Etherparty, the easy-to-use smart contracts creation platform, is pleased to announce that it has completed the verification process from its crowdfund campaign.  It has also compensated fuel tokens to 61 contributors affected by the security breach that took place on Oct. 1st, 2017 prior to 10:00 am PDT.

"We are making every effort to ensure that we take care of those who were affected by the security breach," commented Founder, Lisa Cheng.

The breach which occurred shortly after the launch of the sale, was quickly identified and resolved. The issue affected a minimal number of users due to a security vulnerability that Etherparty has since taken steps to eliminate.

Since the launch of its beta on Oct. 17th, the company has added over 800 beta testers to its platform launching a variety of escrow, token, and crowdfunding contracts on the Ethereum network. Interested users can request an invite to the beta by visiting: etherparty.io/beta-testing-registration.

About Etherparty

Etherparty is a contract wizard that removes the complexity of creating, managing, and executing smart contracts on multiple blockchains. The platform allows users with zero knowledge of smart contract programming to create an enforceable, self-executing digital agreement for all types of transactions.

Visa has announced the European launch of Visa Direct – a real-time payments platform that allows companies to leverage Visa’s global reach and scale to transform domestic and cross-border payments for businesses and consumers. Visa is working with payment service providers, financial institution clients and strategic partners to roll out services using Visa Direct.

Visa Direct enables person-to-person (P2P), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) payments. With Visa Direct, funds can be transferred into the recipient’s Visa account quickly, conveniently, and securely – providing instant access to funds2 and the ability to make purchases at 44 million retail locations worldwide.

Visa has partnered with Worldpay, a global leader in payments processing technology and solutions for merchants, to accelerate the availability of Visa Direct to merchants in Europe and subsequently across all of its markets globally. Once recipient banks make required changes to their systems, 3 Visa Direct will enable Worldpay’s merchants to send real-time payments to consumers – improving customer satisfaction.

“For decades, Visa has led the way in transforming the way we pay in stores and online. Now, we have an opportunity to transform how consumers and business pay each other in a fast, convenient and secure way,” said Mike Lemberger, Senior Vice President of Product Solutions, Visa in Europe. “Visa Direct is a proven platform that enables technology companies, businesses and financial institutions to meet the demand for real-time payments, backed by the ubiquity, cost-efficiency and speed of Visa’s global network.”

Dave Glaser, Chief Product Officer, Global eCom at Worldpay said: “In recent years, the payments landscape has changed dramatically with clients and consumers alike expecting to be able to make a payment under their own terms – whether that is making a real-time payment or using a specific method. We are proud to be working with Visa on this unrivalled platform as an early adopter in Europe and other global markets and believe that Visa Direct is an important step in meeting those needs – providing both acquirers and merchants with the tools they need.”

Visa Direct is expected to transform payments in Europe by enabling a range of real-time payment use cases backed by the security and scale of Visa’s global payment network, including:

• Business-to-consumer: enabling businesses to send almost any kind of payment directly to a Visa account – such as gaming winnings, insurance payouts, and daily merchant settlements.
• Business-to-business: enabling businesses to pay freelancers, contractors, and other small businesses – in real time.
• Person-to-person: enabling consumers to pay each other quickly, conveniently, and securely, often through their connected devices – such as when splitting bills or giving gifts.

In the US, Visa Direct is already enabling payments for partners such as PayPal, Braintree, Square Cash, and Stripe.

Visa Direct is one of the many Application Program Interface (API)-based network capabilities available on the Visa Developer Platform – an open platform intended to drive innovation in payments and commerce. The platform is designed to help financial institutions, merchants, and technology companies meet the demands of consumers and merchants who increasingly rely on connected devices to shop, pay, and get paid.

Orange is launching its new banking offer in mainland France today. This 100% mobile-based offer is provided by Orange Bank and will be the only French bank to offer for free a service that provides real-time balances, mobile payment, innovative uses and a virtual adviser that is available 24-hours a day, 7-days a week.

Mizuho Financial Group, Inc. (President & Group CEO: Yasuhiro Sato) and Mizuho Bank, Ltd. (President & CEO: Koji Fujiwara) have begun proof-of-concept testing of pring*, a wallet app for smartphones. 

AltFi Data has today announced that Assetz Capital, the leading UK SME secured lending originator, has been added to the AltFi Data Analytics platform. The entire lending track record of Assetz Capital can now be analysed according to AltFi Data’s established standards. This enables investors to perform like for like comparison of both return, and risk adjusted return, with the other marketplace lending platforms that provide standardised disclosure using AltFi Data Analytics. This includes Zopa, Funding Circle, Ratesetter and MarketInvoice in the UK, Prosper Marketplace in the USA, and Lendix in Europe.

The availability of standardised data facilitates due diligence, risk management and valuation and is driving adoption of the asset class. Furthermore, Assetz recognise the alignment with investors that can be created by facilitating verified disclosure to a common standard. 

Stuart Law, founder and CEO of Assetz Capital, commented: “At Assetz, we recognise that full loan book disclosure underlines our commitment to originate high quality loans. We are comfortable being held accountable for the quality of our origination. This transparent disclosure can also greatly assist investor processes such as due diligence, valuation and risk management. Equally importantly, it reminds the lenders on our platform that our economic destiny is inextricably linked to the performance of the assets that we originate. We trust that our full disclosure and analysis through AltFi Data will further increase the attractiveness of the assets that we originate and it is appropriate to be recognised as a fellow leader of the industry and its quality standards.” 

Rupert Taylor of AltFi Data explained: “Assetz should be commended for pushing the boundaries of transparency by facilitating verified disclosure to a common standard. Investors, including big institutions, recognise that this sector is originating assets with high expected returns and low expected correlation. But investors have established protocols regarding valuation, risk management and due diligence. Standardised metrics allow these assets to fit within these protocols and will encourage adoption of the asset class.”

Coupa Software (NASDAQ:COUP), a leader in cloud-based spend management, announced today that senior software executive Mark Riggs has joined the company as its first chief customer officer (CCO) to help scale the customer success function, foster long-term customer relationships and maximise customers’ lifetime value with Coupa.

With more than 25 years of experience, Riggs has a consistent track record of creating and scaling customer-facing teams across organisations while delivering optimal success to internal and external stakeholders. Riggs worked as the chief customer officer and general manager for Bazaarvoice during a period of rapid revenue growth and was also part of the team that led the company through its initial public offering (IPO).

At Coupa, Riggs will champion, orchestrate, and advance the customer experience across Coupa’s ever-more-complex range of customer interactions.  His role will include evangelising customer-centric initiatives and strategy and also creating and driving experiences that best deliver value for customers and partners while differentiating Coupa.

"Ensuring customer success has been our number one core value since the beginning,” said Rob Bernshteyn, CEO at Coupa. “Mark has a proven track record and the practical know-how for building enterprise programs that ensure long-term customer success at every stage of their journey - from contract through renewal. We believe that Mark is the right leader to help take our customer success function to the next level at this stage of our growth.” 

Prior to Bazaarvoice, Riggs was senior vice president of world-wide customer success for Endeca Technologies where he helped grow the company from early stage through its acquisition by Oracle for $1.1 billion. Before Endeca, Riggs served as vice president of global services for Business Objects where he helped grow the company from $400 million to $1.6 billion in annual revenue. Business Objects was acquired by SAP for $6.8 billion. 

“I am excited about joining Coupa to deliver authentic and consistent brand experiences across all customer touch points,”  said Riggs, who believes in the philosophy of “making others greater.”  “Coupa is known for its innovative product architecture and rapidly expanding customer base. I am honoured to build upon the Coupa heritage by leading our efforts in customer centricity, and ultimately delighting our customers with innovative technology, product choices, and solutions that uniquely differentiate the customer experience.”

Corvil today announced the launch of a new solution that establishes a system of traceability to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), a critical capability for monitoring, analysing and reliably reporting activity on electronic trading networks. This is now a mandatory requirement for businesses to comply with pending financial regulations such as MiFID II from the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This capability also extends and is necessary to assure accountability, auditability, and performance in algorithmic and AI environments.

Rapidly deployable and providing continuous assessment of clock synchronisation stability, Corvil’s UTC Traceability Solution provides business, technology, and compliance teams with precise visibility, quantitative analysis, and insight into computer clock accuracy compared to the UTC reference. It provides an independent, continuous assessment, and record of UTC synchronisation integrity and automatically provides alerts when clock synchronisation is not compliant. The solution also provides automatically generated reports for clock synchronisation quality, saving time and reducing risk associated with MiFID II and CAT compliance.   

The consistency and integrity of time across computer systems is an increasingly important aspect of providing transparency into the business transactions executed across those systems. The speed and automation of today’s financial markets and other industries makes it challenging to measure performance, determine causality and establish an accurate, sequenced forensic record of what has transpired.   

As regulators look to recreate markets, they have mandated greater precision, oversight, and auditability of clock synchronisation. To that end, both ESMA and the SEC will soon require trading venues and market participants to have a system of traceability to UTC in place for all reportable events within the trading network.

Supplementing its existing solutions for real-time monitoring, surveillance, and precision timestamped order record-keeping, Corvil now tracks variability to UTC. Corvil’s UTC Traceability Solution delivers an independent, continuous assessment and record of UTC synchronisation integrity, which provides firms the insight and information to meet the obligations of MiFID II (RTS 25, Article 4), and CAT Reg 613.  Reporting on variances more granular than the level of current regulations, it is also expected to address the tightening of future compliance requirements.

Corvil’s new offering enables businesses to rapidly respond to issues or outages by alerting when there is any loss or disruption of clock synchronisation. It also identifies messages whose timestamp accuracy may be suspect so customers have a record of the affected transactions for closer examination, auditability, risk mitigation, and regulatory reporting purposes.

“As we shift to a world run by algorithms and artificial intelligence, there is a new reality of time that we must understand to provide oversight of what transpires digitally,” said David Murray, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer. “Financial markets have moved first to regulate the precision by which time and events are captured within trading networks to help increase transparency and surveillance.  Corvil’s UTC Traceability Solution provides an important capability for compliance with new regulations, but can be effectively applied beyond financial regulations by any company looking to monitor and assure critical business activity on their networks.”

Customers already relying upon Corvil’s compliance solutions have realised the following benefits:

• An investment firm reduced risk and accelerated their compliance timeline by three months by deploying Corvil to replace bespoke and manual processes dependent on system logging for UTC traceability.
• A multinational bank is leveraging their MiFID II investment in Corvil not only to meet compliance requirements for tracking order flows and for timestamped order record-keeping across multiple asset classes, but to also improve understanding of their clients’ experience leveraging Corvil’s analytics.
• A regional bank minimised complexity and reduced their planned cost meeting, while maintaining their MiFID II order record keeping and UTC traceability compliance requirements through their Corvil deployment.
• Validating the capacity requirements under MiFID II RTS 7 presented many challenges for one European exchange. The difficulties lay in monitoring a simulated environment operating at twice the historical peak message rates with enough granularity to accurately assess capacity utilisation. Corvil was deployed to capture and analyse every order and market data message under those conditions to simplify and accelerate the exchange’s compliance efforts.

Available this month, the Corvil UTC Traceability Solution is rapidly deployable, creates zero performance impact on systems or networks, and leverages the Corvil machine-time analytics platform, already widely used and trusted across the largest venues and market participants.  For more information, please visit Corvil’s UTC Traceability for MiFID II and SEC CAT page.

Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS) and Black Duck Software have signed a definitive agreement for Synopsys to acquire privately held Black Duck, a leader in automated solutions for securing and managing open source software. The addition of Black Duck’s highly respected Software Composition Analysis solution will enhance Synopsys’ efforts in the software security market by broadening its product offering and expanding its customer reach.

Under the terms of the definitive agreement, Synopsys will pay approximately $565 million,
or $548 million net of cash acquired. In addition, Synopsys will assume certain unvested equity of Black Duck employees. The transaction will be funded by Synopsys with U.S. cash, and is subject to Hart Scott Rodino regulatory review and other customary closing conditions. The acquisition is expected to close in December 2017.

“Our vision is to deliver a comprehensive platform that unifies best-in-class software security and quality solutions,” said Andreas Kuehlmann, senior vice president and general manager of

the Synopsys Software Integrity Group. “Development processes continue to evolve and accelerate, and the addition of Black Duck will strengthen our ability to push security and quality testing throughout the software development lifecycle, reducing risk for our customers. We look forward to working with Black Duck’s experienced team as we drive our combined solution to the next level of value for our customers.”

Software development is undergoing sweeping and rapid change, including the increasing use of open source software (OSS), which makes up 60% or more of the code in today’s applications. While the use of open source code lowers development costs and speeds time to market, it has been accompanied by significant security and license-compliance challenges, because most organizations lack visibility into the OSS in use. Black Duck’s industry-leading products automate the process of identifying and inventorying the open source code, detecting known security vulnerabilities and license compliance issues. It also provides automated alerts for any newly discovered vulnerabilities affecting the open source code.

Customers are seeking to address security and quality as early as possible in the software development cycle to enable Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) and the move to the cloud. Given open source’s prominence in application development, early identification of security and compliance issues increases the ability to deliver secure, high-quality software more quickly.

“Today, software security is top of mind for every organization and their Boards of Directors. As reliance on open source grew rapidly over the last decade because of its economic value, most organizations have struggled in their efforts to secure and manage it effectively. Many high- profile, costly breaches resulted. Our rapid growth and success over the last four years is evidence that organizations are taking open source security very seriously,” said Lou Shipley, chief executive officer of Black Duck. “We’re excited to join an organization that shares our commitment to addressing security and quality issues at the earliest phases of the software development process. Doing so will enable us to provide leading solutions that enable customers to develop and deliver more secure and higher-quality software faster than ever before.”

While Synopsys has not yet provided financial guidance for fiscal 2018, the preliminary review indicates that, due to the impact of purchase accounting and the associated deferred revenue haircut of approximately $25-30 million, Synopsys expects Black Duck to contribute approximately $55-60 million to fiscal 2018 revenue. Synopsys currently expects the acquisition to be approximately 12 cents dilutive to 2018 non-GAAP earnings per share, reach break-even in the second half of 2019, and be accretive thereafter (all on a non-GAAP basis). Investors should no longer rely on previous preliminary commentary regarding 2018 consensus estimates.

Barclays acted as exclusive financial advisor to Black Duck on this transaction.