Gate.io, a world-leading digital asset trading platform, is thrilled to announce its sponsorship and active involvement in the esteemed Coinfest Asia 2023. Scheduled for the 24th and 25th of August, Coinfest Asia will set its stage in Bali, Indonesia.

Coinfest Asia stands as a cornerstone event in the Asian Web3 landscape. As Indonesia's foremost annual crypto and blockchain gathering, it consistently attracts a diverse mix of cryptocurrency enthusiasts, investors, emerging entrepreneurs, and technical experts from various nations.

Leveraging the success of its 2022 edition, which boasted attendance from over 2,000 individuals, collaboration with 40+ media entities, and an impressive lineup of 20+ side events, Coinfest Asia 2023 is gearing up to surpass its own legacy. This year's rendition aims to captivate a wider media presence.

Gate.io remains committed to fostering dialogue and engagement within the crypto industry. As such, Richard, Head of Global Business Development and Institutional at Gate.io will participate in panel discussion together with other crypto industry leaders to share pivotal insights on the dynamics of crypto market cycles, highlighting and elaborating on key talking points like:

• How to define a crypto market cycle and what are the key characteristics?
• How do current trends like Bitcoin ETFs, liquid staking, and the meme coin market impact or influence the market cycle differently from the past?
• How do halving events impact the overall crypto market?

Gate.io Web3 is also hosting an exhibition booth in Converge area to showcase its developmental milestones and leading Web3 ecosystem. Attendees are warmly invited to visit the Gate.io Web3 booth, fostering connections and gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the crypto ecosystem in the process.

LemFi, a leading fintech platform transforming financial services for immigrants, has raised a $33 million Series A round led by Left Lane Capital. Other investors included Y-Combinator, Zrosk, Global Founders Capital, and Olive Tree.

Each year, millions of immigrants move abroad to start new lives, and the biggest hurdle they face is access to financial services. In 2020, Founders Ridwan Olalere and Rian Cochran joined forces to solve these challenges with a vision to build a platform that empowers the next generation of immigrants.

Olalere and Cochran first met while building OPay – one of Africa’s most successful fintech platforms. After combined decades of navigating the underlying complexities and regulatory nuances of cross-border payments in emerging markets, the two were uniquely positioned to leverage their experience as a launching pad for LemFi.

Olalere, LemFi’s CEO, drew from his own experience as an immigrant and shared, “Having lived on three continents and leading a multicultural team, our mission is deeply personal: creating a world where financial services are universally accessible. We’ve already made life easier for over half a million people, but we’re only just getting started.”

Today, within minutes of residency, a user can onboard with LemFi and use its multi-currency offering to send, receive, hold, convert and save in the currencies of both their country of origin and country of residence. In addition, LemFi also offers instant international transfers at the best exchange rates with zero fees on transfers or account maintenance.

“Our product is a game changer for users since traditional banks and other leading neo-banks have always steered clear of less common or more volatile currencies,” Ridwan Olalere explained. “This has driven immigrants to often use unsafe, informal channels or to stitch together several other services to solve some of their basic financial needs. Until now.”

In 2020, LemFi launched in Canada to enable easy and low-cost remittance payments to Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya. By 2021, the company quickly expanded to the UK, and in parallel, broadened its reach by enabling 10 new African remittance corridors.

In a strategic consideration, LemFi acquired UK-based Rightcard Payment Services in late 2021. Through the acquisition, LemFi obtained an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority to provide customers with more services, such as higher transaction limits, e-money accounts, and more.

“LemFi has been very deliberate and strategic in acquiring licenses and building a robust network of financial institution partners to facilitate cross-border payments for immigrants,” said Matthew Miller, Principal at Left Lane Capital, who joined LemFi’s Board of Directors as part of the transaction. “We’re excited to support LemFi as it expands its product offering to serve more immigrant communities globally.”

2023 has similarly been a pivotal year for LemFi, with its new subsidiary Rightcard Payment Services securing an International Money Transfer Operator (IMTO) license from the Central Bank of Nigeria. The IMTO license will enable LemFi to offer its services in partnership with Nigerian banks, empowering users by eliminating the need for intermediaries. The Acting Governor of the Central Bank, Folashodun Shonubi, recognizes the alignment of LemFi with the Central Bank’s goals of improving the availability of foreign exchange in Nigeria and ensuring exchange rate stability.

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has launched two open-source large vision language models (LVLM), Qwen-VL and its conversationally fine-tuned Qwen-VL-Chat. The models can comprehend images, texts and bounding boxes in prompts and facilitate multi-round question answering in both English and Chinese.

Qwen-VL is the multimodal version of Qwen-7B, Alibaba Cloud’s 7-billion-parameter model of its large language model Tongyi Qianwen (also available on ModelScope as open-source). Capable of understanding both image inputs and text prompts in English and Chinese, Qwen-VL can perform various tasks such as responding to open-ended queries related to different images and generating image captions.

Qwen-VL-Chat caters to more complex interaction, such as comparing multiple image inputs and engaging in multi-round question answering. Leveraging alignment techniques, this AI assistant exhibits a range of creative capabilities, which include writing poetry and stories based on input images, summarising the content of multiple pictures, and solving mathematical questions displayed in images.

Contribution to open source and inclusivity 

In a bid to democratise AI technologies, Alibaba Cloud has shared the model's code, weights, and documentation with academics, researchers, and commercial institutions worldwide. This contribution to the open-source community is accessible via Alibaba's AI model community ModelScope and the collaborative AI platform Hugging Face. For commercial uses, companies with over 100 million monthly active users can request a licence from Alibaba Cloud.

The introduction of these models, with their ability to extract meaning and information from images, holds the potential to revolutionise the interaction with visual content. For instance, leveraging its image comprehension and question-answering capability, the models could provide information assistance to visually impaired individuals during online shopping in the future.

The Qwen-VL model was pre-trained on image and text datasets. Compared to other open-source large vision language models that can process and understand images in 224*224 resolution, Qwen-VL can handle image input at a resolution of 448*448, resulting in better image recognition and comprehension.

Based on various benchmarks, Qwen-VL recorded outstanding performances on several visual language tasks, including zero-shot captioning, general visual question answering, text-oriented visual question answering and object detection. 

Qwen-VL-Chat has also achieved leading results in both Chinese and English for text-image dialogue and alignment levels with humans, according to the benchmark test of Alibaba Cloud. This test involved over 300 images, 800 questions, and 27 categories.

Earlier this month, Alibaba Cloud open-sourced its 7-billion-parameter LLMs, Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat as its ongoing contribution to the open-source community. The two models have had over 400,000 downloads within a month of their launch.

Modulus, a US-based developer of ultra-high-performance technology that powers Fortune 500 firms; government agencies and laboratories; and leading research universities, announced that the company filed for a patent on a new order type now available within the company’s white label futures exchange solution. The order type, “Automatic Order Autonomy,” is said to offer a next-level competitive advantage to clients. The Modulus futures exchange made international news previously as the technology upon which FTX built their exchange empire.

“SBF made horrendous choices. He’s a bad actor, and it irreparably harmed investors who trusted him with their assets, as well as the crypto industry. That said, at the time of its implosion, the exchange was one of the most technologically viable exchanges on the planet, and the technology came from Modulus. Since then, we have continued to make upgrades, the latest of which is Automatic Order Autonomy, a true gamechanger for operators,” said Modulus CEO Richard Gardner. Modulus does not publicly disclose white-label clients, however, given that FTX is defunct, it has made an exception.

“Perhaps, in part, due to SBF’s criminal intent, regulators have made it difficult to move forward with crypto spot ETFs. That, however, has led more and more operators to look at Bitcoin futures exchanges, particularly after Coinbase received new regulatory approval this month. We’ve continued to add new features to our white-label futures exchange, and we’re proud to say that it is the most advanced option on the market,” noted Gardner.

Modulus has led the way on exchange innovation in the cryptocurrency industry for years. In 2018, the company launched a market surveillance and risk management solution, which targets abuse within cryptocurrency markets and helps exchange operators identify risks of money laundering.

“We’ve spent a lot of time over the course of the summer adding new functionalities to our solution. From staking to borrowing and lending, our white-label solution is turnkey-ready. It even offers NFT plugin availability. Right now, crypto-world continues to show signs of a slump, but all the smart money is preparing for the coming boom,” explained Gardner. “All the prospective operators are considering their options right now, and few things are seeing more interest than crypto futures.”

Last month, the company launched its AI conversational assistant, especially designed for use within digital asset exchanges. The assistant allows users to ask for and receive instantaneous help with trades, their order status, and their account history, among other functionalities. This month, Modulus CEO Richard Gardner was announced as a new addition to the Board of Directors of the American Society for AI (ASFAI).

“We’ve seen how quickly crypto can turn a corner and move from a winter into a boom market. If you wait until the boom begins to prepare your product for launch, you’ll have missed out. There’s no question that the boom is coming and that you best be ready for it,” offered Gardner. “A white-label solution, complete with best-in-industry security, latency, and scalability, is just what the doctor ordered if you want to get to market quickly, while also ensuring that your exchange is viable for the long-haul,” noted Gardner.

Fintech Hub LT, an association of licensed Fintech companies in Lithuania, will now accept virtual currency exchanges and virtual asset service providers (VASP) into its Association.

"In May this year, the European Union (EU) adopted the European Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) Regulation, which will increase the potential of cryptocurrencies, introduce legal clarity, reduce risks and protect consumers. The EU will be the first political and economic community to put in place a common set of rules for companies operating in the cryptocurrency market. This is exactly what the mature growth of the crypto asset sector has required, our Association believes. Crypto companies have historically been classified as fintech, and we believe that by being part of a single organization, crypto companies, specialized banks, e-money institutions and payment institutions will be able to share best practices, develop new products and thus add more value to their customers, not only in Lithuania, but also across the EU. Such synergies can strengthen Lithuania's position as a European value-added fintech center," said Asta Grigaitytė, Fintech Hub LT Chairwoman of the Board.

Lithuania can become a hub not only for fintech, but also for crypto companies, according to Asta Grigaitytė. We are already starting to see this happen. For example, Bifinity, a company that converts cryptocurrencies into regular money and provides services to the customers of Binance, the largest crypto asset company in the world, is based in Lithuania.

According to the Centre of Registers, there are 478 companies on the list of virtual currency exchange providers in Lithuania and 470 on the list of virtual asset service providers. The same company can be on either list.

Currently, 80 fintech players in Lithuania are members of Fintech Hub LT. The association is in regular contact with regulators such as the Central Bank, the Government of the Republic of Lithuania and other relevant institutions. Its aim is to help create favorable conditions for the activities of fintech companies and to contribute to making Lithuania a center of attraction for fintech companies not only in the Baltic region, but also in the EU.

LHV Bank, the UK's newest licensed bank, has finalised the business transfer from its Estonian affiliate, AS LHV Pank’s UK branch, to its newly licensed entity. This transition, affecting LHV Bank’s Banking Services clients in the UK, follows LHV Bank receiving its banking licence this May and the subsequent approval from the UK High Court to transfer the business. 

As a result, the GBP payment services associated with the Banking Services business have been moved from the previous branch to the new bank. This transition also included the transfer of associated GBP payment scheme memberships and related contracts.  

At the same time, LHV Bank implemented a new cloud-based core banking system and successfully migrated the customer data from the Estonian core banking system to the new LHV Bank system in the UK. This modern infrastructure simplifies GBP payment systems integration for UK clients, improves reliability, and allows for better scalability of their operations. 

Erki Kilu, CEO of LHV Bank, stated, "The preparation for this business transfer has spanned over a year and a half. The whole project has been sizable, both legally and technically. During this period, we have built a completely new banking software, culminating in what is arguably the most state-of-the-art banking system, giving us a technological advantage for the foreseeable future. Today, our clients, along with their data, have been successfully transitioned to this new system.

"When building this system, we chose to collaborate more extensively with external value-adding service providers, transitioning all systems to cloud solutions and enhancing in-house agile software processes. We partnered with Tuum for the core banking system, Salv for payment monitoring and Salesforce for customer management. During this time, we have also built a considerable engineering team in the UK," added Kilu. 

LHV Bank, a member of major UK and EU payment schemes, connects over 200 global Banking Services clients with the traditional banking world. Through LHV Bank’s robust BaaS offering, these clients serve over ten million customers, accessing a potential clientele of 500 million across the UK and Europe. 

As a result of this transition, the LHV Bank will handle all the GBP payments for its Banking Services customers. Meanwhile, LHV Pank will continue processing EUR payments without changes.  

LHV Bank is a licensed bank owned by LHV Group and is under the supervision of the UK financial regulators. Alongside its new banking system, the bank is preparing to implement a new loan system and plans to begin attracting deposits soon. 

Agent IQ, the pioneer in digital relationship banking providing personal banker engagement and AI-supported self-service, is pleased to announce that Pinal County Federal Credit Union (PCFCU) has been named a Finopotamus 2023 Tekkie Award winner in the category of “Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning.”

Partnering with Agent IQ, PCFCU launched the service in approximately six weeks to rapidly deploy three member-facing services: a web chat on public-facing websites, the PCFCU Connect mobile app and the AI-powered self-service enablement for web chat. Notably, the PCFCU Connect app allows team members to become digitally available to prospects and members anytime and anywhere by utilizing AI to respond to simple requests, provide employee guidance and recommendations, and analyze user conversations, promoting greater transparency and insight into members' needs. Within weeks of deployment, PCFCU saw approximately one-third of all web chat engagements resolved without employee involvement, while 70% of all conversations now occur on the app as opposed to the web chat.

“We are excited to be named a Tekkie winner as this is a testament to our member-centric engagement model, blending the efficiency of AI automation and self-service options with the necessity of human interaction and creativity,” said Tiffany Tipton, VP, Organizational Development for Pinal County Federal Credit Union. “Agent IQ understands the best approach to modern relationship banking is through utilizing AI/ML to augment the human banker; not replace them, and PCFCU Connect prompts greater transparency between our members and employees, leading to a more fulfilling banking experience.”

“We are pleased to congratulate our friends at PCFCU for winning a Tekkie award, as well as their dedication to their members in meeting the growing consumer demand for a more digitally consistent banking experience,” said Slaven Bilac, CEO & Co-Founder at Agent IQ. “The solution ensures the best user experience by seamlessly integrating the importance of human empathy with the speed and efficiency of computer intelligence, providing a real-time digital connection between members and associates while also empowering members to select and engage with a preferred personal associate for all their financial needs across any digital channel; just like they are used to engaging with their family and friends.”  

PCFCU was also named a Future Branches Innovators Awards finalist in the category of “Most Effective Tech Implementation,” and continues to track real ROI.

Bitso —the leading financial services company powered by crypto in Latin America with 7 million users and 1,500 institutional clients— announced today the appointment of Robert Dennis Harrop as the new Chief Technology Officer (CTO), a British specialist who has worked at Bitso for over two years.

With an MSc in Software Engineering from the prestigious University of Oxford and over two decades of experience in the areas of data engineering, IT development, tech, and finance, Rob Harrop has contributed to the growth of Bitso and other companies of which he was a co-founder such as Cake Solutions (which is currently part of Disney Streaming), SpringSource, Bamboo Loans.

"I’m incredibly proud to lead the outstanding Bitso technology team and continue developing a world-class organization with our clients' needs, security, business strategy, and innovation at the core of everything we do. I am happy to take on this new challenge, which implies continuing to build the infrastructure behind the crypto products that enable financial inclusion and freedom in Latin America,” Harrop said.

Before joining Bitso, Harrop was CEO of Skipjaq Inc., focused on machine learning, which Skyscanner later acquired and where he led the Platform, Developer Enablement, and Data Engineering teams.

At Bitso, he held the positions of Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technologist before being assigned CTO, which has allowed him to learn about the technological challenges of the company, contributing with his knowledge and experience to the growth that Bitso has experienced during the last two years.

Rob is also the author of the book Pro Spring, which became a best-seller on the Spring Framework, an open-source framework that allows the development of applications and investment control based on open source, as well as other notable open-source-related projects such as Eclipse Virgo and availability for RabbitMQ.

Rob replaces Ben Peters, co-founder of the company, who was appointed Chief Research and Innovation Officer. 

Since 2014, Bitso has revolutionized finance in Latin America by becoming the first crypto unicorn in the region to offer border-less, accessible, secure, and easy-to-use financial products powered by crypto; Bitso sees technological development and innovation as fundamental components to achieve its mission of making crypto useful.

Trulioo, a leading global identity verification platform, today announced new Workflow Studio capabilities to accelerate person matching worldwide. Trulioo provides an alternative to the complex array of vendors that companies often depend on to ensure reliable person matching through personally identifiable information (PII) and identity documents. The Trulioo platform streamlines the verification of good users through intelligent transaction routing that improves match rates and helps businesses accelerate customer onboarding. 

Defeating a Legacy Problem

Today’s highly regulated international business environment demands comprehensive, accurate identity verification. But global companies facing stringent regulatory compliance requirements for person matching often resort to multiple vendor solutions, creating complex, time-consuming, tiered functions that result in additional expense and decreased efficiency. 

Trulioo streamlines identity verification and reverification with automated workflows that identify optimal combinations of PII matching, ID documents and watchlists to efficiently verify the right customers. Those capabilities eliminate the need for multiple vendors and complex solution waterfalling. The result is streamlined and efficient identity verification that aligns with the demands of today's dynamic regulatory landscape. 

“A piecemeal approach to person matching through multiple vendors has been a necessary evil in the industry because incomplete products have failed to meet the challenges of diverse demographics and regional limitations,” said Michael Ramsbacker, Trulioo chief product officer. “The Trulioo breakthrough approach eliminates the need for redundant, complex multivendor verification systems, enabling organizations to quickly and intelligently onboard customers and gain a competitive advantage. The proof is in the platform, and we invite everyone to test it themselves.”

Leveraging enhanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, Trulioo helps organizations assess millions of configurations to ensure the right balance of performance, job processing time and cost. Trulioo applies smart, data-based business logic to adjust in real-time to customers’ PII and funnel them to the most optimized onboarding workflow. That approach ensures maximum performance and good, verified users. 

The Proof in the Platform

A global brokerage and trading platform serving institutional and individual investors has leveraged the Trulioo platform for customized Know Your Customer person match onboarding in 20 markets and Know Your Business in the U.S. Trulioo machine learning algorithms analyzed millions of configurations weighted for cost, performance and job processing time. Trulioo also introduced new thin-file specific, multibureau sources and adapted the company’s verification waterfall. 

As a result, the company’s verification rates jumped more than 7%, which decreased costs per verified user, manual reviews and abandonment. The company’s job processing time dropped by 35%. 

To learn more about global Person Match services with intelligent routing, click here.