Catapult, an Accelya Group Company and creator of the most accurate freight rate and freight quote management system on the market, is pleased to announce the launch of CATAPULT QMS 5.0, a brand new version of their flagship product.

QMS 5.0 builds upon the strengths of past achievements which include high-accuracy rates, complete and flexible surcharge capture, and control over visibility and margin management, but with several exciting changes that will alter the state of the industry.

Many industry experts, including CEO Virgil Ferreria, have collaborated to ensure QMS 5.0 is designed around an increasingly younger and more digitized workforce.  Users will be introduced to a beautiful and intuitive interface that is fully-responsive across all devices. This is significant in that pricing managers and sales reps can now access QMS anytime, anywhere, making Catapult the first in its class to offer such capabilities in freight management.

With the end-to-end freight contract, rate, and quote process as Catapult's focus, QMS 5.0 links air, ocean, rail, and road buy-and-sell rates together for freight forwarders' end clients. The new quoting screen encourages users to "shop" for rates by carrier, link multiple legs and modes, and create new spot rates all in the same place.  Further, you can customize a quote sheet that is specific to your company, all in an environment that speeds up your response to end-customers, and does so more accurately.

Throughout the past 18 months, Catapult Systems Analyst Chris Dillard traveled the globe, previewing QMS 5.0 framework to existing Catapult clients and potential users alike to gauge feedback and get to the heart of the customer's needs. In turn, many of those recommendations were incorporated into the final product being launched today.

"We are in the business of technology, but rely heavily on customer interactions and direct feedback to provide the most efficient and positive outcomes for our users," said Virgil Ferreria, Catapult CEO. "Many of the features of Catapult's new interface are based on that input. We are thrilled to roll out QMS 5.0 and effectively change the rate management to quoting process in the freight management market as we know it."

QMS 5.0 is available now to media outlets for preview. We invite you to discover Catapult's new user interface that is bringing the most tech-advanced freight management solution on the planet to our customers and the industry.

Catapult, an Accelya Group Company, was built on a simple idea - global freight rate management and getting an accurate quote shouldn't be so difficult. We have offices in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Our future is bright, and our plans are focused on building more and better shipping lifecycle solutions to support logistics operations around the world. Learn more at www.gocatapult.com.

Recently, TokenPay Swiss AG announced its partnership with WEG Bank in Germany. Under the terms of the previously announced deal, TokenPay acquired 9.9% of the bank along with options to purchase approximately 90% overall of the bank pending the customary regulatory approval. Today, this 9.9% stake in WEGBank was further transacted to the benefit of Litecoin Foundation in exchange for a broad and comprehensive marketing and technology service agreement to benefit TokenPay and its related cryptocurrency and business operations. As a result of this partnership, TokenPay and Litecoin combine as a leading force in creating and delivering to the market modern consumer-driven crypto FinTech solutions. 

Specifically, TokenPay will directly benefit from Litecoin's high-level blockchain mechanization capabilities. The partnership will focus on several key areas that have been identified by analysts as critical to the success of the enterprise. This includes, but is not limited to, the TPAY cryptocurrency and its vital blockchain, eFin decentralized exchange (DEX) and the EFIN coin, TokenSuisse asset management and structured financial products, WEG Bank FinTech platform including high demand consumer debit cards and the TokenPay Multisignature Transaction Engine designed for processing fast and secure crypto e-commerce payments for merchants.

Furthermore, at the same time, TokenPay has acquired an additional 9.9% of WEG Bank. It is essential to understand that under German banking law no entity can own more than 9.9% of a bank without regulatory approval. Upon the granting of the approval, TokenPay plans to exercise its options to acquire the remaining shares of WEG Bank it is entitled to purchase. With the prominent addition of Litecoin as a strategic marketing, blockchain technology, and logistics partner in WEG Bank and its long-standing partnership with Verge Currency, TokenPay conservatively anticipates adding several hundred thousand customers to its debit card solutions platform in the near term. Accordingly, the technical expertise provided by Litecoin will be a tremendous benefit to the establishment of comprehensive automation guidelines and standards employed by the bank as it explores new market opportunities.

Charlie Lee, Managing Director of the Litecoin Foundation, stated, "This partnership is a huge win-win for both Litecoin and TokenPay. I'm looking forward to integrating Litecoin with the WEG Bank AG and all the various services it has to offer, to make it simple for anyone to buy and use Litecoin. I'm also excited about Litecoin's support in TokenPay's eFin decentralized exchange."

Matthias von Hauff, founder, and CEO of WEG Bank AG added: "The partnership with innovative institutions such as TokenPay and Litecoin might at first come unexpectedly for a very conservative institution like us. But we have thoroughly and diligently examined the prospects of a common future, and we became convinced that the future of banking will make adoption of such modern payment methods inevitable. We are therefore proud to have teamed up with the best in the field."

Prof. Dr. Jorg E. Wilhelm, Head of Supervisory Board of TokenPay Swiss AG commented, "We are elated to be in the process of acquiring a large stake in a successful business bank based in Germany such as WEG. Our ecosystem consisting of the TPAY blockchain, WEG Bank, TokenSuisse and Litecoin Foundation provides us with a tremendous opportunity regarding merchant solutions, along with a strong and diverse customer base for our crypto debit card business. The tangible reality of bridging the gap between the old and new world is electrifying."

Duco, the data engineering technology company, today announced the opening of three new offices: Singapore, Wroclaw and Edinburgh. The move follows several years of rapid growth and adoption of Duco’s self-service reconciliation model by global financial institutions. Duco announced a $28m funding round in January 2018.

Duco’s new offices will all open by September 2018. The firm will target the Asia Pacific financial services market from its Singapore base, as well as supporting existing clients in Australia, Hong Kong, India and the Philippines. Wroclaw in Poland will serve as a technical operations base for Duco’s cloud-based services, as well as an additional location for engineering talent to complement the London headquarters. Duco’s research and innovation team, Duco Labs, is expanding its footprint in Edinburgh, a city known for its university’s strength in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Christian Nentwich, CEO, said, "Duco is experiencing a period of rapid growth. We see Singapore as a key point to fuel our expansion into Asia, due to its support for FinTech and innovation, and the presence of both local and global clients. Wroclaw and Edinburgh are important locations that will enable us to scale our technology organisation faster and more sustainably, and with the access to the top Computer Science talent that we seek."

Frontierpay, a foreign exchange and international payments firm is proud to announce the opening of its Asia headquarters in Singapore’s central business district. As part of Frontierpay’s continued international expansion, the new hub will act as a counterpart to the company’s primary headquarters in the United Kingdom, founded in 2009. 

The Singapore office, currently occupied by an initial team of five people, is expected to grow to 50 staff in the next three years. The team will focus on assisting customers with their foreign exchange needs, this includes supporting existing clients in the region, hedging solutions to new clients, growing treasury and mass payment. With an emphasis on sales, B2B payments, client management and local trade operations Frontierpay’s new headquarters is firmly positioned to further tackle the Asian market.  
Frontierpay’s rapid growth within the Asian markets made Singapore a natural choice to establish operations.  Singapore’s world-class reputation as a global business centre, exceptional infrastructure and talented workforce were the contributing factors in the decision to establish operations in this vibrant city. Singapore offers a unique environment for the company to support and grow its Asian business. The services and products that have solidified Frontierpay as a premier international payments partner will now be more readily accessible to customers in Asia.  

Owain Walters, CEO of Frontierpay, comments: “As Frontierpay has grown over the years, we’ve seen more and more opportunities outside Europe. The Asian market in particular is responsible for much of the global increase in our cross-border trade. With a permanent location in Singapore, we’re well-positioned to serve our clients in managing costs, counterparty risk and exploring new markets, and we expect the location to be a prime driver of growth in our business. We are excited by the regional opportunities and have a fantastic team in our new office in the Central Business District.” 

The Singapore based Asian headquarters demonstrates that Frontierpay’s business model is scalable across different regions. Ultimately, the company intends for the site to act as a roadmap for further expansions in the Middle East, Africa and North America

Fujitsu today announces the immediate availability of a new, extremely rapid blockchain productisation framework which enables the development of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in just five days. The offer is aimed at organisations wanting to jump-start new blockchain development or de-risk existing blockchain projects.

At the core of the framework is a week-long assessment where Fujitsu and its customer co-create new business ideas based on blockchain or other Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs). The goal is to identify and prove a specific business process that has the potential to become a full-scale implementation. This Proof of Business (PoB) approach, before committing to a Proof of Concept (PoC), avoids many common pitfalls of blockchain projects and focuses on creating business value.

With the blockchain PoB assessment, stakeholders can create and validate the potential of an initial Hyperledger Fabric application while testing how it could work in an enterprise environment. The application is developed using MVP principles, which require that application to create enough value so that people are willing to use it, demonstrate enough future potential to retain the loyalty of early adopters, and provide a feedback loop to guide future development.

Assessments are led by Fujitsu’s global blockchain experts, who bring insights, ideas, and technical know-how, embedded within Fujitsu’s proven Human-Centric Experience Design (HXD) rapid transformation methodology¹. HXD has been developed and proven by Fujitsu in Japan in hundreds of customer digital transformation projects and forms the core platform in Fujitsu’s global network of Digital Transformation Centers, including the Blockchain Innovation Center in Brussels, which oversees the new framework.

Frederik de Breuck, Head of Fujitsu’s Blockchain Innovation Center in Brussels, Belgium, comments: “Blockchain and other DLTs hold the potential to transform organisations and entire industries. Inspired by high levels of interest from our customers, we have created this ready-to-go package not only to jump-start the customers’ blockchain efforts but also to review and improve existing projects. Available immediately across the EMEIA region, we expect this assessment to have a major impact on unlocking blockchain’s potential for business use cases.”

Fujitsu is a world-leader in DLTs, holding close to 50 patents concerning blockchain and is deeply involved in the development of DLTs, with an emphasis on Hyperledger Fabric. Hyperledger Fabric is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation, a consortium that is developing cross-industry advanced enterprise software for business applications. Fujitsu is a Premier member, sits on the Governing Board and is a technical steering committee member of Hyperledger. Others Premier members include Intel and Deutsche Börse.

Hyperledger is a project hosted by The Linux Foundation and Fujitsu is already working on several co-creation proof of concept (PoC) projects based on Hyperledger Fabric for enterprise customers. The joint goal is to ensure the business value of use cases and provide the capability to progress rapidly beyond PoCs. The Fujitsu vision for blockchain goes further than this and is focused on building on the advantages of Hyperledger Fabric to create an enterprise-class blockchain framework. In support of this goal, Fujitsu now provides the Blockchain Platform Service, a ready-to-use “Blockchain as a Service”. This takes away the burden on enterprises of building their own end-to-end blockchain capabilities.

Pricing and availability

The Fujitsu five-day rapid productisation program is available immediately in EMEIA, with concept prices starting at Euro 9,900.

¹ Human-Centric Experience Design (HXD) is based on a corporate philosophy of change, Design Thinking, which seeks to harness new ways of thinking and creativity to realise what Fujitsu calls Human Centric Innovation. Created in Japan and refined through multiple customer engagements, HXD makes the creative process faster and accelerates the overall transformation.

Payment innovator Alcinéo has chosen Trustonic Application Protection (TAP) to protect its mobile point of sale (mPOS) apps. This will enable banks around the world to offer Alcinéo’s mPOS solutions to their business clients, providing them with the ability to accept payments on mobile devices safe in the knowledge that their customers’ data and payment credentials are protected to the highest level.  

Accepting contactless payments on a smartphone app is highly beneficial for small businesses such as independent retailers and tradespeople, as it enables them to get paid quickly and easily without requiring investment in costly mPOS hardware. Larger merchants are also using mPOS apps on the shop floor to reduce queuing time and provide a more personal service. With these benefits driving rapid adoption, Juniper Research forecasts that mPOS transactions will represent 24% of all POS transactions by 2023.

Arnaud Corria, CEO, Alcinéo, commented, “As demand for and use of smartphones as card acceptance readers continues to grow, simple security is crucial to protect transaction data from malicious attacks. Integrating TAP enables us to provide an mPOS solution that processes payments with the same level of security as a contactless-capable POS – all on a smartphone. No annoying hardware tokens; same security.”

Alcinéo’s integration of Trustonic’s technology is based on the TAP SDK, which enables Alcinéo to embed MCL (Mastercard) and PayWave (Visa) microkernels into the device’s Trusted Execution Environment (TEE*) - an area isolated from the device’s normal operating system. This protects apps, data and IP from software vulnerabilities in devices’ rich operating systems, which could be exploited by hackers or malware looking to steal sensitive data. The PCI-compliant Alcinéo mPOS solution also uses Trustonic technology to secure the information displayed and entered on-screen, with a feature called Trusted User Interface (TUI). This protects the confidentiality and integrity of the information exchanged, such as PIN entry or sensitive customer information presented on screen, by using the hardware isolation built into most modern smartphones.

Dan Rawlings, Chief Commercial Officer, Trustonic, adds: “This is an exciting jump forward for the payment acceptance industry. Using TAP to build strong security into the app and employing the TEE to store payment credentials on-device, rather than an embedded Secure Element (eSE), enhances security, delivers a frictionless user experience and enables companies like Alcinéo to bring the best payment solutions to market without complex agreements with device manufacturers and mobile carriers. Our TAP SDK reduces time to market and development cost and we look forward to announcing further TAP-based mPOS trials in the coming months.”

Plato Partnership is pleased to announce the appointment of Mike Bellaro as its new CEO following a comprehensive search process. Mike will commence his new duties with immediate effect.

The appointment of a Plato CEO enables Plato Partnership to move to a dedicated leadership model and enables significant drive and focus to identify key market issues and opportunities to improve equity market structure and develop solutions in cooperation with industry providers such as our key partnership with Turquoise.  Plato selected Turquoise, a leading pan-European MTF, as its preferred partner in 2016 and the two organisations have subsequently worked together on various initiatives that benefit all participants, including Turquoise Plato Block Discovery, the leading European block trading mechanism.

Plato Partnership is also pleased to announce Christoph Hock, Head of Multi-Asset Trading, Union Investment as the buy-side Chairman of Plato Partnership with immediate effect.  Christoph will work alongside Plato Partnership’s sell-side Chairman, Nej Djelal (Head of Electronic Equites, EMEA, Barclays) to support Mike in the governance and leadership of Plato.

Nej Djelal, Head of Electronic Equities Product, EMEA, Barclays & Plato Partnership Co-Chair, commented:

“Today it is my honour to announce that Plato Partnership is moving to the next level in the appointment of Plato’s new CEO, Mike Bellaro. Mike’s extensive industry expertise, renowned stewardship, and illustrious ability to innovate over many years positions him perfectly to lead Plato Partnership into this new era.  Equally, we are delighted to announce Christoph Hock as the new Co-Chairman of Plato Partnership. Christoph’s deep industry network, significant understanding of markets and cross asset mandate lays the foundation for tremendous potential in Plato Partnership’s next chapter.

Plato Partnership has already contributed significantly to European Equity markets by delivering solutions and funding independent academic research to simply market structure and reduce industry trading costs. Such progress is reflected by the success of Turquoise Plato and the formation of the academic network with Imperial College Business School.  What’s more we know achievements to date represent only the tip of the iceberg, with so much more to come.”

Robert Barnes, CEO Turquoise, commented:

“I’m delighted to congratulate Mike and Christoph on their respective new appointments as CEO and buy-side Chairman.  Through Turquoise’s cooperation with Plato Partnership, we have a strong track record of working with the market to deliver innovative, MiFID II-compliant solutions to achieve best execution. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Mike, Christoph, Nej and Plato’s members to further develop and build on the success of innovations including Turquoise Plato Block Discovery and Turquoise Lit Auctions. ”

Mike Bellaro, CEO, Plato Partnership, commented:

“As we enter into perhaps the greatest period of change in trading history, Plato has a unique opportunity to shape the market structure design of tomorrow with a number of initiatives to be announced in the coming months. It is an immense honour and a privilege to be appointed CEO of Plato Partnership, and I am thankful they have given me the opportunity to continue developing the proposals I initially helped shape in my previous role as buy side co-chair.

“I am also delighted to welcome Christoph Hock to the leadership team – I have known him for a number of years and I know he shares Plato’s passion for delivering creative solutions and efficiencies for today’s equity marketplace – reducing costs, simplifying market structure and acting as a champion for end investors.

“On a personal level, I am particularly looking forward to continuing our relationship with Turquoise as an important strategic partner and deepening our relationship with Imperial College London; coordinating the industry’s efforts to give back to market participants and end investors through accessible and independent academic research.”

Christoph Hock, Head of Multi-Asset Trading, Union Investment & Plato Partnership Co-Chair, commented:

“It’s a privilege to work as Buy-Side Chair of Plato Partnership and I look forward to working with Mike, Nej and the Plato Partnership member firms in our efforts to reduce trading costs, simplify market structure and champion the needs of end investors.  I am excited to help Plato Partnership bring the buy-side and sell-side closer together and to work with their extensive network of platform providers, exchanges and venues, regulators and academics.”

iwoca, one of Europe’s largest alternative small business lenders,
today announces it reached profitability in the first half of 2018 amid a doubling of revenue
over three successive years.

iwoca launched in 2012 and has since lent £500m to 20,000 businesses. To meet soaring
demand from its small and micro business customer base, iwoca lent a company-record £2.2
million to 137 businesses in a single day at the end of June 2018, funding small businesses
with more than £1,500 per minute.

The alternative lender uses technology to reduce traditional underwriting costs by up to 90%
and has seen 100% year-on-year growth in each of the last three years. The company’s stated
aim is to finance 100,000 business over the next five years.

iwoca’s award-winning technology allows businesses to get approved for a credit line within
minutes through a simple online application process. Customers can draw down the funds as
required 24 hours a day. In Q1 2018, iwoca’s credit line represented ca 9% of the total number
of business overdrafts approved by the members of the British Bank Association, according
to UK Finance.

The increase in lending comes at a time when the overall value of debt products provided by
traditional banks for small businesses is contracting. According to UK Finance, the value of
gross lending to small businesses fell by 13% since Q4 2011, while the total number of VAT
registered small businesses increased by 28% to 2 million over a similar period.

Christoph Rieche, Chief Executive of iwoca, said: “We are building Europe’s leading tech-
enabled small business lender, eliminating the barriers banks have put up to small business

finance - the cumbersome paperwork, long waiting times and unfairly rigid lending criteria - so
that small businesses can get access to the funding they need to realise their full potential.”
“Achieving profitability demonstrates the strength and depth of our business and marks a
significant milestone for iwoca. We have built a strong and trusted brand with a solid customer
base. This is just the beginning as iwoca aims to finance 100,000 more small businesses in
the UK over the next five years.”