong track record. With his background and experience in the financial services sector focused on finance, treasury, business planning, cost management and M&A he is the ideal CFO for Nordea. The appointment supports Nordea’s new phase and our key priorities – optimise operational efficiency, drive income growth initiatives and create great customer experiences – and I look forward to working with him across the business and in the Group Leadership Team, says President and Group CEO Frank Vang-Jensen.
- Nordea is the leading bank in the Nordic region. I am excited to join Nordea’s new phase and look forward to working with the Group Leadership Team to drive financial performance and help unlock the potential of the bank, says Ian Smith.
The appointment is subject to regulatory approval.
Ian will remain in his role at Virgin Money UK PLC to support an orderly transition until a date after Virgin Money’s interim results announcement (due to be on 6 May 2020) to be agreed.
As announced earlier, the current CFO Christopher Rees has decided to relocate to the UK and will leave Nordea and step down from the Group Leadership Team at the latest when Ian joins. The exact transition date will be announced later.
