Published
- 05:00 am
Innovative trade finance network Tradeteq will become a value added service (VAS) provider to the Singapore government’s digitalised international trade platform, the Networked Trade Platform (NTP). Developed by Singapore Customs and the Government Technology Agency of Singapore, the NTP is a one-stop trade and logistics ecosystem which supports digitalisation efforts and connects players across the trade value chain – in Singapore and abroad. It aims to provide the foundation for Singapore to be a leading trade, supply chain and trade financing hub.
Tradeteq’s role as a VAS provider for NTP users, facilitates the use of the platform for trade by offering instant credit analytics on counterparties. Tradeteq’s AI-powered credit scoring can be generated at the touch of a button and in standardised formats -- allowing traders, bankers, lenders, and logistics companies to enhance their risk management processes.
“Many of the customers for Tradeteq’s services through NTP will be originating banks or non- banks, with a need to assess the creditworthiness of particular entities,” says Tradeteq’s CEO Christoph Gugelmann. “They need assessments that are rapid and available in a standardised format, which our AI-powered credit-scoring service provides.”
The NTP was officially launched in Singapore on 26th September 2018, by Singapore’s Minister for Finance, Heng Swee Keat. Tradeteq is one of the earliest VAS providers of credit scoring on the platform.
"NTP is at the forefront of Singapore's initiative to digitalise trade, so it is a fantastic achievement to be invited to offer credit scoring services on the platform,” says Gugelmann. “It also demonstrates Singapore's vision in understanding how trade is being digitalised and democratised – with elements such as the availability of credit scoring a critical part of that process.”
Singapore headquartered GTR Ventures, the world’s first specialised investment platform for trade and supply chain, is an early backer of Tradeteq. Says its CIO Kelvin Tan, “We are glad to see Tradeteq do more with trade and trade finance in Asia, through Singapore. By connecting to the NTP, Tradeteq will allow more Singapore based traders and SMEs to gain greater access to funding. We encourage global fintechs for trade to follow Tradeteq’s example. Access markets, lenders, and customers in Southeast Asia, as well as Hong Kong and Greater China, through NTP’s connection to Hong Kong’s digital trade platform and other regional trade nodes that subsequently follow.”
Ms Serene Ho, Director of NTP Office adds: “Tradeteq and the NTP share the same goals of digitalising trade and opening trade to the greatest number of participants. We recognise that instant and available credit scoring contributes to that goal, so this is a partnership that we are delighted to announce.”
Both NTP and the Tradeteq marketplace are part of a growing global “tradetech” trend of digitalising international trade – aimed at helping close the “trade finance gap” between supply and demand for trade finance, which is estaimated US$1.6 trillion globally.
- 04:00 am
CQG, a leading global provider of high-performance trading, market data, and technical analysis tools, announced today it has collaborated with ErisX, a new exchange for digital asset investors and traders.
Designed to bring a regulated, transparent and stable venue to the digital asset market, ErisX will usher in a new wave of participants. The Exchange aims to fill gaps in security and compliance that exist in the current digital asset markets and has developed an enhanced offering to accommodate the execution and clearing needs of a broad range of institutional and individual investors.
ErisX requires an innovative trading product and has collaborated with CQG to provide CQG Desktop as the front-end trading platform for its customers. On Oct. 3, 2018, ErisX announced its plans to launch a derivatives exchange and clearing organization that will include fully regulated digital asset futures and spot contracts on one platform.
CQG President Ryan Moroney said: “We see the value that ErisX brings to the digital asset space and are excited to partner with them to present the spot crypto markets together with futures contracts on a single platform. In an industry in need of this level of security and transparency, we believe ErisX will open these markets to many of our institutional partners and help move this emerging market forward.”
“We were impressed with the range of trading tools that were included in CQG’s platform offering and are pleased to offer CQG Desktop as our front-end trading provider,” said Thomas Chippas, Chief Executive Officer at ErisX. “We are working with a robust group of leading class technology and service providers to improve the digital asset trading experience.”
- 05:00 am
According to a recent Home Equity Report by CoreLogic, homeowners with mortgages have seen their equity increase year-over-year, representing a $1 trillion gain since 2017. That, combined with rising interest rates, helped fuel a 14 percent increase in home equity line of credit (HELOC) originations in the first quarter of 2018 when compared to last year, according to Attom Data Solutions.
Many homeowners are choosing to invest in their homes through home improvement and remodeling projects — the most popular reasons for seeking a home equity product. Notably, a recent study by Houzz found 51 percent of approximately 130,000 homeowners surveyed plan to begin or continue renovating their homes in 2018.
Until now, tapping into home equity has been complicated, frustrating, and expensive. Figure is changing that with a fresh approach, including tools and information to educate and empower consumers to make good financial decisions.
“We’re transforming the entire customer experience by creating a faster, simpler, and more convenient way for homeowners to access the equity in their homes,” said Wendy Harrington, chief marketing officer at Figure. “The status quo was far from ideal, so we reimagined it and applied technology to the problem. The result: approval in five minutes, funding in five days, all online.”
Key Benefits of the Figure Home Equity LoanPLUS
● Fast and convenient: At Figure, you’re approved for a home equity loan in five minutes. Just fill out a short online form, select the desired loan amount and term, and digitally sign. Figure’s eNotary helps finalize the details. It’s simple, fast, and convenient.
● Lower rates and better options: Homeowners typically qualify for a lower interest rate and monthly payment with home equity loans compared to personal loans. At Figure, you can borrow $15,000 to $100,000. Annual percentage rates start as low as 5.99 percent** with loan terms of 5, 7, 10, and 15 years.
● Easy access to funds: Figure disburses the full loan amount as soon as the loan’s final — often in as few as five days. You can make additional draws over time as you start to pay down the loan balance.
● No hidden fees: In contrast to most other lenders, Figure doesn’t charge appraisal fees, title fees, late fees, or pre-payment penalties. There’s just one low origination fee**.
“Figure is tackling the most important and overlooked opportunity to help improve people’s financial lives — the equity in their homes,” noted Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the SEC and advisor to Figure. “Figure has completely revamped what’s been a frustrating, time-consuming, and expensive undertaking. Consumers are bound to benefit from their continued innovation.”
Technology Empowering Consumers
Figure is creating innovative products designed to improve the lives of consumers using advanced technologies. Home equity required a fresh approach designed for consumers and powered by technology. The Figure Home Equity LoanPLUS highlights the benefits for consumers: speed, convenience, and savings.
Figure will soon launch its second product, a sell and leaseback alternative to reverse mortgages for retirees and empty nesters. This is a unique solution addressing a massive demographic challenge — underfunded retirement.
Importantly, Figure is harnessing the power of blockchain to reduce costs and increase access to financial products. In July 2018, the company achieved a major milestone by originating the first loan ever on blockchain. Figure has built an ecosystem of leading financial firms — asset originators, buyers, and financiers — around its blockchain solution, ProvenanceTM.
Armed with the latest technology, Figure will transform financial services as it dramatically reduces costs, improves liquidity, reduces risks, and opens new financial markets.
- 04:00 am
The Western Union Company, a leader in global cross-border, cross-currency money movement, today announced its foray into the multibillion-dollar bank account-to-account money transfer sector for consumers, by launching high-value digital transfers from the United Kingdom to around the world.
Over the last few years, Western Union has undergone a dramatic digital transformation, driving a multi-layer digital strategy allowing customers to begin their transactions on mobile - via app or web browser. Today, Western Union’s digital business has seen continued double-digit growth, and now 70 percent of digital transactions originate on mobile devices.
The company’s boosted investments in real-time compliance controls and expansion of its bank payout network to billions of accounts now allows consumers to send high-value money transfers, commencing in the UK with other major money-sending countries to follow.
“With this launch, we have added one more milestone in our quest to serve the diverse money transfer needs of our customers—many of whom are global citizens with assets and holdings in multiple countries,” said Graham Baker, U.K Country Head Global Money Transfer, Western Union.
“The opportunity to send £50,000 per transaction, 24/7, around the world, enables our customers representing a mix of affluent expats and natives, to send money in larger values with confidence. They send money between their bank accounts across countries for high-value purchases such as real-estate, or financial payments such as mortgages or investments,” he said.
Western Union’s annual global digital revenue was over $400 million in 2017-larger than many of the digital start-ups in the space. The company’s digital growth continued to be strong, with 22 percent wu.com revenue growth in quarter two, this year. In the same quarter, about 30 percent of the wu.com principal moved globally was delivered into accounts.
“On top of our existing digital offerings for global business customers, we have custom-built our digital account-to-account service drawing from our fast-growing global account payout network. Now our money transfer customers can also connect to billions of accounts in more than 70 countries and this will continue to accelerate,” said, Jean Claude Farah, President, Global Payments, Western Union.
Western Union’s global account payout network connects to local banks, national payment settlement switches, third-party payment processors as well as mobile wallets, prepaid and other card connections.
Western Union serves more than 150 million consumer-to-consumer and business-to-business customers whether they are sending or receiving money using web, apps, accounts, mobile wallets or retail, every year, to more than 200 countries and territories.
In the U.K., more than USD $26 billion was sent in person-to-person transfers to the rest of the world in 20171, according to the World Bank, with more than 60 percent of those funds directed into bank accounts. More than USD $13 billion of these funds were sent to a mix of developed and emerging nations - led largely by Nigeria and India and closely followed by France, Germany, Pakistan, Poland, and China.
Western Union has been operating in the U.K. for 30 years and in 2017, moved money into more than 200 countries and territories.
- 07:00 am
Aqua Security today announced the general availability of Aqua Security for (PCF) as an integrated service for Pivotal Cloud Foundry® (PCF). Pivotal users can now download and install the Aqua Security for PCF service from Pivotal Network, and use it to scan application or container artifacts for vulnerabilities. Aqua Security for PCF empowers Pivotal Cloud Foundry users to apply Aqua Security’s best practices early on in the build process to ensure that only code that complies with their organisation’s security and compliance policies is deployed.
”Aqua Security provides valuable insights into IT security posture with automated security scans, threat detection, remediation, and expedited compliance processes at scale,” said Nima Badiey, Head of Technology Ecosystem at Pivotal. “We are excited to make this integrated solution available to all Pivotal customers through the Pivotal Services Marketplace. One of the many advantages of using Pivotal to build containerised, cloud-native applications is that it presents an opportunity to improve application security, and Aqua helps Pivotal customers do that at DevOps speed.”
Aqua Security for PCF provides enterprise customers with the following capabilities:
- Automatically scan application or container artifacts for known vulnerabilities, based on an updated feed from multiple resources (e.g., public CVEs, vendor-issued, proprietary vulnerability data streams and malware lists)
- Identify unauthorised application or container artifacts based on pre-configured assurance policies that check for:
- Authorisation
- CVEs and score
- Presence of hard-coded secrets
- Presence of malware
- Add custom compliance checks to identify security and compliance risks (e.g., PII, PCI, GDPR-related data)
- Developers and Security teams get actionable information on how to mitigate detected vulnerabilities
- Users gain visibility into vulnerabilities in their application or container artifacts directly from CI/CD tools and the Aqua dashboard
The Aqua solution is easy to operate, supports more than 40 languages, including Java, Go, C++, Python, Ruby, NodeJS and others, as well as static binaries, and finds known vulnerabilities, embedded “secrets”, and malware. Users can integrate Aqua Security with their existing CI/CD tools for security testing as part of the build, with Active Directory/LDAP for user authentication, and with SIEM/analytics to output audit and alert data. Based on image assurance policies, users can then approve or block application or container artifacts depending on their vulnerability posture, the presence of embedded secrets, malware, and runtime configuration parameters.
“We are extremely excited to extend Aqua’s security capabilities to Pivotal Cloud Foundry users,” said Upesh Patel, Vice President of Business Development for Aqua Security. “Our automated lifecycle security controls enable organisations to integrate security best practices into the build process based on their compliance or corporate GRC requirements.”
- 04:00 am
- 07:00 am
LexisNexis® Risk Solutions, a part of RELX Group (LSE:REL/NYSE: RELX), today announced an alliance with iMeta Technologies, a leader in Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) technology for financial organisations, to integrate iMeta’s CLM technology with LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ data capabilities. Together, this alliance will increase efficiencies for customers and offer a more robust, all-encompassing bank compliance program.
By providing a single source of clean, consolidated data across the enterprise, LexisNexis Risk Solutions can now provide a CLM platform specifically designed to adapt to a firm’s individual and constantly changing business requirements. Proven to reduce operating costs and deliver operational excellence by harmonising multiple internal systems, accelerating client onboarding times, transforming the overall customer experience and driving a single view of the customer across a business, this revolutionary platform will provide customers with an end-to-end client lifecycle management system.
“With this union, our customers will now have the opportunity to receive our robust public records data and ID verification capabilities paired with an integrated platform to help them optimise and meet their KYC requirements,” says Daniel Wager, vice president, global financial crime compliance, LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “This important alliance with iMeta provides the opportunity for one-stop-shopping for onboarding consumers and businesses, bringing together all the data sources needed in a way that will help our customers maximise the efficiency of their operational processes and massively increase the speed at which they can serve their consumers and businesses.”
This new platform will offer significant benefits to customers, such as:
· Comprehensive reporting and dashboard capabilities;
· A tool that automatically associates business data with affiliates, clients and/or accounts;
· A single profile for each unique business or entity with connections between entities across all profiles highlighted;
· A seamless integration of up-to-date third party data content.
“We’re delighted to be working with LexisNexis Risk Solutions to harness the combined intelligence of our two companies,” says Ben Marsh, CEO, iMeta Technologies. “As we endeavour to provide a seamless journey for our customers throughout the CLM process, the productivity gained from this new, single solution will pay enormous dividends. Automation is key to profitable growth and the minimisation of risk, and leveraging a single product for all a customer’s CLM needs is the key to those business goals.”
- 03:00 am
NeoXam, a leading provider of data management and transaction software solutions dedicated to the financial industry, has acquired 100M. The acquisition will consolidate its digital expertise and enable the start-up to accelerate its growth.
The asset management industry is currently facing more stringent reporting obligations and increasingly demanding clients with regards to data quality. As a result, asset managers are turning towards solutions like the fully integrated ‘100M Digital Reporting’ offering, which has reinvented user experience in the asset management sector due to the speed of its analytical functions and the quality of its data visualisation interfaces. In only two years since inception, the fledgling company has already appealed to numerous key players in France and the U.S.
Continuing its upward trajectory, 100M has chosen to join forces with NeoXam:
“Joining NeoXam will enable us to significantly accelerate our product and business development. We share the same vision: that the sector is heading towards more digital offerings, cloud applications and a new user experience. Furthermore, 100M’s products are currently at the end of the financial value chain. Collaborating with NeoXam will allow us to deploy our technology throughout the chain,” said Clément Miglietti, co-founder and C.E.O. of 100M.
Serge Delpla, CEO of NeoXam said “we are always looking for new ways to keep our products innovative. One of our main goals is to ease the use of centralised data in our solution suite by enabling it to be coherent, user-friendly and accessible. This value-added data will be visible instantly, continuously allowing our clients – and theirs – to make intelligent decisions and follow all events in real-time.”
- 06:00 am
Arcserve, LLC, the world’s most experienced data protection provider, today unveiled Arcserve Business Continuity Cloud, the first fully-integrated, cloud-born solution to prevent the impacts of unplanned downtime by immediately restoring access to critical data, systems and applications across complex, multi-generational IT infrastructures ranging from non-x86 and x86, to software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). With this solution, Arcserve solves the challenges of protecting modern IT caused by the time, skill, expense and multiple tools needed to protect new workloads.
According to new data being released by Arcserve, 64 percent of global IT decision-makers agree that protecting business-critical data has not become easier over the past five years, despite efforts to adopt solutions to simplify and reduce costs. Further, as backup infrastructures are increasingly becoming more costly and complex, the tolerance for data loss is diminishing. Ninety-three percent of IT decision-makers revealed their organizations could tolerate “minimal,” if any, data loss from critical business applications, yet just 26 percent feel extremely confident in their ability to recover quickly enough to avoid business disruption.
“Based on our observations and underscored by this research, it’s evident that organizations cannot effectively protect modern IT infrastructures with today’s incomplete tools that create more complexity, drive up the total cost of ownership, and ultimately increase the risk of data loss and downtime through gaps in protection,” said Oussama El-Hilali, Vice President of Products at Arcserve. “Arcserve Business Continuity Cloud is the only solution capable of addressing these challenges by bringing all data protection processes together in one place. Whether migrating workloads to the cloud, needing advanced VM protection or requiring support for sub-minute RTOs and RPOs - it’s all under one hood.”
“Arcserve has accomplished something very unique in this market by closing a substantial gap for businesses requiring more robust data protection capabilities without the complexity of juggling multiple backup tools for new or disparate workloads,” said Edwin Yuen, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Many solutions today consist of products bolted together with a UI upgrade, yet Arcserve Business Continuity Cloud stands out with a level of integration beyond most other vendors, creating a truly seamless solution that’s extremely intuitive yet incredibly powerful.”
Arcserve Business Continuity Cloud eliminates the need for other data protection tools and management consoles with fully-integrated capabilities to protect and restore applications and systems in any location, on-premises and in public and private clouds.
- Provides a consumer-grade user experience: Capabilities spanning the data protection lifecycle are accessible through a customizable, cloud-based web console. Most tasks are implemented in three clicks or less.
- Eliminates data loss and extended downtime: Supports near-zero RTOs and RPOs with high availability, minutes with virtual standby and instant VM, hours with bare metal restore, and granular recovery and quick discovery for compliance.
- Shifts the economic profile: Fully-integrated technologies reduce time and money spent on IT management by up to 50 percent.
- Simplifies protecting modern IT infrastructures: Safeguards modern infrastructures, including those with x86, non-x86, SaaS and IaaS. Multi-cloud and cross-cloud data protection support organizations planning to, or are currently in the process of implementing a cloud platform for backup or disaster recovery.
- 03:00 am
Re:Call is an app based recording service, meaning users can retain their current mobile services from their chosen partner. Created with requirements around financial regulation and 2018’s new data protection laws in mind, Re:Call provides a solution for separating employees’ personal and business calls and SMS on the same device.
Building up a significant userbase since launching 12 months ago, Re:Call is now used within large financial corporates such as Liberum, boutique firms such as Marshall Sterling and within businesses across healthcare and professional services too. In response to requests from customers and partners, TeleWare has now built the capability for Re:Call to be used by users in Europe, the United States and Canada. Firms with a presence in European countries including France, Belgium and Spain, as well as North America, can provide their employees with Re:Call to compliantly record conversations with peers and customers across these territories.
Re:Call supports global, local and multi-territory compliance regulations such as MiFID II in Europe, Dodd Frank in the US and the EU General Data Protection Regulation. All of which have rules around the use of communications monitoring and storage.
Steve Haworth, CEO at TeleWare, comments: “Re:Call has fast become a critical piece of our communications suite and has firmly found its place amidst 2018’s raft of regulations. 2018 has been the year of regulation for many in Europe and, if rumours are to be believed, the US may face a similar situation next year. With a public hearing currently in progress to gather comments on policy options towards consumer privacy protection.
Re:Call was created, and continues to be developed, in response to customer and partner requirements. Whilst we’re successfully up and running in multiple international territories now, we will continue to add further territories based on customer and partner needs.”
