Published
- 02:00 am
Gemalto, the world leader in digital security, today announces it has won an open tender with the Home Office, acting through Her Majesty's Passport Office (HMPO), for the production of the next generation of British passports and associated services.
Gemalto, an international security company with substantial operations in the UK, won the contract following a rigorous competitive process which rated each bidder against strict requirements that included security capabilities, processes, technical quality and the value for money for the taxpayer. The contract is for 11.5 years, including 10 years of production and issuance services.
British citizens will soon carry one of the most technically advanced passports in the world thanks to a combination of high-end security features. For the first time, the British passport's data page (also known as the biographical data page) will be made from polycarbonate instead of paper. This material makes the document extremely secure; any attempt to tamper with it causes visible damage. The material is more durable than paper, preserving the integrity of the document over its lifespan. The digital component of the new British passport will rely on a highly secure Operating System designed to comply with ICAO* standards, developed and secured in-house by Gemalto.
Mark Thomson, Director General for HM Passport Office, said: "I am delighted that we have awarded the contract to design and produce the new blue passport. I look forward to working with Gemalto to continue to deliver a world-class service to British nationals around the world, and keep the UK passport as a global leader of document security."
Howard Berg, Managing Director of Gemalto UK Ltd, said, "We are delighted to have been selected by Her Majesty's Passport Office to deliver the new generation of British passports. As a pioneer of cutting edge government document design, we're confident that the new passports will be the most attractive and most secure ever, as befits the British traveller."
The passports will be personalised in the UK to ensure all citizens' personal and biometric data remains in the country. This process will further extend Gemalto's presence in the UK, where it has operated for the last 25 years and create new jobs, supplementing the 500+ staff which Gemalto already employs in the UK, as well as generating secondary economic benefits in the local communities where Gemalto will be manufacturing the passports. In line with HMPO tender requirements, Gemalto has developed a complete business continuity plan, featuring the multi sourcing of key components and a manufacturing capability distributed over several factories.
Gemalto will be manufacturing the first CarbonNeutral® certified passport. The carbon footprint of the new British passport will be independently measured, validated and reduced to net zero in line with The CarbonNeutral Protocol – the global standard for carbon neutrality.
Frederic Trojani, Executive Vice President of Gemalto Government Business Unit added, "Over the past decade, Gemalto has helped develop some of the world's most secure passports, including landmark projects in Norway, Sweden, USA, Finland and Singapore. We look forward to working with Her Majesty's Passport Office to deliver one of the most technically advanced passports ever."
Gemalto has extensive experience in developing secure government documents; its products and solutions are deployed in more than 200 active government programs worldwide including over 40 ePassport programs. It has pioneered secure document techniques, including polycarbonate data pages and a wide portfolio of visual and tactile features to protect citizens' identities with top results in the various benchmarks organised by the industry. Last year Gemalto acquired Cogent, a leading identity and biometric security company, adding further expertise and scale across the spectrum of biometric solutions, with a particular focus in civil identification, border control and law enforcement.
- 06:00 am
Defining a Sustainable Strategy for Innovation: Keeping banks relevant to consumers now and in the future
Arena International is proud to present the 4th edition of the Harnessing Fintech Innovation in Retail Banking conference. This event will host around 150 senior attendees aiming to continue supporting retail banks in defining a sustainable strategy for innovation in the long term.
This is the only event to put retail banks at the centre of the Fintech discussion. An event that provides a platform for the industry to come together and exchange idea to tackle the strategic issues surrounding collaboration with FinTechs – how to find them, how to work with them, how to streamline your internal processes to facilitate partnerships- whilst also taking a closer look at the practical implementation of some of the “Tech of the moment”.
With an exciting mix of panels; lightning rounds and interactive workshops on the programme, delegates will discuss practical strategies for integrating with fintech, encouraging a culture of innovation in the traditional bank and complying with PSD2. The Harnessing Fintech Innovation in Retail Banking conference will focus on use-cases and experience-based insights to provide attendees with useful and practical knowledge.
Speaker’s line-up includes:
Alessandro Promutico, CEO, L’Atelier BNP Paribas NA
Wayne Filin-Matthews, Global Head of Digital Architecture, HSBC
Ricky Knos, Founder and CEO, Tandem
Krysztof Chlabicz, Head of Chance Management and Digital Transformation, Credit Agricole
Helene Panzarino, Managing Director, Rainmaking Colab Fintech
For more information visit http://www.arena-international.com/fintech/
Or contact us at events@arena-international.com
- 07:00 am
The conference Blockchain Indo will be held in Jakarta Indonesia on May 11-12 2018. Venue: Hotel Indonesia Kempinski Jakarta
Jakarta is one of the top 10 crypto-capitals of the world in 2017, according to IDACB (International Decentralised Association of Cryptocurrency and Blockchain). This means that the city has created conditions for trading, crypto-exchanges, mining and ICO. This ranking was compiled by artificial intelligence based on research of cryptocurrency events worldwide. Indonesian government is still skeptical of digital money and in the future (and potentially) only agrees to accept its own cryptocurrency. However, the business community shows growing interest in the new opportunities of digital economy.
The event is attended by the full gamut of the cryptocurrency community starting from authority experts in bloсkchain, heads of ICOs, blockchain specialists, to investors and miners. In total, event will bring together 1000 participants from 20 countries.
More than 40 blockchain experts will deliver their speeches: CEO of worldwide company, owners of innovative blockchain platforms, biggest ICO-projects, lawyers and blockchain analytics. Delegates will discuss the future of cryptocurrencies, legal aspects of cryptocurrencies in different countries, ICO, transformation of ICO-marketing and information security.
The lectures will be held in two halls: Red Hall and Green Hall. The theme of the lectures will be investments in cryptocurrencies, future forecast, choice of investment strategy and ICO. Several speakers already confirmed their participation: Fakhrul Razi A.B., CEO & Founder of Pinkexc Sdn Bhd; Łukasz Żeligowski (Poland), CEO of easyMINE; Robert Ryu, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Tristar Ventures and others. Conference participants will have a chance to see the presentations of ICO-projects.
The conference will host an exhibition of cryptocurrency companies, with over 30 booths. Various types of companies will present their stands: investment funds, ICO projects, suppliers of mining equipment, services for trading, consulting and marketing companies, blockchain platforms and other relevant organizations.
After the main part business ticket participants, speakers and investors will go to the cryptoparty in a trendy club of Jakarta.
The initiator of the conference is the CryptoEvent company from Russia, the organizer of mass blockchain events in Europe and Asia. “The market of financial technology in Indonesia is very prospective. Indonesia is the third country in the world, after China and India, that has the biggest rate of the technology growth. Moreover, Indonesian e-commerce market is growing rapidly, - says Nikolay Volosyankov, CryptoEvent’s CEO. - Therefore, bitcoin as one of the financial instruments of technology will be quickly accepted by the people of Indonesia and according to our predictions there will be approximately 100 thousand bitcoin users in Indonesia in the next 6 months».
Visit the official website of the conference: https://cryptoeventindo.com
Contact us:
Sponsorship opportunities: sponsors@cryptoconf.su
Become a speaker: speakers@cryptoconf.su
Information partnership: pr@cryptoconf.su
For all questions: info@cryptoconf.su
- 07:00 am
Unveiling the opportunities digitalisation offers to insurers to better engage their customers and improve operational agility
Arena International is proud to host the 3rd year of the Digital Transformation in Insurance conference, on the 2nd – 3rd May in London.
This year’s conference will welcome more than 250 leaders and experts to discuss the most pressing issues of the industry. Following that purpose, all the attendees will access two different stages under the same roof – Customer Engagement (front office) and Operational Agility (back office) – aiming to answer topics like how digitalisation is disrupting customer engagement by using AI, developing marketing and adapting to changing behaviours of new generations. Furthermore how this is possible only through a higher operational agility and efficiency, allowed by digitalisation.
Each year the Digital Transformation in Insurance conference brings the leaders of the insurance industry, and this 2018 edition will not be different. Experts of the digitalisation of insurance will come on stage to present their point of view on these burning topics and will help their counterparts harnessing on new technology and strategies to improve the customer engagement and operational agility.
All the attendees will be part of a two-day conference that will showcase 33 speakers from the biggest insurance companies: Allianz, AIG, QBE, Covea, Ageas, Swiss Re, Generali, First Central, Vitality Health, Axa, RSA, but also from the most disrupting starts-up companies like Tapoly, In My Bag, Urban Jungle, Anorak Life or Honcho Market. This amazing diversity of insurers will provide the audience key takeaways through dynamic panel discussions, roundtables, case studies and debates on the most important issues the industry is facing.
The Digital Transformation in Insurance conference attracts an international audience with a particular focus on the UK market. It will bring under one roof brokers, incumbent insurers aggregators and disrupting start-ups to debate about the most urgent topics in regards to digital transformation in insurance.
Digital Transformation in Insurance is not an event showcasing the latest technology innovation. The event will not focus on the latest gadgets or the unproven ideas, but on the steps insurance have to take to sustain their business moving forward. Each year we aim to create a comprehensive agenda, speaker line-up and audience to share ideas and inspire the scalable innovations of the future.
For more information visit http://www.arena-international.com/insurance/
Or contact events@arena-international.com
- 01:00 am
ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank by consolidated assets, announced the launch of a digital application facility on smartphones and tablets, that enables bank officials to open current accounts of self-employed individuals and businesses swiftly in just a few hours, in comparison to an industry average of a few days.
A first-of-its-kind digitisation process, this facility can be used to open current accounts of various kinds of businesses including proprietorship, partnership, private & public limited companies as well as limited liability partnership firms, among others in a few hours.
The digital application is equipped with state-of-the-art technology like ‘Optical Character Recognition’ (OCR) that recognises written characters in documents and auto-populates them in the digital application seamlessly and accurately. It also uses multiple innovative ‘Application Programme Interface’ (APIs) which allows the application to validate KYC documents of the individual and the business in real time from publically available information on government databases such as the National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL), Aadhaar and Import Export Code (IEC) among others. All of these innovative features of the digital application enable the Bank to significantly improve customer convenience by opening a current account opening in a few hours.
As a testimony towards encouraging collaborations with technopreneurs, this innovative solution has been developed at ICICI Bank’s state-of-the-art innovation centre along-with a fintech nurtured by the Bank.
Speaking about the initiative, Ms. Chanda Kochhar, MD & CEO, ICICI Bank, said, “ICICI Bank has always leveraged technology to pioneer digital innovations and provide world-class banking experience to its customers. In line with this vision, we are delighted to introduce the country’s first process of opening a current account in a digital manner. This unique proposition heralds a ‘new era’---of opening current accounts in a few hours, a marked improvement over a few days taken earlier. We believe that the ‘ease of doing business’ is a key parameter for businesses and organisations when they look for a banking partner. To this endeavour, we are leveraging technology in the business banking space to provide unparalleled speed and ease of banking. We believe that this direction will enable us to grow our current account and business banking portfolio faster than the industry, thereby increasing our market share.”
Below are some of the benefits of the application:
• Faster account opening: Current accounts can now be opened within few hours, which helps segments like startups to initiate their business transactions faster
• Reduction in physical documentation: Customers need not visit a bank branch. They can open an account without the hassle of arranging paper work like physical photographs and photocopies of KYC documents. Additionally, it also eliminates the need for filling internal bank annexure details as it is now integrated within the application.
• Enhances accuracy: It accurately captures details of KYC documents and auto-populates the data, thereby reducing duplication of effort and strengthening the compliance framework
• Reduction in paper consumption: In line with the Bank’s commitment towards creating a sustainable environment, this facility helps in significantly reducing the usage of paper for customers and the Bank alike
Once all the relevant details are captured in the digital form, a summary of the account opening form and most important terms & conditions is required to be signed physically by the customer as a one-time authentication.
The launch of the digital facility for opening current accounts comes close on the heels of a slew of path-breaking initiatives undertaken by the Bank to offer digital services for the business-banking segment. These include the country’s first online and instant overdraft facility for MSMEs, integration of accounting and banking services on a single platform with a leading software products firm among others.
- 08:00 am
FICO today unveiled a host of new retail banking solutions that allow lenders to manage the credit lifecycle in a way that is smarter, faster and simpler. The innovations are designed to help support lenders with their digital transformations as retail banking continues to be shaped by the forces of mobile, cloud, analytics and big data.
Originate Loans Using Optimised Deal Structures
Providing consumers with multiple options for the best-fitting terms in real time has been an industry goal for some time, and with its latest innovation FICO has made it a reality. FICO® Origination Manager now interacts seamlessly with Alternative Deal Structure (ADS) to evaluate thousands of alternative offers and present a set of differentiated options in seconds.
“FICO is the only vendor that is able to apply optimisation technology to search in real time for deals that provide maximum customer desirability while abiding by current pricing and loan eligibility policies,” said VanTassel. “Last year we released ADS targeting auto finance but with this release we have become smarter about how to organise eligibility rules for even faster search outcomes, and we are now addressing mortgage lending as well. Supercharging originations so that each deal can be checked against thousands of options and loan products allows us to answer the simple consumer ask, make me an offer that makes me want to be a customer of yours, and make it now!”
Manage Customers with Greater Agility
FICO® Strategy Director, which delivers faster, easier decision authoring and management with plug-and-play industry configurations, builds on the proven decision process flow of FICO® TRIAD® Customer Manager and now offers the same business value with configuration for the Telecommunications industry. The Telco Service Management solution uses analytically driven decisions to help make relevant and profitable offers, reduce churn and improve device financing decisions. At the same time, new configurations for lenders bring the capabilities of TRIAD Customer Manager to Strategy Director and provide a simple migration to speed cloud adoption and time to value.
“FICO Strategy Director provides analytically powered decisions to maximise the consumer’s relationship with their service provider,” explained VanTassel. “Strategy Director helps to complete the credit lifecycle ecosystem by using the same data, decision logic and analytics to maintain the current customer view, which can of course then be fed into a new originations decision.”
Make Better Decisions Collecting Payments
FICO® Debt Manager FitAgent can now sift through massive real-time datasets from internal or external sources, such as diallers and other communication systems, using FICO® Decision Management Platform Streaming to rapidly generate powerful insights that assist with the collection and recovery process.
FICO has further improved the FitAgent user experience with new controls, views and insights around payments, customers, accounts and communication that put the customer at the center of a lender’s operations. To reduce the cost of deploying industry-leading analytics, Debt Manager also easily consumes optimisation analytics from FICO’s suite of decision optimisation capabilities.
“The improvements to our debt collection solution have been designed to reduce the number of places a collection agent needs to go to get the information they need,” said VanTassel. “It also helps agents know whether they’re doing the right thing in a given situation for the customer. This improves the cure rate and the likelihood of that person remaining a loyal customer.”
Improve Customer Communications with AI and the Cloud
FICO® Customer Communication Services (CCS), provides analytically driven, scalable, two-way, automated voice, text, email and mobile app notifications. This solution helps banks, telcos, government agencies and utilities around the world connect more effectively with their customers and resolve suspected fraud cases and overdue payments automatically. FICO has collaborated with AWS to bring Amazon’s AI-driven text-to-speech service to CCS.
“Using Amazon Polly we can now create and edit voice responses in seconds versus days,” said VanTassel. “We’re able to generate speech recordings for our IVR systems and voice notification products at speed, which is essential for our customers that are working in dynamic and highly regulated markets.”
FICO is also using Amazon Web Services to deliver CCS Voice.
“We make millions of contacts per day around the world and AWS allows us to scale with the high performance, security and reliability needed to match the growth of our business. In growing regions like Asia-Pacific, where we currently serve six countries, it has been the perfect match for customers who need speed, simplicity and scale,” said VanTassel.
- 03:00 am
Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the banking software company, was ranked the market’s leading software provider in the core banking category, as well as in the digital banking and channels categories, according to the IBS Intelligence Sales League Table 2018. This ranking is a testament to Temenos' strategy to provide packaged, upgradeable, front-to-back software solutions, which help banks digitalize their operations.
The IBS Sales League Table evaluated global sales to new named customers for the 2017 calendar year. In the following global categories, Temenos ranked:
- #1 best-selling core banking system with T24 Core Banking, securing 45 new name customer deals in 2017, more than double the number of deals compared to the next largest competitor;
- #1 best-selling digital banking and channels system with Temenos Channels, gaining 33 new name deals – almost twice as many as the next largest competitor;
- #1 best-selling compliance and risk management system with total of 27 new deals with Temenos Risk & Compliance, 59% more than the second placed system
- #2 best-selling Payments system with Temenos Payments selling seven deals in 2017.
As more banks embark on digital transformation projects, the industry is seeing an increase in the volume and value for core banking deals. Temenos’ position in the league tables shows that Temenos is not only the market leader but is accelerating and capturing market share with milestone wins such as Santander’sOpenbank.
David Arnott, CEO, Temenos, stated: “We are proud to consistently be at the top of the IBS Sales League Table for both our digital channels and core banking system, as well as compliance and risk. The banking industry is clearly shifting towards packaged software solutions and we are best placed to help banks become end-to-end digital. We invest in innovation; our R&D represents 20% of our revenues, which is the highest in the industry and we consistently deliver; we had over 251 go-lives in 2017. The IBS Sales League Table shows that we continue to increase the gap against our competition in a market that keeps growing. Temenos is now the de facto partner of choice for digital banking transformation with the best routes to digital renovation.”
- 06:00 am
Solactive today issued the Solactive UBS Development Bank Bond Index Family, a new family of financial benchmarks targeting the World Bank and other high-grade development bank debt. The family is the result of a partnership between Solactive and UBS and follows the launch of an increasing number of ESG strategies by the German index engineer. This time, however, the Solactive UBS Development Bank Bond Index Family focuses on a field of sus- tainable investment that has not been widely explored before: that of development banks.
Development banks are supranational institutions that gather funds for development pro- jects with positive social and environmental impact. Purposes of these projects can vary greatly, however, the majority are covered in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustain- able Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Thanks to the indices, inves- tors will be able to support an economic development agenda by investing in large baskets of fixed income instruments issued by high-grade financial institutions. In addition, the fam- ily can be used as a transparent benchmark for active managers interested in the perfor- mance of the development bank sector.
Steffen Scheuble, CEO of Solactive, says: "Indices play a critical role in attracting capital to sustainable development. They enable investors to gain efficient, standardized access to rel- evant instruments and can help deepen liquidity and issuance. Partnering with large institu- tions such as UBS helps us develop these offerings and bring them to a wider audience."
Axel Weber, Chairman of UBS Group, says: "UBS has committed to channeling more capital towards meeting sustainable development targets. Indices for World Bank and other highly rated development bank debt enable investors to allocate more to sustainable high-grade debt overall. They also help development banks fund their activities."
The index family is currently composed of 36 total return indices engineered to mirror the performance of USD-denominated bonds issued by entitled development banks. The indices can be subdivided into three groups: indices covering bonds issued by development banks, bonds issued by multilateral development banks, and bonds issued by the World Bank. For each of these three groups, shorter maturities versions of the indices are available. The in- dices are denominated in four different currencies (CHF, EUR, GBP, USD). Composition is market-cap-weighted and readjusted monthly. The family will be expanded to also include price return and hedged versions of the indices.
- 09:00 am
Vigilant Solutions announces today that it has reached an agreement with Plate Locate to sublicense Vigilant's patent portfolio in return for Plate Locate granting Vigilant the ability to enable law enforcement to have greater access to commercially-generated license plate reader (LPR) data via its hosted LEARN analytic software to assist in law enforcement investigations. Additionally, this agreement allows Plate Locate to immediately become a Vigilant reseller and begin reselling Vigilant's new high definition LPR camera systems when they become available later this year.
Vigilant Solutions, through its Digital Recognition Network (DRN) operations, offers the largest commercially-gathered LPR dataset available to U.S. law enforcement via the LEARN investigative platform. LEARN offers advanced analytics along with agency-managed access controls and auditing. Today's announcement now provides Vigilant Solutions' law enforcement customers with access to over 100 million annual LPR detections.
"Analytics are made more powerful with additional data," said Shawn Smith, Founder and President of Vigilant Solutions. "We are very pleased to have reached an agreement with Plate Locate to further enable our law enforcement partners to use this additional data. Coupled with our LEARN analytic solution, law enforcement will be able to enhance its ability to combat crime and improve the safety of our officers, families and communities."
The data from Plate Locate has the same attributes as the existing data from DRN and only contains the text of the license plate, time, date, location coordinates and other information for auditing purposes. There is no personally identifiable information contained in the data, and it is legally gathered in publicly accessible areas. Law enforcement is only able to connect the anonymous letters and numbers of the license plate to a registered owner by accessing vehicle registration data contained in a completely different and state-controlled system used to access state owned DMV data. Access to state owned vehicle registration data is governed under the rules set forth in the federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act.
LEARN is also used to manage LPR systems deployed by law enforcement and to make investigative insights into the collected data. LPR data gathered by law enforcement systems remains the property of each respective agency and is managed by the agency according to their access controls, data sharing rules, and retention policies. The commercial datasets offered by Vigilant are provided to law enforcement to supplement their own LPR programs and empower their investigations. Law enforcement generated data is never shared or sold to commercial entities.
"We are equally as excited to be working with Vigilant Solutions," adds Jeremy Gonske, President of Plate Locate. "Vigilant Solutions' LEARN analytics, and the data behind them, have proven themselves to be an effective tool for law enforcement for the generation of investigative leads, ultimately leading to improved case closure and reduction of crime," said Mr. Gonske. "It is very rewarding to know that the combination of our data and Vigilant's advanced analytics will enable law enforcement to better protect and serve our communities while affording us the opportunity to be fully licensed and continue to grow our market share within the repossession industry."
- 06:00 am
Truss Edge, a technology company that has been founded to support the day to day portfolio management and reporting tasks of hedge funds and ETFs, is launching in Europe this week.
Truss Edge was originally known in the US market as EDD Fund Services. Founded in 1998 by a global hedge fund to meet its own internal trade processing and post-trade requirements, EDD has grown its business over the years, serving hedge funds, CTAs and ETFs in the North American market and with a growing base of European clients. It is recognized for its expertise managing the processing and reporting needs of its clients.
Truss Edge provides seamless straight through processing with connectivity to counterparties and market data providers and a single source, robust processing platform. It draws on the company’s proprietary Safari technology, an end to end modular platform that can be adapted to the needs of funds of all sizes and has been operational for over 17 years.
Jay Duffy, CEO of Truss Edge, commented: “Fund managers around the world have been facing the prospect of increased reporting requirements for some time now, especially in the wake of the European MiFID II and EMIR directives. But beyond that, fund managers are also looking for trusted technology partners with the ability to scale up with them as they grow, who can deliver exceptional service and trade processing expertise on a day to day basis.”
Truss Edge brings several sought after services to the fund management industry, including:
• Comprehensive data management support for middle and back office operations
• OTC reconciliations and reporting with connectivity to the major pricing services
• Cost-effective, desktop order execution with low latency
• Three-way portfolio reconciliation linking to trading counterparties, including administrators, prime brokers, clearers and custodians
• A central portfolio data resource that can support the needs of other service providers - e.g. administrators, compliance consultants, investor reporting
Duffy added: “Truss Edge goes beyond being a technology solution for fund managers - part of our appeal is the depth of experience of our team of personnel. We work very closely with our clients to ensure that they get the maximum benefit from our services and our insights.”
