Hazeltree, the leading provider of treasury and liquidity management solutions for the alternative asset management industry, today announced the appointment of Vlad Berson as its Chief Marketing Officer. Vlad brings more than 20 years of marketing leadership experience in scaling high-growth fintech companies and financial institutions.

Vlad joins from Broadridge, a global fintech leader, where he most recently served as Global Head of Marketing for Capital Markets. During his 10 years with the firm, Vlad also held the positions of Head of Marketing for Investment Management Solutions and Head of Account Based Marketing. Prior to Broadridge, Vlad was Vice President and Group Manager of Technology, Analytics and Operational Solutions Marketing at Pershing, a BNY Mellon Company. His professional experience also includes product and marketing roles at J.P. Morgan and Bear Stearns. Vlad holds a BA in electronic filmmaking and digital design from Fairleigh Dickinson University and an MBA in marketing from the NYU Stern School of Business.

“Hazeltree’s unique treasury and liquidity management solutions are more important than ever due to the rising cost of capital, high investor expectations, and demand for workflow solutions tailored to their businesses,” said Doug Haynes, Executive Chairman of Hazeltree. “Vlad’s extensive experience as a results-oriented leader brings us valuable capabilities to guide Hazeltree’s marketing efforts as we as we continue our strong growth trajectory.”

Vlad will report to Hazeltree CEO Tushar Amin and will be based in New York. He will lead Hazeltree’s marketing strategy globally.

“Vlad has the right background in leading marketing for high-growth startup and enterprise-scale B2B Fintech, SaaS, and asset management companies, delivering measurable success,” said Tushar Amin. “We are thrilled that he is joining our team.”

“Amid current market turmoil shaking the financial services landscape, alternative asset managers are realizing the value to be gained by modernizing their treasury and liquidity management systems,” said Vlad Berson, Chief Marketing Officer of Hazeltree. “I’m excited to join the leadership team to share Hazeltree’s story and cement the company’s position as the leader in treasury, liquidity, and cash management solutions for the alternative asset management industry.”

Today’s appointment of a Chief Marketing Officer follows several new executive hires at Hazeltree since 2022, including: Tushar Amin as CEO in April, 2022; Sandy Weil as Chief Revenue Officer in June, 2022; Sonia Spicehandler as Chief People Officer in August, 2022; Kevin Held as Chief Financial Officer in September, 2022; Jeremy Payne as Chief Product Officer in May, 2023; and Richard Winter as Chief Technology Officer in June, 2023.

VizyPay, a leading payment processing fintech that serves small businesses in rural America, today announces its inclusion on the 2023 Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing privately-owned companies in America, ranking No. 1841 with a growth rate of 305%. This marks the third year in a row that the bootstrapped company has made the prestigious list. Additionally, it is the No. 9 fastest-growing company in Des Moines and No. 10 in Iowa.  

VizyPay has propelled forward and exceeded expectations annually, becoming one of the most recognizable fintech payment processors in the industry. The company supports 354 employees, grew by 281%, surpassed $5 billion in total payments processed since its inception in 2017, and services 12,000 small businesses in rural America.  

“Our dedication to aiding rural small businesses provides us with a unique perspective and drive to be a leader building up this Silicon Prairie in the Midwest. As a result, we’ve been recognized by the Inc. 5000 three years in a row,” said VizyPay CEO and Founder Austin Mac Nab. “There is an untapped need for affordable and accessible fintech services here, and we take pride in being the ones to deliver world-class services to these people.” 

This year, the fintech has been busy streamlining services for merchants with an overhaul to its proprietary payment processing app, VizyPOS. It additionally launched a unique advisory board of leaders to guide strategic growth objectives and enhanced its product lineup with the introduction of its Dual Pricing Program that increases payment transparency for small business owners.  

“Each year, I become more impressed with the work our team has done to make VizyPay an inspiring, innovative and successful company. Each year that we are included on this list, I’m humbled with how far we’ve come,” said VizyPay Executive Sales Director Frank Pagano. “Our staff comes in every day ready to make a difference and put their best foot forward. We have an incredible group of individuals here. We work hard and we play hard – that is the VizyPay way. 

VizyPay ranked No. 918 on the 2022 Inc. 5000 list and No. 45 in 2021. VizyPay also received recognition on the 2023 Inc. 5000 Regionals: Midwest list, ranking No. 85. Complete results of the Inc. 5000 can be found at www.inc.com/inc5000. 

Nutanix has today announced the Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box™ solution for customers looking to jump-start their artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) innovation, while maintaining control over their data. The new offering, available today, is a full-stack software-defined AI-ready platform, along with services to help organisations size and configure hardware and software infrastructure suitable to deploy a curated set of large language models (LLMs) using the leading open source AI and MLOps frameworks on the Nutanix Cloud Platform™. It allows customers to easily procure AI-ready infrastructure to fine-tune and run generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), including LLMs at the edge or in their datacenter. 

Many enterprises are grappling with how to quickly, efficiently and securely take advantage of the power of generative AI and AI/ML applications, especially for use cases that cannot be run in the public cloud because of data sovereignty, governance and privacy concerns. New use cases emerge every day as organisations look to leverage generative AI to improve customer service, developer productivity, operational efficiency and more. From automated transcription of internal documents, to high speed search of multimedia contents, and automated analysis, many organisations see the opportunity with AI but are struggling with growing concerns regarding intellectual property leakage, compliance and privacy. Additionally, organisations looking to build an AI-ready stack often struggle with how to best support ML administrators and data scientists, while the prospect of large AI investment costs has enterprises stalled in their AI and ML strategy.

“As customers look to design and deploy generative AI solutions, they find themselves struggling with balancing the deep expertise required to install, configure, and run these workloads with concerns around their data security and protecting company IP – all while controlling costs,” said Greg Macatee, Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group at IDC. “With GPT-in-a-Box, Nutanix offers customers a turnkey, easy-to-use solution for their AI use cases, offering enterprises struggling with generative AI adoption an easier on-ramp to deployment.”

The Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution delivers ready-to-use customer-controlled AI infrastructure for the edge or the core data centre and allows customers to run and fine-tune AI and GPT models while maintaining control over their data. Nutanix provides a full complement of security and data protection offerings ideal for AI data protection.

“Helping customers tackle the biggest challenges they face in IT is at the core of what we do, from managing increasing multicloud complexity, to data protection challenges, and now adoption of generative AI solutions while keeping control over data privacy and compliance,” said Thomas Cornely, SVP, Product Management at Nutanix. “Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box is an opinionated AI-ready stack that aims to solve the key challenges with generative AI adoption and help jump-start AI innovation.”

This new solution includes:

• The Industry-leading Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure™ platform, with the Nutanix Files Storage™and Objects Storage™ solutions, the Nutanix AHV® hypervisor and Kubernetes, along with NVIDIA GPU acceleration, which can be sized for large to small scale.
• Nutanix services to help customers size their cluster and deploy an opinionated stack with the leading open source deep learning and MLOps frameworks, inference server, and a curated set of large language models such as Llama2, Falcon and MPT.
• Ability for data scientists and ML administrators to immediately consume these models with their choice of applications, enhanced terminal UI, or standard CLI.
• The platform can also be leveraged to run other GPT models, as well as fine tune these models leveraging internal data, hosted on included Nutanix Files or Objects Storage services.

“Leveraging AI to more efficiently and effectively help our customers is a top priority for us but, as a regulated financial services organisation, maintaining full control over our data is necessary," said Jon Cosson, CISO at JM Finn. "The Nutanix Cloud Platform delivers the performance, flexibility and security required to safely deploy AI workloads."

The Nutanix GPT-In-a-Box solution builds on the full stack scalability, performance, resilience and ease of use that the Nutanix Cloud Platform is known for. Nutanix’s expertise with scalable infrastructure across public cloud, datacenter and edge use cases delivers the ideal environment to fine-tune and run AI applications while maintaining control over the data. In fact, in a recent survey, 78% of Nutanix customers indicated that they were likely to run their AI/ML workloads on the Nutanix Cloud Platform.

Nutanix’s expertise and involvement in the open source AI community provide customers with a strong foundation on which to build their AI strategy. Key contributions include: participation in the MLCommons (AI standards) advisory board; co-founding and technical leadership in defining the ML Storage Benchmarks and Medicine Benchmarks; serving as a co-chair of the Kubeflow (MLOps) Training and AutoML working groups at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). 

The Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution is available to customers today. 

Latest data from financial software provider, Advanced, uncovers a rising concern for employee privacy, as an uptake in futuristic human implantation technology is set for the workplace sooner than many anticipated.

Speaking to more than 5,000 senior decision makers, the findings reveal that nearly half (47%) of financial leaders predict employee microchips and other human technology implants to be in workplace use by 2030, along with 32% of financiers overall.

The revelation follows controversy in the US, in which a company microchipped 50 of its employees, leading at least 11 US states to ban employee microchipping at the time of writing. 

This move toward innovative technologies is a growing trend, and one that the financial sector seems keen to set into motion. In addition to surveillance measures, Advanced’s research discovered that:

• Businesses are putting money behind new tech, as 40% of survey respondents state their organisation’s leadership is prioritising technology investment at present.

• AI technology is gaining more responsibility and will be used to make critical business decisions by 2030, according to over half (55%) of financial CEOs and MDs.

• A third (33%) of financial leaders believe AI will replace at least 50% of manual work.

However, financiers are not looking forward to this change, as only 19% feel robots and AI-based technologies will positively transform the workplace. With talk of microchipping and additional surveillance only set to cause more concern, Alex Arundale, Chief People Officer at Advanced, explains how additional surveillance measures could negatively impact the working environment, “Employers need to consider the proportionality and necessity of new technologies, weighing convenience against the impact new additions might have on employee morale.

“Having some autonomy over how they work, when they take breaks, and working at times when they feel most productive is an important part of employee wellbeing. Feeling under constant surveillance can cause anxiety and increase the risk of burnout, making it counterproductive for the employer.”.

Although it could be a while before we see employee microchipping become the norm, since the pandemic’s widespread introduction to remote and hybrid working, more and more AI and technology-driven surveillance has seeped into the workplace, from wellness trackers to remote employee monitoring software. The TUC previously revealed the financial service sector to have the greatest proportion of workers reporting workplace surveillance, at a shocking 74%.

Whilst wellness trackers may sound harmless, and even beneficial for worker wellbeing, the move again brings privacy concerns into question, as businesses potentially gain access to personal employee medical data. 

New technology comes with new risks, particularly where possible negative outcomes are yet to be revealed and worked through. However, it seems that embedded human microchip technology is set to be the next step forward from these existing technologies, and will certainly open a Pandora’s box of ethical questions around privacy, data ownership and security.

For a full rundown of Advanced’s future technology predictions, and what this means for the financial sectors, visit: www.oneadvanced.com/news-and-opinion/workplace-technology-predictions.

Provenir, a global leader in data and AI-powered risk decisioning software, today congratulated Chief Credit Officer Costin Mincovici of tbi bank for being named a Constellation Research 2023 SuperNova Awards’ finalist in the “Data to Decisions” category.

The Constellation SuperNova Awards recognize individuals and teams who are prioritizing disruptive technology and transforming their organizations with digital initiatives. SuperNova Award winners are determined by a combination of public voting and SuperNova judges' input. Winners are announced live at the 2023 Supernova Awards Gala Oct. 25 at Constellation’s Connected Enterprise (CCE).

SuperNova awards voting is open to the public through Sept. 1 on the Constellation website. View and vote for Costin Mincovici and tbi bank’s entry here: https://www.constellationr.com/node/25106/vote/application/view/1025

tbi bank is a mobile-first challenger bank in Southeast Europe, operating in Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, Germany, and Lithuania. Via digital channels and trusted partnerships with nearly 20,000 merchant locations, tbi serves 2 million clients and issued 550,000 loans in 2022. Its business model and customer-focused approach has made it one of the most profitable and efficient banks in the region.

Leveraging Provenir’s AI-Powered and Data Decisioning platform, tbi bank is able to automate decisioning processes and quickly implement changes via use of a dynamic low-code platform. tbi bank can also offer clients credit decisions in real-time at scale, with a decisioning engine that is efficiently managed with only three full-time employees for the three markets tbi operates in.

By providing faster and more accurate lending decisions, tbi can provide customers with the best experience while reducing risk. The bank has achieved significant market differentiation by offering the speed and convenience consumers require while more easily tailoring lending products and terms to meet the specific needs of customers.

The bank can also now perform underwriting quickly and at scale, enabling capacity growth from less than 500,000 credit applications to 7 million applications annually – for a 1,400 percent improvement. It’s also improved efficiency with the ability to implement changes in minutes, thanks to the use of low-code functionality. Customer experience has also improved through tailored offerings and streamlined credit approvals and can confidently manage compliance operations, with the ability to adapt very quickly to updates and implement needed changes quickly, for best-practice compliance and governance.

“We congratulate Costin and tbi bank on being named a SuperNova award finalist, having been distinguished for innovation in the Data to Decisions category,” said Provenir’s Frode Berg, Managing Director, Europe. “Provenir is very proud to play a supporting role in tbi bank’s automated decisioning processes leveraging a cohesive risk ecosystem of decisioning, data and AI that enable smarter decisions across the entire customer lifecycle.”

“Savvy digital leaders from all industries have made the move from digital channels to digital business models. Despite a high level of uncertainty, rampant inflation, rising interest rates, uncertain inventory and a massive labor shortage, this year’s SuperNova Award winners have made a significant impact to their businesses,” said R “Ray” Wang, founder and CEO of Constellation Research. “The lessons learned from these organizations provide a strong template and great inspiration for other leaders looking to pave the way in their organizations.”

“We’re living in an increasingly digital world with more connected and smart devices that need to be secured,” says Stefan Auerbach, CEO, Utimaco. “The results of our Circles of Trust whitepaper show that more work is needed to create trust and reassurance for consumers and their connected devices.”

Aaron Holmes, Founder and CEO of Kani Payments, says: “We know that consumers are increasingly demanding climate-conscious actions from the businesses they transact with. To prepare for this changing landscape and provide future-proof value-added services to its clients, Kani Payments’ partnership with Earthchain is creating even more compelling and value-added services for our customers. By integrating Earthchain’s unique carbon intelligence capabilities into our platform, we’re empowering our clients to take proactive climate action.

 

“This partnership demonstrates that Kani Payments is prioritising tangible business intelligence insights that align with global climate action targets. By working together with Earthchain, Kani Payments can take proactive strides to achieve our own ESG goals as well as encourage our climate-aware clients, including payments companies, neobanks and processors, to do the same for their customers.”

Mike Barlow, Co-Founder and Head of Growth at Earthchain, comments: “Our ultimate goal is to educate fintechs and financial institutions to help change consumer behaviour and reduce the impact businesses have on the environment. This partnership with Kani Payments is the next step on our journey, and we’re delighted to be able to work with Aaron and the team to create a unique carbon reduction tool based on their needs.

 

“Earthchain is different to other providers as we tailor our integrations to each of our clients’ needs, including the ability to provide recommendations based on online purchasing history, advice on how they can reduce their carbon footprint as consumers or as an organisation, and real-time tracking of their impact and climate project portfolios.”

Daniel Dierkes, CEO and Co-founder of SureIn, said, “Our experience in the market shows no SMB entrepreneur really knows their risks and which insurance they need. When they come to us, we can see their former contracts all had gaps in their protection. Clearly there is something wrong in this market. With this in mind, our overarching mission is to dispel the opaque nature plaguing the industry, empowering founders with insights into their risks and the insurance products best suited to shield against them – all the while securing top-tier products at competitive prices.”

Monik Pham, Founding Partner at Pact VC, commented, “SMBs are the backbone of Europe as they make up 99 percent of all businesses, accounting for more than half of the GDP across the market. Yet they are severely ignored by insurers. SureIn’s solution uniquely places them to change the insurance market by providing fair access to products, smoothing out market inefficiencies and empowering businesses to take control of the risks posed to their livelihoods. We are proud to be backing this incredible team who have spent most of their professional lives building tools and products for SMBs in insurance and scale-ups that have reached IPO.”  

George Robson, Partner  at Sequoia, said, “We partnered with SureIn early on because we strongly believe in the team’s mission. As businesses’ needs change, so does their risk situation, and so should their insurance coverage. SureIn is constantly monitoring these changes to make sure clients’ coverages are up-to-date. We believe this is a game changer for the industry and many entrepreneurs will benefit from this at such a crucial point in their businesses’ journeys.”