The quality of payment processing by paytech firm Paysend has been recognised by MasterCard.

The recognition comes in the form of MasterCard’s Regional Compliance Award, which compares ICAs (Interbank Card Association Numbers) in their respective region. Only ICAs in the top five per cent with the highest compliance percentage receive the awards.

Ronald Millar, CEO of Paysend, said: “We are delighted to have won this award. The fact that we won this while against the major processors is something we at Paysend are all proud of. Like MasterCard, we take our compliance role very seriously.”

The Award is part of MasterCard’s Data Integrity Compliance Awards Program.

Imandra Inc. - creator of the Imandra cloud-native automated reasoning engine - has completed a $5 million Seed investment led by AlbionVC, IQ Capital and LiveOak Venture Partners. The capital will be used towards further growth in financial services and fast-growing applications of their AI technology to autonomous vehicles, robotics and machine learning. Imandra democratises deep advances in symbolic AI for making algorithms safe, explainable and fair. Imandra’s “Reasoning as a Service ®” platform makes these techniques widely accessible to those without specialised background in these fields.

Since its founding in 2014, Imandra has pioneered advances in AI for algorithm safety and compliance and their application to new industries. In 2015 it won the UBS Future of Finance Challenge, coming in 1st place out of more than 600 companies from 52 countries by using its AI technology to find a fundamental flaw in the design of the UBS dark pool previously undetected by the bank and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Imandra’s current clients include top global investment banks who rely on Imandra for design, testing and ongoing audits of their complex trading systems.

Since the public release of Imandra’s cloud services last year, the company has expanded into robotics, autonomous vehicles and reinforcement learning. Grant Passmore, co-founder and co-CEO, said “As our reliance on complex software grows, deep advances in AI are required to ensure the algorithms we depend on are safe, explainable and fair. We’re proud of our team and the advances we’ve made in turning groundbreaking research into a scalable product with wide-reaching positive impact. This investment is a strong recognition of our progress and we’re delighted for the support of our venture partners in our next phase of growth.”

Denis Ignatovich, co-founder and co-CEO, noted “The need for automated mathematical techniques for algorithm analysis has never been more pressing. Industry leaders including Facebook, Amazon and Google are recognising this with significant investments into automated symbolic reasoning for their business use cases. We could not be in a better position at a better time to provide a scalable and industry-agnostic platform. We’re excited to partner with Albion, IQ Capital and LiveOak on this journey and look forward to leveraging their expertise as we scale our company in this next stage.”

This latest round of seed funding will support Imandra’s expansion in both the US and the UK, with significant hiring of AI, engineering and product talent in Austin, London and Edinburgh.

Robert Whitby-Smith, Partner at Albion VC, said: “Increasing automation safely is critical to most sectors including automotive, aerospace, defence, healthcare, financial services and social media. The number and complexity of algorithms used in applications regarded as safety critical is increasing rapidly with the expansion of automation and machine learning and it is increasingly challenging to test software robustly at scale, and ensure the exhaustive creation of edge cases, using traditional techniques. Imandra’s proprietary software which provides automated testing for functional languages and model-based generation of tests will become a key element of the future mix of software testing. The completeness of the learning experience provided by Imandra will provide significant benefits beyond software testing including the evolution of the training of artificial neural networks. We are delighted to support Denis and Grant achieve their exciting vision.”

Ed Stacey, Partner at IQ Capital, said: “The founders of Imandra - Grant and Denis - have taken their cutting edge research into characterising algorithmic behaviour and applied it in making a scalable product for the finance industry. We also believe this technology has great potential for a broad class of algorithmic and AI challenges. The founders have a proven track record both in academia - at leading institutions including the University of Cambridge and University of Edinburgh - as well as in business. Many of the companies IQ Capital invests in are IP-rich and spin out of university networks - Imandra is a great example of the type of businesses we want to invest in.”

Krishna Srinivasan, Founding Partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, said: “Our investment in Imandra embodies the core of our investment thesis to back Texas based top notch entrepreneurs that are disrupting large industry categories.  We recognized quickly that Denis, Grant and team are amongst the best in the world at this emerging area of algorithm and application security testing and that their approach has the ability for multi-industry transformational impact. We are also super excited to welcome Denis and Grant back to their Texas roots, leverage the tremendous local computer science talent and build something significant from where it all began.”

Denis Ignatovich and Grant Passmore, the founders of Imandra, have backgrounds in academic mathematics and financial trading. They founded the company in London in 2014, a decade after having met as undergraduate roommates at the University of Texas. Denis started his career at Deutsche Bank in New York, before moving to London to lead a trading desk that relied heavily on complex algorithms. Grant earned his PhD in AI for algorithm safety at the University of Edinburgh and is a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. In 2019, the company opened its new US headquarters in Austin, TX.

Statistics from the recent FCA complaints handling report show that the total redress paid to consumers was £2.26 billion, 12% (£216 million) increase compared to £2.57 billion in 2018 this time last year.

This news comes after Gartner stated that over the next 12 years, 80 per cent of traditional banking firms will either go out of business or be rendered obsolete by new competition, changing consumer behaviour, and advancements in technology.

As agile challenger banks and fintechs threaten the market share of traditional banks, customer retention is top of mind for bank executives. Banks need to ensure their future business operations are directly aligned with the needs of the customer, according to business process management experts at Signavio.

Dr Gero Decker, CEO and Co-founder at Signavio comments: “Customer experience is the new battleground for the financial services sector. By embracing the customer journey as a strategic and creative imperative, banks can drive digital transformation, optimise operations and stay competitive.”

Dr Decker continues: “One way to approach this is through customer journey mapping; a system which captures each touch point and moment of truth of customer interaction. This then allows banks to better understand a customer’s motivations or frustrations. Even more importantly, this holistic overview enables financial institutions to constantly evolve their processes in order to deliver the desired customer experience at scale.”

 “As financial institutions transform their operations, customer journey mapping forces them to consider each element of their business from the end-user perspective. This engagement also empowers companies to move away from lopsided efficiency goals, which often frustrate customers. Instead, they can adopt a more holistic approach to reaching strategic business outcomes which are built around the consumer.”

Baker Hill – a leading provider of technology solutions for common loan origination, risk and relationship management, CECL compliance, and smart data analytics – and Validis – a pioneer of financial data sharing and standardization technology – have entered into a strategic partnership to combine the companies’ industry-leading technology.

Through this partnership, Validis’ world-leading financial data sharing and standardization technology platform, DataShare, will integrate with Baker Hill NextGen®, the expert cloud solution for lending, risk management, CECL compliance, and analytics. As a result, financial institutions will fully automate statement spreading and benefit from an enhanced SMB lending process. The combined technology will enable financial institutions to offer higher value, personalized services to potential customers and build a satisfied, loyal customer base. Automating the gathering and consumption of financials commonly cuts weeks off the commercial lending process. The function drives much more rapid growth in a bank’s C+I portfolio and reduces the time pressure on underwriting by as much as 90 percent by delivering standardized and complete financials at the touch of a button.

Validis’ DataShare, which features a suite of APIs and an online portal to view the data, provides financial institutions with fast, easy access to an SMB client’s financial data, direct from their accounting application, in a standardized format. SMB borrowers benefit from quicker decisions and automation of the collection and transfer of their financial data to the financial institution. Likewise, financial institutions benefit from access to the borrower’s accurate, complete and current financial data, which provides greater insights, speeds decisioning and minimizes risk. Validis connects to over 80 percent of online and offline accounting applications used by the SMB market and extracts the full transactional history.

More than just another loan origination system, Baker Hill NextGen® is the most powerful banking solution in cloud technology, empowering its customers with unprecedented core strength combined with risk management and unparalleled insights – all through a single platform. Specifically engineered to adapt to the evolving needs of banks and credit unions, Baker Hill NextGen® is the intelligent choice for those who want to boost productivity, maximize convenience and lower costs of ownership. The platform uses the most advanced, flexible and scalable technology stack in existence today to allow for seamless data and third party integrations. Packed with the functionality required in today’s evolving financial services landscape, development of Baker Hill NextGen® was informed by more than 35 years of industry expertise.

By integrating these two platforms, financial institutions will now have access to a superior, automated statement spreading solution that offers unprecedented insight into the commercial lending underwriting process. This revolutionary combination will not only offer financial institutions greater efficiency and consistency to make sound credit decisions, but it will also streamline the collection of financials from business customers and provide a better experience. No configuration or data preparation is required for either the financial institution or the borrower, and borrowers’ complete financials are delivered into Baker Hill NextGen® within minutes.

“With DataShare, financial institutions gain a comprehensive view of an SMB borrower’s financial health, ultimately becoming a true partner to their customers,” said Joel Curry, CEO of Validis. “By combining this technology with Baker Hill NextGen®, we are empowering financial institutions with fast and easy access to clients’ financial data in a standardized format. Baker Hill has made a substantial impact on the financial services industry, not only driven by its three decades of expertise and technology, but by its executive leadership team. We believe this relationship will drive future success and growth of our customers’ businesses.”

“Because of our rapid success and as evidence of our superior innovation and expertise, Baker Hill NextGen® has captured the attention of the financial services industry and attracted a number of high-tech, high-profile, innovative companies like Validis as strategic partners,” said John M. Deignan, President and CEO of Baker Hill. “Our partnership with Validis illustrates the impact of Baker Hill NextGen® and the need for powerful technology for both loan origination (from online loan applications to complete lending process management) and portfolio risk management, making it possible for financial institutions to aggressively compete while driving profitability. This relationship is an exciting venture for us and we look forward to the value it will provide the entire industry.”

Surecomp®, the global trade finance fintech leader, announced today the inauguration of SureLab, Surecomp’s newly established innovation lab. SureLab was established to centralize Surecomp’s digitization initiatives thereby enabling Surecomp to maintain its position at the forefront of trade finance innovations. SureLab aims to introduce new technologies to the digital trade finance arena. During the first quarter of 2019 SureLab released two innovations;  APIsure an open API platform and SureStore, the world’s first trade finance app store.

Thanks to APIsure, core trade finance systems can be more connected than ever. APIsure simplifies the way banks connect their trade finance offerings including cloud capabilities. Apps for RPA and data analytics are currently available at SureStore.  In the coming months, SureLab will be releasing additional innovations all of which will greatly enhance a trade finance developers’ ecosystem

Based in Israel’s Silicon Wadi, SureLab employs a multidisciplinary staff of technologists, developers, product managers and UX/UI specialists. Emerging technologies explored by SureLab include; distributed ledger/blockchain technologies, RPA, regtech, internet of things (IoT), and more. SureLab investigates how these technologies can best be utilized in trade finance areas such as supply chain, client interaction, open banking, back office processing and others.  SureLab provides an incubation environment for Surecomp clients and third party fintech companies to mutually explore the optimal way to incorporate and leverage exciting new technologies.

“We are pleased to announce the inauguration of SureLab, which is poised to become a focal point in digital trade finance innovation,” said Eyal Hareuveny, Surecomp President. “We are confident that the innovations and services developed by SureLab will provide bottom-line benefits to our banking and corporate customers worldwide.”

“Collaborating with our customers and fintech partners, SureLab is now a fundamental part of the digital trade finance ecosystem,” added Lyron Wahrmann, Surecomp’s Head of Digitalization.

Today, payments infrastructure company Stripe announced a series of updates to its product stack for businesses operating in Europe, and acquired a Dublin-based tech company called Touchtech Payments.

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is coming

On September 14, 2019, SCA will come into force in Europe, radically changing the way people buy and sell online. More than 300 million European consumers will need to confirm their identity for the majority of their online purchases, using two of the following: something they know (e.g., a password), possess (e.g., a phone), or are (e.g., their fingerprint).

Hundreds of thousands of European online merchants—from retailers, to ridesharing companies, to crowdfunding services—will have to upgrade their payments set-up to prepare for the upcoming regulation. If they don’t, their transactions will be declined outright. When similar regulation was enforced in India in 2014, some businesses reported an overnight conversion drop of over 25%, due to the extra step in the payments experience. And while European regulators created a number of SCA exemptions for low-risk transactions (e.g., low value transactions, white-listing by end customers…), most merchants will simply not be able to leverage them on their own.

“SCA is a ticking time bomb for the European payments industry. Merchants must deal with a complex set of changes to the payment flow that can have a disruptive impact on the customer experience. Yet, awareness among merchants is low,” said Ron van Wezel, Senior analyst at Aite Group. “Payment service providers are at a turning point. SCA is simply too complex for any merchant to manage on its own, including for large online businesses. Payments providers who can abstract away SCA complexity will have a significant advantage over their competitors.”

New Stripe products to make SCA as seamless as possible for online businesses

Today, Stripe is announcing new products and updates to help merchants implement the best SCA-ready authentication methods to their checkout page and dynamically trigger SCA when required: - The Payment Intents API: a new dynamic payments API that lets businesses design their own SCA-ready payment forms, and accept the best authentication methods (e.g., 3D Secure 2, Apple Pay, Google Pay) through a single integration.

• Checkout: a pre-built payments page optimized for SCA that merchants can integrate with just a few lines of code.

• Billing: a suite of tools for subscription businesses that identify which charges require SCA and send customizable emails to subscribers when additional authentication is needed.

• Dynamic support for SCA exemptions on low-risk transactions (e.g., whitelisting, recurring transactions, low amount): behind the scenes, Stripe dynamically scans every transaction to trigger SCA only when required, protecting both users’ safety and merchants’ revenue.

Stripe’s products are built with an uncertain future in mind. When new authentication requirements arise in Europe and elsewhere, Stripe will update its logic to protect merchants’ revenue against all odds, with few to no changes needed to their integration. To help merchants navigate the complexity of SCA, in addition to the new and updated integration products, Stripe is launching SCA guides, SCA-ready payments flow designs, SCA-ready API documentation, and SCA webinars, all of which can be found on the new SCA web page.

An acquisition - Touchtech Payments - to accelerate SCA readiness for financial institutions

Stripe also announced it has acquired Dublin-based Touchtech Payments—a software company that provides advanced SCA-ready authentication technology for some of Europe’s leading fintechs and challenger banks, like N26, Transferwise, and many others. By providing advanced authentication technology for credit card issuers, Touchtech Payments helps them offer better payments experiences for their customers, without having to choose between security and user experience.

“On the modern internet, payments should be everything you’d expect: easy, secure, and fully compliant with the latest regulations. Unfortunately, these three attributes are often at odds with one another, making it nearly impossible for an individual business to keep pace with regulatory changes and build a great payments product experience for their customers,” said Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s Chief Product Officer. “Touchtech adds yet another layer to the economic infrastructure Stripe is building for the internet, which is designed to help businesses comply not only with SCA but also with the entire next generation of regional payment regulations.”

As part of Stripe, Touchtech will continue to grow its products, working from our Dublin Engineering hub.

Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:BR), a global Fintech leader and part of the S&P 500®Index, today announced it has entered into a purchase agreement to acquire the retirement plan custody and trust assets from TD Ameritrade Trust Company, a subsidiary of TD Ameritrade Holding Company (Nasdaq: AMTD).

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced the release of a new paper addressing issues of trade failures in the institutional post-trade marketplace where greater technology adoption could help with growing problems in an era of cost pressures, heightened regulatory requirements, and increasing cyber security focus.

Standing Settlement Instructions (SSIs) represent a significant proportion of trade failures, as missing or incomplete SSIs create one of the biggest pain points for firms. The significant number of manual touch points relating to SSIs during the settlement process sees trade data handled by many disparate systems from matching engines to counterparties and settlement organizations, while flowing across an array of market infrastructure facilitators.

The white paper, A Roadmap to Automation: How an SSI Utility Benefits All Participants, looks at the structural transformation underway in the capital markets and the need for industry consensus to ensure SSIs become fully automated.

From the efficiency perspective alone, a global failure rate of just 2 percent is estimated to result in costs and losses up to $3 billion. Beyond cost savings, automation can help address security concerns as sometimes communication still occurs via email instead of through secure networks. In fact, it is estimated that roughly half of institutional participants are sending critical SSI information manually rather than on a secure platform which is inefficient and introduces cyber security risk.

“Settlement processes are now attracting more attention as regulators require shorter and more certain settlement with the potential of penalties for noncompliance,” said Matthew Stauffer, Managing Director and Head of Institutional Trade Processing at DTCC. “Removing manual touch points in the settlement process will have a tremendously positive impact in efficiency and security.”

The move from manual to automated SSI processes, and ultimately to custodian-managed SSIs, is underway with more than 3,600 firms already leveraging DTCC’s ALERT platform. Using ALERT’s Global Custodian Direct (GC Direct) workflow, custodians and prime brokers can administer settlement instructions for their buyside clients with industry standard compliant messaging. GC Direct has just passed the milestone of more than 1 million SSIs now managed by custodians and prime brokers, where early adopters are reporting a reduction in fails of 40-50 percent.

Surecomp, the global trade finance fintech leader, announced today the inauguration of SureLab, Surecomp’s newly established innovation lab. SureLab was established to centralize Surecomp’s digitization initiatives thereby enabling Surecomp to maintain its position at the forefront of trade finance innovations. SureLab aims to introduce new technologies to the digital trade finance arena. During the first quarter of 2019 SureLab released two innovations;  APIsure an open API platform and SureStore, the world’s first trade finance app store.

SureLab’s vision can be summed up in three words: ‘Simplify. Connect. Expand.’

Thanks to APIsure,  core trade finance systems can be more connected than ever. APIsure simplifies the way banks connect their trade finance offerings including cloud capabilities. Apps for RPA and data analytics are currently available at SureStore.  In the coming months, SureLab will be releasing additional innovations all of which will greatly enhance a trade finance developers’ ecosystem

Based in Israel’s Silicon Wadi, SureLab employs a multidisciplinary staff of technologists, developers, product managers and UX/UI specialists. Emerging technologies explored by SureLab include; distributed ledger/blockchain technologies, RPA, regtech, internet of things (IoT), and more. SureLab investigates how these technologies can best be utilized in trade finance areas such as supply chain, client interaction, open banking, back office processing and others.  SureLab provides an incubation environment for Surecomp clients and third party fintech companies to mutually explore the optimal way to incorporate and leverage exciting new technologies.

“We are pleased to announce the inauguration of SureLab, which is poised to become a focal point in digital trade finance innovation,” said Eyal Hareuveny, Surecomp President. “We are confident that the innovations and services developed by SureLab will provide bottom-line benefits to our banking and corporate customers worldwide.”

“Collaborating with our customers and fintech partners, SureLab is now a fundamental part of the digital trade finance ecosystem,” added Lyron Wahrmann, Surecomp’s Head of Digitalization.

Glue42, the company bringing an entirely new desktop experience to financial institutions, expands its desktop ecosystem with new fintech providers. New partners include independent software vendors (ISVs) Adaptable Tools and BCC Group, and service provider NORMAN & SONS. 

Available immediately, the ISVs can now offer their services via the Glue42 platform using the FINOS FDC3 open standard to provide a seamless UI and data integration experience from any enterprise application or cloud-based service to their end users’ desktops. As a result, their end users now enjoy greater flexibility as they gain access to best of breed systems and data sources without the need for separate integration or connectivity, including: 

• the Adaptable Blotter best-in-class HTML5 DataGrid solution, enabling the visualization and manipulation of enterprise data to any JavaScript, .NET, Java, VB/COM enterprise application, as well as data that surfaced via the BCC Group’s ONE platform along with a host of other third-party platforms and products including Bloomberg, Refinitiv, Salesforce and Excel;
• real-time market-data sources via BCC Group’s cloud-native ONE Solution, a solution that provides a single interface to ICE, Bloomberg, Morningstar, Refinitiv and other exchanges and data providers, ready to be leveraged by terminals, desktop applications, analytics, calculations, correlation, regulatory, and / or contribution requirements all fully entitled via the single ONE API.

In addition, Glue42 will leverage NORMAN & SONS’ expertise to ensure UX and UI designs as well as the desktop implementation itself are delivered in a quick and reliable manner that aligns with customers’ business goals.  

“We’re at the confluence of adopting industry standards and providing a better end user experience,” said James Wooster, COO, Glue42. “As big proponents of building towards a vendor-agnostic financial desktop, leveraging FDC3 to integrate our platform with these new partners is a major step forward in this pursuit – one that enables firms to create a seamless user experience across applications of any type.” 

“Interop goes beyond JavaScript and simple data sources,” he continued. “With our partners we can further reduce the number of manual steps traders and wealth managers need to perform and provide better insights. Don't throw away what you can integrate.”

Danielle Nagler, CEO and founder, Adaptable Tools, says, “We couldn’t be happier with the ease with which we were able to integrate the Adaptable Blotter with Glue42 into applications of any type. Firms can now connect the Adaptable Blotter to any JavaScript, .NET, Java, VB/COM enterprise application along with a host of third-party platforms and products including Bloomberg, Refinitiv, Salesforce and Excel. This capability will help accelerate the roll-out of fully customizable DataGrids across both legacy and new desktop environments.”

Mauricio Gonzalez Evans, CEO, BCC Group, says, “Market participants have for too long been waiting for an open solution that provides resilient and entitled distribution of streaming real-time and reference data over a single API. With our joint offering available in the cloud, on-premises or as a hybrid deployment, customers will be able to reinvent their market data world from a commercial and technical perspective. Glue42 couldn’t have made this any easier for us.”

Graeme Harker, founder, NORMAN & SONS, says, “Glue42 is a mature and proven interoperability platform that helps our customers create connected, cross-application enterprise solutions without having to re-develop legacy desktop applications from scratch. As our customers are increasingly demanding this type of experience across their desktops and smart devices, we can now lead the way with user-centric interop without breaking the bank.”

More fintech vendors and data providers will be added in the next few months. 

Glue42 will be demonstrating its latest capability at Trade Tech Europe 2019. For additional information about the new partnerships and their value-add, check out the Glue42 blog.