OKEx (www.okex.com), the world’s largest digital asset futures exchange, has been named among the top 10 exchanges among 160+ active spot exchanges globally, according to the latest cryptocurrency Exchange Benchmark report from CryptoCompare, a global leader in digital asset data. With a refined methodology, the new report now offers market participants and new entrants the most comprehensive, granular and reliable source of information on the best digital asset trading venues. OKEx takes the top spot with a grade A verification in the Q3 report, further highlighting OKEx’s continuous effort and innovation in product development.

“We are glad to be well-received by our customers and analysts, and it’s encouraging to see our years of hard work rewarded with a grade A verification,” said Andy Cheung, Head of Operations of OKEx. “This honor by a trusted firm shows that we are on the right track. We will never stop improving, and will continue to develop and bring the best products to the global community. We hope to see ourselves at an even higher position next time.”

Launched in June 2019, CryptoCompare’s Exchange Benchmark was created in response to growing concerns over cryptocurrency exchanges engaging in wash trading and incentivised trading schemes to inflate volumes. The rankings bring transparency to the market and serve as a guide to traders, investors, regulators and exchange service providers who wish to understand the crypto exchange landscape and manage risks effectively.

The analysis reveals the top ten exchanges to be: Gemini (1), itBit (2), Coinbase (3), Kraken (4), Bitstamp (5), Liquid (6), OKEx (7), Poloniex (8), bitFlyer (9) and Bitfinex (10). The ranking components include geography, legal/regulatory, investment, team/company, data provision, trade surveillance, and market quality. Analysis is based on public information and detailed methodology is made freely available, underscoring CryptoCompare’s commitment to bringing greater transparency and improved decision-making to the cryptocurrency marketplace.

 ACH Alert, an award-winning provider of electronic payments fraud prevention technology for financial institutions of all sizes, and Apiture, a leading digital banking provider, have entered into a strategic partnership to offer ACH Alert’s patented fraud detection services to Apiture’s more than 450 customers.

Through this partnership, financial institutions using Apiture’s online banking platform can now contract for ACH Alert’s Fraud Prevention HQ’s suite of services directly with Apiture. Apiture’s customers will access and benefit from ACH Alert’s Fraud Prevention HQ platform, the industry’s first exception decisioning portal that provides a fully integrated dashboard for a financial institution’s customers to make pay or no-pay decisions on suspicious payment activity across all payment channels.

“Apiture brings a full suite of consumer and commercial banking solutions to more than 450 financial institutions, and we are excited to partner with ACH Alert to further enhance our cash management solutions,” said Chris Cox, President of Apiture. “ACH Alert has long provided the industry standard for fraud protection for many of our customers. Formalizing this partnership will enable us to bring a more unified experience to our online banking customers.”

As part of this partnership, Apiture invited ACH Alert to lead a breakout session at Accelerate 2019, Apiture’s two-day user conference held October 7-9, packed with industry-leading speakers, best practices and insider updates on Apiture. During the panel, “Is winter coming? Protecting your institution and customers from payment fraud,” ACH Alert CEO Debbie Peace, Citizens Union Bank VP of Treasury Services, Genny Wenta, and Apiture VP of Products, Kellie Endres, discussed tools that enable financial institutions to remain constantly vigil in the fight against fraud. In fact, PYMNTS reported that nearly three-fourths of U.S. financial institutions have experienced growing losses attributed to online and mobile fraud, proving that fraud prevention tools are necessary to combat this continuous threat.

“This partnership demonstrates the industry’s need for sufficient fraud prevention tools that can be easily accessed by account holders through their online banking platforms,” said Peace. “Apiture is already equipping financial institutions with quick and straightforward payment options that their customers crave, so adding our tools into the mix will assist their customers in mitigating the risks associated with electronic payments. We look forward to this journey with Apiture and the value it will provide the entire industry.”

Colt Technology Services has today announced that its premium business Internet offering, IP Access, is now available via its SDN-enabled On Demand platform.

Available from today, Colt’s IP Access On Demand capability sees enterprises being able to benefit from high bandwidth, agile, Internet connectivity provisioned in near-real-time.

Colt is operating its own global IP Backbone with presence at 25 Internet exchanges worldwide. Colt’s IP Access On Demand service combines the scale and performance of Colt’s Internet offering with the flexibility of On Demand. Customers can now take full control over their Internet connections, flexing bandwidth up and down in near-real-time, bypassing legacy service delivery processes and lead times – all through the use of a feature-rich self-service portal.

Customers are able to combine IP Access On Demand connections on the same physical port as On Demand Ethernet and cloud connections – enabling seamless and efficient connectivity.

Colt’s IP Access product is supported by the wholly-owned and managed Colt IQ Network, which is comprised of more than 900 data centres and 27,500 on net buildings globally.

Colt’s On Demand offering has gone from strength-to-strength, with the platform recently expanding to encompass more regions including the US, Hong Kong and more countries in Europe. Colt’s customers also have the ability to connect in real-time to many of the key cloud environments, with most recently Colt enabling direct, on-demand connectivity to the Google Cloud.

Peter Coppens, Vice President Product Portfolio, Colt Technology Services, says: “The business environment of today requires unprecedented flexibility. Enterprises now need connectivity solutions that can react to business challenges in real-time for them to be an actual differentiator. Colt’s On Demand offering has always been innovative, and adding IP Access to our On Demand portfolio reaffirms our market-leading position in the SDN market.

“We are not aware of any other providers who are able to offer IP Access On Demand services on this scale; to hundreds of data centres and tens of thousands of enterprise buildings. Colt is prioritising giving more control to our customers because we know enterprises today require high bandwidth, on-demand solutions to truly drive their continual digital transformations.”

Colt’s IP Access On Demand is available in Europe and is expected to roll out wider in Asia and the US in 2020.

B-Hive, one of the most successful fintech ecosystems in Europe, announces that the company has reached all original goals set up on its inception and is now ready to hand over the torch to the broader community.

Successful innovation and strong alliances 

Over the last three years, B-Hive brought together a fintech ecosystem of over 180 members, helped position Brussels as a gateway to Europe and saw major brands such as Lloyds, MoneyGram and TransferWise open offices in the country.

The company became a structural partner of Flanders Investment and Trade, broadening the scope from positioning Brussels to Belgium as a whole. B-Hive’s brand gained outstanding Belgian and international recognition. This thanks to B-Hive’s presence during prestigious international events on the one hand, and also because of the creation of an impressive network of 18 international partner hubs.

B-Hive executed several innovation projects, including a Consumer Onboarding (KYC) project for the banking sector that was handed over to Isabel Group and a number of successful projects in the insurance sector. Prime example is The Digital Green Card / Proof of Insurance Project. This project aims to digitize the insurance proof every car in Belgium should have on board. The project has completed a pilot and a vendor has been selected. It will be transferred to Assuralia to build and have a Minimal Viable Product in 2020.

Partnerships with large corporates and technology companies like Oracle were formed, where we saw the tech giant offer companies that graduated from B-Hive’s “FinTech Scale-Up program” a spot on their cloud marketplace.

Raf De Kimpe, Director of Business Development & Ecosystem at B-Hive: “B-Hive enabled banks, insurance companies and market infrastructures to equip themselves with the tools and mindset to collaborate directly with start- and scale-ups. We leave the financial market stronger than when we started. Other associations like Febelfin and Assuralia have evolved further and are ready to take over in their respective communities, making the continuation of B-Hive in its current form no longer necessary. It’s time to hand over the torch to the broader community and explore new projects.”

The merger of startups.be and Scale-Ups.eu the last year, created a broad community for young and innovative technology companies. The community building for technology companies, not limited to financial services but across all domains, will going forward be done by Scale-Ups.eu, the growth platform in Belgium that brings startups, scale-ups, investors, corporates and public sector officials together for innovation and co-creation. FinTech Belgium remains the go-to ecosystem for emerging financial technology players.

Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity

B-Hive is currently working on a focused digital project in cybersecurity for market infrastructure companies leveraging the strong Belgian talent base in this domain both in the academic and private sector. Also, work is being done on a project focused on ethical and responsible AI. Discussions with partners are ongoing but the start of the new activities is targeted for the beginning of next year.

On 27 November, B-Hive’s success will be celebrated at the Digital Finance Summit in Brussels. The country’s largest fintech conference is co-organized with the European Banking Federation, Febelfin and FinTech Belgium. Many members of the B-Hive ecosystem, including large financial institutions, start-ups and technology experts will continue the dialogue on developing a strong European fintech sector.

ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW), a leading global provider of real-time electronic payment and banking solutions, today announced a global strategic collaboration with Microsoft via the Microsoft Partner Network to support the payments industry’s rapid adoption of technology deployed in the public cloud. As one of Microsoft’s top 10 global ISV partners in the financial services industry, ACI will support the company’s industry growth and extend the reach of its own market-leading Universal Payments portfolio through Microsoft Azure.

The industry has begun to reap the benefits of cloud, including lower total cost of ownership (TCO), increased scalability, speed to market, enhanced development tools, and the integration of platform services such as data analytics and artificial intelligence. The cloud, a vital component of today’s service delivery model, enables banks and other organizations to capitalize on new market opportunities and access new channels. By deploying ACI’s UP solutions through the cloud, as well as via traditional on-premises and on-demand implementations, banks, intermediaries, merchants and corporates can thrive amid the unprecedented digital disruption.

The collaboration will initially enable ACI Universal Payments technology to be licensed by customers for implementation powered by Azure. Through this relationship, ACI on-premises customers will benefit from enhanced security, as well as a reduction in long-term capital expenditure, adopting a scalable model for cloud-based infrastructure—this will be particularly advantageous for neo banks and innovators within existing banks and intermediaries.

“We have witnessed increased global interest in and rapid adoption of ACI’s payments technology in the cloud from both new and established organizations,” said Craig Saks, chief operating officer, ACI Worldwide. “In fact, we have secured two significant acquirer clients running our UP Retail Payments solution on Microsoft Azure. As global trends, changing business models and innovation create a new set of challenges for the world of payments, this collaboration will allow banks and other organizations committed to innovating and moving to the cloud to become more agile, deploying new payment services more quickly. In addition, they can develop proof of concepts, and launch and test them in the marketplace at a low cost – this is already gaining traction among our customers.”

Bill Borden, corporate vice president of financial services at Microsoft Corp. said, “More leading banks worldwide are embracing the cloud, and partnering with ACI on this key growth initiative reinforces that trajectory. With the high level of stability, resiliency, and performance of Microsoft Azure integrated with ACI’s payments solutions, ACI can offer organizations the ability to provide a wider range of services to their end customers.”

ACI’s UP family of solutions connects more ways to pay with more payment capabilities than any other provider. The solutions orchestrate thousands of payment capabilities – business services such as authorization, authentication, tokenization and more – for card-based and digital transactions including industry-standard real-time payments applications. These capabilities are combined in unique ways, forming the UP solutions that perform the payment functions that banks, corporates, merchants and intermediaries need.

Signifyd, a global leader in ecommerce fraud protection, has seen its new research and development centre grow faster than expected, contributing to the Silicon Valley-based company’s ability to launch an unprecedented number of products in the past nine months.

The company announced its Northern Ireland R&D centre in February with a plan to hire 150 employees. With its current headcount of more than 60, Signifyd has been able to fuel its hyper-growth and the innovative product development necessary in an era of ecommerce disruption. 

“The depth of the Northern Ireland talent pool has outstripped our high expectations, meaning we’ve been able to fill crucial jobs at a pace that has allowed us to extend our leading position in the industry,” Signifyd CEO and Co-Founder Raj Ramanand said. “We never doubted that Belfast was the right place to expand our R&D. We look forward to the years of growth ahead.”

Signifyd marked the progress by hosting an opening ceremony for the expanded R&D centre, housed at River House in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter. The centre provides technical innovation and support for features and products serving Signifyd’s customers worldwide.

Developers and technical teams in Northern Ireland work closely with colleagues in Silicon Valley by embracing a microservices model. The model calls for small, agile and autonomous teams to develop, build, deploy and monitor their own code — while constantly communicating with U.S. teams, without being constrained by dependencies. 

To mark the opening, Silicon Valley business leaders, including Ramanand, Head of Human Resources Emily Mikailli and Vice President of Corporate Communication Stefan Nandzik joined with Belfast leaders, including Director of Engineering Trevor McCullough, to celebrate the milestone.

“The Belfast team has completely changed the landscape of Signifyd for the better,” Mikailli said. “There is now no Signifyd without Belfast and everything we’ve done over the last year and everything we do moving forward will reflect the intellectual heft and innovative spirit we have in Belfast.” 

The Belfast team has helped fuel the growth that led to Signifyd being recognised as one of North America’s fastest-growing innovation companies, landing the company on the 2019 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list.

The expanded R&D centre has positioned Signifyd to continue to support brands such as Lacoste, FOREO, Pure Scooters, Jessops and thousands of others while attracting additional global brands going forward. 

The Belfast team has also contributed to an unprecedented run of product releases dating back to early in the year with the launch of Chargeback Recovery, which expands Signifyd’s Commerce Protection Platform beyond fraud chargebacks to significantly automate the management and recovery of non-fraud chargebacks. 

Next came INR Protection, which refers to “item not received” and extends Signifyd’s expertise and guarantee to claims from a customer that an order was never delivered. Then, this summer, Signifyd launched Seamless SCA, a solution that allows European merchants to comply with the stricter customer authentication requirements contained in the PSD2 regulations that took effect in September.

Seamless SCA was the first strong customer authentication (SCA) solution certified by EMVCo for the 3DS2.2 protocol. The solution provides a combination of technology and infrastructure that allows authorisation to be completed in the most efficient manner, depending on the order's circumstances, and shifts fraud liability away from merchants.   

The development velocity Signifyd has achieved since launching the Belfast centre has allowed the company to build an ambitious innovation roadmap for 2020 and beyond that will both rely upon and spur further growth in Northern Ireland. 

EMVCo has reaffirmed its commitment to industry engagement with the launch of an enhanced EMVCo Associates Programme (EAP), increasing the number of organisations that are eligible to provide strategic input and further encouraging merchant involvement.  

The EAP was established in 2010 to facilitate industry engagement and enable the payments community to play an active role in the strategic and technical direction of EMVCo. The enhanced programme expands participation on EMVCo’s Board of Advisors, a group which facilitates discussions about new initiatives and future iterations of the EMV®* Specifications, to all Associates demonstrating an ongoing commitment to EMV deployment and interoperability. This will enable broader strategic input and reflects the growing diversity of EMVCo’s initiatives across both physical and remote payment environments.

The enhanced programme also includes the creation of targeted merchant and industry group participation categories with the goal of providing these important payment partners flexible options for engagement.

“As EMVCo’s scope has expanded in recent years, encouraging and increasing participation has been an ongoing focus,” comments Bruce Rutherford, Chair of the EMVCo Executive Committee. “The enhanced programme expands the opportunity for engagement, facilitates early and inclusive interaction, and delivers a worldwide schedule that offers face-to-face meetings in every global region annually. This feedback and direction from the industry is critical to ensuring the EMV Specifications support immediate requirements and future trends.”

EMVCo’s commitment to marketplace engagement and education is also demonstrated by the appointment of Simon Kleine to the newly-created role of Director of Communications. With a corporate communications career spanning 30 years, Simon has held leadership positions at American Express, Visa and Western Union.

Current Director of Operations Brian Byrne, a payments veteran with close to 30 years’ experience, will transition into an expanded Director of Engagement and Operations role. Karen Shunk joins EMVCo as Manager of Operations, following roles at the Object Management Group (OMG) and the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), the technology standards division of the National Retail Federation (NRF).

• 19.11.2019 -- 11:35 am

• 19.11.2019 -- 11:15 am

Financial IT speaks with James McGivern, Head of Non-Bank Financial Institutions at Cashfac during Open Banking Expo 2019. James McGivern highlights the importance of Virtual banking and Cash management.

Payment solution provider, Girmiti Software, is today announced as the latest company to join the membership base of industry association, nexo standards, becoming the first in the association’s global expansion to join from India.

Girmiti Software is a pioneer in implementing innovative, seamless and new generation payment solutions and services globally. It provides payment services including digital issuance for HCE and NFC wallets, prepaid, mobile payments, terminal management system, trusted service manager, acquiring, point of sale and tokenization solutions. Additionally, Girmiti provides services for banks, processors, acquirers, retails, transit, telecom, e-commerce and original equipment manufacturers.

Joining at the Associate Membership level, Girmiti will actively contribute to the activities of the association and support the development of the nexo messaging protocols and specifications worldwide. Specifically, Girmiti will provide payment solutions for customers utilizing the nexo FAST Specification and the nexo Acquirer, nexo Retailer and nexo TMS Protocols.

“Over the next six months, we are embarking on a mission to offer end-to-end nexo solutions to our customers,” comments Sanjeev Patil, Founder and CEO, Girmiti Software. “Becoming a member of nexo standards and integrating the protocols and specifications enables us to provide secure, cross-border solutions. We truly recognize the value the nexo specifications can bring to the payments domain and we are excited to collaborate with other nexo members to address and overcome some of the challenges currently facing the payments ecosystem.”

nexo’s messaging protocols and specifications enable fast, interoperable and borderless card payments by standardizing the exchange of payment acceptance data between merchants, acquirers, payment service providers and other payment stakeholders. The protocols and specifications adhere to ISO20022 standards, are universally applicable and freely available globally.

“We are delighted to welcome Girmiti as our first member from India,” comments Claude Brun, Chairman, nexo standards. “Its participation in our association is a real landmark moment for us as we continue in our efforts to engage with and represent a broad range of global payments players. The addition of such an influential player from this region, together with the recent membership of two significant payment players from China, demonstrates the growing interest in our standards across two of the most populated payments markets in the world.”