Paybase has been announced as a sponsor of this year’s FinTech Connect Conference on 5th - 6th December. The UK’s largest FinTech event will this year host 5000 attendees from over 60 countries, with over 250 speakers giving talks on a variety of topics within FinTech. 

Paybase CEO Anna Tsyupko commented: “we are proud to sponsor an event connecting so many innovators, driven by a desire to improve what financial services can offer us. In uncertain times, the belief in what FinTech can do for the world has been unwavering, shown through continued investment in FinTech companies. Despite Brexit, London’s position at the heart of FinTech is as strong as it ever has been - it’s amazing to be a part of that.” 

Paybase Head of Marketing Jessy Conflon will be speaking about what Paybase is offering the world of FinTech and how it can help others in the industry. “I’m looking forward to meeting lots of interesting people and showing others what Paybase can do. These events are a brilliant opportunity to listen to and learn from your peers, I think it’s going to be a great day!” added Conflon.  

Paybase is a flexibility-focussed payment solution for platform businesses. It has been recognised by Wired and Real Business as a company set to revolutionise finance and was recently announced as a Fintech Power50 winner. 

 

The Open Banking Expo, which launched in London on 27 November, has been hailed a huge success by visitors, speakers and exhibitors alike. Attended by leading high street banks, challenger banks and fintech businesses, Open Banking Expo is the only event focussed on the customer journey and consumer adoption of Open Banking, as well as offering business leaders an insight into the opportunities and risks that Open Banking presents for their company.

Described by Forbes as ‘a wave bigger than the internet and mobile’, the Open Banking revolution has rapidly gained momentum since it came into play in January 2018, with many companies choosing to invest in Open Banking technology which enables consumers to securely give providers access to their financial information in order to get a better deal on financial products and services.

With a conference programme designed to represent a cross-section of businesses at varying stages of the Open Banking ‘disruption cycle’, Open Banking Expo welcomed 40 expert speakers who joined a packed schedule of panel discussions, interviews, case studies and roundtable debates. Amongst the high-profile speakers at the event were representatives from HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, First Direct, Tandem, Starling and the Open Banking Implementation Entity.

Increasing consumer adoption of Open Banking was top of the agenda, with leading figures from across the industry taking to the stage to offer their insight and advice on the topic. Olly Betts, CEO at OpenWrks, argued that Open Banking must drive genuine change in people’s lives in order to offer real consumer value. “Open Banking helps us to create better versions of ourselves. From enabling us to budget better, understand our finances more clearly and access finances we wouldn’t have otherwise had, to taking the stress out of debt, Open Banking is an enabler to a happier life.” He argued that the whole industry must come together to demonstrate the clear value of Open Banking to customers in order to encourage mass consumer adoption.

Continuing the customer journey theme, Hiro Sayama, Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Co., argued that convenience is the key to encouraging consumers to adopt Open Banking more widely. “Convenience is king. It is vital that Open Banking offers a convenient solution to the customer in order to nail consumer adoption.” Hiro went on to argue that inertia is one of the key issues facing Open Banking, as consumers don’t have the time or inclination to shop around for a better deal on their finance products. However, she believes that early adopters hold the key to overcoming this issue. “Early users will lead the way and share their experiences with their peers, proving that changing their banking behaviour is possible and beneficial.”  

Another hot topic at the show was the benefits that Open Banking can offer to vulnerable customers. Joined by a panel of industry experts from financial service companies, charities and regulation bodies, Faith Reynolds argued that Open Banking can help vulnerable people in financial difficulty at every step of the journey. “From helping customers at crisis point and assisting them with repaying the debt they are already in, to preventing them for getting into difficulties again, Open Banking has the potential to really benefit the most vulnerable members of our society.”

Panellist Katie Evans, Head of Research at the Money & Mental Health Charity, agreed with Faith, suggesting that Open Banking can change lives for vulnerable people, including those suffering with mental illness. “Open Banking offers an alternative to the ‘one size fits all’ outlook that is currently applied in banking and increases inclusivity. By taking a more granular approach, Open Banking can prevent people with mental illness from spending more money than they can afford and have a positive impact on their lives.”

The sold-out show welcomed over 300 visitors throughout the day. One visitor and speaker who was impressed by the calibre of conference content was Anne Boden from Starling Bank. “When we first heard the phrase ‘Open Banking’ we all worried about the concept of making data open and exposing our data to other companies. Lots of organisations feared it but this event, Open Banking Expo, is all about talking about it, being comfortable with it and planning for the future.” 

In addition to the packed conference programme, the show welcomed a host of industry-leading exhibitors including OpenWrks, the show’s headline partner, TransUnion, Cifas, Experian, Unisys, Equifax and Computershare.

Commenting on the company’s experiences at the show, Marc Plato, Client Relationship Manager at The ID Co., said, “The show has been very well attended by professionals across a number of sectors, with credible speakers from the whole of the Open Banking industry. It has been great to see so much candid debate amongst a selection of interesting experts in the field. As exhibitors, we have felt a genuine vibe throughout the show that everyone here wants to work together towards a common goal – to achieve success for Open Banking.”

Another exhibitor who enjoyed success at the show was Ping ID. Richard Marsh, Account Executive at the company, commented,“We’ve met a good number of people and had lots of productive conversations with some opportunities for growth. We’ve been particularly interested in the strategic level of thinking at the show, as well as spreading information to help integrate Open Banking in the future.” 

Adam Cox, Co-Founder & Managing Director at Open Banking Expo, concluded: “The launch of The Open Banking Expo has been an overwhelming success. It has been fantastic to bring together some of the biggest and most influential names in the business to discuss the enormous changes which are currently taking place across the industry. Between everyone who attended the event, we hold the key to unlocking mass consumer adoption of Open Banking and we look forward to tackling the challenges that we, as an industry, face in achieving this vital ingredient in the success of Open Banking.”

The stage is set for this holiday season to be one for the records, with ecommerce sales alone forecasted to be up 104 percent compared to five years ago, according to Mastercard Spending Pulse.  With this, it’s no surprise that this holiday will see the trend toward digital payments continue as consumers look for the most convenient ways to check off their holiday to-do lists.

And in the search for convenience, many of us store our payment cards with the online merchants and digital wallets we use most often. Yet, 60 percent of Americans are unable to name all the places where their card information currently lives online.

As more and more people continue to store or link cards to everything from online retailers to smartwatches and even voice assistants in the name of a more convenient checkout experience, Mastercard is working hard to provide transparency and control.

Through its digital branding requirements, Mastercard addresses how and when digital entities need to present Mastercard branding – whether that be in-app, browser, contactless, voice-enabled devices, or QR experiences – with the intent of providing consumers with transparency and certainty of the Mastercard credential being used.

It’s a simple reminder at checkout of the card that is stored in that device or with that merchant so consumers can click with confidence.

So when you are hopping into a Lyft ride this season to celebrate with friends, rest assured knowing that you’ll be presented with the preferred Mastercard card you stored on file, ensuring you can use the card that you want to pay with.

This Mastercard branding provides reassurance, confidence, and a little more peace of mind during a busy season so that you can focus on what matters most.

TIBCO Software Inc., a global leader in integration, API management, and analytics, today announced the general availability of TIBCO® Data Virtualization 8at the AWS re:Invent 2018 conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. The offering is designed to allow businesses and their technology leaders, data engineers, and architects to remove data bottlenecks and implement an agile, high-speed, virtualised data layer in their architecture. Such a layer allows for robust management and governance, while also delivering self-service access to critical data, organising it for scale, and making it available in a cost-effective manner for applications and analytics.

TIBCO Data Virtualization 8 features a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Engine that significantly improves performance by distributing queries across multiple processors, bringing the benefits of data virtualisation to modern big data architectures. TIBCO Data Virtualization now includes a MPP Engine as part of its automatic query optimisation that improves federated queries across data lakes and relational sources to benefit from the best possible query plan. By scaling data virtualisation processing on existing infrastructure, heterogeneous data workloads can be managed with less replication, lower costs, and greater agility. In this way, the solution delivers data virtualisation that is up to five to 10 times faster than previous versions without extra engineering.

“Data and insight are the competitive battlegrounds for business today. Organisations that quickly and continuously derive value from data, big and small, will be leaders and others will fall behind,” said Brad Hopper, vice president, analytics product strategy, TIBCO. “TIBCO Data Virtualization 8 raises the bar with remarkable advancements in data virtualisation, providing a high-performance and agile experience for data engineers, regardless if their task is to provide data to mission-critical applications or help analysts and data scientists discover new data relationships and insights — or both.”

The solution’s advanced granular workload management sets a new standard for scalability by providing more control over specific server resources, beyond the previously available server or cluster settings. This allows users to control memory usage, request length, row counts, and more, as well as avoid potentially problematic requests so the most important workloads always get prioritised.

TIBCO Data Virtualization 8 turns an enterprise’s big data silos into an advantage by easily accessing big data repositories with new data source adapters for Apache Spark™ SQL, Cloudera Hive™, and Cloudera Impala™, and updated adapters for Apache Hive™ and Apache Impala™. TIBCO Data Virtualization 8 further simplifies access with an all-new Elasticsearch adapter.

TIBCO Data Virtualization 8 is newly available on the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. Learn more by visiting https://www.tibco.com/products/data-virtualization.

Ascension Ventures, the London-based investment firm, today announced a funding round, which will see the addition of 14 new Venture Partners. The group strengthens Ascension’s core belief in entrepreneurs investing in entrepreneurs, bringing in active UK and US investors with a number of them already successfully-exited entrepreneurs. Ascension’s bolstered experience in early stage investments and deep sector knowledge will increase deal-flow and support portfolio companies as they develop and scale in the UK and beyond.

Since 2013, Ascension has invested in more than 75 early stage tech companies across the UK, including Vidsy, Moteefe, Wagestream, A Million Ads and Hazy, which have gone on to raise multimillion pound rounds since Ascension invested in their initial seed rounds. The firm continues to attract exceptional entrepreneurs seeking early stage investment (ranging between £250K-£1.5m) and private capital, angels and other early stage VCs seeking co-invest partners. Ascension raises annual SEIS & EIS Funds, in addition to bidding for larger institutional funds. In the last year, Ascension also launched a series of initiatives including the Fair by Design Fund, a new £10m Fund tackling poverty in the UK, and the Unicorn Ascension Fund, the first UK/India cross-border EIS scale-up fund.

Serial entrepreneur, Vin Murria OBE, who set up Advanced Computer Software in 2008 and sold the business for £765 million in 2015 commented, “I’ve been very impressed with the Ascension Team and their track record of investments in UK tech start-ups. I’m delighted to be joining as a Venture Partner and look forward to building Ascension's brand as the best place for early stage investing.”

Gary Stewart, Managing Director of Wayra UK, said, “Ascension has always been a committed and consistent partner of Wayra. Indeed, they've invested in 16 of our start-ups, are investors in residence in our London hub and are our principal partner in the Fair By Design programme. That being said, we expect that the best is still yet to come.”

Erik Blachford commented, "Over the past few years, I've noticed a proliferation of strong UK tech businesses. I felt that working with Ascension was a great opportunity to access the UK's best early stage tech deal-flow, and I look forward to supporting these portfolio companies as they scale up and enter the US market." Erik was CEO of Expedia when it sold to IAC and currently lives in San Francisco, where he is a Venture Partner at TCV, an active angel investor, and a Board Director at Zillow Group, Peloton, SiteMinder, TourRadar, Varsity Tutors, Liftopia, Busbud, and the Cutting Ball Theater.

CEO of Ascension Ventures, Jean de Fougerolles, commented, “I’m delighted we’ve pulled together such a strong group of Venture Partners, all with deep operational experience in scaling and exiting tech businesses. Early stage investing requires specialist sector knowledge, not only to pick the right companies, but also to provide the necessary support to guide them through the early years. My vision has always been to build Ascension as the top seed VC brand in the UK, a place where seasoned tech operators can back the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovative business models. The addition of these new Venture Partners brings Ascension closer to this objective.”

Along with the 14 new Venture Partners, Kip Meek will be joining as Ascension’s new Chairman. Kip is the Founder of the Communications Chambers and Director of the Wireless Infrastructure Group; he was previously a Senior Advisor to EE and BT, Chairman of the Radiocentre, a Board member of Ofcom and the Founder of Spectrum Strategy Consultants.

The other Venture Partners included in today’s announcement are Pharus Advisors, Emma Blackburn, Antonin de Fougerolles, Craig Fletcher, Aleks Habdank, Jami Jenkins, Ian McClelland, Remy Minute, Diane Stewart and Barney Worfolk-Smith.

The internet scored a win after an FBI-led takedown disrupted a massive, multiyear scam that saw cyber criminals use botnets to manipulate internet traffic from 1.7 million IP addresses and generate nearly 30 million dollars in fraudulent ad revenue. F-Secure supported the takedown operation by providing threat intelligence on the scam’s malware campaigns and botnets.  

The ad fraud ring, dubbed “3ve” in an advisory published by US-CERT,* built two different botnets by spreading Kovter and Boaxxe malware to individuals through spam emails and drive-by downloads. 3ve used these botnets to manipulate internet traffic and direct it to ads they ran under the pretense that the traffic was from real visitors. Estimates suggest 3ve’s botnets allowed them to manipulate internet traffic from as many as 1.7 million IPs at once.

The takedown, described yesterday in a news release from the US Department of Justice,** saw the FBI search 89 servers and sinkhole 31 domains to disrupt the botnets, and seize bank accounts connected with the group. The operation led to multiple charges being laid against eight individuals. 

F-Secure played a supporting role in the FBI-led effort by exposing parts of 3ve’s botnets and malware campaigns for the authorities.

“3ve blasts out failed delivery notification spam, which is a common attack vector these days. Users open an attachment or click a link and end up infected with Kovter, Boaxxe or even both,” said F-Secure Researcher Paivi Tynninen. “3ve also uses malvertising that redirects users to fake software updates and tricks victims into installing Kovter, which is a fairly popular social engineering tactic.”

3ve used the Boaxxe botnet as a proxy for fraudulent ad requests sent from their own data center in Germany. The Kovter botnet was a network of infected PCs that ran a hidden browser from users, which 3ve used to discreetly direct traffic toward their ads. 

Fabricating internet traffic with the these botnets helped 3ve convince buyers their ads were being viewed by countless numbers of people. It’s a type of fraud that many don’t realize is happening, but it’s actually a fairly prevalent type of cyber crime. A 2016 report from the World Federation of Advertisers projected that ad fraud revenues could balloon to anywhere between 50 to 150 billion dollars per year by 2025.***

“Ad fraud might not feel like a very pressing issue. But it costs a lot of businesses a lot of money, and those costs eventually get fed back to consumers,” said F-Secure Security Advisor Sean Sullivan. “That makes these kinds of takedown operations beneficial to not just companies or advertisers, but pretty much everyone.”

While the takedown successfully disrupted 3ve’s operations, the persistent nature of today’s botnets makes it difficult to say for certain whether or not 3ve is gone for good. And Sullivan says that even though many organizations contributed to the operation, they need help from individual PC users to ensure 3ve can’t bounce back.

“Most modern botnets have pretty sophisticated backends that are extremely resistant to takedown attempts. Infected PCs can be used to begin rebuilding, so it’s really important that individuals check their PCs and remove the malware if they discover an infection,” said Sullivan.

CloudMargin, creator of the world’s first and only collateral and margin management solution native to the cloud, announced today that its platform has been named Collateral Management and Optimisation Product of the Year at the Risk.net Markets Technology Awards 2019. CloudMargin Chief Operating Officer Steven Marconi accepted the award at a ceremony last night in London during the magazine’s flagship Risk Awards event.

The awards recognise the work of technology vendors in the derivatives, regulation and risk management markets. Award recipients were chosen by a panel of 11 judges selected by the editors of Risk.net, including nine technology experts and analysts and two members of the editorial team. This year’s awards attracted more than 170 entries across 30 categories – an increase of nearly 50 percent over last year.

The award is the latest in a series of honours bestowed on the company this fall, in addition to more than a dozen awards in recent years for innovation and technology. Earlier this month, CloudMargin captured its third award from Custody Risk Magazine as Collateral Platform of the Year. Last week, RegTech Analyst named CloudMargin to its global RegTech 100 list for 2019, identifying the “world’s most innovative technology solution providers that address the challenges of dealing with regulatory issues within financial services.” And last month, CB Insights named the company to its 2018 Fintech 250, a list of the fastest growing fintech startups, representing a “prestigious group of emerging private companies working on groundbreaking financial technology.”

CloudMargin CEO Steve Husk said: “Over the past year, we’ve focused on greatly enhancing our platform, expanding on our global hub and strengthening our product and procedures to accommodate the largest, most demanding financial institutions. It is truly gratifying to receive this award from Risk.net, as well as the other recognitions in the past couple of months. Clearly we have no intention of resting on our past successes but will continue to raise the bar to meet clients’ changing needs in a challenging regulatory environment.”

The CloudMargin platform is designed to scale up and down based on the number of collateral agreements, give clients ready access to best-in-breed solutions through a global collateral hub, and provide real-time data and processing that all parties can see simultaneously. It does this at a fraction of the cost of legacy technology, with constant automatic technology updates and functionality enhancements that enable all clients to benefit instantly without paying anything extra through the life of the contract.

Pelican, a global provider of AI-powered payments and financial crime compliance systems for banks and corporates, has strengthened its compliance management team with the appointment of Byron McKinney as Trade Finance Compliance Product Manager, based in Pelican’s London headquarters.

Byron brings considerable expertise to Pelican, with over 15 years’ experience across the trade compliance and commodity trade sector.Byron is a seasoned product manager with a successful and consistent track record of leading digital transformation projects and new technology deployment solutions. Most recently Byron led the Global Trade Compliance team at Accuity, responsible for launching the North American dual-use goods application and also its real-time vessel tracking product. Prior to this Byron spent a number of years at Thomson Reuters in the commodity trade division creating and designing digital products for the coal, gas and shipping markets in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Parth Desai, Founder and CEO of Pelican, commented: “We are delighted to appoint Byron as Pelican Trade Finance Compliance Product Manager. Leveraging our unique expertise in Artificial Intelligence disciplines, Pelican provides our customers with market-leading trade finance compliance solutions, including document consistency checks, dual-use goods screening, and red-flag indicators. Byron’s extensive trade compliance experience will further strengthen our financial crime compliance team, and I look forward to the contribution he will make in developing our PelicanSecure product suite.”

Byron McKinney added: “Across the industry, Pelican is well known for its ground-breaking use of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing technology to derive meaning and understanding across all trade instruments and messages, delivering highly functional and efficient financial crime compliance solutions. I am extremely excited to be joining such an innovative and pioneering company and am keen to assist with further developing Pelican’s end-to-end trade finance compliance solutions.”

Agorai, a global platform which provides an inventory of turnkey software solutions, technology, and data needed for any company to join the AI economy, today announced that Neuramatix, a provider of artificial intelligence tools powered by a proprietary neural engine called NeuraBASE, is joining the Agorai AI marketplace.   

QuantaVerse, the first in the market with artificial intelligence (AI) solutions purpose-built for identifying financial crimes, today announced it has signed an agreement with Cathay General Bancorp, a holding company for Cathay Bank, a California state-charted bank. Cathay Bank selected QuantaVerse’s AI financial crime solutions as a fully built and tested anti-money laundering (AML) platform to reduce costly, manual financial crime investigations. 

Cathay Bank will deploy the following QuantaVerse solutions to improve the effectiveness of its AML compliance program and financial crime investigations while expanding its correspondent banking services.

• QuantaVerse Pre-TMS Entity Resolution & Risk ScoringTM reduces transaction monitoring system (TMS) false positive alerts by classifying the risk of each transacting party, down to the pseudo-client level. In the vast majority of transaction messages, who the transacting parties are is often ambiguous which forces an expensive manual intervention.

• QuantaVerse Alert InvestigatorTM automates investigations when an alert is produced by a TMS. By replicating much of the human investigative process which analyzes entity, transaction, and intention (or economic purpose) variables, up to 70 percent of an AML case investigation can be successfully completed by QuantaVerse.

• QuantaVerse False Negative Identification and InvestigatorTM examines transactions for financial crime risks missed by a TMS. According to industry estimates, up to 70 percent of financial crimes go unalerted and are therefore uninvestigated and unreported. These false negatives have the potential to cause significant risks to both the organization and their accountable employees.

• QuantaVerse Third Party Risk ManagementTM provides risk managers with better insights into the variances in correspondent bank account activity that might indicate risks of financial crimes, or that suggest an account is being used for something other than its stated purpose.

The Alert Investigator and False Negative Identification and Investigator solutions provide QuantaVerse Financial Crime Reports (FCR) that automate alert investigations, detailing suspicious activity and providing risk scores for both entities and transactions. The QuantaVerse FCR also includes the supporting documentation necessary for the case to be efficiently analyzed by an AML investigator and for creating a suspicious activity report if indicated.

“We are excited to be working with Cathay Bank and other financial institutions that are dedicated to strengthening AML compliance,” explained David McLaughlin, CEO and Founder of QuantaVerse. “Our full suite of AI financial crime solutions will better utilize the bank’s resources to identify financial crimes, streamline its AML investigation process and eliminate bad actors from the global banking system.”