Browne Jacobson’s corporate team has advised on another InsurTech venture capital deal – assisting crowd insurance pioneer Laka on its £1.1m (US $1.5m) seed round.

The Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET)’s 13th President has announced the strategic direction “Creating Partnership Platform to Drive Inclusive Growth” with four agendas: Transform, Strengthen, Enhance, and Grow with quality aiming at promoting market quality, improving market accessibility, building capital market infrastructures as well as removing obstacles and streamlining processes for the whole capital market, reinforcing SET’s vision “To Make the Capital Market ‘Work’ for Everyone.”

Accuity, the leading provider of financial crime compliance, payments and counterparty know-your-customer (KYC) solutions, today announced its new vessel monitoring capability, Firco Trade Compliance Ship Enforcement Alerts (SEA), which will further enhance its market leading screening solution. Firco Trade Compliance SEA will allow organisations involved in trade finance to track shipping vessels in real-time to ensure they are not in breach of international sanctions. If a vessel should enter a sanctioned zone or port, the organisation will be alerted and able to take action, report suspected breaches of regulation and protect itself from involvement in any wrongdoing.

In recent months, regulatory regimes have sharpened their focus on institutions involved in financing global trade, requiring them to know not only who they trade with, but what they are trading, and more specifically, is the trading vessel sanctioned, or has it visited sanctioned ports or anchored in sanctioned waters? In 2017, there were 30,000 visits by 4,500 container, bulker and tanker vessels to OFAC sanctioned terminals (Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, Syria and the Crimea). At the same time, active enforcements against breaches of UN sanctions by shipping vessels are increasing.

Accuity’s new vessel monitoring capability has been developed in response to this growing regulatory pressure for banks to intensify their efforts to fight financial crime and trade-based money laundering. It integrates global automatic identification system (AIS) vessel movement content provided by IHS Markit, within the Firco Trade Compliance workflow to provide an accurate, reliable and real-time notification system to monitor a vessel and its global port calls. Firco Trade Compliance SEA will enable Accuity customers to identify potential risks in relation to vessel shipments, as well as screening for sanctioned entities and dual-use goods efficiently within a single interface.

Byron McKinney, Accuity’s Trade Compliance Product Lead, said: “International trade finance has been in the spotlight as a means for criminal organisations and terrorist financiers to launder money, and now banks are under intense pressure from regulators to avoid proliferating the financing of such individuals or entities associated with money laundering, terrorism, bribery and corruption. The problem is that those working in trade finance are not chemists or shipping specialists, so understanding the nuances of dual-use goods or identifying rogue vessels can be challenging. 

“Our customers are looking for a single screening solution that can provide them with the confidence to accurately detect risks involved in a shipment or trade, and thereby open up opportunities for business which might otherwise be overlooked. Our enhanced trade compliance solution brings together proprietary data, on-the-ground intelligence and regulatory expertise to give a comprehensive single view of risk in real-time, throughout the lifecycle of a trade.

“In addition, we know our customers are looking to improve their compliance efficiency so we have automated this new vessel monitoring capability and digitised the audit trail. Firco Trade Compliance SEA is designed to run passively in the background and alert any vessel red flags as they happen, rather than requiring banks to actively search for suspicious vessel activity.”

AiX, the artificial intelligence broker, announces today that it has completed the first ever trade brokered by an AI powered chatbot.

Descartes Systems Group, the global leader in uniting logistics-intensive businesses in commerce, announced that B+S Logistik (B+S GmbH Logistik und Dienstleistungen), a leading German logistics service provider (LSP), has expanded its contract logistics business with new business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce operations using the Descartes pixi* warehouse management solution (WMS) to support order fulfillment in fashion, food distribution and other segments.

"After only one year, approximately 15% of our business is now B2C ecommerce and a combination of B2B/B2C commerce (omnichannel)," said Manuel Unkel, CEO at B+S Logistik. "Using the Descartes pixi* WMS and its multi-order picking capabilities, we're able to efficiently process anywhere from 2,000 to 10,000 parcel shipments per day."

B+S Logistik requires flexibility and scale to support seasonal demands and other types of peaks in consumer buying behaviors inherent in the industries they serve. With Descartes, the company can onboard new customers quickly and cost effectively. B+S Logistik's implementation took only eight weeks and provides robust capabilities to manage the entire ecommerce fulfillment lifecycle including order receipt; pick, pack and ship; item availability; and visibility tracking.

Descartes pixi* WMS is a cloud-based, flexible solution for efficient ecommerce fulfilment and warehouse management. Diverse organizations including online pure-players, traditional retailers and manufacturers, B2B wholesale distributors and LSPs, such as B+S Logistik, can use the solution to automate warehouse management processes for ecommerce order fulfillment and to exchange information seamlessly with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and financial systems. Descartes pixi* WMS helps companies improve productivity and reduce costs by automating shipping processes, nearly eliminating order processing errors, sending more packages per employee, and streamlining returns handling.

"We're pleased that our solution is playing an important part in the rapid ecommerce business growth at B+S Logistik," said Dirk Haschke, VP, Sales & Ecommerce Operations at Descartes. "Ecommerce continues to drive significant growth in business and consumer markets. The Descartes pixi* WMS solution and team of ecommerce domain experts can help customers rapidly meet operational and technological requirements to capitalize on their ecommerce opportunities domestically and internationally." 

Atos, a global leader in digital transformation has been awarded two major outsourcing contracts by Siemens, a global engineering leader, to drive Siemens’ digital transformation program. The first contract will cover multiple activities spanning Application Management services and Technical Production Support in SAP, Microsoft and Business Intelligence for multiple divisions of Siemens, while the second contract will cover Application Management services for Siemens regions in Europe, APAC and Latin America. Both contracts, with a total value above €200 million, will run for a duration of 5 years commencing Q4 2018. Most of those contracts represent new business for Atos.

Driving an ambitious IT transformation program, Siemens launched a tender to identify and select providers which offer cutting-edge technologies, digital expertise and industry knowledge, while meeting Siemens’ important selection criteria. In this context, Atos has been selected as provider for:

• Technical Production Support: Onsite technical production support services for 30,000 users across multiple divisions of Siemens mainly in Germany and USA.
• SAP in Siemens Divisions: Application Management and Project Services for Siemens enterprise divisions in Germany.
• Microsoft / Enterprise Content Management: Application Management Services for Enterprise content management and Business applications in Non-SAP technologies globally.
• HR systems: Application management for SAP and Non-SAP based HR systems in Germany.
• Business Intelligence: Application management for regional BI systems globally, in liaison with another supplier.

The global agreement stipulates specific business volumes for each activity over a five-year term. As part of this contract and subject to receiving the respective approvals for the antitrust filing in Germany, Atos will take over Siemens employees along with the services.

In addition to this contract, Atos has been selected as a partner for Application Management services in Siemens Regions in Europe, APAC and Latin America, with the task of transforming these into an industrialized best in class global delivery model with end-to-end and business KPIs.

Atos will drive the application management transformation in the regions through its end-to-end Integrated Service Delivery Platform.

“Following an intensive competitive review we have decided in favor of Atos, therefore expanding our thriving existing partnership,” said Dr. Helmuth Ludwig, Siemens Global Head of Information Technology. “Atos has been convincing, particularly with regard to our important selection criteria, including statements on employment conditions and locations, cost efficiency and prospects based on its market positioning. We look forward to working together with Atos on building a Collaborative Global IT business. ”

“We are glad to have been awarded these major outsourcing contracts and to have been selected by Siemens as their trusted partner to drive their Application Management Services transformation program. As always, we are 100% committed to delivering excellent user satisfaction. With this contract, we are strengthening our unique partnership, through which we support the end-to-end digital transformation of Siemens itself, as well as Siemens’ and Atos’ customers.” said Eric Grall, Atos Senior Executive Vice President, Head of Global Operations.

From Money20/20 Europe, Helen Yu, chief growth officer of Clinc, the leading conversational artificial intelligence platform for financial institutions, joined the stage with İşbank’s Ceren Sayar and Eren Hukumdar to discuss their collective vision for the future of AI and customer experiences, and to announce their expanded partnership and upcoming launch of İşbank’s new call center initiatives powered by Clinc’s world-class conversational AI.

İşbank has been using Clinc’s self-service AI platform, Spotlight, which leverages Clinc’s novel machine learning infrastructure and technology to build unprecedented conversational AI experiences in native Turkish from scratch for their customers. Yu shared the partnership roadmap and plans to roll out to İşbank’s 5.5 million mobile users. Later this year, İşbank also plans to integrate Clinc’s AI into its call center, enabling its representatives to provide quicker and more accurate responses to customer inquiries made over the phone.

“We’re thrilled to bring the best conversational AI on the planet to one of the biggest banks in the world,” said Dr. Jason Mars, Clinc CEO. Just last Fall we announced our initial project with İşbank so we’re really proud to be expanding our partnership with their team. We’re now not only helping their banking customers, but their customer service teams too.”

Clinc today also announced that is has officially opened its first international office located in the heart of London’s financial district. The office is located on the third floor at 9 Devonshire Square and will allow Clinc to increase its team to better serve its expanding customer base throughout Europe.