The Marriott International Group data breach exposed the records of 500 million of their customers.[1] This data breach has left Marriott International customers around the world concerned about the safety of their personal information, including their passport details and account information.

To keep customers up to date, the company has set up a website to give affected customers more information. It will also offer customers in the US and some other countries a year-long subscription to a fraud-detecting service.[2]

In the last 6 months, over 4.5 billion customer records were compromised in 945 data breaches the world over.[3] In light of these data breaches, it is imperative to ensure customers are constantly aware of the status of their personal information and what the next steps they should take are. Next-generation technologies, such as automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), can speed up this dissemination of information, says Global technology provider Teleperformance Digital Integrated Business Services

Bhupender Singh, CEO of Teleperformance Digital Integrated Business Services comments: “When companies suffer from data breaches, transparency is key. It’s important to put yourself in the shoes of the customer, especially when their passport information and account details could have been exposed to malicious actors. In today’s digital age, this may lead to customer’s dissatisfaction being aired on social media, leading to further bad press for the company as well as loyal customers looking for alternate service providers.”

Bhupender continues: “An omni-channel approach must be taken here, with information being disseminated across the different customer touch points to ensure full visibility for customers, including the next steps to mitigate damage in case their personal information has been exposed. Additionally, by focusing on boosting back office operational efficiency, front-line staff will be able to attend to a higher volume of customer enquiries. Not only can automation reduce the time of calculating payable compensation by 60 per cent, but it can also ensure that customer complaint handling is accurate. This in turn can mitigate customer dissatisfaction and alleviate customer concerns.”

Teleperformance Digital Integrated Business Service has been recently ranked as a top level travel domain business service provider by a leading global analyst & advisory firm.

Tieto accelerates the digitalization of public sector buildings in Finland by offering the Empathic Building Core solution – originally launched at Slush two years ago and already used by many companies – free of charge for all public sector buildings in Finland. The Tampere University is the first public body to adopt the solution.

The digitalization of public services is one of the spearhead projects of the Finnish government. This objective is accelerated by the KIRA-digi project, funded by the Finnish state as well as the real estate and construction sector. The KIRA-digi project has started nearly 140 industry-renewing pilot projects that have generated new innovations and businesses. As part of their practical implementations, Tieto offers Empathic Building Core solutions for all public buildings free of charge starting from January 2019. 

“This trial is a great example of promoting experimental culture which will hopefully help to enhance operational efficiency and user experience in public buildings. I look forward to the first applications for example in day-care centers or libraries where this solution has significant potential,” says Hannele Pokka, Permanent Secretary at the Finnish Ministry of the Environment.

The Empathic Building Core solution is an Internet-of-Things based solution, which creates a digital twin from the floor plan of the property. The office's digital twin facilitates space planning and improves employee comfort and efficiency.

A location-based solution that facilitates work

The solution can facilitate navigation, especially in public spaces. In hospitals, for example, the solution can make it easier to find the way to the laboratory. In a library, the solution helps you navigate directly to the bookcase you are looking for. The solution also works as a location-based publishing system where administrators and end-users can layer and view useful information on the map. For schools, this can mean timetables for classrooms. At health centers, the solution could provide users location of certain medical devices. The solution also enables collaboration between users, meaning that any discussion platform can be integrated in the Empathic Building solution.

At the next stage, with the help of sensor technology, the Empathic Building Core solution can be augmented for the office environment for even more intelligent solutions. Employees can, for example, share their location with each other, making it easier to find a colleague. In addition, the current booking status of a workstation or conference room can easily be checked from the screen or through the application. Other use cases include air quality and temperature monitoring and creating digital maintenance requests for buildings. 

"The digital dimension brings a whole new user experience to buildings. The Empathic Building makes life easier for people in many ways, and it supports the integration of all open information – if the information is available on the browser, it can basically be combined with the solution. It is fantastic that we can bring the solution to the public spaces – and I believe it represents a big digital leap forward for the public sector,” says Tomi Teikko, head of Empathic Building Solutions at Tieto.

Tampere University of Technology adopts a new tool for research purposes

The new Tampere University will take the Empathic Building Core tool into use in early 2019. The University looks forward for the new tool to opening up a range of new opportunities especially in the field of research.  

”Tieto’s Emphatic Building Core solution will allow us to test our algorithms in real-life settings. It will enable researchers, companies and students to perform quick experiments and thereby foster our culture of experimentation,” says Dean Mika Grundström from Tampere University of Technology. 

“Tampere University of Technology and Tieto have enjoyed strategic research collaboration since 2015 within the National Science Foundation Center for Visual and Decision Informatics, dealing with AI solutions and big data analytics. Research on Intelligent Buildings is an important research topic both in NSF CVDI and VIRPA-D, funded by Tieto and Business Finland,” says Moncef Gabbouj, Professor, Laboratory of Signal Processing at Tampere University of Technology and Director of NSF CVDI Site.

Wolters Kluwer’s Finance, Risk & Reporting (FRR) business is proud to be a sponsor of this week’s RiskMinds International conference taking place in Amsterdam. This conference, which is celebrating its 25^th anniversary, will be attended by more than 650 risk professionals from the financial industry. The event will feature presentations from Wolters Kluwer’s experts across a range of finance, risk and regulatory topics and the firm will also have senior experts on hand at its prominent stand during the course of the event.

With the rise in data volume and granularity needed to meet the demands of supervisory entities, as well as firms’ senior management, banks are increasingly exploring new structures and processes to enable them to meet those requirements. Data quality, consistency, reconciliation and lineage is now top of mind for both regulators and the firms they oversee. As a result, the need to benchmark data readiness for finance, risk, and regulatory reporting has never been more important. On Wednesday, December 5, Kris Van Bavel, Managing Director for EMEA at Wolters Kluwer FRR, will discuss the topic with Andrew Delaney, President and Chief Content Officer of A-Team Group, publisher of Data Management Review.  

One of the most challenging data management burdens facing banks globally is rooted in duplication. The evolution of regulations has left banks with various bespoke databases across five core functions: credit, treasury, profitability analytics, financial reporting and regulatory reporting, with the same data appearing and processed in multiple places.

An attractive alternative, Van Bavel will argue, is to adopt a dedicated FRR data warehouse that removes barriers between finance, risk and reporting functions by integrating all data into a standard format. Integrating finance, risk and regulatory reporting duties provides a significant competitive advantage and creates a firmer foundation for building the solution needed to navigate the supervisory landscape of the future.

The conference will also include a dedicated stream on International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 9. The “IFRS 9 and Beyond” sessions, which will be chaired by Jeroen Van Doorsselaere, Vice President, Risk & Finance, for Wolters Kluwer FRR, will provide expert analysis of IFRS 9 and the upcoming adoption of the Current Expected Credit Losses (CECL) standard in U.S. GAAP based countries, exploring tactical and strategic approaches to the standards. 

The conference will include presentations from major regulatory bodies including The European Banking Authority, The Federal Reserve Board, Bank of England, The European Central Bank, The Bank of Japan and The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority. Banks speaking at the event include BBVA, Citigroup, Commerzbank, HSBC, Mizuho, Nomura, Santander, Scotiabank and UBS.

Wolters Kluwer FRR, which is part of the company’s Governance, Risk & Compliance division, is a global market leader in the provision of integrated regulatory compliance and reporting solutions. It supports regulated financial institutions in meeting their obligations to external regulators and their own boards of directors.

Wolters Kluwer FRR receives frequent independent recognition of its excellence and innovation. Risk magazine awarded the company its coveted Regulatory Reporting System of The Year Award and Central Banking magazine recently named OneSumX for Regulatory Reporting its Best Technology Solution For Regulatory Compliance. Wolters Kluwer FRR is also this year’s Category Winner for Regulatory Reporting in the annual RiskTech100® report. This comprehensive study of the world’s leading risk and compliance technology companies is compiled by Chartis Research. Notably, this is the seventh time in eight years that Wolters Kluwer FRR has achieved this honor.

Leading financial services firms from across the world have implemented the company’s award winning OneSumX solution for integrated Regulatory Reporting, Risk and Finance. Major financial services providers that have recently announced their use of Wolters Kluwer FRR solutions include ABN AMRO, SME Development Bank Malaysia Berhad, Bahrain Middle East Bank, Bank of Beirut, China Merchants Bank, China Everbright Bank, LGT and Nordea.

The time has come for the banking community to listen to its customers and realise that the UK public is ready for biometric card authentication. According to recent research by IDEX Biometrics, more than half (53 per cent) of cardholders would trust the use of their fingerprint to authenticate payments more than their PIN.

A further 56 per cent of research respondents stated that they would feel more secure conducting purchases with their card, if they were authenticated with their fingerprint. It seems that payment card users are very aware of the limitations of their PIN with almost half (45%) admitting that they never change them. And a third (29 per cent) expressing concerns that PINs cannot be relied on to keep their money secure.

This scepticism around current card security measures also extends to contactless payments with 63 per cent questioning their security and 70 per cent believing that they actually leave them exposed to theft and fraud when used. 

It is evident, that as a nation, we are ready for the introduction of biometric fingerprint card authentication. The only area of concern users admitted to, was how their fingerprints would be stored. 45 per cent were worried that criminals could mimic their fingerprint biometric data and a further 51 per cent was concerned about the possibility of it being stored in a bank’s central database - leaving them exposed to identity theft or their personal information being used without their knowledge. 

These findings highlight that banks need to provide reassurance that biometric fingerprint authentication can be used in a user-friendly manner. There is no need for this information to be retained centrally and that any fingerprint data is kept with the user on their own cards. Providing customers with the confidence that they can embrace fingerprint biometrics as a more secure and personal method of authentication for their payments.

“Consumers are ready for the use of biometric fingerprint methods of authentication for card payments and it is set to be a reality in 2019, but banks have a responsibility to address security concerns, particularly in relation to how and such data is held. It is ultimately up to the banks and the financial services sector to reassure consumers to drive adoption and ultimately tackle fraud head-on,” comments Dave Orme, SVP at IDEX Biometrics.

“With a resounding 53% of consumers stating they would trust the use of their fingerprint to authenticate payments more than the traditional PIN, this must be where the UK banking industry focuses its attention. Chip and PIN is now 12 years old, and has seen its course. The consumer demand for fingerprint methods of authentication is a reality, with two-thirds (66%) of UK consumers expecting their roll out to authenticate in-store card transactions by 2019.” added Orme.

FICO, a leading analytics company, today announced that it has been named a category leader in enterprise fraud in the Financial Crime Risk Management Systems: Enterprise Fraud; Market Update 2018 report from research firm Chartis. Among other themes, the report considers the rise of technologies such as machine learning (ML) in fraud detection, and assesses the top providers worldwide.

A companion report, Vendor Analysis: FICO (Financial Crime Risk Management Systems: Enterprise Fraud; Market Update 2018), gives more detailed analysis of FICO’s rating in the Market Update report*.

“FICO’s capabilities across a broad selection of antifraud functions gave it consistently good scores across the six completeness of offering categories,” the report says. “In particular, its ‘cognitive analytics’ – central to its Falcon Platform, which the company has been developing and strengthening – and its variety of specific solutions gave it a high score for payment fraud capabilities.”

“FICO was also notable for its pre-packaged fraud detection rules and scenarios, with simple connections to third-party data analysis and a choice of analytics, including the option to develop open-source machine learning libraries. Its extensive range of detection techniques (including the use of ML and Artificial Intelligence [AI]) gave it a high score for that specific criterion, while its ongoing research and provision of converged fraud and compliance capabilities also featured strongly in its scoring.”

Beyond technology, geographic coverage was a factor in FICO’s ranking. “FICO’s geographic expansion was especially notable, including strong growth in its European business and significant client wins in Latin America and Asia-Pacific,” the report says. “Its strong client base in credit risk, alongside robust financials and a comprehensive strategy for ongoing growth, also helped to steer FICO to its category leader status.”

The report also calls out FICO’s use of supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised AI techniques, which FICO applies across payment types, including real-time payments, mobile wallets, peer-to-peer transfers, payment cards, card-not-present transactions and account takeover.

“Our analysis reflects the breadth of FICO’s solutions, and its strategy for enterprise fraud management,” said Rob Stubbs, Head of Research at Chartis. “Through its work with financial services providers around the world, the FICO team has developed an understanding of fraud and financial crime prevention, and continues to develop its product roadmap.”

“This report validates our holistic approach to payments fraud and financial crime," said TJ Horan, vice president of fraud solutions at FICO. “We have spent years building the FICO Falcon Platform into an unbeatable solution for enterprise fraud management.”

The FICO^® Falcon^® Platform, the world’s most intelligent fraud platform, advances the consumer experience by extracting frauds from real time payment streams while remaining invisible during legitimate transactions. Powered by more than 80 patents in fraud-specific machine learning and AI, the FICO® Falcon® Platform helps financial institutions detect and prevent fraud seamlessly, in real time. More than 2.6 billion payment accounts worldwide are protected by Falcon.

Last month, FICO was named a category winner in the 2019 Chartis’ RiskTech100^®  report, which ranks the top 100 risk technology providers, and recognises success in specific risk and compliance categories. FICO won awards in three categories: Innovation, AI, and Cyber Risk Quantification.

VERMEG the banking and insurance software solutions leader, has announced strong progress following its acquisition of Lombard Risk, with its regulatory business signing more than 30 new customers in 2018.

VERMEG now has over 300 regulatory reporting customers, underlying its leading position in the market and making 2018 a record year for the business.  Lombard Risk fully transitioned to the VERMEG brand in all of its operating countries from October 1st 2018, giving additional scale, enhanced technical capability and geographical strength to the already strong VERMEG portfolio.

Badreddine Ouali, Chairman and CEO, VERMEG, said: “VERMEG acquired Lombard Risk as part of its long-standing strategy to develop its business in the risk & compliance area, which we have seen significantly enhance the business in terms of geography, capability and scale. We spent time working to identify the best business to acquire in order to complement our existing footprint and to add technical regulatory reporting strength to our strategic solutions portfolio.

“I am thrilled that we have overachieved on our ambitions to grow our footprint in regulatory reporting with a record year for this business. As well as acquiring more than 30 new clients in the regulatory reporting space, we have also seen more than 40 existing customers committing to new strategic long-term relationships with us and secured new service partner relationships with premier audit and advisory firms and delivered an extension of our offering in CLOUD and BPO.” 

TIBCO Software Inc., a global leader in integration, API management, and analytics, today announced that it has acquired Orchestra Networks, a recognised leader of master data management (MDM) solutions and a pioneer in data asset management. This acquisition will extend the TIBCO Connected Intelligence platform with trusted shared data assets for critical operational and analytics processes that drive innovation and transformation.

Orchestra Networks’ innovative EBX platform is a single solution to manage, govern, and share all master data, reference data, and metadata assets. Most organisations manage these shared data assets independently, resulting in higher cost, lower agility, and greater risk.

One of the world’s largest hospitality companies uses EBX to uniformly manage and distribute master data (e.g., menu items, ingredients, suppliers, and locations) to its mobile and web applications, analytics, and in-restaurant displays, to improve overall agility and reduce the cost of new brand acquisitions. Another successful customer, a leading travel and transportation company, uses EBX to manage its reference data (e.g., airlines, airports, alliances, and agencies) for over one trillion transactions each year, to help ensure the accuracy of its analytics. In addition to many similar examples of customers powering digital transformation through improved operations and analytics with EBX, many organisations also leverage it to comply with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

“This is a very important acquisition for us, supporting our mission to create the world’s leading platform for digital business. Orchestra Networks will allow TIBCO to address our customers’ simple and complex master data and data asset management needs quickly and easily,” said Matt Quinn, chief operating officer, TIBCO. “EBX, an industry-leading master data management solution, will be further amplified as part of the TIBCO Connected Intelligence Cloud. EBX customers will gain instant access to our leading integration and analytics capabilities for their data assets. Orchestra Networks brings an exceptional team that, with TIBCO, will continue to support their customers and partners.”

“Strengthened by TIBCO, EBX will provide shared data assets for integration and analytics to empower better decisions and faster, smarter actions,” said Christophe Barriolade, co-founder and chief executive officer, Orchestra Networks. “TIBCO will help Orchestra Networks to market and support its leading data asset management software on a larger, more global scale while offering complementary API-led integration and AI-driven analytics capabilities to our customers.”

The market-leading capabilities of EBX add to the strengths of TIBCO's data management portfolio, including TIBCO® Data Virtualization and TIBCO® MDM.

BMO Capital Markets acted as exclusive financial advisor to Orchestra S.A. Elaia Partners acted as the only professional investor alongside Orchestra Networks.

To learn more, visit the Orchestra Networks website here and the TIBCO website here.

Follow us @TIBCO on Twitter, and on our Facebook and LinkedIn pages to hear the latest news and updates from our team.

The Derivatives Service Bureau, founded by the Association of National Numbering Agencies (ANNA) to facilitate the allocation and maintenance of International Securities Identification Numbers (ISINs) for OTC Derivatives, has today announced a new Product Committee membership for its second term, which will serve to further broaden industry collaboration.

The DSB values representation on a fair and equitable basis within the ISIN user community. Following extensive industry consultation and a lengthy invitation process for industry participation, distributed to all DSB users and other interested parties (over 2,800 individuals), the new Product Committee membership has been chosen based on experience, asset class and workflow expertise and geographical representation across all user categories.

From 8th January 2019, 5 trade associations will now be joining as non-voting members, to contribute to a balanced representation of asset class knowledge and geographical representation. Representation will expand on the existing buy-side, sell-side and trading venues, thereby increasing voting members to also include two new categories - custodians and data vendors. In addition, the role of chair will transition from the DSB to two external co-chairs directly from industry, to maintain strict neutral and impartial discussion.

This latest DSB announcement confirms the new industry participants in the DSB Product Committee as follows:

Co-Chairs: 

• BNP Paribas: Harry McAllister, Information Architect 
• Intercontinental Exchange/ NYSE: Joseph Berardo, Head, Credit Product Management  

Buy-side 

• Allianz Global Investors: Michael Sandro Bauch, Regulatory Project Manager 
• Citadel: Jonah Platt, Director, Regulatory and Government Policy 

Custodians

• State Street Financial: Michael Burg, Vice President, Derivative Product Offering Management

Data Vendors

• IHS Markit: Kirston Winters, Managing Director, Head of Product Management - MarkitSERV by IHS Markit 
• Refinitiv: Ben Scofield, FX Content Manager 
• Smartstream RDU: Jourik De Lange, Market Data Analysis 

Sell-side

• Citigroup: Tia Ellerman, Senior Vice President
• HSH Nordbank: Rene Muller, SVP Market Management 
• J.P. Morgan: Jay Shotton, Regulatory Change Officer 

Trading Venues

• 42 Financial Services: Maros Oberman, Head of Poland, ZAR Fixed Income 
• Bloomberg L.P.: Adam Lister, IRS Electronic Trading Product Manager EMEA
• Tradeweb: Uwe Hillnhütter, Director, Head of European Operations 

Trade Associations

• European Fund and Asset Management Association: Vincent Dessard, Senior Regulatory Policy Advisor
• FIX Trading Community: James Northey, Global Technical Committee Co-chair 
• Global Financial Markets Association: Fiona Willis, Manager, Global Foreign Exchange Division 
• Investment Association: David Broadway, Investment Operations Lead 
• International Swaps and Derivatives Association: Karel Engelen, Senior Director

Emma Kalliomaki, Managing Director of ANNA and the DSB, said, “We would like to convey our thanks to the members of the current Product Committee who have worked tirelessly with the DSB, having met on a weekly basis for the past two years. We are delighted with the high quality of applicants driving the composition of the new Product Committee membership, and are confident that Product Committee discussions will continue to ensure the best possible ISIN creation and use will only serve to bring greater transparency and efficiency to the global OTC derivatives market.”

Malavika Solanki, a member of the DSB Management Team, said, “With this new Product Committee membership and the broad-based expertise they bring, the DSB can now move from developing ISIN products and defining product templates, to solving additional OTC Derivative ISIN use cases and examining the introduction of hierarchies, as well as discussions on what to prioritise.”

Arachnys, the leader in Customer Risk Intelligence (CRI) solutions for Client Onboarding, Know Your Customer (KYC), Customer Due Diligence & Enhanced Due Diligence (CDD/EDD) and Anti Money Laundering (AML), today announced the launch of their CRI cloud-native platform.

Customer Risk Intelligence is an entirely new approach to Client Onboarding, KYC, CDD, EDD and AML investigative activities. It enhances the speed, accuracy and re-use of information for KYC and onboarding; uplifts the customer experience; accelerates revenue acquisition, streamlines compliance efforts and transforms investigative “know-how” into an institutional asset.

The capabilities inherent in the Arachnys Customer Risk Intelligence platform address rapidly changing market dynamics which are compelling financial institutions, around the world, to focus on five “must-do” initiatives: real-time money laundering interdiction, competitive differentiation with accelerated client onboarding, syndication of investigative knowledge, re-use of compliance data exhaust and analyst empowerment.

With Customer Risk Intelligence, financial institutions can trim weeks from onboarding times to drive topline revenue, avoid the sunk expense of AML remediation cost and dramatically increase investigative throughput by reducing false-positives and QA error rates.

The foundations for a firms’ Customer Risk Intelligence platform are: a cloud-native solution suitable for global use; an entity-centric infrastructure and approach to compliance investigations; a curated online information library tailored to the firm’s compliance policies and risk knowledge management capability for capturing, organizing and leveraging prior analyst work. Once in place, CRI harnesses and transforms a firm’s institutional and people assets for competitive differentiation and true financial crime prevention.

“Banks today face significant KYC challenges in sourcing data, extracting meaningful intelligence and efficiently and accurately assessing risk. An approach that solves for these bottlenecks will help improve customer experience, support regulatory compliance and contribute to KYC revenue enhancement,” said Neil Katkov, Head of Risk and Compliance at Celent. “A modern, cloud-based platform, coupled with an entity-centric approach, provides the lingua franca for evaluating corporate-wide risk and exposure. To do this, these capabilities must be delivered at critical junctures within the customer risk evaluation lifecycle.”

“We are solving extremely complex problems that require significant levels of financial crime and bank operations domain expertise which few, if any, other KYC, AML and Due Diligence solution providers have,” said Edward Sander, President at Arachnys. “Arachnys alone possesses the unique capability to acquire and distill complex risk data into highly useful risk decision content, the cloud and financial crime domain expertise and advanced technology mastery to create a consumable Customer Risk Intelligence platform. We’re at the intersection of a paradigm shift in the market for how entity data and investigative intelligence can transform business performance and we’re passionate about empowering investigative minds to stop bad actors and make the world a safer place.”