Financial blockchain corporation Finom AG today announced the launch of its $101 million tokenized equity offering to be executed pursuant to Regulation D of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933. Finom makes the world of finance available to everyone by providing a blockchain ecosystem with a single point of entry. The company’s ecosystem allows anyone to manage digital currency and assets conveniently and in accordance with KYC and AML regulations. Finom will release both a security and utility token. The FIN token, the digital equivalent of four shares of Finom’s common stock, grants its owner the rights of a common stock owner of the controlling entity. The NOM token serves as the internal currency within the ecosystem and gives its holders commission discounts, along with special privileges attached to using Finom bank cards and the Finom advertising system.

According to Coin Schedule, so far in 2017, ICOs, or Initial Coin Offerings, have raised more than $3.6 billion in investment in more than two hundred offerings. However, the placement of coins, or utility tokens, does not afford purchasers the same protections available to investors in a securities offering. By contrast, Finom intends to offer to its investors a security token in a Regulation D offering under the United States Securities Act of 1933. The FIN token will be the digital equivalent of four company shares of Finom.

Among Finom’s holdings are four cryptocurrency companies already reaching 520,000 users worldwide. Finom also owns a mining center Cryptal. The corporation aims to raise up to $101 million through its token sale to create the world’s first blockchain-based platform to reduce the barrier to entry in financial markets and provide Artificial Intelligence advising.

“FIN token holders will be able to receive dividends, notices and the opportunity to vote as a stockholder the way that any equity holder does,” says Kirill Suslov, CEO of Finom and founder of TabTrader.

The quantity of utility NOM tokens is equal to FIN. When purchasing security tokens, each investor gets the same number of utility tokens as a bonus. NOM tokens are expected to be listed on one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges immediately after the Token sale.

Alexandr Barkovskiy, CTO of Finom, founder of Nanopool, comments: “We digitize assets so that anyone will be able to purchase them regardless of their level of wealth or expertise. The system will adapt to your goals and offer relevant solutions”.

The Finom ecosystem will eventually take care of all financial operations including banking integration, payments processing, and factoring performed by different companies. Finom plans to introduce cryptocurrency wallets with linked debit cards, and launch a cryptocurrency bank with a network of terminals by 2020. This would make cryptocurrency circulation and financial transactions with any currency seamless and less costly for users.

“People regularly lose 5-15 percent on commissions. By removing intermediaries, we minimize fees, allowing users to significantly save on transaction costs,” notes Konstantin Karatov, business developer at Finom and founder of Cryptonit exchange.

San Francisco-based SharesPost, a FINRA/SEC registered broker-dealer, investment advisor and Alternative Trading System, is facilitating the Initial Coin Offering for Finom. The FIN token will be available for purchase through a Regulation D offering expected to close on December 30, 2017.

Mitratech, a leading provider of legal, compliance, and risk management software solutions, today announced that its enterprise legal management (ELM) products have earned distinctions as Market Leaders and Highly Innovative products in the 2017 MarketView(TM) Report on Enterprise Legal Management by Hyperion Research, a leading analyst-based market research firm covering the ELM market.

Mitratech's years of investment in TeamConnect continues to deliver strong results - being one of the strongest products in the ELM market with top rankings across many of the rating categories in the MarketView(TM) Report. TeamConnect is the only ELM platform in the industry that includes code-free customizations, saving its clients significant time and money. And, its one-of-a-kind "upgrades-included" program demonstrates the company's true commitment to client success.

According to Hyperion, "TeamConnect, driven by aggressive development and a holistic vision of ELM in recent years, is one of the leading systems serving the enterprise market."1

"We are honored to be recognized as a Market Leader once again," said Mitratech CEO Jason Parkman. "We made the decision four years ago to pull ahead of all other ELM providers by offering something no one else can. It was a significant investment that is paying off for our clients today."

TeamConnect is one of three Mitratech products to make Hyperion's top ten and qualify as Advanced Solutions. Each Advanced Solution met all of Hyperion's Key Solution Components - fundamental requirements that define leading ELM practices for both e-billing and matter management. Twenty-three corporate legal department software products were evaluated with an opportunity to qualify for this distinction.

Hyperion validated Mitratech's vision to develop products that enable increased collaboration and communication between legal, compliance and risk professionals: "One of the things that distinguishes Mitratech from its competitors is its espoused worldview of ELM. Management contextualizes the discipline as part of a larger Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) universe, where risk management is perhaps as important as, or more important than, operational efficiency,"2 stated Hyperion.

Hyperion Research's MarketView(TM) report provides a comprehensive review of the broad market for Enterprise Legal Management technologies. The report provides a guidebook for ELM system evaluation, including market trends and dynamics, key components expected from leading solutions, an overview of vendors in the solution area, and guiding principles for selecting and implementing solutions.

Nordea has joined the we.trade consortium as founding partner. The consortium is, in conjunction with IBM, developing a platform based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) that aims at making domestic and cross-border commerce easier, safer and more efficient for companies. It is the first such blockchain-based trade finance platform, marking a milestone in the practical adoption of DLT in the financial industry.

In entering the we.trade initiative, Nordea joins Banco Santander, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, KBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Société Générale and UniCredit as a founder member of the consortium and extending its geographical coverage into the Nordic markets.

The we.trade platform will facilitate secure international trade between SMEs, seamlessly connecting the parties involved in a trade transaction, ie the buyer, buyer’s bank, seller, seller’s bank and transporter. The platform will be accessible 24/7 from any connected device. Ville Sointu, Head of DLT & Blockchain at Nordea, comments: - In the current broad landscape of blockchain technology based initiatives in trade finance we see we.trade as a standout in its focus and realistic execution strategy. We’re looking forward to providing a Nordic perspective to the future of trade finance.

Nordea plans to roll out the we.trade platform to its customers across the Nordics and is the first bank in the region to deliver a customer-facing trade solution based on DLT. Patrik Zekkar, Head of Trade & Working Capital Management Sales at Nordea focuses on the benefits to customers: - We are delighted to join we.trade and look forward to delivering its benefits to our customers. It promises to simplify trade finance processes for SMEs by addressing the challenge of managing, tracking and securing domestic and international trade transactions. With we.trade, SME customers will secure and accelerate the order-to-settlement process, as it is quicker than the traditional exchange of documents, and with the required traceability. The platform’s end-to-end transparency will give SMEs confidence to initiate trade with new partners in their home market or internationally.

The commercialisation of the platform is anticipated in Q2 2018, while it is expected that test customers of the founding banks will use the platform earlier. Although backed by nine founding member banks, the we.trade consortium is an open bank platform available for other banks to join in order to create standardisation, collaboration and consensus across banks to support trade.

Purpose Software, the UK’s leading supplier of business management software to the managed services and print reseller industry, has announced the immediate availability of a new dashboard option for its CBS and 2serv service management solutions.  This new capability will help resellers to improve individual, team and organisational performance whilst enhancing decision-making across the business.

The dashboards provide browser-based access to a consolidated view of organisational performance, highlighting metrics and KPIs that matter the most, from existing, disparate data sources. Dashboards can be customised to meet the functional requirements of individual users who can ‘drill down’ for more detailed analysis all the way to individual customer record, document or devicelevels.

According to Mike Burke, Managing Director of Purpose Software:  “This new dashboard add-on is intuitive, easy-to-use, highlyconfigurable and can be implemented in hours rather than months. It demonstrates our ongoing commitment to developing all our business management software, which comprises the market’s widest range of products, maintaining our position as the UK’s leading provider of data integration solutions to print and managed services resellers.”

Trustly, the European payments company, is pleased to announce that it has been nominated for the highly distinguished DI Gasell award for the third consecutive year.

The DI Gasell award was established in 2000 by the Swedish financial daily newspaper Dagens Industrito recognise Sweden’s fastest growing and most profitable companies. 

“It is a great honour for the whole team at Trustly to be awarded the DI Gasell nomination for the third time in a row. In 2017 we reached the milestone of surpassing 10 billion EUR in payment volume – a true testament to the work done by the team. We continue to develop our online banking payment service to provide the best solution for businesses and consumers across Europe,” said Oscar Berglund, CEO of Trustly.

A nominated DI Gasell company must have:

• A turnover surpassing 10M SEK
• A minimum of 10 staff members
• At least doubled its turnover, when comparing the first and the past fiscal year
• Increased its turnover each year for the past three years
• A positive operating profit during the past four fiscal years
• Grown organically, rather than by acquisitions or fusions
• Healthy finances

Milestones reached in 2017:

• 10 billion EUR in processed transaction volume since inception in 2008
• Launched Trustly Direct Debit, a new payment product for recurring purchases including subscriptions services and one-click payments
• Recent customers include travel sector partners UATP and Flywire, leading e-commerce company Boozt, Nordic e-commerce focused payments provider Qliro as well as software provider Emric (part of Tieto) and P2P lending platform Lendify.
• Recognised as one of the most inspiring and fast-growing SMEs in Europe by London Stock Exchange Group

The Nordic IT services and software company Tieto is contributing to the market introduction of Facebook’s open source initiative, Open/R. The goal of Open/R is to become the foundation for an ecosystem of open source solutions to enable next generation network services and architectures that would pave the roads towards digitalization. 

As businesses are becoming more and more digital and consumers’ usage of rich digital content is accelerating, the complexity of the underlying communication network is increasing as the flow of information grows.

To remove some of the existing constraints, Facebook developed Open/R as an extensible distributed network application platform in order to prototype and deploy new network applications much more quickly and reliably than previously possible, covering a wide variety of network domains and designs.

As an extendable IP routing platform, Open/R allows for faster, more agile and cost efficient introduction of new protocols, application and services, solving the flexibility and extendability shortcomings of other well established routing protocols (such as e.g. OSPF). 

“The backbone of consumer, but also business services, is becoming more and more application centric. Digitalization is very much about the need for more rapid introduction of new applications and distributed applications,” says Tom Leskinen, Head of Product Development Services, Tieto. “Facebook is always looking to the future, and they have identified the need to enable a more efficient and speedy way to run distributed applications. This is required for the improved Internet connectivity that is at the heart of digitalization.”

Tieto, with its extensive experience in the telecom industry and strong background in network architecture, routing and switching technologies, collaborated with Facebook to validate Open/R in real life scenarios for network operators and services providers.

In the carried pilots, Open/R demonstrated its capability to adapt the routing topology according to various dynamic link parameters, using more intelligent load balancing routing algorithms, support for high automation and off-the-shelf deployment for self-configuring, and auto-generated global Ipv6 addresses. It has proved very suitable for ad-hoc networks consisting of largely autonomous routing devices. 

With Facebook's announcement to Open Source Open/R platform, it will be possible to adapt and tune the routing logic, metrics and other parameters to meet current and future demands, beyond what can be obtained with traditional OSPF.

As part of the collaboration, Tieto engineers are working with Facebook and the Open/R ecosystem to expand the market adoption among network operators and services providers by providing advisory, development and system integration services to enable smooth integration of Open/R community version into customer specific platforms and support thereof. 

“Tieto’s wireless and network experience and expertise helps showcase Open/R as a technology from which the telecom industry could benefit. In addition to helping Facebook identify additional functionalities, we are also helping them to build an ecosystem for open source projects. This is something that we believe in, and in which we gladly participate,” Leskinen says. 

As part of driving next generation network architectures, Tieto is also a member of the Facebook initiated Telecom Infra Project, an engineering-focused initiative driven by operators, suppliers, developers, integrators, and startups to disaggregate the traditional network deployment approach.

Tieto Product Development Services enable semiconductor, connected device and communication infrastructure vendors build next generation IoT, Mobile & wearable devices, Connected car and Networks. Together with alliance partners, we deliver complete chipset, software and services solutions for 5G, IoT and automotive.  Tieto's Product Development Services is a trusted Technology development and Systems Integration partner for Telecom industry for over 20 years.

Research from Proofpoint, Inc. (NASDAQ:PFPT), a leading cybersecurity and compliance company, reveals that whilst the majority (54%) of UK businesses expect a data breach in the next 12 months, only 48 per cent of respondents agree that their business is financially prepared to cover the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) fines when the deadline arrives on 25th May 2018.

The GDPR study, carried out amongst 1,500 IT decision makers across businesses in the UK, France, and Germany, highlights a disconnect between perception and reality when it comes to GDPR readiness. Whilst most UK businesses (77%) believe they will be fully compliant by May 2018, only five per cent have all the necessary data governance strategies in place to be compliant.

"It's clear that when it comes to GDPR readiness, there is a disconnect. While the majority of UK businesses are bullish about their ability to meet the compliance deadline, our research shows that for many, the basic requirements are not met," says Adenike Cosgrove, EMEA Cybersecurity Strategist, Proofpoint. "With data breaches becoming the new normal and the deadline to comply now less than six months away, the time is now to identify and protect all personal EU data. Failure to do so could lead to financially-significant fines, broken customer trust and in turn, potentially crippling disruption to the business."

Data breaches are the new normal

Along with high-profile global cyberattacks, the research highlights that data breaches are significantly on the rise. More than a third (36%) of UK businesses suffered a data breach in the last two years and nearly a quarter (23%) suffered a data breach multiple times in the past 24 months.

Looking ahead, France seems to have a heightened awareness of this new paradigm compared to its European counterparts. Seventy-eight per cent of French IT decision makers think their business is likely to suffer a data breach, with German respondents (46%) believing that they are the least likely to experience an EU personal data breach.

GDPR is driving IT investments

Interestingly, 65 percent of IT decision makers in the UK are seeing increased IT security investments to help bolster their cyber defences and comply with GDPR ahead of the deadline.

Additionally, almost a quarter (24%) have even purchased cyber insurance, implying that whilst reactive measures are in place, these organisations fear current strategies are not sufficient enough to comply with GDPR in time. Cyber insurance can help cushion the cost of a breach, however many insurance policies will not cover fines for non-compliance.

GDPR preparations are underway

Proofpoint research also found a disparity around which methods are being prioritised to ensure GDPR deadline compliance. More than half (56%) of respondents have a user awareness programme on data protection, 46 per cent have encryption for all personal EU data, and 49 per cent have implemented advanced security solutions to prevent data breaches.

However, according to the findings, only half of respondents (50%) know (and have documented) what personal EU data their organisations currently hold. This demonstrates that whilst some businesses are implementing strategies and recognise the importance of GDPR compliance, they are still at a significant risk of non-compliance to the regulation because they cannot discover where EU personal data sits.

"Despite having two years to comply, UK businesses are still at a critical risk of exposing data and facing potentially colossal fines as a result," concludes Cosgrove. "Over the next six months, organisations must invest in solutions that will enable them to have clearer visibility over EU personal data, solutions that prevent breaches of identified data, as well as implement solutions that enable them to monitor, detect, and respond to any regulatory violations."

The European Union General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) will come into effect on 25th May 2018, replacing the 22-year old EU Data Protection Directive. Failure to comply with the new rules could lead to unprecedented fines of up to four per cent of annual global revenue or €20,000,000.

Gold trading among existing private investors rebounded as bullion prices steadied in November, but new interest from first-time buyers sank to its lowest since the metal's bear-market price lows of 2015.

That pulled the Gold Investor Index lower to 53.9 from October's reading of 54.6 according to new data today from BullionVault, the world's largest online marketplace for physical precious metals.

Internet searches for 'buy Bitcoin' meanwhile further overtook the phrase 'buy gold' last month as the crypto-currency jumped to new all-time historic highs above $11,000.

Gold trading on BullionVault rose 30.5% by volume last month from October. Across November as a whole, clients of the West London-based fintech specialists added 100 kilograms of gold to their holdings overall.

That took total client gold holdings back above 38.0 tonnes, within 0.2% of July's all-time peak.

But the number of new first-time investors fell again, recording its lowest monthly level on BullionVault since December 2015, when gold, silver and platinum prices hit five, six and seven-year lows respectively before turning sharply higher.

Over the last 12 months, the number of first-time precious metal investors has now fallen by 20.1% compared to the previous half-decade. Only Germany is ahead of its 5-year average among BullionVault's top 10 markets, with the number of new users from the Eurozone's largest economy rising 10.5% in the 12 months to November 2017.

Adrian Ash, director of research at BullionVault, said:

"Whether or not Bitcoin ever achieves common use as money, the crypto-currency plainly offers investors a hot speculation and not a safe haven right now. Bitcoin's fresh record highs have come alongside new historic highs in the stock market, led by stretched valuations in tech shares. The ultimate investment insurance of physical gold in contrast is trading flat in line with its 5-year average.

"Only German investors have so far used this opportunity to start building their gold holdings, but a sharp New Year's correction in 2017's hottest assets will surely see investors elsewhere rush to follow Germany's lead, albeit at higher prices. The best time to buy insurance remains when it isn't urgent."

Worldwide, the number of BullionVault users starting or growing their gold holdings in November was little changed from the month before, down 2.6% from October.

The number of sellers in contrast rose 22.5% from October's 23-month low as prices edged higher on a month-average basis against all major currencies.

That saw the Gold Investor Index retreat to 53.6 from October's 54.6 reading – then a 3-month high – to mark the 10th month of 11 so far in 2017 that BullionVault's sentiment measure has moved inversely to prices.

Tracking only genuine buying and selling among private investors, the Gold Investor Index hit a record 71.7 in September 2011, peaking with the gold price. It would read 50.0 if the number of buyers exactly balanced the number of sellers across the month.

The number of silver buyers meantime rose 8.8% last month from October's 29-month low as prices edged higher. The number of sellers jumped 26.9%.

That pushed the Silver Investor Index down to 51.0 from October's 51.6 reading, marking the 9th time in the first 11 months of 2017 that this sentiment measure moved in the opposite direction to silver prices.

By weight, total client silver holdings stayed unchanged for a third month running, holding at a record 689 tonnes.

Openlink, the global leader in trading, treasury and risk management solutions for the energy, commodities, corporate and financial services industries, has announced a deal with the international energy company, Uniper based in Germany, to move its extensive energy trading and risk management (ETRM) systems into the Cloud. This marks the first fully public Cloud ETRM implementation for a company of Uniper’s size and prestige. 

The 700-user deal will include two applications of Openlink’s system, covering front-to-back office trading and risk management support across Uniper’s asset classes including oil, gas, LNG and power. 

Uniper has one of the world’s largest and most extensive energy trading portfolios, both to supply its broad fleet of generation assets and for proprietary trading purposes. Uniper’s goal is to migrate from its current hosting facility into a future ready, fully scalable and cost effective Cloud offering from Openlink.

Having worked with Openlink on other solutions for the past 15 years, and with a new five-year partnership agreement in place since 2016, Uniper already had a trusted partner in Openlink. The timing was also perfect: Openlink has invested heavily in bringing its award-winning systems to the Cloud and developing industry-leading expertise. This meant that Openlink was able to deliver the ideal solution to include Openlink Cloud, cloud management tools and ancillary services to fulfill Uniper’s requirements.

In a three-month proof of concept (POC) project between October 2016 and January 2017 it was demonstrated that the system could provide the required featureset, security and computing power while maintaining access to historical data. 

The POC showed that a Cloud-based delivery could not only match current performance, but significantly improve it, for example by accelerating end of day batch processing along with allowing intra day calculations that would not have been possible on premise. The solution was also shown to lower the total cost of ownership by enabling Uniper to only pay for what it needed, scaling to suit requirements all this in combination with a sophisticated security stack and integration into the Uniper downstream systems.

As is typical for a utility of Uniper’s size, the existing system included highly customised physical and virtual components and bespoke user interfaces.

“There are a lot of challenges in recreating highly customised software ecosystems completely in the public Cloud,” says Rich Grossi, CEO at Openlink. “However, we’ve built a robust Cloud environment at Openlink and we’re confident it is up to the task. The fact that Uniper agrees is testament to the power of our Cloud offering.”

“Uniper is at the center of the global energy markets,” says Marco Scherer, SVP Sales and Trading IT at Uniper. “Our traders need the very best technology underpinning their actions to ensure we are always managing our risk responsibly. To be able to do so while reducing IT spend and increasing performance is a hugely attractive proposition. With Openlink Cloud, we will be able to even better support the Uniper Business activities and our future Business developments with this future proven, scalable and pay-per-use Cloud solution.”