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DriveWealth, LLC, a leader in global digital trading technology, today announced a strategic partnership with Trading Central, a global leader of financial market research and investment analytics. The new relationship will allow the two companies to leverage the complementary elements of their businesses: seamless, digital, mobile-first transaction capabilities and sophisticated, accessible and actionable financial content.

DriveWealth CEO Robert Cortright said: “We are creating an exciting opportunity for investors and financial advisors around the world by putting together relevant financial content that drives investment decisions with a seamless digital investing experience and state-of-the-art execution capabilities. Working with Trading Central allows us to bring a complete investment solution to a wide range of market participants.”

Julien Heiderscheid, Global Solutions Director at Trading Central, said: "At Trading Central, we've spent the last 20 years dedicated to empowering investors by providing them actionable analytics and research through the world's leading online brokerage and media platforms. DriveWealth's disruptive technology is a natural complement to these goals. We are excited to announce our new partnership, in the spirit of helping even more of today's investors participate in financial markets."

With customers and partners in more than 140 countries, DriveWealth is the pioneer in bringing digital access to the U.S. securities market for investors around the world. The company, which launched its patent-pending real-time fractional share trading capabilities in 2016, was founded with the mission to democratize investing in the U.S. stock market by making it available to everyone, globally, at an affordable cost. Feature by feature, DriveWealth has eliminated many of the barriers investors typically encounter with legacy brokers, creating its own proprietary infrastructure that allows investors to purchase securities without minimum account balances, high transaction costs or full share quantities. Today, DriveWealth provides this innovative investing technology and its own customizable suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) to partners all over the world, allowing investors everywhere to gain access to the highly stable, liquid and regulated U.S. stock market with a fully accessible, straightforward user experience.

Tencent, one of the world's biggest online service providers, has selected HERE Technologies as their main provider of global map content and places information.

As part of the partnership, HERE will power the mapping platform from Tencent outside of China with its location platform and Places data, including Japan. This platform supports all Tencent products and services, including the well-known chat and instant messaging applications WeChat and QQ.

"Leading companies from around the world and across industries trust HERE when it comes to delivering high-quality map data and location services. We're delighted to expand our work with Tencent by supporting its large user base with fresh global maps and accurate places information," said Leon van de Pas, SVP and General Manager APAC at HERE Technologies. "We look forward to exploring further opportunities in our partnership with Tencent in the future."

HERE is the leading global provider of location data and platform services. The company delivers up-to-date and high-quality maps for 200 countries and territories. HERE detects, processes and publishes tens of millions of changes to its map data every week to keep it as fresh as possible. This includes hundreds of millions of places and point addresses worldwide to discover and interact with.

Digital banking alternative, Revolut, has selected Exasol’s in-memory database as the central data repository for its organisation-wide data analytics requirements. One of the fastest growing FinTech businesses in the world, Revolut has adopted data-driven decision making, and has chosen Exasol to provide comprehensive and up to date data to every employee from its data science team to business heads to frontline staff.

Revolut previously used Postgres, but it was not feasible to use the transactional database when computing complex aggregations with multiple joins across hundreds of millions of rows of data. Revolut’s data science team sought a high performance Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) database and trialled a free Docker image of Exasol. It was impressed that even the limited version of the database, running on a single node, outperformed its former database. Furthermore, since the trial began in May, Exasol has never failed to perform or required maintenance.

An Exasol cluster is now fully implemented in production on the Google Cloud Platform, providing the central repository for all data required for analytics throughout the business. Since implementation, the database has improved decision-making processes with query times that the data scientists estimate are 100 times faster than its previous solution. With more than 2 million people using the Revolut app, the ability to use and analyse large datasets spanning several sources helps Revolut with fraud detection, improving customer satisfaction and financial reporting.

Abhi Thanendran, lead data scientist at Revolut, said: “Revolut is extremely data-driven, and we needed a universal database that could keep up. When we tested Exasol in the Docker trial, to say we were extremely impressed would be an understatement.”

Thanendran continued: “We’ve saved countless hours across all our departments. Reports that previously took hours to generate can now be loaded in a second, and we have a much better grasp of our company KPIs and industry trends. It’s also proved incredibly stable since the start and we’re looking forward to seeing continued results as we increase the demands we place upon the database.”

Unusually, Revolut provides every employee with an open source BI (Business Intelligence) tool, and self-service access to the central Exasol repository. This data underpins the key performance indicators (KPIs) for every team. The data science team also works from this central database as a “single point of truth”, and benefits from being able to quickly query and download extracts from the large live database at any time. Exasol has saved Revolut’s data scientists a significant number of hours work during ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) processing, which enables them to run their further analysis in proprietary tools and use advanced functionality such as machine learning algorithms for analysis.

Aaron Auld, CEO, Exasol, commented: “Revolut is a high-growth, cutting-edge business that has put data at the heart of its culture by overcoming the limitations of conventional data analytics solutions. Its data science team has very ambitious plans for the future and we are excited about working with them to make full use of Exasol’s capabilities to apply machine learning tools to its processes and empower employees with the data analysis capabilities they need.”

Revolut was the latest British financial technology company to achieve “unicorn” status in April 2018 when a new funding round valued the business above $1 billion. The company has an ambitious roadmap with a high rate of future product releases that will create new data sources. Having adopted Exasol’s flexible data analytics infrastructure, it can easily aggregate these into its central repository by expanding its database schemas, ensuring employees continue to have access to the all data they need as business grows.

Ingenico Group, the global leader in seamless payment, today announced a strategic partnership with Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, to enable international online merchants to accept the national MIR Card Payment System.

Since the introduction of the domestic card scheme in 2015, some 45 million MIR cards have already been issued, with more than half issued by Sberbank – the main credit institution in Russia and the CIS, and the largest acquirer in Europe.

Extending its network of global acquiring banks with Sberbank as a local partner in Russia is key to Ingenico’s merchant-focused international growth strategy. As Sberbank is the main issuer of MIR cards, millions of MIR cardholders will now be able to use their cards to shop with the well-known international brands that use Ingenico to process their payments.

Svetlana Kirsanova, Director of Sberbank’s Acquiring and Bank Card Division, commented: “Russian consumers love buying from international brands and want to use their MIR cards to do so. With Ingenico, we can now offer this opportunity to our customer cardholders from Russia’s national payment system.”

“From January to August 2018, upwards of 58 million online transactions were performed using national cards,” added Vladimir Komlev, CEO of MIR Card Payment System operator, NSPK. “We are glad that, thanks to the joint project between Sberbank and Ingenico, foreign web stores will accept MIR Cards. It will significantly expand the geography of online purchases for cardholders.”

International online merchants can now accept MIR card payments for the first time, providing them with access to a rapidly growing market. By using a local acquirer, merchants will be able to offer a higher level customer experience, with increased authorisation rates and fewer disputes – and since Sberbank uses data centres in Moscow and Kazan, Ingenico’s merchants are automatically compliant with Russia’s data storage regulations.

“We are proud to cooperate with the largest acquiring bank in Europe, which will ensure the acceptance of MIR cards on international websites,” added Gabriel de Montessus, SVP Global Online (Retail BU) for Ingenico Group. “The partnership with Sberbank will allow us to offer a truly unique solution to merchants who seek to exploit the potential of the Russian market. Already, we are working to further expand our cooperation through additional features and products.”

Looking ahead, Ingenico and Sberbank are aiming to expand the partnership to include additional features such as support for Sberbank Online, its real-time banking solution, and an opportunity for international merchants to participate in the loyalty program Spasibo to establish and nurture strong connections with Russian consumers.

DLRT, part of the TALL Group of Companies, the UK leader in the provision of secure paper and electronic payment solutions, is celebrating after the business scooped two supplier awards from long-standing client Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks (CYBG). This was the inaugural year of the Bank’s ‘Spotlight’ awards that are designed to recognise the contribution of key partners across its supply chain.

More than 50 of the Bank’s major suppliers were invited to attend the special ceremony, which was held at the Grand Central Hotel in Glasgow. The Spotlight award categories represented CYBG’s core values of “Be Ambitious, Be Connected, Be Courageous, Be Curious and Be All Over It”. Lisburn-based DLRT was shortlisted in several award categories following nominations from the CYBG team for its ongoing successful contribution to the group. After being judged against the core values, DLRT triumphed in two categories – Be Connected and Be Courageous.

DLRT has a long-lasting partnership with CYBG that goes back to 2004, during which time it has supplied a range of services and solutions, including Personalised Cheques, Lodgement Books and Drafts.

Peter Thomas, DLRT’s Managing Director, collected the awards on behalf of the team in Lisburn and the wider TALL Group. He said: “This is the culmination of years of consistent and open communication between both parties. DLRT prides itself in going that extra mile for the customer. We are very grateful to CYBG for its support and we are honoured to be recognised for the services we provide. We are looking forward to many more successful years working alongside the team at CYBG.”

Fraser Ingram, Innovation and Change Director, at CYBG said: “We would like to congratulate everybody at DLRT for triumphing in two categories at our inaugural awards. The judges were impressed with the continued commitment DLRT has shown to the Bank and our customers, always delivering a high standard of services and solutions. Most recently, they have supported us with the introduction of Image Clearing for cheques, an important industry development that has required changes to be made within the business. The team at DLRT developed robust fraud security features and training materials that protect the Bank and our customers as cheque imaging is introduced across our sector.”

Abacus Group, a leading provider of hosted IT solutions and application hosting for alternative investment firms, has been recognized as the winner of “Best Technology-Overall” at the 2018 Alt Credit European Services Awards which took place in London on 31^st October.

The Alt Credit European Services Awards recognize best in class for services to alternative credit fund managers, including excellence in customer service and technological innovation. The “Best Technology-Overall” category honours a firm that has provided excellent service as a provider of outsourced IT solutions for the credit sector, demonstrating both customer and revenue growth, product innovation and examples of how service provision has been able to improve the communication, infrastructure, IT and business development of clients.

During the first three quarters of 2018, Abacus’s London-based Europe division experienced record growth. The number of clients it services in the European market has doubled so far this year. With outstanding service at its core, the London office has scaled at the same rate, doubling its employee headcount. The team moved into a new, larger space in March of this year in anticipation of such accelerated growth.

“I’m very proud of our Abacus team,” said Tom Cole, Director-Europe at Abacus Group. “Our exciting growth is testament to the team’s passion to deliver great service and innovative yet appropriate technology solutions.”

The innovative Abacus Cloud platform allows investment managers to source all technology needs as a service. It offers the capacity to scale on-demand to meet a firm’s current and future cybersecurity and compliance requirements, and is suited for firms of all sizes – from small start-ups to larger, technically sophisticated firms. Abacus specializes in providing services to hedge funds, private equity firms, mutual funds, family offices, asset managers and independent software vendors.