IHS Marki, a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions, today announced that its client onboarding, entity data management and know your customer (KYC) services achieved the highest, “Best in Class” ranking in a new report on client lifecycle management by Aite Group.

Opening and maintaining accounts is complex in financial services because of the amount of information the bank or service provider must collect from the client to satisfy KYC, anti-money laundering, credit, legal and tax requirements.  Managing client information and client lifecycle procedures effectively requires flexible technology optimized for third-party connectivity, data validation and regulatory needs.

“Over the last decade, IHS Markit expanded its service offering to support a much broader set of requirements,” said Virginie O’Shea, research director at Aite Group.  “The vendor’s focus on gaining critical mass and buy-in from the end-client community of asset managers has enabled IHS Markit to adapt and grow in the tough-to-break-even KYC data community.  Incorporating feedback from these buyside firms has also enabled the vendor to tailor the service to the actual requirements of banks’ and brokers’ end clients.”

Earlier this year, IHS Markit launched Onboarding Accelerator, a service to help asset managers and corporations open accounts in as fast as one day, compared to the 40-day industry average estimated by the firm.  Onboarding solutions from IHS Markit offer APIs and no-code customization, so that asset managers can integrate and design workflow according to their preferences.

“This achievement is a result of long-standing partnerships with buyside firms and our commitment to helping them get to market more quickly by modernizing how account documents and data are managed and validated,” said Darren Thomas, managing director for KYC and Regulatory Services at IHS Markit. “Solutions like Onboarding Accelerator and our Request for Amendment service offer digital alternatives to cumbersome, manual processes for client onboarding, tax, legal and regulatory compliance.”

Pico, a leading provider of technology services for the financial markets community globally, today announced the appointment of Francis J. Troise to its Board of Directors supporting the firm’s growth and innovation trajectory. 

“I am delighted to welcome Frank to Pico and look forward to working alongside him as we pursue our goal to lead market share of the $50 billion financial technology services market,” said Jarrod Yuster, Founder and CEO of Pico. “Frank is an accomplished senior executive with a successful record in leading strategic, operational and technology transformations in global financial services. He brings tremendous industry insight, expertise and relationships, having held numerous senior leadership positions in electronic trading and financial technology for global businesses. He will be immensely helpful in advising our executive team on the continued global expansion of our business and further client penetration across investment banks, institutional asset managers and hedge funds.”

Frank most recently served as the President and CEO of Investment Technology Group (previously NYSE:ITG), a global financial technology innovator and brokerage solutions provider offering trading, analytics and workflow technology to institutional asset managers, hedge funds, investment banks and broker/dealers in more than 40 global markets, including the Middle East, Latin America and China. He has a stellar reputation for building high-integrity, high-performance teams and cultures. Frank led the vision and strategy that ultimately culminated in the successful acquisition of ITG by Virtu Financial earlier this year.

Prior to joining ITG, Troise was Managing Director and Global Head of J.P. Morgan’s Cross-Asset Execution Services. During his tenure at J.P. Morgan, Troise crafted and implemented the strategy and built the global sales, trading and product management teams responsible for overhauling the global electronic equities and electronic F&O execution businesses. The team tripled electronic equities market share in the U.S. and Europe within five years. Additionally, the team set the agenda for technical innovation in fixed income, currencies, and commodities agency execution. Prior to J.P. Morgan, Frank held senior leadership roles in electronic trading at Barclays Capital and Lehman Brothers.

“During my career, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Pico at various stages of its growth, and have always been impressed with the clear vision, breadth of services and subject matter expertise they bring to clients,” said Troise. “I am honored to join Pico’s Board given what they have accomplished building a comprehensive global data center presence, low-latency connectivity, data and infrastructure analytics offerings while growing rapidly over the past several years. I look forward to working closely with Pico’s board of directors and top-notch executive team of innovative professionals as it continues to grow the business through its deep customer understanding, superior capabilities and focus on service excellence.”

Troise’s appointment is the latest in a series of accomplishments for Pico over the past two years.  Most recently, Pico acquired Corvil, a market leader in real-time infrastructure analytics and machine intelligence products for financial markets infrastructure performance and operations. With a recent focus on APAC expansion, Pico continues to make strides in its goal to be globally comprehensive in infrastructure, network and exchange connectivity, data analytics and enterprise hybrid cloud for financial services.

Neato Robotics today announced it has appointed Thomas Nedder as global Chief Executive Officer.  Nedder brings with him over 25 years of experience in multi-million dollar tech-based international businesses, most recently serving as Head of Sony Electronics, Germany. With a solid history of realising aggressive growth objectives in highly competitive markets, Nedder will utilise his leadership, sales and marketing background to continue elevating Neato products among a rapidly growing vertical.  

“The projected growth for robotic vacuums is incredibly exciting and presents unique sales and marketing opportunities especially across Europe and the US,” said Nedder. “I am passionate about driving brands ahead to make them market leaders and I believe Neato has the right ingredients – innovative technology, consumer-driven product development and a loyal customer base – to capitalise on the projected industry growth in the next five years.”

“Thomas has built a career connecting best in class tech products with a mass consumer audience,” said Thomas Rodemann, Managing Partner, Vorwerk International and Chairman of the Board, Neato Robotics. “His global expertise in consumer electronics gives him a specialised ability to gain market share, exceed sales goals and create a beloved brand in markets North America and Europe. His engineering background and many years in the component world are perfect to guide the development at Neato and create industry-leading new products. We are thrilled to have him lead Neato’s future.”

Prior to his tenure at Sony, Nedder was General Manager of NEC Deutschland where he successfully established NEC as the leading brand in Europe for multimedia and display solutions, significantly developed the business and revenue for the computer storage products, oversaw international sales, channel marketing and distribution, and established the European MNO and EOM businesses.  Additionally, Nedder has served as Director of International Sales for Edding, Vice President Sales & Marketing at Proxima, and Distribution Manager at SHARP Micro-Electronics. 

FICO, a leading analytics software firm and provider of financial crime compliance solutions, today announced a partnership with Arachnys, a leader in risk investigation solutions for client onboarding, Know Your Customer (KYC), customer due diligence & enhanced due diligence (CDD/EDD), and anti-money laundering (AML).

This new partnership will enable financial organisations and their customers to benefit from a faster and smoother onboarding experience and enhanced record management. Arachnys and FICO combined help to significantly increase operational efficiency and reduce costs through intelligent automation while also enabling improved compliance process outcomes and lower false-positive rates.

Arachnys’ cloud-native solutions provide more than 23,000 curated data sources in over 90 languages to enable quick and simple onboarding, enhanced due diligence, AML alert investigation and refresh of customers and counterparties. The FICO^® Siron^™ KYC solution leverages this accurate data to effectively manage the customer lifecycle, improve list matching and risk scoring, and enable firms to maintain regulatory compliance.

“The open architecture, risk knowledge management and comprehensive capabilities of the Arachnys platform provide effective solutions for a wide variety of customer risk evaluation use cases,” said David Buxton, Arachnys CEO. “Through this integration with FICO’s compliance solutions, financial institutions around the world will gain access to relevant, curated data including local and international adverse media and corporate ownership data, enabling further benefit from enhanced insights and increased confidence in the people they do business with.” 

“Arachnys’ ability to provide best-in-class and highly efficient investigation capability is highly complementary to our Siron suite,” said Sebastian Hetzler, Vice President of compliance solutions at FICO. “We look forward to creating additional value for our customers in the fight against financial crime.” 

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

Worldline [Euronext: WLN], the European market leader in payment and transaction services, announces the launch of its e-Payments Booster Program to support Start-ups and Fintechs with easy access to payments. With this move, Worldline demonstrates its strong commitment to supporting the development of the Fintech community by applying a true collaborative approach.

Worldline’s Booster Program for Fintechs was announced by  Deputy CEO Marc-Henri Desportes in his speech at last night’s opening conference of the e-Payments Challenge in Frankfurt. This co-innovation event is one of the main elements of Worldline’s Fintech engagement strategies. It brings together some 150 participants from Fintech Start-ups, Worldline experts and industry leaders to co-innovate and shape the future of payments. The other elements are Worldline’s developer portal that comprises a suite of API (Application Programme Interfaces) for easy connection to Worldline’s technology assets, and the extensive Payment Business Network under Worldline’s Alliances and Partnerships model which is made available for the Start-ups to use. 

Helping Start-ups accelerate their business

Worldline’s new “e-Payments Booster Program” is an enablement program designed specifically for Start-ups and Fintechs who want to accelerate their business and incorporate trusted and scalable payment functionalities. By plugging into Worldline’s e-Payments Booster Program, Start-ups, often owner-run, can fully focus on developing their business idea without having to spend their valuable time on understanding the complexities of payments. Through this program, Start-ups will benefit from:

• Minimal effort for set-up through APIs, a quick and easy on-boarding process backed by local Worldline support;
• Maximum bandwidth of reachable target payers & payees, thanks to a wide range of payments methods, functionalities and channels;
• Flexibility to choose the appropriate set of payment functions for specific business needs; 
• Adequate pricing in-line with the challenges of an emerging business.

Emmanuel Ruiz, founder and CEO of Copsonic, says « We are participating in the e-Payments Challenge for the second time now, and really appreciate Worldline’s commitment in the field of co-innovation. For a Start-up like us, being able to easily connect to the trusted and established payments platform from Worldline literally means that we can preserve our energy and agility for developing our business ideas. »

Online payments made easy

Worldline will start the “e-Payments Booster Program” by offering Start-ups easy access to the acceptance of e-commerce payments, which reflects the needs of Start-ups as the vast majority of new businesses are directly or indirectly operating in the online marketing space. This is also confirmed by the 26 Fintechs participanting in the e-Payments Challenge.

Under this initiative, Worldline enables Start-ups to integrate online payments through a particularly easy set-up via the APIs on the Worldline developer portal, a fast on-boarding process and local support. In relatively no time and seamless way, young companies can accept the full range of payment methods including Visa, VPAY, Mastercard, Maestro, American Express, Dinners Club, Discover, JCB, UnionPay, Alipay, Twint) and also embed DCC (Dynamic Currency Conversion), which is indispensable for any international business.

Online Payments is only the first step. In the near future, Worldline plans to expand the fast-lane access for newcomers in the business to a wider area of services in Acquiring and Card Issuing as well as Third-Party Provider (TPP) services.

Special support for the Fintech Community

The first 25 Fintechs joining the “e-Payments Booster Program” will receive a Worldline subsidy in the form of 10.000 free transactions for the first six months of their business. This support is limited to companies of not more than 40 employees and currently available in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and Switzerland. 

Marc-Henri Desportes, Deputy CEO of Worldline, states: « We see tremendous value in our cooperation with Fintechs and Start-ups and wanted to give this year’s e-Payments-Challenge a particular edge by launching our dedicated support program to emerging companies. With the e-Payments Booster Program, we give every Start-up and Fintech a kick-start to take their business to a next level, thanks to a direct and sponsored access to our platforms. As strong believers in open innovation, we decided to give 25 young companies a free half year of online transactions. »

The e-Payments Challenge is taking place until the 18^th of September in Frankfurt. 14 challenges have been set for the participating Fintechs – each submitted and organised by a Worldline client, amongst them are Erste Group, Accor and OP Finance Group. 26 pre-selected Fintech Start-ups will take the opportunity to partner with Worldline to scale their business, pitch their solutions to Worldline’s clients and establish important business relationships.

Kristian Luona, Head of OP Lab at OP Finance Group, says: « OP has been in business for 110 years and does not take the future for granted. Building a future without partners is impossible. It requires collaboration and joint effort. In that respect we appreciate the e-Payments Challenge as a vehicle to meet interesting Fintechs and initiate partnerships that really create value.”

 HALL Group announced today that Abacus Group, a global provider of IT services for alternative investment firms, has leased 6,891 square feet at 2401 Internet Boulevard at HALL Park. Abacus will begin occupying their new space on November 1, 2019.

“Abacus Group’s success in the IT industry can be attributed to their innovative leadership and strong brand reputation within the alternative investment industry that they serve,” said Kim Butler, HALL Group’s director of leasing. “We are thrilled to have them join us at HALL Park and know they will continue to thrive at their new home in Frisco.”

Originally founded in San Francisco in 2008 and now headquartered in New York City, Abacus first opened a satellite office in Dallas six years ago as a dedicated space for its growing remote support team and centralized location for employee training programs. Abacus has teams across the US and in the UK, and each new team member starts their Abacus career with time spent learning the firm’s systems during a training week in Dallas. In addition to an open-concept layout, private offices and break-out rooms, the new Abacus office build-out at HALL Park will include a large multi-purpose conference room designed specifically to be able to convert into a classroom-style training space.

The new office in Frisco will provide Abacus over 75 percent more square footage versus its current location, allowing the firm to plan for continued anticipated growth of its Dallas team. In a Class-A building with extensive amenities, a campus environment and prime location, Abacus is poised to continue investing in recruiting the best IT and client services talent within the Dallas area.

“Before even beginning the build-out of our new office, we hosted our annual Support Team Leadership Summit this summer at HALL Park and were very impressed by the collaborative spaces available to tenants,” said Chris Grandi, CEO at Abacus Group. “The idyllic location and breadth of amenities played a key part in our decision to lease at HALL Park. We encourage our employees to have a healthy work-life balance and focus on wellness, so I know our team is looking forward to the long list of amenities, including the in-building fitness center and expansive green space they’ll have easy access to. Frisco is one of the most prominent suburbs of the Dallas Metroplex and we look forward to growing our business at HALL Park.”

Charlie Otte with Rubicon Representation represented Abacus Group in the lease and HALL Group’s Kim Butler, Brad Gibson and Cynthia Cowen represented HALL Park.

The 162-acre HALL Park features the largest private collection of contemporary Texas sculpture ever assembled, where more than 200 works created by artists from all over the world are displayed in the Texas Sculpture Garden. Park amenities include outdoor meeting and event spaces, three miles of walking and jogging trails, corporate lounges and a bike share program.

Cloudian® today announced the creation of EDGEMATRIX, a majority-owned subsidiary led by Hiroshi Ohta, Cloudian co-founder. The new company will provide solutions for Artificial Intelligence (AI) processing of large-scale data sets at the edge, building on the innovation and momentum Cloudian has demonstrated in the Japanese AI market. EDGEMATRIX has raised $9 million in Series A funding from strategic investors NTT DOCOMO, INC., SHIMIZU CORPORATION and Japan Post Capital Co., Ltd. as well as Cloudian CEO and co-founder Michael Tso and Cloudian board director Jonathan Epstein. The new company will leverage Cloudian’s HyperStore platform for managing large-scale data sets, data analytics and machine learning use cases.

A Strong AI Foundation

EDGEMATRIX will initially focus on the Japanese market, where both the government and private sector view AI as essential to boosting productivity. According to IDC, spending on AI systems in Japan is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 45.3% from 2018 to 2023, the strongest spending growth on a geographic basis.

EDGEMATRIX is well-positioned to capitalize on this opportunity. Building on Cloudian’s expertise in software-defined solutions for managing large data sets, over the past two years Ohta and a small Cloudian team created a number of innovative AI software solutions and a low-cost, ruggedized device for AI applications processing and data collection at the edge. By applying analytics near where data is created (e.g., where sensors are located), the edge device enables real-time data analysis and decision-making while minimizing the transmission costs and latencies of public clouds.

These AI solutions have been deployed by a number of large companies and organizations for various use cases, including:

• Targeted advertising – video analysis of the make, model and year of cars on a highway to display targeted ads on a nearby billboard.
• Manufacturing quality inspection – identification and removal of products that failed to get wrapped in an automated assembly line process.
• Traffic congestion measurement – counting of cars on a road as a basis for changing turn lanes to improve traffic flow.

Expanding Cloudian’s Storage Footprint

EDGEMATRIX will both better position Cloudian to capitalize on the AI market opportunity and enable the company to expand its core object storage business.

AI solutions are insatiable consumers of data and therefore require a limitlessly scalable, highly cost-effective data storage and management foundation. Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage platform will provide this foundation, allowing EDGEMATRIX appliances to send subsets of data analyzed at the edge to a central storage repository using the S3 API. In addition, because of its fully native S3 storage compatibility, Cloudian will give EDGEMATRIX customers the ability to manage this data seamlessly across on-premises and public cloud environments.

“In just a short time, we have built a compelling product, an initial base of top-tier customers and a range of strategic partnerships,” said Ohta. “We will leverage these strengths, the new funding, and the collaboration with our strategic investors to bring the benefits of our solution to more enterprises, helping them derive greater value from their digital assets.”

“Today’s announcement reflects our continued leadership in delivering software-defined innovations that provide customers with the foundation they need to thrive in today’s data-centric economy,” said Tso. “By establishing the EDGEMATRIX subsidiary, we can align more closely with our strategic partners in AI while continuing to focus on building on our position as a leading provider of object storage and hybrid cloud solutions.”

FSS (Financial Software and Systems), a global payments technology company, has launched for United Bank of India, FSS Voice Commerce in partnership with Amazon, a real-time voice banking platform that offers customers personalized banking interactions.

The solution supports an extensive set of Retail banking transactions, enabling seamless 24/7 secure access to a broad range of financial and non-financial banking services. The launch took place at the headquarters of the bank located in Kolkata.

FSS Voice Commerce uses machine-learning techniques for analysis and synthesis of language and speech to deliver personalized banking experiences. Furthermore, with machine-learning capabilities embedded into the solution, consumer patterns will begin to emerge and result in insight-led banking and personalized customer experiences. At the backend, FSS Voice Commerce interfaces with multiple banking systems to provide real-time information of accounts, balances along with transactional capabilities, thereby enabling delivery of a unified and seamless omni-channel banking experience. 

FSS Voice Commerce for UBI allows users to do the below listed transactions at present –

• Account Balance Enquiry
• Forgot voice pin and Reset voice Pin
• Information on last transaction
• Service requests like Issuing a cheque book

Services in the likes of funds transfer is in the pipeline and should be enabled very soon for the UBI customers.

How FSS Voice Commerce helps Banks and their customers –

• Customer Support: Instead of customers reaching out to support centers of the banks to raise the services request, the customer can just invoke the Bank’s Alexa skill and raise the service request which will be directly registered in Bank’s service desk.
• Drive Sales: Based on the recommendation engine and by transaction analysis, banks can craft a personalized offer to customers. E.g. special interest rates for fixed deposits, eligibility for personal loans etc.
• Lead Generation: Generate customer interest towards respective banking products/offers/cash backs through an advertisement.

All transactions initiated via FSS Voice Commerce are completely secure and it supports out-of-band multi-factor authentication including one-time passcodes, to maintain the integrity of the transaction ecosystem and prevent fraud.

Speaking on the launch, Shri Ajit Kumar Das, Executive Director, United Bank of India said, “Voice-based banking services will give customers a relatively new way of banking that we want our customers to experience. It will also help us understand better the customer behavior in adapting to new banking gadgets in future.”

VAKT, the company re-imagining commodity post-trade processing underpinned by blockchain, announces a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with essDOCS, a leading enabler of paperless trade. The MOU focuses on the North-West European barge markets, smoothing the post-trade process for all parties involved in the transaction.

Previously, this market relied on a highly inefficient paper-based post-trade process. Trading parties would agree information to send on to the terminal, which would add its own information before sending on to barge captains to agree and sign for the product and quantities loaded or discharged from the vessel. This lengthy process results in several paper documents including the barge receipt, which when physically signed allowed the barge to sail and the seller to invoice the buyer.

The combined VAKT-essDOCS solution allows that process to be handled entirely digitally, speeding it up, reducing the scope for error and cutting costs. By working with VAKT, the key shipping documents (and data) can then be added to the immutable, tamper-proof blockchain platform, offering an easily-retrievable single source of truth for all parties involved in the transaction.

By collaborating, both companies are able to extend their market reach. For VAKT, this represents a step towards expanding its services to encompass the full physical energy trading ecosystem.

“We are delighted to partner with VAKT on bringing eDocs to the wider energy market,” said essDOCS CEO Alexander Goulandris. “While our initial focus is the North-West Europe tank barge market, where combined we have a critical mass of customers and an unrivalled digital post-trade offering, we are also exploring additional global markets where eDocs are key to full digitization.”

Etienne Amic, VAKT CEO, added: “At its core, VAKT is a multisided platform that allows the various parties in a physical energy transaction – traders, terminals, inspection companies, brokers, port agents, brokers and trade finance banks – to exchange information securely and seamlessly. Some information is transactional; some operational; and some of it represents the documents related to the transfer of the physical goods themselves. There are not that many well-conceived solutions allowing these documents to be passed safely in a digital form within current legal constraints.

“It was therefore a very natural step for us to enter into a collaboration with essDOCS, who have been developing solutions in this field for a number of years. We are delighted to offer the convenience of electronic barge receipts to our clients as part of our North West Europe Barges product. We are hopeful that VAKT and essDOCS will be able to roll out even more exciting products in the future.”