This announcement does not constitute a prospectus and nothing herein contains an offering of securities. No one should purchase or subscribe for any securities in Adform A/S ("Adform" or the "Company") except on the basis of information in any prospectus published by the Company in connection with the potential offering and admission of such securities to trading and official listing on Nasdaq Copenhagen A/S (“Nasdaq Copenhagen”). Copies of any such prospectus will, following publication, be available at the Company’s registered office and, subject to certain exceptions, through the website of the Company.

Adform announces intention to launch an Initial Public Offering on Nasdaq Copenhagen

Adform, an advertising technology company, today announced its intention to launch an Initial Public Offering ("IPO") and to list its shares on Nasdaq Copenhagen. 

The contemplated IPO is expected to consist of sale of newly issued shares, to raise gross proceeds of DKK 750 million to support Adform’s strategy by funding its strategic initiatives and strengthening its balance sheet, as well as a potential sale of existing shares by certain of the current shareholders in Adform. The total offer size will be announced in connection with the publication of the prospectus.

Adform is currently owned by GCM Holding ApS, VIA Equity Fond I K/S, Accredonet Holding ApS, Stefan Juricic (collectively the "Selling Shareholders") and Danica Pension, Livsforsikringsaktieselskab.

Chairman of the board of directors, Peter L. Ravn, said:
“We are investing in accelerating Adform’s growth on several dimensions and intend to seek funding of the rapid market expansion, continued product development and a strengthening of our balance sheet through an initial public offering. It is our firm belief, that Adform’s multiple growth levers, business model, and high-growth markets constitute an interesting investment opportunity for new investors." 

CEO, Gustav Mellentin, said:
“Since Jakob, Stefan and I founded Adform 16 years ago, we have focused on building a unique product portfolio for lead-ing customers, while driving towards sustainable, long term growth.  

It’s been quite a journey from a basement in Nørrebro, Copenhagen to today having more than 850 fantastic colleagues across 24 countries, but I am convinced the most exciting times are still ahead of us. We have ambitious goals for the fu-ture, and we believe that our unique proposition forms a solid foundation for future growth. I am thrilled by the prospect of inviting new shareholders along for Adform’s continued successful journey.”

China International Import Expo ("CIIE") is being held in Shanghai with more than 3,000 enterprises from over 130 countries attending. UnionPay International, leveraging on its advantages in network, products and services, is offering smooth payment service to visiting guests and export and import settlement service to traders.

Offering payment convenience for exhibitors visiting mainland China

To date, over 100 million UnionPay cards have been issued in 48 countries and regions outside mainland China. And in many countries and regions, UnionPay is the No.1 card brand in terms of card-issuing scale. In addition to providing great convenience to overseas residents in local markets, these overseas-issued UnionPay cards also facilitate overseas residents' visits to China. In the third quarter of this year, the volume of transactions made in mainland China with overseas-issued UnionPay cards grew by 12% year-on-year.

Exhibitors may use UnionPay cards issued outside mainland at almost all merchants and ATMs in mainland China. If with RMB or dual-currency UnionPay cards that with a RMB account, the spending in mainland China will be settled in RMB, thus effectively lowering the currency conversion cost. In addition, exhibitors are able to apply for UnionPay debit or credit cards in banks in China with effective identity certificates. Currently, many banks in China are offering card application express channels for foreign exhibitors.

Since the opening of CIIE to February, 2019, UnionPay International are providing special offers of up to RMB588.00 for cardholders with overseas-issued UnionPay cards at restaurants and hotels in Shanghai.

Supporting cross-border trade between China and other countries

Over the past few years, UnionPay International is actively offering payment support to the cross-border trade between China and the rest of the world. For instance, about 600,000 UnionPay Commercial Cards have been issued outside mainland China, and UnionPay cross-border remittance service is launched in 45 countries and regions outside the Chinese Mainland. In answer to the digitalization of cross-border trade, UnionPay International has launched its Cross-border B2B Payment Service Platform, to provide enterprises with secure and convenient online import and export settlement services.

So far, a number of cross-border e-commerce and traditional export companies in Africa, Central Asia, and mainland China have connected to UnionPay Cross-border B2B Platform. After selecting goods at these e-commerce websites, domestic and overseas purchasers are able to make safe and convenient payment via UnionPay Cross-border B2B Platform.

To better serve CIIE, UnionPay International collaborates with several banks to provide one-stop import and export settlement service via the UnionPay Cross-border B2B platform. Enterprises can complete online the whole process of payment, order review, foreign currency purchase and settlement, and declaration, saving the trouble of going to the bank outlet for remittance and filling in the customs declaration materials. Furthermore, UnionPay International is a strategic partner of the official transaction service platform of CIIE, and will deliver long-term services to exhibitors even after the closing of CIIE.

Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) has been selected by Orica (ASX: ORI), one of the world's largest manufacturers of commercial explosives and innovative blasting systems, to migrate Orica's IT infrastructure to the cloud. This important initiative will enable Orica to achieve higher levels of efficiency, agility and business impact, while optimizing Orica's capital investment and operating costs. 

Orica selected Cognizant as technology advisor and managed cloud-platform provider to develop a highly available, scalable, and resilient IT platform on a pay-per-usage model, to enable "anywhere, anytime, any device" mobile access to core enterprise systems. As a part of this initiative, Cognizant has designed and implemented a managed platform-as-a-service based on the SAP® S/4HANA intelligent ERP solution on Microsoft Azure. Furthermore, as part of the ongoing implementation, eight of Orica's core enterprise business processes are being transitioned to the new S/4HANA platform in 57 countries around the world.  

As a partner of Microsoft, SAP® and SUSE, Cognizant leveraged its innovative service delivery model through the  Cloud Assessment and Transformation Framework to design and develop the SAP® S/4HANA systems on Azure. 

"New technologies hold great potential for us to align with the needs of a fast-changing market by driving innovation and enabling new ways to work across every part of Orica," said Gabriela Azzali, 4S Program Director, Orica. "Cognizant leveraged its deep cloud technology and platforms capabilities to architect, design and build SAP® systems on HANA deployed on Microsoft Azure. They built business critical SAP® systems to kick-start the program right on schedule and implemented automation processes in operations to keep infrastructure costs under control."

"Cognizant is the right technology partner for us, with their strong credentials in architecting managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for SAP® on Microsoft Azure. Hosting SAP® S/4HANA on Azure needed a best-in-class foundational design and Cognizant's technology architects were able to create an effective technology governance model that laid the basis for this implementation," said Sascha Wenninger – Technology Lead, 4S Program, Orica.

"The Orica 4S transformation project has achieved solid business outcomes on time and on schedule. SAP® S/4HANA certified VMs on Microsoft Azure and other Azure services have enabled Cognizant and the Orica project team to rapidly deploy SAP® systems as and when needed. Orica will also benefit from Microsoft's world class datacenters, security, SAP®-certified infrastructure with High Availability solutions and the added assurance of Azure Site Recovery for Business Continuity and DR," said Brett Shoemaker, Business Group Leader, Cloud & AI, Microsoft Australia. 

"Making business critical systems such as SAP® S/4HANA highly available requires a well-defined architecture, and Cognizant, Microsoft and SUSE worked together to build a collaborative solution based on multi-node iSCSI server configuration. Significantly, this configuration is the first ever such deployment on Microsoft Azure," said Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE CTO.

"The ability to quickly and cost-effectively deploy, manage and operate modern, dynamic and scalable architectures on industry-leading cloud platforms is crucial for enterprises to achieve the future of work today," said Rajesh Balaji Ramachandran, Senior Vice President, Global Delivery Leader for Enterprise Application Services at Cognizant. "We are pleased to be helping Orica embrace the cloud and develop powerful provisioning, monitoring, and automation capabilities to increase operational resilience and manage market volatility. Cognizant's future-ready CRI framework providing IT on demand will help Orica empower employees, improve speed-to-market, and make operations safe, secure and reliable to deliver sustainable value to its stakeholders."

Wirecard, the global innovation leader for digital financial technology, today announced its platform expansion in Australia and New Zealand. The Wirecard platform is now available in New Zealand for e-commerce services and Australia for omnichannel solutions. With this expansion, Wirecard is extending its ecosystem of real-time value added services around innovative digital payments in Oceania.

This leverages on the global Wirecard strategy of digitizing payments worldwide as Australia is leading innovation in areas such as contactless payments, bill payments, digital commerce, and point-of-sale applications, and the market is ready to make the next transformation. Research and Markets found out that the Australian payment mix is shifting heavily toward electronic payments. Consumers are continuing to switch to electronic payment methods from paper-based methods - like cash and checks - for their purchases. The dominant payment method in Australia is cards: more than 50% of consumer payments in 2016 were made with cards. The rapidly increasing use of contactless card payments, the development of new digital cash substitutes, such as mobile P2P payments, and the high adoption rate of smartphones (89% in 2016) position Australia as a strong candidate for a cashless society.

It is the same situation in New Zealand: Online spending in New Zealand is on the rise and more than a quarter of citizens prefer to shop on the web. Online spending in New Zealand is now worth NZ$4.2 billion annually, up from NZ$3.9 billion the same time a year earlier, with retailers making more effort to combine their selling points on one single platform.

Daniel Vukovac, General Manager Merchant Business Solutions Australia at Wirecard, commented: "Wirecard has been successfully doing business in Australia for quite a few years, winning some major clients. The latest omnichannel expansion in this region marks another important step to offer our services globally to as many merchants as possible - through digitizing payment processes and making transactions seamless for end-consumers. We are looking forward to further reducing the usage of cash worldwide and offering customers the benefits of truly digital payment solutions."

Validis, a pioneer of financial data sharing and standardization technology, has launched its DataShare product line, which features a suite of APIs (DataShare APIs) and an online portal to view the data (DataShare View). DataShare provides financial institutions with fast, easy access to a SMB client’s financial data, direct from their accounting application, in a standardized format.

SMB borrowers benefit from quicker decisions and automation of the collection and transfer of their financial data to the lender. Likewise, lenders benefit from access to the borrower’s accurate, complete and current financial data, which provides greater insights, speeds decisioning and minimizes risk.

Validis connects to over 80 percent of online and offline accounting applications used by the SMB market and extracts the full transactional history. The data is encrypted, interrogated for accuracy and standardized. No client configuration or data preparation is required for either the lender or the borrower. Borrowers’ complete financials are delivered into the lender’s credit system within minutes.

With DataShare APIs, lenders can receive the extracted data in the format they prefer. DataShare View, Validis’ intuitive online portal, allows lenders to easily analyze a standardized view of their customers’ uploaded financials. Additional features include: upload scheduling tool, administrative control, data configuration, white labeling and the ability to download the data into Excel to drill down through multiple months, quarters or years. 

“Validis’ DataShare products are changing how lenders speak with their clients. DataShare allows lenders to gain a comprehensive view of a SMB borrower’s financial health and become a true partner to their customers,” said Joel Curry, CEO of Validis. “With our DataShare products, financial institutions can benefit from fast and easy access to clients’ financial data in a standardized format, allowing greater control and increased productivity during the SMB lending process.”

ING Group was subject to the 2018 EU-wide stress test conducted by the European Banking Authority (EBA), in cooperation with the De Nederlandsche Bank, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB). ING Group notes the announcements made today by the EBA on the EU-wide stress test and fully acknowledges the outcomes of this exercise. 

The 2018 EU-wide stress test does not contain a pass fail threshold and instead is designed to be used as an important source of information for the purposes of the SREP. The results will assist competent authorities in assessing ING Group's ability to meet applicable prudential requirements under stressed scenarios. 

The adverse stress test scenario was set by the ECB/ESRB and covers a three-year time horizon (2018-2020). The stress test has been carried out applying a static balance sheet assumption as at December 2017, and therefore does not take into account future business strategies and management actions. It is not a forecast of ING Group's profits. 

Under the hypothetical baseline scenario and EBA's methodological instructions, ING Group would have a fully loaded common equity Tier 1 capital ratio (CET1) of 13.99% in 2020. Under the hypothetical adverse scenario and EBA's methodological instructions, ING Group would have a fully loaded CET1 ratio of 10.70% in 2020. ING Group published an actual fully loaded CET1 ratio of 14.51% per 31 December 2017. As of 30 September 2018 ING Group reported a fully loaded CET1 ratio of 14,0%.

Slide is a new banking app that gives business owners a complete, real-time and editable view of their past, present and future cash position. It is designed to help them make better-informed financial decisions, giving them more control and peace of mind when it comes to their future financial health.

No More Guesses.

Running out of cash is the worst thing that can happen to a business. But it happens – more often than it should. Cash is difficult to manage because banking apps and bookkeepers only tell small business owners what has happened in the past, not what they need to know for the future.

This means they don’t have a clear view of how their cash position will be impacted should a payment come in late or several creditors demand payment at the same time. Businesses have had to rely on multiple data sources to get a clear view of their financial health, with the launch of The Slide App this is now a thing of the past. With Slide there are no more guesses.

“Banking apps and technology have never reduced the rate at which small businesses fail in the UK. That didn’t sit well with us so we set out to tackle the problem,” said Simon Lyons, Chief Commercial Officer, The Slide App. “Small business owners have traditionally struggled to predict what their cash position will look like in the future. This means they are basing financial decisions on guesswork. We designed Slide to help these businesses get a step ahead to proactively predict and control their financial future. We believe this will help customers to evolve, survive and thrive.”

Slide in action

Slide brings together all the financial information that SME owners need in one place. This gives them a clear and simple view of their cash position and the impact of payments that go in and out of the business. Slide tells businesses what hasn’t happened as well as what has.

This takes away the stress of cash flow management for business owners, they feel safe in the knowledge they are making the right decisions that prevent them from running out of cash.

Slide also has online connectivity to banks, enabling it to automatically reconcile balances and payments and match receipts to expectations, clearing invoices from the forecast. As consequence, unpaid invoices get pushed forward automatically.

The launch of Slide is the next step in virtual banking and enabling businesses to have full visibility over their cash position. The announcement is supported by Cashfac recently being granted its licence by the FCA to carry out account information and payment initiation services as an Authorised Payment Institution (API).

For further information about joining our pilot programme or to find out how Slide is helping businesses control their future, please visit the Slide app website or we would be happy to organise a demo.

Invest Cyprus, the national investment partner of the Republic of Cyprus, VeChain Foundation, a Singapore-registered legal entity with focus on building public blockchain solutions, and CREAM, a USA-registered company with a focus on blockchain project strategic advisory and investments, are announcing that the parties have signed a MoU for strategic collaboration. The essence of this MoU is to establish a framework for the basis ofcooperation in the field of blockchain technologies and related use cases. This collaboration signifies a change in direction towards a prosperous Cyprus in the next digital age.

VeChain Foundation and CREAM will establish a partnership in Cyprus assisting in the development and implementation of blockchain solutions. To facilitate a new digital age through blockchain technology the two parties will make suggestions to Invest Cyprus including policy reform that enables blockchain as an underlying infrastructure for operations and financial services.

The parties will work together to accomplish several national level investment strategies involving the advancement of blockchain technology and blockchain powered economies. This cooperation will show the use of blockchain technology in financial services, investments and economic reform moving into many other aspects of society, in the context of Government policy developing a new era of blockchain technology in Cyprus.

The initial scope of the collaboration consists of the blockchainization in areas which will be announced as the project develops. This cooperation represents the single largest venture into blockchain technology in Cyprus to date and aims to introduce a new framework that is transparent, fair, and in compliance with AML and KYC, EU laws, regulations and best practices, which will also create value and further improve economic development on Cyprus.

"The plans unfolding in Cyprus should open the world to what is achievable by investing in new technologies. Invest Cyprus as a promoter of Cyprus Investment opportunities and advisor to the Government of Cyprus in the investments space, sees this technology as both transformational and fiscally restorative at the infrastructure level. We are investing in thedevelopment of the fintech, blockchain sector and we plan to be at the forefront so that we can facilitate investments and economic development in Cyprus and the region." — Michalis P. Michael, Chairman of Invest Cypru

"Just as the blockchain technology represents something much bigger than business and money, this partnership represents the true competency for global change embedding trust, transparency, and fairness to the core of our society. Along with our partners, we are excited to showcase the true value of blockchain as supplemental technology and as an infrastructure to the world." — Sunny Lu, Co-Founder, and CEO of VeChain

"Cyprus as a nation represents a wonderful opportunity to make trust and fairness commonplace in the next digital age. As the first nation to fully support the development of the blockchain technology, along with our partners, we will assist the nation to attract projects and talents from around the world increasing the vivaciousness of development building an ecosystem out of blockchain technology. In turn, we will help blockchain related projects to find a home where they will be supported and protected by the law to create, develop and thrive." — Jackson Fu, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of CREAM.

Insurance Nexus are developing a comprehensive report into the state of play of connected claims and the technologies currently transforming the insurance business. As a precursor to this, they are holding a survey of global insurance professionals to gauge their thoughts, opinions and predictions on the current state of the industry.

The report will contain full statistics from the survey, as well as exclusive business cases exploring computer vision, straight-through-processing and claims automation. Insurance Nexus are already conducting a series of interviews with senior executives from Allstate, Chubb, Allianz, and more, which will be included in the report. The report will also allow insurance carriers to benchmark their performance and priorities against competitors, in a global context. This is no easy task given the rapid pace of claims transformation across insurance.

Contributors to the Claims Transformation Survey will receive the final Connected Claims USA Summit post-event report free-of-charge.

The survey is being conducted in association with Supporting Partners, Actuarial Post, Insurance Nerds and InsurTechNews. “Taking part in the survey is a win-win for insurance industry experts and insurtech start-uppers alike, considering the global reach of the study and final report put together by Insurance Nexus,” said Celia Clinciu, Director, InsurTechNews. “Participating represents a great way of extracting insights on connected claims adoption for all parts involved, while also having a clearer picture of the impact on the insurance value chain and on claims processing in particular.”

Those who wish to take part in the survey can do so by following this link: http://bit.ly/2PlRJIq, and all submissions will be completely anonymous. For more information, please see contact details below.

Contact: Mariana Dumont

Head of New Markets, Insurance Nexus

T: 44 (0) 207 422 4369

T: 1 800 814 3459 ext 4369

Email: mdumont@insurancenexus.com

Insurance Nexus is part of FC Business Intelligence Ltd. FC Business Intelligence Ltd is a registered company in England and Wales. Registered number 04388971, 7-9 Fashion Street, London, E1 6PX, UK

Insurance Nexus is the central hub for insurance executives. Through in-depth industry analysis, targeted research, niche events and quality content, we provide the industry with a platform to network, discuss, learn and shape the future of the insurance industry.

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