Commerce Bank has promoted Paul Steiner to Corporate Controller and Chief Accounting Officer of Commerce Bancshares effective immediately.

In his role as Corporate Controller and Chief Accounting Officer, Steiner will lead corporate accounting functions including corporate tax, regulatory reporting, accounting policy and risk management while also managing the company’s accounting staff. A 12-year veteran of Commerce, Steiner has more than 25 years of accounting experience including eight years in public accounting. He most recently served as Assistant Controller and managed a number of accounting areas including the corporate tax function.

“Paul has a proven track record of enhancing our financial operations and processes,” said Charles G. Kim, Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President at Commerce Bancshares, Inc. “His breadth of knowledge and strong leadership skills make him the perfect choice to occupy this important role, and we look forward to the impact he will make on our accounting capabilities.”

Matt Burkemper, who joined Commerce Bank in January 2018, as the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development will assume responsibilities for leading Investor Relations for the company. Burkemper has worked in the banking industry for over 12 years with extensive experience in finance, strategic planning, lending and business transformation. All inbound investor relations queries will be directed to Burkemper going forward.

Steiner’s promotion to Controller and Chief Accounting Officer and Burkemper’s added responsibilities for leading Investor Relations is preceded by the retirement announcement of Jeff Aberdeen. After 31 years of leadership at Commerce, Aberdeen will be retiring effective June 28, 2019. His exit comes at the end of a well-organized, multi-year succession plan. Jeff will continue to support the finance team until his retirement date. For more than three decades, Aberdeen served as a leader, resource and mentor all while positively shaping Commerce’s culture in innumerable ways.

New data released today by Adyen, the payments platform of choice for many of the world’s leading companies, highlights the value of unified commerce to retailers. Its report The Unified Commerce Index analyses data across its global payments platform, which processed €159 billion in transactions in 2018.

Providing a seamless omnichannel experience represents a significant opportunity for retailers to grow their market share. The data shows that omnichannel shoppers, who regularly buy from a retailer both online and instore spend 15 percent more per purchase, than those who shop just on one channel. The report also shows that providing a positive omnichannel experience boosts loyalty as those that shop with retailers both online and offline spend twice as often as single channel shoppers. Globally, the impact of omnichannel retail is even higher, with those who shop across multiple channels spending 30 percent more per purchase.

According to Adyen’s data, four in five single channel purchases globally are made in-store, with 20 percent completed online. However, for omnichannel shopping, 60 percent of purchases are made in-store. Myles Dawson, UK Managing Director of Adyen comments: “Debate continues to rage on about whether online shopping is killing retail – but actually it’s a symbiotic relationship. Those retailers that create the seamless link between the online and offline channels will prosper. “What matters most is creating an experience that gives your customers the opportunity to choose.

The data shows that if you do, your customers will spend more, and make purchases more often. Online channels will help drive footfall to physical stores and vice versa.”

The index is available for download at: https://www.adyen.com/landing/online/global/the-unified-commerce-index

Allied Wallet, a globally leading provider of mainstream online payment processing, is now compatible with Nganluong, Momo, and VTC Pay in Vietnam to support its growing e-commerce market, ranked as one of the top ten fastest growing in the world.

Value Walk listed Vietnam as the #6 fastest growing e-commerce market in the world with an annual growth rate of 32%. It’s currently worth €2.3 billion and highly influenced by the incredible e-commerce growth in China.

Although Vietnamese banks are launching programs to promote an increase in credit card usage, the country has not yet seen widespread adoption due to cultural barriers and the existing minimum income requirements.

Despite a rate of just 2% in credit card penetration and only 31% of the Vietnamese population being banked, the country shows incredible growth in e-commerce partly due to the use of smartphones and their online services.

“At Allied Wallet, we’ve always put a focus on connecting buyers and sellers and supporting their preferred payment methods. As e-commerce and m-commerce continue to grow in Vietnam we want to promote growth there and make sure we support the unique culture and payment methods,” said CEO Andy Khawaja of Allied Wallet.

Vietnam, similar to its neighboring countries, is gravitating towards e-commerce because of the comfort and convenience it offers. It also allows them access to goods and services from neighboring countries or even further.

Solutions like Momo allow users to load their eWallet by connecting it to their bank account or loading it in any one of its 4000+ retail locations. Nganluong already works with more than 10,000 e-commerce merchants and supports over 500,000 eWallet customers and partners. VTC Pay has over 22 million active eWallet users and is accepted by over 30,000 businesses.

Allied Wallet is proud to support these payment methods and connect their users to a global payment platform that supports over 150 million.

Customers give out payment details over the phone even when they aren’t confident or haven’t considered whether the information will be stored safely, new research by Ultracomms has found.

The contact centre specialist surveyed 1,000 consumers on their experience of dealing with brands and presented the results in its comprehensive report It’s still good to talk: Consumer contact centre experiences in the age of the GDPR.

Despite strong public awareness around GDPR regulations, 45% of respondents who gave their payment card details either weren’t confident or didn’t consider whether their card details would be stored safely - 71% of these gave their details to a person over the phone.

Of this group, only 3% were aware that using secure payment technology is the safest method of providing payment details over the phone.

Derwyn Jones, CEO at Ultracomms, said: “This research tells us that there is a need for consumer education around what a secure transaction over the phone looks like and the right to demand secure transactions.”

“In face to face and online environments security has improved considerably by the introduction of Chip & PIN and Verified by Visa. This, whilst great news, has resulted in telephone payments being an open target for fraudsters. Proactivity by businesses to provide Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard services is vital to protecting consumers and ensuring they continue to feel confident.”

The research also highlighted concerns around consent to contact customers with 66% of those who were contacted by a brand stating that they had not given their consent for the contact to take place.

Derwyn continued: “It’s also important that after putting GDPR plans in place these are being executed effectively. With an increase in GDPR data breach reports, contact centres need to be transparent about why they are contacting people to avoid penalties. This needn’t require a complete overhaul of practices or processes, it can be quite simple - with the right guidance, companies can design great relationships with customers and build compliant processes into their existing contact centre workflow.”

The full Ultracomms report – It’s still good to talk”: Consumer contact centre experiences in the age of the GDPR - can be downloaded here.

Today, FICO announced the latest version of its industry-leading Decision Management Platform (DMP). FICO DMP is a platform for cloud-based, digital decisioning solutions. DMP enables organisations to create and rapidly deploy digital decisions across departments, functions, and customer lifecycle stages. FICO DMP spans the entire enterprise, helping organisations to make consistent, data and model-driven decisions. As a unifying platform it breaks down functional silos.

Recently named a leader in The Forrester New Wave™: Digital Decisioning Platforms, Q4 2018 report, FICO Decision Management Platform includes:

• High-performance, scalable service execution that supports machine-learning, optimisation and decision execution environments.
• A robust analytic data mart that seamlessly tracks all of the decision assets (data, analytic and decision models, UI) associated with any business decision and provides an audit trail.
• A collaboration hub to connect and enable data, analytics and decision science teams to share best practices, algorithms and other authoring collaboration.

FICO DMP Introduces Open APIs and Kubernetes

With the latest release, FICO DMP now offers improved open application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow other software vendors and customers to extend the platform with complementary capabilities or connect it to other enterprise systems such as CRM or ERP. The latest version fundamentally utilises Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling and management. Kubernetes enables FICO Decision Management Suite, the FICO solution for developing analytically powered, decision automation solutions, to support seamless and cost-effective deployment on public and private clouds as well as across hybrid cloud deployments.

“In the latest release of FICO DMP, we’ve focused on scalability, cost management, openness and extensibility,” said Jari Koister, vice president of product management, FICO. “By leveraging Kubernetes and adding open APIs, customers now have a fully extensible platform that can connect to and support the broadest range of cloud services, infrastructure platforms, data ingestion, and other robust customisations.”

As part of the Decision Management Suite, FICO DMP enables digital decisioning by leveraging real-time insights about customers and business operations to automate actions for individual customers, at the right time and via the right channel.

According to the Forrester Wave report, "FICO is best for companies automating consequential business decisions. Because FICO supports both business-rules authoring and advanced analytics modelling, enterprises can use FICO to make sophisticated decisions. FICO also offers business solutions that encapsulate decision expertise for vertical and horizontal applications."

FICO DMP enables deep collaboration and coordination that breaks down organisational silos to connect decisions across the enterprise. FICO DMP provides centralised control, shared knowledge and distributed accountability, which helps facilitate collaboration in complex, distributed and fast-paced organisations.

FICO DMP is available from Amazon Web Services (AWS); FICO is also an APN Advanced Technology Partner and has achieved AWS Financial Services Competency.

FSS (Financial Software and Systems), a global payments technology company, and QRails Inc., a financial services technology company, have entered a partnership to provide next generation strong customer authentication to drive frictionless payments. As part of the agreement, QRails will embed FSS Secure3D, an innovative 3DS 2.0 solution, with its sophisticated integrated payment processing and program management services.

FSS Secure3D, modelled on EMVCo 3D Secure 2.0 guidelines, provides a frictionless approach to authenticate customers and combat fraud in card-not-present scenarios. The solution deploys sophisticated machine learning algorithms to continually learn customer transactional patterns and authenticate customers behind the scenes. Issuers can use a combination of variables including merchant, cardholder details, device, location and transaction related parameters to risk score transactions and determine if it was initiated by the legitimate cardholder. Most customers are authenticated in the background, with zero friction whilst shopping online. This improves customer experience, reduces false positives and minimizes incidence of fraud.

Naseer Nasim, CEO of QRails, commented: “Our industry mandates the highest levels of transaction security, but our clients and cardholders require a frictionless experience. FSS is the ideal partner to enable both and ensure strong security without impacting convenience. We are excited offer this capability to our clients with an innovative partner like FSS.”

“With increased online purchases--especially through mobile devices—consumers expect simplicity and speed. This puts pressures on issuers and merchants to meet consumer demands for simpler e-commerce transactions while mitigating fraud risks. FSS’ Secure3D 3DS 2.0 solution augments the innovative QRails platform to promote secure frictionless payments”, Ram Chari, Global Head - FSS,said.

Commenting on the win, Haresh Hemrajani, Regional General Manager - Europe, FSS said, “We are proud to be a strategic partner for QRails. This win validates FSS’ strong leadership position in the payments industry when it comes to driving strong customer authentication.”

FSS is making significant investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive its next phase of growth, by adding business value to its customers across a wide range of applications including Digital Banking, Payment Analytics, Digital Security, Reconciliation, ATM Monitoring and Data Centre Operations.