Published
- 03:00 am
This has been a landmark year in data security, with regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), MiFID ii and the forthcoming ePrivacy regulation all set to change how we think about and deal with sensitive information.
Since GDPR came into being on May 25th 2018, there’s been a marked increase in the number of data breaches being reported to national regulators throughout Europe, as consumers awaken to the rights they hold as data subjects; to have their personal details handled responsibly, securely and consensually.
Security has to be priority in today’s data economy, and organisations have to adhere to higher data processing standards through all levels of activity if they are to satisfy the demands of cutting edge regulation.
Data Protection World Forum
Coming to London’s Excel arena on November 20th and 21st, Data Protection World Forum is an unmissable opportunity for executives, professionals and IT leaders to understand what the wave of new legislation means, and how it breaks down into changes in organisational procedure.
This exclusive two-day conference – much of which is free of charge – is packed with keynote talks, panel discussions and engaging content that brings clarity to the key issues in context, enabling delegates to appreciate how to embrace the huge opportunities that laws such as GDPR present.
DPWF is delighted to welcome four more internationally-renowned experts to our distinguished roster of event speakers, which already includes representatives from the Information Commissioner’s Office, European Commission, European Data Protection Supervisor, Google, Deloitte, Schneider Electric, PWC, National Cyber Security Centre, John Lewis and many more.
Speakers include:
- Chris Combemale, CEO of the DMA
- Christie Dennehy-Neil, Head of Policy & Regulatory Affairs, IAB UK
- Rowenna Fielding, Senior Data Protection Lead at Protecture
- Guy Johnson, Head of Data Governance at Marks & Spencer
- Ian West, COO & EVP, GDPR Associates
- Kevin Willis, DPO, Aviva
Free-to-access content theatres include:
- ISF Pavilion Cyber Security & Risk Management
- GDPR Advanced
- One Trust Marketing & Advertising
- GDPR Refresh sponsored by TrustArc & BigID
- Speakers’ Corner in association with Cyber Talks
Each theatre features a packed two-day agenda of keynotes and panel discussions held by global authorities in data protection, exclusively at Data Protection World Forum at London’s Excel arena on 20th and 21st November.
- 03:00 am
Equiniti Group plc (“Equiniti”), the multinational specialist technology outsourcer, is delighted to announce the completion of the acquisition of Aquila Group Holdings Limited (“Aquila”) from AquilaHeywood Limited on 31st October 2018. Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.
Aquila is a UK-based life and pensions technology provider for pension schemes and large insurance companies. The Aquila proprietary platform ‘Administrator’, supports propositions in workplace savings, bulk purchase annuities and heritage transformation.
The acquisition is in line with Equiniti’s strategy of acquiring capabilities to enhance client offerings and cements the EQPaymaster division as a leading technology and solutions provider. Aquila will predominately support Equiniti’s Life and Pensions (L&P) team to add depth of choice to the L&P technology solutions and diversify the overall proposition, as well as enhancing software options available to existing clients.
AquilaHeywood Limited (and its remaining subsidiaries including Heywood, ATMOS and i-Connect) is not being acquired as part of this transaction and will remain under the ownership of its existing shareholders.
Ric Williams, co-CEO of EQPaymaster, said:
“We are delighted to announce the acquisition of Aquila, a leading provider of software and technology solutions. Aquila will enhance EQPaymaster’s technology and services to the insurance market and broader financial services space, alongside our existing capability. I look forward to offering an enhanced combination of technology and services to our new and existing clients and building upon Aquila’s investment in the proprietary ‘Administrator’ platform.”
- 04:00 am
Solactive is pleased to announce the release of its latest white paper on Economic Moat, which explores a rules- based approach to select companies with lasting competitive advantages. In the paper, Solactive presents the Solactive Systematic Moat Index concept, which is an alternative way for quality investing. This strategy falls under the Solactive Intuitive Beta® family, an investing approach relying on intuition and gut feeling as a starting point.
Simplified, the fundamental structure of a competitive advantage consists of three levels, which are the following: low cost of production or differentiation power, scalability of the business model, as well as acompany’s intellectual properties like franchises, patents, or licenses. The paper argues that in order to be surrounded by an Economic Moat, companies should maintain their unique selling proposition by means of products or services that lead to high switching costs for customers, and trigger strong network effects.
Timo Pfeiffer, Head of Research at Solactive, commented: “Many products on the market are almost utilities in our daily life. Out of convenience, the switching costs to alternatives become high. These big brands establish themselves through a strong network effect – for example, I myself have never used another spreadsheet other than Excel. It is fascinating that these commonalities are captured through our newly launched index concept.”
The index universe consists of 40 stocks having the highest Economic Moat ranking; these securities were systematically added to the index as an Economic Moat with a wide operating margin. Some current index components are: Gilead Sciences, Inc., McDonald's Corporation, Planet Fitness, Inc. Class A, and Oracle Corporation.
- 02:00 am
A pioneering actively managed cryptocurrency solution has today been launched by one of the world’s largest independent financial advisory organizations.
deVere Group has founded the deVere Digital Asset Funds, a suite of digital currency solutions for experienced investors, in association with Dalma Capital Management Limited, a prominent hedge fund manager in the Dubai International Financial Centre.
It comes a day after Bitcoin, the world’s original digital currency, and still largest by market capitalization, reached its 10th anniversary.
Nigel Green, founder and CEO of deVere Group, comments: “Cryptocurrencies are now undeniably part of mainstream finance.
“Their momentum continues to gain traction as both retail and institutional investors increasingly value the need and demand for digital, global currencies in today’s ever-more digitalized and globalized world.
“The crypto market continues to expand considerably, with mass adoption on the horizon.
“These actively managed cryptocurrency solutions address growing demand by clients who want the potential associated benefits of exposure to the digital currency sector - which typically include portfolio diversification and decent returns - but with reduced volatility for which the market is known.”
He continues: “The deVere Digital Asset solution will invest in a diversified portfolio of digital assets via algorithmic trading over different platforms – including crypto-currency exchanges and OTC markets - as well as arbitrage opportunities.”
“Through a ground-breaking algorithmic system, when the price of one asset, for instance Bitcoin or Ethereum, is greater on one platform than on another, the opportunity is identified to generate profit from the difference of price across platforms. These trades, referred to as arbitrage, allow profits to be generated with little or no directional market risk.”
Zachary Cefaratti, CEO of Dalma Capital comments: “Crypto Asset Markets abound with durable inefficiencies – creating opportunities for hedge funds to generate uncorrelated excess returns through systematic relative value arbitrage, momentum trading and mean-reversion strategies.”
He adds: “Crypto Markets have created opportunities that we have not seen in conventional markets for decades. Arbitrage opportunities abound – the prices of the top 25 crypto assets vary across over 400 liquidity venues. The ability to trade long and short allows profit opportunities regardless of market direction.”
The deVere Digital Asset Platform is to be showcased at the forthcoming Alternative Investment Management (AIM) Summit taking place in Dubai on 26-27 November at the Ritz Carlton hotel.
Mr Green concludes: “We’re confident due to our custom-developed platform, which analyses market data and suggests rebalancing that’s best suited for the current market, will be a market leading investment solution in the digital currency space.
“The launch today of the deVere Digital Asset strategies underscores our ongoing commitment to reshaping and redefining the way financial services are delivered through fintech [financial technology], which we believe is a positive force for individuals, businesses and society.”
- 02:00 am
Global technology services provider points to automation and fully-accredited partners as way to avoid cloud security vulnerabilities
A lack of knowledge and an overreliance on manual change processes is leading many businesses to jeopardise the security of their cloud deployments, global technology services provider Claranet warns today.
The warning follows the launch of a report published by McAfee this week, which found that the average business has approximately 14 improperly configured IaaS instances running at any given time and roughly one in every 20 AWS S3 buckets are left wide open to the public internet. Additionally, researchers estimate that roughly 5.5. per cent of all AWS S3 storage instances are in a “world read” setting, allowing anyone who knows the address of the S3 bucket to see its contents.
Commenting on the findings, Steve Smith, Senior Site Reliability Engineer and AWS Team Lead at Claranet, said: “The cloud security challenges highlighted in this report have little to do with the platform itself, but everything to do with the people using it and, in our experience, people are the biggest weakness here. The major cloud providers like AWS set a lot of sensible defaults designed to support configuration – for example, S3 buckets are now private by default – but unfortunately, it’s very easy to get things wrong if you don’t know how to use the platform.
“We’ve seen many AWS configurations that end-user businesses have developed themselves or have worked with partners that don’t have the right experience, and, frankly, the configurations can be all over the place. When internal IT teams create these environments themselves, mistakes can occur when they don’t have the depth of knowledge or experience tofollow best practice.
“A click of a button or slight configuration change can have a major impact on your security posture, so it’s important to get a firm grip of the access controls and have safeguards in place to catch mistakes before they hit the production environment,” Steve added.
“Developing infrastructure as code – effectively, templated scripts that will create infrastructure in any public cloud environment – helps here because it makes it more difficult for mistakes to occur. Any changes in the code need to be peer-reviewed in the development lifecycle, making it much less likely that errors will make it out to the production environment and ensuring that any changes can be tracked and audited. In addition, it’s also good practice to run that code from a centralised location – some kind of CICD server for example – so that only that machine can make configurations and that there’s no way to make changes manually.”
Steve concluded by stating that AWS’s Well-Architected Framework, a programme designed to help AWS users build the most-secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications, is a key way that users can secure peace of mind about their cloud deployments.
“AWS has set up a review scheme, the AWS Well-Architected Framework, to help address these very issues and provide users with the assurance that everything is configured securely and as it should be. Qualified AWS partners can conduct comprehensive and free reviews of existing AWS architectures, checking things like access policies and change processes, and advise on the best way forward to safeguard security,” he concluded.
- 03:00 am
Assetz Capital investors claim that the Bank of England’s increased interest rate will have no impact on the economy in the near future, according to new data from the Q3 Investor Barometer.
The peer-to-peer business lender surveys its 29,000-strong investor community every quarter to determine their thoughts and predictions for the health of the UK economy.
Last quarter, 63% of investors were in no doubt that August’s rate rise from 0.5% to 0.75% would be a damp squib. 15% predicted a negative impact while just 22% thought it would be a positive for the economy.
While the interest rate rise may appear to be a positive for savers, high-street banks were called out for quickly adding the additional 0.25% to relevant mortgages but not doing the same to their savings accounts*. Even if the additional interest is added, inflation is still outstripping average savings rates, meaning consumers are effectively losing money.
Stuart Law, CEO at Assetz Capital said: “The cynical view is that an interest rate rise simply increases the banks’ profit margins, and it’s becoming difficult to argue against that. Our investors see that the main outcome will simply be higher mortgage rates – which isn’t going to deliver a huge positive economic impact.
“We don’t claim that peer-to-peer lending is the answer to everything, but, for informed investors that understand the risk, we are able to provide attractive target returns – while giving SMEs much-needed access to finance. It is alternative approaches like this that will unlock economic growth – not insignificant rate rises.”
Robert Eve
Senior Director at TIBCO Software
Everyone suffers from having too much information. There is no shame in that. There is only so much you can deal with any time, and under bombardment we become confused. see more
- 07:00 am
SMIT Holdings Limited ("SMIT" or the "Company," together with its subsidiaries, the "Group") (stock code: 2239), a world leading CAM supplier and a major mPOS supplier in China, has announced its new acquisition of S2C Tech Inc. ("S2C"), a hardware-based verification systems and software companies,to further diversity its business and revenue stream.
According to the agreement, the Group agreed to acquire 19,042,988 ordinary shares representing approximately 86.36% interest in the share capital of S2C on a fully diluted basis, at the maximum cash consideration of US$19,000,000, plus up to US$2,000,000 at the maximum in milestone based payments to the key management team.
S2C has been successfully delivering hardware-based rapid verification solutions since its establishment in 2003. S2C provides 1) rapid hardware-based verification system and automation software; 2) Prototype Ready™ IP, interfaces and platforms; 3) System-level design verification and acceleration tools. With over 400 customers and more than 2000 systems installed, S2C's focus is on SoC/ASIC development to reduce the SoC design cycle. Its highly qualified engineering team and customer-centric sales force understands users' SoC development needs. S2C systems have been deployed by leaders in consumer electronics, communications, computing, image processing, data storage, research, education, automotive, medical, design services, and silicon IP. S2C has offices and distributors around the globe including in the US, UK, Israel, mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.
Mr Shuai Hongyu, President of SMIT, said, "S2C is a well-established company principally engaged in rapid hardware-based verification systems and software for over 15 years. It has strong presence in mainland China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The acquisition added a new and strategically important component to our ongoing business development and helps us to quickly tap into this new industry. It is also in line with our overall investment strategy in the high-technology sector, representing a good opportunity for us to broaden our revenue stream. Through SMIT's new investments, S2C will be able to accelerate new product developments and provide superior customer support."
- 01:00 am
Consumer finance is poised to become the next gold mine of opportunity in China's booming financial technology sector, said a senior executive from LexinFintech Holdings Ltd. ("Lexin" or the "Company") (Nasdaq: LX), a leading online consumer finance platform for educated young adults in China.
In a dialogue with Professor Christopher J. Malloy and Professor Lauren H. Cohen at Harvard Business School on Oct 30, Lexin's chief financial officer Craig Zeng spoke to the audience about the fintech market in China, as well as how Lexin is leveraging advanced technology to serve this largely untapped market where demands for consumer financing are burgeoning.
Zeng said there is a paradigm shift in the technological scene where the next cycle of growth may be driven by ideas hatched from China.
"China is absolutely a world leader of fintech that the rest of the world can learn from," said Professor Cohen, who teaches Business Administration at Harvard University. "The country will continue to be an innovation hub (of different technologies) and I think fintech is just the beginning."
China's consumer finance market is projected to grow to US$1.6 trillion by the end of 2020, which is equivalent to the GDP of Mexico, representing a compound annual growth rate of 18 percent, said Zeng.
However, despite the huge demand for consumer financing, only 28 percent of Chinese consumers have credit ratings of any kind, significantly lower than the 86 percent of the US. This lack of credit infrastructure has caused many individuals in China to have unattended credit needs, especially in the educated young adult population. Zeng attributed this to the lack of credit infrastructure and the loan process at traditional financial institutions.
"Traditional financial institutions rely on a credit rating system from the central bank to evaluate loan applications. But those who have credit records are usually individuals who already have a stable income and hence don't require consumer financing," Zeng said.
In response to this issue, Lexin has adopted a forward-looking approach by using a combination of big data and artificial intelligence to assess a consumer's credit worthiness. The company relies on its proprietary risk management Hawkeye, which processes more than 1,000 decision rules and over 7,500 data variables to generate an assessment within seconds.
"Lexin is trying to provide financial services to customers by predicting their futures, which in this case is assessing the repayment prospects of customers who don't have a credit history," Zeng said.
"The basis of fintech is that we can help you prepare for the future. As such, it's more important that we know your future than your past."
Zeng noted that Hawkeye manages 98 percent of loan applications, and as such data evolves over time, the company can even create in real-time a lender's latest credit profile and engage in predictive analytics to understand how this profile may change over time.
With artificial intelligence and big data at play, Lexin is able to streamline the traditional process of loan applications, making it possible for its customers to complete a credit application within just a few minutes without having to submit a bundle of paperwork or wade through red tape.
This has largely improved the operating efficiency of the company. Lexin saw the percentage of its operating expenditure as a percentage of its debt balance steadily drop from 17.3 percent in 2015 to 8.9 percent in 2016 and 5.8 percent in 2017. In the first half of 2018, that number narrowed again to 4.7 percent, hence further boosting the firm's profitability.
Looking ahead, Zeng said the company will continue to diversifying its services to meet the growing needs of customers. It is also eyeing potential investment opportunities in Southeast Asia and the US.
Luke Graham
MP at Ochil & South Perthshire
Access to financial services, particularly for rural communities, is a lifeline. Critical to this lifeline are not just bank branches but also ATMs. see more
