NatWest has today announced a collaboration with Microsoft, and Artificial Intelligence specialist DreamQuark, in developing Next Generation Complex Analytics. The work will allow the bank to simulate behaviours of different environments such as financial markets or transport networks, processing it into meaningful patterns and insights that help to accurately predict future outcomes.

Next Generation Complex Analytics will be used by NatWest to predict future risks and opportunities across its chosen markets and customer segments, using a combination of simulations run through the system, and machine learning.

The bank is working with Microsoft and DreamQuark to test the capability on numerous use cases within its personal and commercial businesses; as examples, the tool looks at the impact of a number of scenarios within the Buy-to-Let mortgages market, and the effects of price elasticity within the small business loans market.

In testing the capability, the bank wants to understand if the new modelling outperforms the methods that the bank currently uses to accurately predict future outcomes.

Kevin Hanley, Director of Innovation and Solutions, NatWest said: “We are genuinely excited by the opportunities afforded by this new partnership with Microsoft and DreamQuark. By allowing us to better predict future outcomes, risks and trends, the implementation of this technology could be of significant value to our customers and shareholders over the coming years. For the first time we’ll be able to deliver an aggregated, forward looking view of the world around us, ultimately helping us build a stronger, safer bank.”

Cindy Rose, CEO, Microsoft UK, said: “AI is the engine of the fourth industrial revolution. It has the potential to fundamentally transform how entire industries operate, delivering greater value to organisations, employees, customers and society as a whole. NatWest’s ambition to harness this technology to deliver more sophisticated insights, boost performance and reduce risk is an excellent example of the transformative powers that AI offers.”

This is the second project that the bank has announced with Microsoft in 2019. Earlier in the year the bank’s standalone digital lender, Esme Loans, enlisted the support of Microsoft to help build an AI-assisted chatbot and data warehouse to make faster and more accurate lending decisions for its customers.

François de Lescure, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, DreamQuark, said: "We are thrilled to work on this innovation project with Natwest and Microsoft. DreamQuark's mission is to facilitate the high-scale production of trusted AI solutions, on which banks and insurance companies can rely to solve concrete challenges and generate new revenues. Major organizations are already running our predictive models in production and these multiple use cases shall strengthen our expertise in delivering zero-code machine learning platform for business experts and citizen data scientists. We are excited by this promising new partnership, establishing a solid base for our further expansion in the UK market."

• Product Reviews
• 01.10.2019 11:33 am

What is the solution?

Horizon is unique in bringing advanced algorithmic capabilities within a fully customizable solution, that provides advanced trading technology to 90 buy-side and sell-side institutions in 26 countries, and connectivity to over 80 exchanges worldwide.

What does the solution do?

Horizon can trade across a wide range of structured products (vanilla to exotic), underlying asset classes (from equity to hybrids, and beyond), and product types (FX, futures, options, warrants, CBBCs, In-Line warrants, capital protected products, etc.), all of this through a high volume of these products. Our system can be integrated with rich APIs, meaning users can build proprietary strategies and keep their code confidential.

A key strength of Horizon is the ability to handle everything on a single platform: from monitoring and managing positions in a single view, to real-time automated trading with embedded algorithmic capabilities. We make it easy to set up thousands of strategies including correlation between pairs of instruments using customized spots, FX rates and validation formulas with simple, intuitive automation parameters. Added-value approaches such as theoretical, friendly or aggressive behaviours are pre-implemented and allow dynamic orders to follow the market, and many others, such as real-time management, spot customization, auto-hedging strategies, fast market detection, large volume management, spike detection, and internal matching engine

What are the key modules in the solution?

We offer a single platform to handle different client needs:

• Market Making, for options, warrants and Delta One products
• Proprietary algo trading with algo scripting, systematic trading, hedging, volatility and arbitrage
• Agency trading, which offers FIX connectivity, Order and Execution Management Systems, and DMA and CARE orders
• Position & risk management including pre-trade risk, risk & position calculations and user rights interface

A key feature in particular is our algorithmic execution architecture, which guarantees the execution of large numbers of orders and optimizes the implementation cost against a benchmark price, irrespective of trade size. Examples are:

• VWAP (volume-weighted average price): Orders are executed based on their value relative to the total market volume over a specific period, minimizing market impact
• TWAP (time-weighted average price): Orders are executed over a period at as close to the average price (during this period) as possible
• POV (percentage of volume) allows the user to limit their order size to a pre-determined one, based on a percentage of average hourly or daily volume

What sets Horizon apart?

The company has always invested heavily in R&D to develop the most cutting-edge technology for the capital markets industry. Horizon’s products can be used out-of-the-box and are based on a flexible architecture that enables software customization to satisfy each client’s specific requirements and market regulations, such as MiFID II.

Also

We provide intelligence for trading by delivering innovative technology, advanced algorithmic trading and high-quality services.

Our clients benefit from many unique advantages, such as:

• Our unparalleled expertise in derivatives trading
• Easy integration with rich APIs (SOA, testing tools), based on Scala, allowing our clients to easily run their own algorithms
• High-level behaviour customization using embedded scripting modules which allows the design of new features and detecting patterns using custom actions and alert triggers
• A full system implementation in just one week
• One single platform with faster capabilities: packaging takes almost no time, release time reduced by 75%, configuration time reduced by 50%, launch takes almost no time, development support time reduced by 75%

• 01.10.2019 -- 11:28 am

Financial IT speaks with Darryl Proctor, Product Director, Payments & Universal Banking at Sibos 2019

Encompass Corporation, a fast-growing provider of intelligently automated Know Your Customer (KYC) solutions, recently carried out a survey questioning onboarding and compliance professionals about the challenges they come up against in their day-to-day roles.

While more than half of all respondents operate within compliance, others who work across the associated industries, in areas such as business development and front office, also provided insight into their jobs, the customer groups that they target and the way in which they approach onboarding new clients.

Key findings:

• Top three challenges when performing KYC are:
  • customer outreach (80%)
  • identifying beneficial ownership (59%)
• unwrapping corporate structures (57%)
• 28% of respondents are using 3+ registries (28%) to onboard a customer
• 30% of respondents are using 3+ sources of business information to onboard a customer
• 81% say they face some/significant challenges in ensuring consistency in data gathering across their business
• Mid-market proves most difficult to navigate in terms of KYC tasks and onboarding:
  • 48% of respondents rate the process for these customers as challenging
• only 29% found this challenging when dealing with sole traders/individuals
• Over half are implementing customer onboarding technology in an effort to deal with the challenges they find
• 52% are already automating manual processes with a considerable proportion planning to do so in next year

Nick Ford, Head of Partnerships at Encompass Corporation, commented:

“Global financial services firms have many priorities and have to negotiate a range of challenges as they strive to provide the best service in today’s fast-paced environment. When taking a deeper look at these challenges, no area is more pertinent than Know Your Customer (KYC) and customer due diligence.

An increase in regulation is adding a degree of complexity to customer due diligence requirements and it has become clear that teams are struggling to manage ever-changing rules while keeping up with various responsibilities.

Implementing customer onboarding technology, such as that offered by Encompass, can significantly lighten the load of onboarding and compliance professionals by improving efficiency and accuracy while allowing manual effort to be focused on other areas that depend on human intervention. Using automation technology enables organisations to get the full picture of their customers and entities they are considering forming business ties with in a way that is both efficient and cost effective.” 

Starting 1st October this year, Claes Meyer zu Allendorf, Danish manager with over 20 years of international experience in IT, is going to become the CEO of Beyond.pl, the first Polish data center to meet the highest Rated 4 ANSI/TIA 942 security standards. His task will be to come up with a new strategy for the Poznań company.

– The new Beyond.pl CEO selection process took 2 years to complete. Finding a manager and a leader whose professional profile fit so well into the company’s long-term development plan drawn by the shareholders, says Michał Grzybkowski, the current CEO, who’ll remain on the board to focus on the company’s technological growth.

– I am very impressed with Beyond.pl. It is a unique company with great potential for growth, attractive service offering, and impressive technological infrastructure. I’m joining the company for a specific purpose. I’d like Beyond.pl to join the leading IT companies in this segment, both at home and abroad, admits Claes Meyer zu Allendorf.

The present board consists of Claes Meyer zu Allendorf, CEO responsible for Operations & Sales, Michał Grzybkowski, Vice President responsible for technology, Piotr Cegieła, Chief Financial and Investment Officer, and Bartłomiej Danek, Chief Sales Officer until the end of January 2020.

The founders and main shareholders of the Poznań-based company specialised in full-range data center and business cloud computing services are Sebastian Kulczyk and Michał Grzybkowski.

Specialist RegTech provider Shield is proud to announce it will be exhibiting at the RegTech Summit 2019, which is being held at etc.venues St Paul’s in London on Thursday 3^rd October. This is the second year that Shield has appeared at the event, following its successful debut in 2018.

VP Global Sales & Business Development at Shield FC, Eran Noam states: “We are excited to be appearing at the event again this year following our illustrious introduction to the audience last year. This Summit brings together a powerful blend of insight from across the RegTech sphere, including practitioners, regulators, start-ups and solution providers with a clear objective - to collaborate and discuss innovative and effective approaches for building a better regulatory environment.”

Shield will again this year be talking about its comprehensive cross-regulation eComms compliance platform. Shield has introduced a number of new features since last year’s event, including powerful AI for the reduction of false positives and Financial Context Recognition Engine (FCR), to provide a true 360 view of electronics communications (eComms) and trades to make compliance more efficient and ROI driven.

Eran adds, “We were very impressed by the scope of the expert presentations and the breadth of the audience at last year’s event, so undoubtedly the London RegTech Summit 2019 will be another must-see opportunity for anyone involved with or reliant on RegTech solutions. In an increasingly complex regulatory and data-heavy financial industry, manual investigation has been rendered unreliable and cripplingly expensive, so RegTech has become the only viable option for meeting these compliance needs.”

The Shield solution brings order to chaos - providing ordered structure to all data (including unstructured data), ensuring monitoring and investigations are rapid and fully reliable. A highly secure out-of-the-box solution, the platform also provides a wide spectrum of bespoke options to fit the requirements of any financial firm, whilst Shield ensures it evolves to meet all future needs.

Eran concludes, “If you are attending the event, come and visit the friendly and knowledgeable team on the Shield stand and see how we can comprehensively ensure your regulatory compliance, whilst reducing the money and resources involved in doing so.” 

Shield has also just been shortlisted for four categories in the Data Management Insight Awards 2019:

·         Best Big Data Analytics Solution Provider

·         Most Innovative Data Management Provider

·         Best Proposition for AI, Machine Learning, Data Science

·         Best Data Visualisation Provider

Voting is open now – please vote for Shield at: www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/FMXDXS9

The RegTech Summit takes place on Thursday 3^rd October at etc.venues, St Paul’s, London. For more details please visit: https://a-teaminsight.com/events/regtech-summit-london/

Integral (www.integral.com), the technology partner trusted by leading banks, brokers, and asset managers to help them outperform their competition in the foreign exchange market, reported today average daily volumes (ADV) across Integral platforms totaled $37.3 billion in September 2019. This represents an increase of 8.1% compared to August 2019 and 10.4% compared to September of last year.

No other platform reaches as many, as varied, and as comprehensive a set of FX products and participants as Integral OCX TM . Banks, brokers, and asset managers now share direct access to OCX and use this unique liquidity to win market share from their competitors.

OCX is directly cross connected with more than 250 liquidity sources supplying more than 3,000 market making streams in NY4, LD4, and TY3. OCX’s award-winning advanced market design delivers the ultimate in execution performance by combining resting limit orders, market-making streams, and midpoint interest in a single integrated high-performance venue. 

Paysend, the Edinburgh-based fintech, launches Paysend Connect, a business account in collaboration with Crassula, an open banking software provider.  The collaboration also enables businesses to provide fintech solutions to their customers.

Paysend Connect provides innovative technology to offer companies next-generation business banking and high-end embedded fintech services.

The new platform enables companies to open multi-currency business accounts, make SEPA/SWIFT transfers, issue corporate Mastercards with no purchase fees and process online payments.

Financial institutions and payment service providers can use Paysend Connect to launch further fintech services because of the open banking technology provided by Crassula. 

Paysend Connect also enables telecoms companies, retailers, social networks and other businesses to embed white labelled fintech products, such payment accounts, to their platforms within days. 

Ronald Millar, CEO of Paysend, said: “Paysend Connect removes the hassle and complexity for business owners wanting to open up a multi-currency business account.  By supporting businesses to do this quickly and simply, we help them to focus on their commercial operations.”

Paysend is a leading UK-based fintech business that helps individuals and companies and to pay, hold and spend money across the globe.  Its Global Transfers service allows seamless card to card transfers and now has more than one million customers worldwide.

Paysend is expanding its services to the corporate world through the collaboration with Crassula.  Crassula helps businesses to create white labelled embedded banking, eCommerce, and other fintech products.

Paysend and Crassula will work together to make business banking more simple, convenient and cost effective for companies across the globe.

Mumbai-based Airpay Payment Services, India’s only omni-channel payments platform, has announced a partnership with InstaReM, one of the world’s fastest-growing digital cross-border payments companies, to launch “FX Payment”, an international payments solution for its merchants. 

Airpay’s “FX payment” is an alternative to credit cards used for international payments and is currently available to customers in 27 countries across the globe. This highly efficient and cost-effective payment solution benefits Airpays’ marquee Indian merchants in the hospitality, retail, and education sectors, and their overseas customers. With an option to make payments via InstaReM on Airpay payment platform, customers will save on high credit card processing fees, sneaky margins on FX rates and service fees.

The “FX Payment” service from Airpay benefits merchants by removing their compliance overhead as well as significantly reducing the cost and time of the transaction. Customers enjoy the benefit of paying in their local currency, competitive exchange rates, and avoid bank or credit card charges associated with international payments.

Prajit Nanu, co-founder and CEO of InstaReM, said, “InstaReM’s innovative payments solutions enable individual and enterprise users to send, spend and receive money efficiently, to and from different parts of the world, while saving on high transaction costs that are traditionally associated with cross-border money movements. We are now extending our capabilities to payment gateways, thereby offering a fast, secure and cost-effective payment option to customers buying on e-commerce sites. With this partnership, consumers all over the world will be able to make payments in real-time to some of the highly-reputed merchant brands in India.”

“International payments via credit cards are opaque and expensive due to high credit card processing charges and hidden fees that are not typically known or explained to the consumers. By leveraging InstaReM’s global presence and capabilities in cross-border payments, we are offering a seamless and transparent payment option which is going to be immensely beneficial to the merchants using our platform as well as their customers,” added Kunal Jhunjhunwala, Principal Founder and Managing Director of Airpay.

By making overseas payments to India seamless and cost-effective, the Airpay-InstaReM partnership is looking to offer much-needed support to India’s global trade ambitions.