Bank of America Merrill Lynch today announced enhancements to AutoFX, its automated currency conversion product for financial institutions. The new capability uses data analytics to make settlements faster, less expensive and more certain for the sending bank. AutoFX now also allows users to customize criteria for automated conversion.

AutoFX enables a bank sending a cross-border payment on behalf of its client to have BofA Merrill automatically convert the payment into the recipient’s local currency. The integration of new data analytics better enables AutoFX to quickly qualify eligible transactions that are destined for beneficiaries with local currency accounts. 

“We continue to improve our cutting-edge data analytics in our leading cross-currency solution, giving clients even more convenience when moving money across borders,” said David Kretz, head of Global Payments in Global Transaction Services (GTS) for BofA Merrill. “As the economy continues to grow more global, the ability to provide services such as automated currency conversion will become more essential for local and regional banks.”

Executing wire payments to foreign beneficiaries is standard in today’s global economy. However, many smaller banks lack the infrastructure, the accounts and the mechanisms to handle the currency conversions themselves. With AutoFX, the sending bank no longer needs to rely on the recipient bank to convert the currency. Instead, the conversion happens prior to delivery.

“As new technologies evolve and impact global commerce, cross-border payments must keep pace,” said Stephanie Wolf, head of Financial Services Companies and Governments for GTS. “In that context, we’ll continue to roll out innovations that enhance the value chain to our financial institution clients, and ultimately their own clients.”  

BofA Merrill’s AutoFX offers an expansive global reach, with up to 89 countries and 41 corresponding currencies. As its name suggests, once set up, AutoFX runs automatically, using machine learning to better evaluate each eligible transaction and convert those destined for beneficiaries with local currency accounts.

BofA Merrill’s GTS business provides comprehensive global treasury solutions across the breadth of the working capital cycle, including liquidity management, payments and receipts, commercial card, foreign exchange and trade and supply chain finance. With a history spanning more than 230 years, GTS supports thousands of clients ― small businesses, mid-size companies, large corporations, financial institutions and public-sector entities ― in more than 200 countries and 140 currencies.

SIX entered into a strategic partnership with Cortica and Duotem Capital to deliver Artificial Intelligence-based services covering collateral and cash optimization for the post-trade industry.

Tel Aviv and New York based Cortica develops next generation artificial intelligence technology that learns on its own in real-time, interacts with the real world and collaborates with other technologies and machines.

Duotem Capital in Hong Kong and SIX together with Cortica will collaborate to identify and evaluate AI-based business opportunities in SIX’s existing business areas to develop new business offerings for SIX in the financial sector. These include the recognition of trading patterns (e.g. front running, spoofing, insider trading, etc.), the creation of algorithms to identify fraudulent payments, machine-learning support for manual corrections in the post trading domain as well as the creation of a real-time business operation dashboard. Further use cases will be evaluated by the organisations over the course of the initial phase estimated to last for one quarter.

To enable the creation of these – and potentially other – solutions SIX, through its stock exchange arm, will make its historical transaction data available to Cortica for modelling and algorithm development.

According to Thomas Zeeb, Member of the Executive Board and Head of the Securities & Exchanges business unit at SIX, ‘Today’s AI capabilities, coupled with self-learning technologies, open up a world of possibilities and opportunities for us to improve the way we perform in terms of efficiency, transparency and compliance as an industry. We are at a point in the post-trade arena where breakthrough solutions – such as those promised by organisations such as Cortica and Duotem – can radically transform the way we interact with our clients and help them to strengthen their credibility for more sustainable business relationships with their clients and investors.’

Philippe Metoudi, CEO, Duotem Capital sees great opportunity, ‘ I have seen, first hand, the challenges financial institutions face in keeping up with regulation and compliance pressures while simultaneously trying to develop intelligent and automatable solutions for their operational businesses. With this approach, we at Cortica and Duotem – working with SIX – plan to create solutions that resolve these industry-wide issues by bringing in today’s future-oriented technologies and applying systems that can learn faster, adapt more rapidly and deliver to a higher quality. We are delighted that SIX has seen the potential for industry-wide service improvement without jeopardizing existing, mission-critical, infrastructure.’

Work has already begun with the expectation that a viable service can be farmed in the coming three months.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the premier post-trade market infrastructure for the global financial services industry, today announced the release of its latest Data Services product, DTCC Equity Kinetics, providing institutional investors with a comprehensive depth of market view of activity across all U.S. equity trading venues. The data is therefore ideal for quantitative market participants seeking insights to enhance their understanding of the U.S. equities markets.

DTCC Equity Kinetics facilitates analysis of U.S. equity market activity by providing a daily feed of trade data based on activity cleared through DTCC’s National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) subsidiary. This data includes aggregated trade volumes for the market, the 10 most-active brokers and an anonymous peer group of nine global brokers, by security and transaction type, covering buy activity and sell activity – sale, short sale and short sale exempt data. This unique offering includeshistorical data from December 2011 onwards.  

Tim Lind, Managing Director of Data Services at DTCC, said, “Post-crisis regulation and the related focus on increased transparency through transaction and trade reporting have led to a surge in demand for data generated from financial market infrastructures (FMIs) like DTCC. We capture and optimize data from our processing engines and data repositories to provide innovative solutions that help our clients address challenges related to risk management, capital adequacy, liquidity and market transparency. DTCC Equity Kinetics allows clients to gain greater insight into movements and trends across select market segments and asset classes, and nowjoins an expanding portfolio of aggregated data solutions across various assets classes.”

With only a day to the 7th Remittance and payment Expo (www.RemittanceAfrica.com) holding from Tuesday 23rd October to Wednesday 24th October, 2018 at the Lagos Oriental Hotel, Nigeria, the event secretariat wishes to remind interested persons and organizations that the discounted online delegate registration process will close at midnight, Monday October 22, 2018.

Meet the largest gathering of money transfer and payment providers at this continental event on 23 and 24 of October at the Lagos Oriental hotel with the compelling headline theme ‘Unlocking Opportunities in Money Transfer and Payment systems in Africa’.

Engage decision makers and engage key influencers

The two days of inspiring presentations, interactive sessions and networking opportunities with more than 24 thought leaders covering eight sessions, 24+ hours of advanced content, networking and more than 250+ official delegates.

Network with leading money transfer and payment providers from MFSAfrica, Transferto, Paga, Flutterwave, MTN Cameroon, Sendittoo, African Payment Gateway, Verve and many others.

The conference which will hold in Nigeria, Africa’s largest remittance market, will aim to create a more competitive market place for players to foster and deepen their engagements across the money transfer and payment ecosystem in Africa.

Registration will continue at full delegate registration rate at the venue of the conference from 8.00AM on Tuesday 23rd October, 2018. Only pre-registered delegates will be fast tracked. You can still pre-register for onsite registration bey contacting the event organizers.

Fidor Solutions, an innovative provider of digital banking services, today announces its extended partnership agreement with GFT USA, Inc. This partnership will see GFT USA, Inc. offer Fidor’s operating platform (fidorOS/fOS) and associated services to banks across the Americas.

Fidor started as a digital bank in 2009, quickly gaining industry recognition for its cutting-edge open banking platform. The platform not only enables 60 second banking, but also the quick deployment of a new bank. Fidor also gained recognition for the unique way it engages with customers through its online community. With over 800,000 active community members, the digital bank operates in Germany and the UK.

In 2016, Fidor extended its offering to include fidorOS, its open banking platform under Fidor Solutions. Partnering with like-minded organisations, including banks, telecoms, and retailers wanting to launch neobanks, Fidor is leveraging not only its technology stack, but also its expertise in customer engagement, as it continues to grow its community-based bank.

GFT is a renowned industry specialist in financial services, operating worldwide with a team of 4,500 employees in 12 countries, supporting leading banks and insurance companies with advisory, creative and technology capabilities. GFT has partnered with Fidor since 2016 in support of Fidor Bank’s mobile app development and o2 banking offering - a white label bank launched together with German Telecom giant, Telefonica.

Ge Drossaert, Board Member and Group CCO, Fidor Group, commented, “We’re thrilled to have such support towards our solutions across the Americas. Recent regulations like open banking, and Fidor’s ongoing commitment to greater financial access to customers will only affirm the need for modern API core software in the region. To ensure success, it is essential that we continue strengthening these new relationships to leverage a strong local presence - choosing GFT USA, Inc. was an easy choice.”

The partnership with GFT covers 3 key areas:

• Sales and marketing: Both companies will jointly exhibit at conferences such as Money 20/20 USA
• Product development: GFT will bring its expertise in user, mobile, and desktop experiences
• Implementation: GFT already has the expertise of implementing the fidorOS platform and will be an advocate as Fidor continues expanding its offering 

Scott Johnson, GFT’s Head of Transformation in North America adds, “Fidor has been a strategic partner of GFT across Europe and we are excited to expand the relationship into America. Fidor’s technology and GFT’s expertise in end-to-end digital transformation will offer banking clients robust accelerators bringing digital offerings to market rapidly and efficiently.  This is especially valuable for small to midsize banks and corporates helping them be more nimble and compete with larger institutions.”

Today at Sibos and Money 2020, Finastra revealed its instant payments offering in the cloud for small and mid-sized banks. The Fusion Global PAYplus packaged solution will enable tier three and four financial institutions in the EU and US to access the benefits that the cloud delivers, without the cost and on-premise infrastructure requirements that may previously have been a barrier to entry.

Based on Microsoft Azure, the pre-defined offering will be generally available in Q2 2019. It will enable central updates, ensuring all users benefit from the latest changes or new product functionalities immediately, including SWIFT and clearing scheme updates. Banks will be able to get up and running in just a few months with standardized pricing and onboarding processes in this SaaS model. This will provide a clear, future-proof cost structure and flexibility in a market where volumes are currently hard to predict.

“The adoption of immediate payments is moving at a rapid pace and is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. It is driven by customer expectations of banking services that provide a user experience aligned to what they encounter in other areas of their lives. Immediate payments are the essential underpinning for clients’ digital transformations,” said Sagive.Greenspan, SVP, General Manager, Payments at Finastra. “We will enable small and mid-sized banks to step up to the plate and really compete in the cloud environment. Where the largest banks would likely prefer our private cloud solution, small and mid-sized banks crave cost-effective packaged solutions which are quick to deploy and avoid legacy platform complications, but still deliver a state-of-the-art product. We’re responding to this increasing demand for hosted payments solutions with a compelling offering built on our deep domain expertise, in combination with Microsoft.”

Small and mid-sized banks require an agile platform that works out of the box, rather than taking a long time to see project value. The Fusion Global PAYplus packaged cloud solution will serve the growing  need for immediate payments processing, including high throughput all day, every day and end-to-end transaction times of seconds. Financial institutions will be able to tap into a proven service, without extensive development and implementation timeframes or costs, and it will ease the move from a CapEx to an OpEx environment.

Janet Lewis, Vice President of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft Corp. said, “Finastra’s requirements for instant payments – sub-second response times, 24x7x365 availability, and secure transmission – are ideally suited to the capabilities of Microsoft Azure. We are pleased that European payment service providers will now be able to access Finastra’s instant payments solution in a manner that reduces cost of ownership and simplifies solution updates – all while ensuring the specific security, privacy and compliance needs of instant payments are met.” 

In an increasingly open and collaborative payments landscape, real-time processing capability is essential to support initiatives such as Open Banking and the ever-growing range ofvalue added services on offer from Fintechs and other players. Users of the Fusion Global PAYplus packaged cloud solution will also benefit from Finastra’s open innovation vision and the FusionFabric.cloud ecosystem. As the company continues to open its architecture for third parties to develop upon, it is committed to developing open APIs for this solution. This will enable banks to draw on third party services, including compliance, AML, and fraud, to round out their payments offerings.

A recent whitepaper from Finastra and Accenture outlines how payments is a fundamental component of today’s API ecosystem. Gareth Wilson, Managing Director, Global Payments at Accenture, said, “Consumers and businesses alike are demanding real-time, connected experiences, driving banks to deliver next generation API services. Advanced payments-related APIs will be essential in helping banks drive innovation and transformation, enabling banks to deliver new services.”

Emailage, the global leader in online fraud prevention and email risk assessment, has launched its cutting-edge RapidRisk Score fraud detection solution, purpose-built to create lightning-fast risk analysis for payment processors, card issuers and merchants on every transaction.

Powered by advances in artificial intelligence, and aided by Emailage’s global intelligence network, RapidRisk Score defines a new benchmark in fraud prevention, offering response times for fraud risk assessment as low as 30 milliseconds – 20x times faster than standard alternatives. 

Additionally, RapidRisk Score was built to scale, meaning it can handle hundreds of transactions per second and has already been adopted by three global payment processing platforms. 

RapidRisk Score is the latest advance from Emailage, using the company’s unique automated email risk assessment products to help merchants identify online fraud in real time without additional friction. This minimizes delays in the transaction process for genuine customers, so they can complete their purchases straight away.

CEO of Emailage, Rei Carvalho explained: “As a company, we saw the need to focus on transaction risk analysis, which due to SLAs requires precision and speed. As global regulations – like GDPR and PSD2 in Europe – bring further questions about data segregation and shifts in liability, our ongoing dialogue with customers has revealed a need in the market for more accurate, reliable and, above all, faster fraud risk assessment tools to be made available.”

RapidRisk Score was developed to meet these needs, said Carvalho, “By leveraging internal signals from a global, cross-industry and sector consortium database, RapidRisk Score can verify and provide an accurate transaction risk analysis in an average of 30 milliseconds – a new industry benchmark which we’re extremely proud to offer our customers. What’s more, it’s an extremely easy solution to integrate into existing fraud prevention systems and risk engines – which can be done in a matter of minutes.”

Appsbroker, one of Google's largest European Premier Cloud Partners, today announced the launch of Appsbroker Cloud Data, the first native Google Cloud market data platform.

Appsbroker Cloud Data delivers buy-side and sell-side firms greater flexibility in accessing market data at a lower cost compared to existing offerings, removing the dependencies on legacy market data infrastructure and proprietary distribution technology.

The first data set launched on the Cloud Data platform is an APA (Approved Publication Arrangements) Aggregator,  designed to help firms achieve better market insights and prove compliance with MiFID II requirements such as best execution.

The APA Aggregator connects to a number of firms, approved by the European regulators to operate as APAs for regulatory reporting under MiFID II, which publish trade reports for post-trade transparency on behalf of market participants. The asset classes covered are non-equities, including bonds, commodities, fixed income derivatives, equity and commodity derivatives.

Using standardised, flexible mechanisms that can quickly and easily accommodate new data sources, the APA Aggregator brings essential data to trading floors and to risk and compliance teams in three ways: real-time data, delayed data and a queryable historical database.

Appsbroker’s APA Aggregator deploys a set of standardised Google components to aggregate APA data, eliminating the need for multiple feeds and services.

Clients benefit from a single fee model regardless of how they consume the data. Appsbroker Cloud Data is easy to integrate into buy-side and sell-side trading desks, delivering market data via accessible APIs and intuitive user interfaces.

Alex Wolcough, Director at Appsbroker Fintech, said: “In a post-MiFID II world, accuracy and reliability of data is core to regulatory reporting and compliance and provides increased levels of transparency in financial markets. We recognise the challenges that exist around data standardisation and understand the industry frustration with the quality of APA data in the market.”

“We have set out to bring innovative Google technologies to bear on these issues; Appsbroker’s Cloud Data platform was developed in response to client demand for enhanced data quality, accessibility, flexibility and pricing.”

Wolcough added: “We are committed to working with regulators and market participants to address inconsistencies in market data. We want to raise the game around data accuracy and data quality.”

CGI (TSX: GIB.A) is pleased to announce the launch of CGI HotScan360—an enhanced version of its industry-leading HotScan solution. The increasing sophistication of financial crime, a sharper focus on money laundering by regulators, and heightened security concerns across the banking industry are driving the demand for more advanced anti-financial crime tools. CGI HotScan360 meets this demand by delivering integrated, intelligent and real time anti-money laundering, customer due diligence and fraud detection capabilities.

In today’s digital world, billions of financial transactions take place each day and ensuring each is legitimate is an overwhelming task. Until recently, banks that manage transactions have relied on multiple solutions to cover different aspects of protection and have been constrained by legacy batch processing. However, as digitalization increases the volume and speed of transactions, banks are looking for a single, end-to-end solution that handles these transactions holistically and in real time.

Developed in close collaboration with major banks, CGI HotScan360 addresses these challenges by providing an innovative, high-performance technology platform with a real-time risk engine for scanning and scoring thousands of transactions per second. The engine uses the latest in machine learning, advanced analytics and automation and is highly scalable to meet future transaction volumes. In addition, CGI HotScan360 is a modular solution that allows banks to integrate certain modules with other systems or omit them, as necessary. The solution also complies with the latest and upcoming regulations such as PSD2, GDPR and SEPA instant payment requirements. 

“Financial crime is increasingly sophisticated, and new technologies enable criminals to replicate fraud across the globe 24/7,” said CGI Vice-President Jan Macek. “In addition, with real-time payments, banks no longer have hours or days to analyze transactions, but must do so instantaneouslywithin milliseconds. CGI HotScan360 meets the demands of the digital age through real-time monitoring and advanced data analysis of customer activities while reducing operational costs and providing a global support network.” 

CGI is an industry leader in providing anti-financial crime solutions and services, with 11,000 banking experts across 5 continents. Its industry-leading HotScan solution is currently implemented in 40 countries and helps clients to settle approximately USD5 trillion of payments on an average day. CGI will be at Sibos in Sydney, Australia to  discuss CGI HotScan360 and our end-to-end services and solutions for banking. To meet with us, please contact sibos@cgi.com or visit cgi.com to learn more.