Introducing the “House of Klarna”. Hot on the heels of the news  this week that 50,000 new Klarna customers a week are choosing ‘Pay later’ at retailer checkouts, and with over 12 million transactions in the past year alone, Klarna is hitting the high-street again with over 27 of the best retail brands in the UK. Following the success of Covent Garden pop-up in June, Klarna will now take up residence in the heart of Manchester’s city centre with an immersive and playful retail space for shoppers, which transforms the bricks and mortar experience into pure joy.

The “House of Klarna” (situated at the iconic 35 Kings Street location) will open its doors with a VIP launch party on 3 October, before welcoming the public on 4-13 October 2019. The three-storey house will be transformed into the home of the best of fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands in the business including ASOS, Oliver Bonas, Topshop, Topman, House of Holland, Missguided, BEAUTY BAY, My Protein and Schuh.

Over a 10-day extravaganza, there will be fashion and lifestyle events, beauty treatments, live DJs and a Klarna Kafé offering free sodas and coffee.

Klarna’s Pay later options are changing the purchase journey into a smoooth retail experience, and the “House of Klarna'' is designed to bring this to life. It invites you on an immersive journey through fun and quirky rooms, including a sustainable hub, with space dedicated to the best-loved retailers that you may have only seen through a screen. Klarna believes this is an important part of shopping; the surprise and joy of uncovering treasures and new brands right before your eyes. 

Amongst the shopping, fun and Instagramming, there will also be styling masterclasses by industry experts, free beauty treatments and exclusive ticketed events in collaboration with the showcasing brands. Tickets will be available free of charge in the week prior to the event. To find out more, click here.

Global fashion destination ASOS returns for the “House of Klarna”. Eve Williams, Brand Experience Director at ASOS said: “At ASOS we want to give our customers the best choice in everything we do; whether that is in the broad range of ASOS Design and branded products, smooth and fast delivery options or payment options. We know these are all important to our customers and we look forward to bringing them to life with Klarna’s fun event in Manchester”.

Leading British Lifestyle store, Oliver Bonas will also be joining the list of favourite retailers. Sara Morris, Senior Press & Marketing Officer at Oliver Bonas, commented: “We are so excited to join Klarna in Manchester for the ‘House of Klarna’. We believe that design has the power to positively affect how people feel and with Klarna’s understanding of how to create a first-class customer experience, we’re excited to present OB at the ‘House of Klarna’. As the only brand showcasing furniture at the pop-up, we can’t wait to welcome shoppers into our home for ten days”.

Visma Connect, the leading Dutch critical payments services provider and FICO have launched a partnership to jointly deliver FICO’s best-in-class Anti-Financial Crime solutions for Know Your Customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML) and real-time sanctions screening to banks, FinTechs, payment institutions, PSD2 third-party providers and corporations. 

In the new partnership, Visma Connect will offer the FICO^® Siron™ Anti-Financial Crime software to its customers as a SaaS solution and provide the IT and platform integration. FICO’s Anti-Financial Crime solutions will be offered as an integral part of Visma Connect’s Critical Payments SaaS portfolio. 

Both companies will cooperate throughout Western Europe, with an initial focus on The Netherlands and the Nordics. 

“Financial services providers face greater regulatory requirements and typically spend over 4% of their total revenue on compliance,” said Juergen Krieg, senior director for sales at FICO. “Regulators are urging financial services companies to increase their efforts to fight financial crime and terrorist financing, and FinTechs and new PSD2 third-party providers are increasingly required to continuously monitor their processes. In addition, with the advent of SEPA Instant Payments, the current batch-based sanctions screening no longer suffices and needs to be upgraded to 24/7 and real-time screening. Our partnership with Visma Connect is aimed at helping all kinds of payment providers meet these demands with less effort and expense, by using the innovations we are bringing to our compliance solutions.”

Marnix Harbers, Tribe Lead Payments at Visma Connect: “The industry is facing ever stronger regulatory demands. Our payment services and the FICO Anti Financial Crime services are always compliant, but don’t require large upfront investments. We’ll take care of integrating, running and maintaining the latest software technology and infrastructure. Our clients can focus on their business.”

FICO®  Siron™ Anti-Financial Crime Solutions is the most widely used KYC, AML and Embargo software in the world, evidenced by more than 1,200 installations in over 90 countries.

Cyber security provider F-Secure has joined ETIS, an organization that facilitates cooperation between companies working in the European telecommunications sector. As an associate member of ETIS, F-Secure hopes to contribute its cyber security expertise to help stakeholders collectively address security challenges facing the telecommunications industry and its customers.

F-Secure has over 20 years of experience in partnering with operators to help address consumers’ security-related pain points. It delivers award-winning security and privacy solutions to households all over the world through its industry-leading global network of over 200 telecommunications companies. And according to F-Secure Director of Business Development Paul Palmer, F-Secure’s role as a global leader in delivering security via service providers leaves it uniquely positioned to work with operators to tackle the security challenges posed by the spread of insecure internet of things devices in people’s homes.

“It’s no secret that the internet of things devices flooding people’s homes aren’t built to be secure. But it’s a tough problem for your average household to solve on their own because many of these devices can’t run security software, and we know they’re looking to their current service providers for solutions to this,” says Palmer. “It’s both a challenge and opportunity for telecommunications companies, and ETIS is a perfect platform for us to share this perspective with operators and work with them to find practical solutions that help people secure their connected homes.”

ETIS is a non-profit organization founded in 1991. As a community for European telecommunication providers and companies that work with them, it functions as a platform for members to share ideas and best practices, and collaborate on issues that affect the entire industry.

“Our members take security really at heart and see it as an asset we have over other players in the market. We are very happy to count F-Secure as a member and we will discuss security as an opportunity for ‘Innovating in a trusted Digital Economy’, the theme of this year’s annual conference on 17 & 18 of October in Vienna,” says Wim De Meyer, Managing Director of ETIS.

F-Secure’s line of consumer security solutions includes a comprehensive range of security and privacy protection services, as well as more unique offerings such as F-Secure Connected Home Security – a combination of different gateway and endpoint protection technologies designed to protect all the devices in modern homes, including internet of things devices that can’t run traditional security applications. 

EZOPS Inc., a New York-based provider of artificial intelligence software for financial services institutions, announced today that the firm was among 20 global fintech start-ups selected to exhibit in the 2019 FIA Innovators Pavilion at the 35^th annual FIA Expo in Chicago October 29 to 31. FIA is the leading global trade organization for the futures, options and centrally cleared derivatives market. FIA Expo is the organization’s largest conference globally.

EZOPS Co-founder and CEO Bikram Singh said: “We are truly honored that FIA has selected EZOPS from a large pool of applicants as one of the industry’s most innovative companies to watch this year. Our transformative application of machine learning can solve a range of business problems, not only driving down operational costs, reducing risk and maximizing efficiencies, but placing firms in an advantageous position with their clients in the delivery of key services.”

EZOPS has brought to market the first machine learning (ML) tools purpose-built to dramatically reduce operational costs by reconciling data management and automating the exception management workflow process for clients that include some of the world’s largest banks, asset managers and fund administrators. The EZOPS suite of software offers clients a true end-to-end data control solution that incorporates best-in-class, user-driven ETL (extract, transform, load); asset class agnostic data reconciliation, including support for complex assets such as contracts for difference (CFDs); source system remediation using the intelligent process automation (IPA) functionality; and out-of-the-box, contextualized ML models tailored for financial institutions.

This is the fifth year that FIA has organized this showcase, designed to encourage greater innovation in the cleared derivatives industry. A panel of experts on emerging technologies and fintech trends assembled by FIA reviewed the applications submitted by the candidates, choosing companies best suited to providing innovative, forward-thinking solutions for the futures, options and cleared swaps industry.

After three days of debates, keynotes, and networking among leaders from some of the main digital companies worldwide, the LatAm Cross-Border Summit, powered by Brazilian fintech EBANX, ended this Thursday (26th) in Rio de Janeiro, with all participants reaching a common ground: Latin America is open for business.

During the event, which was by invitation only, leaders from companies such as AliExpress, Spotify, Stone, Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, Disney, Uber, Shopify, and Microsoft, shared their insights on e-commerce, digital services, and the payments market in Latin America. And they left Rio de Janeiro with numerous business prospects.

“Latin America is relevant, big, mature, and worth the investment,” said João Del Valle, COO and co-founder at EBANX, during the event. 

Del Valle launched on Wednesday (25th) an exclusive survey on the state of cross-border purchases in Brazil. Among other findings, the research shows how smartphones have been instrumental in democratizing access to global products and services in Latin America (mobile phones were the preferred device for 62% of Brazilians when making international purchases last year).

Fernando Teles, Country Manager Brazil at Visa, has also celebrated the business environment of Latin America and said that the region is full of opportunities. "When you have Softbank creating a USD 5 billion fund for Latin America, you know for sure that there isn't a better place to put this money," he said.

For Lindsay Lehr, Associate Managing Director at AMI (Americas Market Intelligence), Latin America’s leading market intelligence and advisory group for global companies, the region is “nearing the end of a lost half-decade” -- a shift driven not only by the largest markets in LatAm (Mexico and Brazil), but also by countries such as Chile, Peru, and Colombia.

“Even when there is volatility, we have seen growth in Latin America’s e-commerce,” she said during her lecture. “E-commerce still has a long road ahead in Latam. While we have 9% to 15% penetration in this sector in the US and 22% in China, in Mexico and Brazil we have 2% and 3%, respectively.”

Among the keynote speakers, there were also Rosario Marín, former US Treasurer; André Street, chairman and co-founder at StoneCo; Camilla Junqueira, CEO at Endeavor Brazil; and João Pedro Paro Neto, Brazil and South America president at Mastercard.

The LatAm Cross-Border Summit closed with Alphonse Voigt, co-founder and CEO at EBANX, who recalled the company’s history. The Brazilian global fintech was founded in 2012 and processes payments in eight Latin American countries to over 1,000 international companies.

“We were the smallest company that Endeavor has ever bet on [when EBANX was selected at the International Selection Panel, in 2012]. And today we are the biggest of all,” said Voigt. “Our history itself proves that the Latin American market is mature and ready for business.” 

Ping Identity (NYSE: PING), a pioneer in Intelligent Identity, today announced that Thomson Reuters has saved $1.2 million by leveraging its platform to modernize the organization’s authentication infrastructure.

Replacing its outdated legacy identity system provided Thomson Reuters the opportunity to re-architect its authentication infrastructure. Its focus was on finding a solution agile enough to handle enterprise complexity, while also providing automation and hands-off maintenance. With these requirements in mind, the organization chose PingFederate—which is part of the Ping Intelligent Identity^TM platform.

Thomson Reuters leveraged the strengths of PingFederate to develop an automated containerized deployment, creating regional instances that minimize latency for users through location-based routing. This includes automatic failover in case of an outage. The more than one million dollar savings speaks volumes to the collaboration between Thomson Reuters and Ping Identity to ensure a successful deployment and continued results.

Jon Lehtinen, principal identity engineer, Thomson Reuters—who single-handedly re-architected the company’s authentication infrastructure—said of the selection, “Ping Identity stands out in the market not only for its flexibility and exceptional service, but also for its partner-mindset with customers. To see Ping Identity now incorporating its own supported containerization deployment and self-service portal is a testament to its steadfast customer commitment.”

When the Ping Identity team learned that Jon recently built an internal product that provides Thomson Reuters business teams with self-service authentication, it incorporated that information—along with related feedback from other customers—into its own product roadmap. Ping Identity wholeheartedly recognizes the benefits of expanded self-service capabilities across its product lines, which is why it values the input Thomson Reuters provided. By integrating this into future product releases, Ping Identity can now offer other customers advanced self-service competencies.

“It’s incredible to see customers like Jon utilizing the flexibility of Ping Identity’s solutions to address some of their most significant security challenges,” said Andre Durand, chief executive officer, Ping Identity. “To be able to learn from their experiences and consolidate their feedback into our product roadmap is a win-win for all.”

 NYMBUS®, a provider of the world’s most advanced financial services platform, today announced Centier Bank has selected and gone live with NYMBUS SmartLaunch™ to outsource the customized development and full operations of its new fintech mobile app, Billinero. A digital-only prize linked savings account with a game-like approach, Billinero offers customers the opportunity to win a monthly and quarterly cash prize at no risk while also increasing their financial savings.

As the largest private, family-owned bank in Indiana with over $4.5 billion in assets, Centier chose SmartLaunch to rapidly grow its digital service offerings for capturing new market share through Billinero without disruption to its existing bank infrastructure or customer base. As stated by one of Centier’s Senior Partners, Chris Campbell:

“By partnering with NYMBUS, we have been able to launch Billinero for expansion and growth without compromise or risk to our established infrastructure. Only SmartLaunch delivers the open architecture and outsourced support that has allowed us to go into new markets more quickly, and SmartLaunch also has offered world-class digital marketing expertise to promote Billinero in 11 states which allows us to expand our footprint beyond our existing markets. We are excited to introduce Centier to new clients and communities with this mobile application which demonstrates our commitment to bring awareness, and tangible support, for financial education.”

Recognizing that innovation must happen immediately for financial institutions to compete and stay relevant, NYMBUS SmartLaunch is a low-risk Banking-as-a-Service business model that outsources all of the operations required to run a digital bank or fintech app experience—from a customer-facing call center and back-office operations to targeted digital marketing and website services—to NYMBUS’ team of industry banking experts. SmartLaunch is also built on NYMBUS’ modern, digital-first SmartCore® platform, which bypasses the need to undergo a technology conversion. The legacy operation isn’t disrupted and no additional staff is required.

“Emerging digital banks and mobile banking experiences continue to disrupt the market as more financial institutions recognize these new opportunities for revenue protection and growth,” said David Mitchell, President of NYMBUS. “The time to act is now, but few organizations have the modern, agile technology or trained staff to quickly succeed. By outsourcing with SmartLaunch, these obstacles are instantly and affordably resolved.”

HSBC Global Trade and Receivables Finance (GTRF) business has deployed an industry-leading Anti-Money Laundering (AML) system and an automated sanctions checking system as part of its ongoing efforts to improve financial crime detection.

In an industry first, the new customer surveillance system uses big data, advanced analytics and automated ‘contextual monitoring’ to detect and disrupt financial crime in international trade. The contextual approach, developed with Quantexa, builds on HSBC’s expertise in network analytics to enable the bank to better identify suspicious patterns and potential criminal networks by combining customer and counterparty trade information, transactional data and external insights. It is currently active in the UK and Hong Kong and is being rolled out across HSBC’s global network.

Adrian Rigby, COO of GTRF at HSBC, said: “This new capability marks a significant milestone in the bank’s intelligence-led approach to detecting financial crime. The introduction of the first automated AML capability in the Trade Finance industry enables HSBC to more effectively concentrate our resources on genuine financial crime risk within our business and make trade safer for customers and society”.

The new system combines bank data and external data, such as company ownership information, to identify links between counterparties and transactions and map out networks. It automatically screens all trade finance transactions against over 50 different scenarios that indicate signs of money laundering, such as associated networks and payment patterns. This is more than double the average number of checks against indicators at a transactional level. It also provides investigators with an enhanced ability to analyse counterparty activities and relationships to better identify potential financial crime.

Vishal Marria, CEO of Quantexa, added: “The solution built with the Quantexa platform uses billions of data points to provide an entity resolution and network intelligence framework which references over 40 billion financial transactions. Using this technology, customer activities can be continuously assessed and scored for risk. This level of contextual monitoring improves accuracy, and decision making, while providing insight into data relationships never before possible.”

As the world’s largest trade finance bank, HSBC screens over 5.8 million trade transactions a year for signs of money laundering and other financial crime. One of the key challenges in detecting financial crime is establishing where people or companies are acting together to move money around the globe.  Now, if there are concerns about the activities of a counterparty, a financial crime investigator can rapidly build a detailed picture of the links and transactions within a customer’s global network and identify previously unknown details.

Coinciding with the new AML surveillance launch, HSBC has automated first line sanctions checking using advanced algorithms and machine learning technology. Automated sanctions checking is now live in India and will be deployed in 41 markets by year end.

The automated solution, developed in-house, produces an instant response. By removing manual checks it reduces the processing time for each search and significantly eliminates false positives. Since HSBC initiates around one million sanctions screening submissions a month, this significantly improves the bank’s control environment as well as improving transaction speed for clients.

Collectively, these innovations will help HSBC to fight financial crime through accurately identifying criminal activity and networks that might not have been possible previously, ultimately helping to protect customers and their communities from financial crime.

CoCoNet announced the launch of MULTIVERSA IFP Version 4.0. This is the next generation of its highly successful payment and cash management solution for banks’ corporate customers.

Banks that use the latest version of MULTIVERSA IFP will enjoy two main benefits. Firstly, they will be able to increase their corporate customers’ satisfaction by offering them an improved solution for payment and cash management services. Secondly, they will gain from improved processes and added customer care functionality.

Improved user experience

The latest features of MULTIVERSA IFP for payment and cash management tasks include smart payment creation functionality, real-time reporting and SWIFT gpi tracking for international payments.

Banks will also be able to delight their corporate customers with the seamless and enhanced user experience provided by Version 4.0. This is thanks to the outstanding visual quality of the version’s user interface, as well as its smart dashboards and optimised workflows.

Furthermore, Version 4.0 has highly convenient security methods. With the new release, users can access their banking channel via an app-based security token for mobile and desktop.

“I am very proud to launch MULTIVERSA IFP 4.0 at Sibos today,” said Oliver Olmesdahl, CEO of CoCoNet. “With the combination of an enhanced user experience, new features and convenient security, banks can provide a tool that makes their corporate customers even more successful.”

Benefits for banks

MULTIVERSA IFP 4.0 brings great benefits to banks as well as to their corporate customers. Its functionality enables them to strengthen their relationships with their existing customers and generate opportunities in new markets.

Included in the new release are customer analytics applications and customer retention tools. MULTIVERSA IFP 4.0 is also agnostic to banks’ back-end systems and integrates seamlessly with their applications and APIs. As a result, it is an excellent foundation on which to base their global channel strategies for corporate customers.

“We already have many international banking clients who are using MULTIVERSA IFP successfully on a day-to-day basis, providing banking services to more than a million corporate users around the world.” explained Oliver Olmesdahl. “The banking and broader business landscape continue to change rapidly, however, which is why CoCoNet is committed to constant innovation. This commitment to innovation is evident in Version 4.0 of our highly popular MULTIVERSA IFP product.”