Published
- 08:00 am
Broadridge FXL is a market leading 24/7 FX solution that utilizes a rules- and exception-based system to reduce human intervention. The technology enables clients to rapidly scale to meet their customer needs around FX, options, money markets and cash/liquidity management. The best-in-class, web-enabled solution will allow Earthport to expand services in a controlled environment and incorporate flexibility to enable a fast-track, efficient response to complex market opportunities and regulatory change in multiple jurisdictions.
“Earthport is delighted to have selected Broadridge FXL as the core technology of its next generation treasury management and FX systems,” commented Harold Bosse, Global Head of Product and PMO, Earthport. “Over the last three years Earthport’s transaction volume has grown by nearly 500%, so the need for global scalability and feature richness is clear. Earthport is a fast-moving, dynamic business which services not only some of the largest banks in the world but also some of the leading innovative fintech and ecommerce companies. As a growth stage company with business in 65 countries and rising, the level of complexity and sophistication required to manage the flows is high relative to Earthport's 200-person size. Broadridge offers solutions that can create immediate benefits for our global client base and that serve as a foundational technology for our high-growth future.”
Mike Thrower, Managing Director, EMEA Sales at Broadridge said: “The foreign exchange and cross border payments industry is undergoing major transformation due to market and regulatory changes. We are excited to help Earthport’s fast-growing payment service as they get ready for new challenges and opportunities, and we look forward to helping empower their future growth by optimizing their operational efficiency, navigating operational risk and compliance and enriching their client experience.”
- 08:00 am
Livingstone’s Business Services sector team has advised the shareholders of Catalyst Development, a specialist financial services consultancy, on a management buy-out backed by private equity investor Livingbridge.
Founded in 1994, Catalyst provides regulatory-driven change, organisational improvement and talent development programmes to global financial markets companies. Catalyst has worked with more than 70 clients in over 30 financial centres worldwide, including nine out of the world’s top 12 investment banks, and has mentored more than 250 of the most senior figures in financial markets. Catalyst holds the UK’s highest business accolade, The Queen’s Award for Enterprise, in recognition of the firm’s global impact.
Global banks spent about $30bn on consultancy fees in 2016, up from $17bn in 2008. Client demand for Catalyst’s specialist services is significant, driven by far-reaching G20 commitments to making markets safer in the wake of the financial crisis. Catalyst’s clients are now increasingly requiring ‘specialism at scale’ to tackle large, complex programmes of transformational change.
Andrew Middleton, CEO at Catalyst, commented: “Since the financial crisis, there has been a growing need for expert, trusted advisors to help financial institutions navigate change. Our ambition is to become Europe’s leading financial markets specialists. In Livingbridge, Livingstone have identified an ideal partner for us who will enable us to build on the momentum we have already generated and accelerate our growth to establish Catalyst as the unrivalled choice for specialist financial markets consultancy.”
Livingbridge’s investment will enable Catalyst to address its market’s escalating requirements and grow its client base by accelerating its service development, expanding its talent development and acquisition strategy (with the aim of trebling headcount) and strengthening its infrastructure.
Catalyst also intends to increase its international presence, and Livingbridge has committed to provide additional capital to pursue strategic acquisitions.
Alex John, Partner at Livingstone London, added: “The Catalyst team are one of the most impressive management teams we have worked with, and have developed an excellent reputation for deep subject matter expertise and service delivery. There is a clear market opportunity, and with the backing of Livingbridge, we are confident they will build a highly attractive specialist consultancy of genuine scale.”
Greg Davis, Founder and retiring Chairman of Catalyst, concluded: “Livingstone quickly grasped the nature of our business, what makes it desirable and what future ownership we needed to fulfil our ambition. They ran a disciplined and highly professional process and attracted several good trade buyers and private equity investors. Even more importantly we trusted Livingstone to help us decide on the best partner for Catalyst going forward. Their outstanding advice and professionalism have been invaluable to the success of this process.”
The completion of this transaction reinforces Livingstone’s credentials in the specialist consultancy space following on from the sale of Technicon Design to French engineering group Segula Technologies, Tata Technologies’ strategic acquisition of Escenda and the sale of Javelin Group to Accenture.
- 09:00 am
Accuity, the global financial crime compliance, payments and KYC solutions provider, today announced the launch of its latest generation of transaction screening technology designed to help clients automate and gain an end-to-end view of their financial crime compliance screening so that they can demonstrate their compliance policy in action to regulators.
Tom Golding, MD, Risk and Compliance, Accuity, said: “Financial institutions are expected to know and show more and more about how their screening and decision making procedures work and the actions they took on every transaction screened. They need to be able to explain to regulators why and how decisions were made, often at a granular level of detail, and currently, this is a manual, costly and painful process.”
The latest version of Fircosoft screening technology – Firco Continuity 5.9 - brings visibility and control to transaction screening, making compliance processes traceable and auditable at a more detailed and granular level. This new level of visibility – over all transactions in the screening systems and decision process - is coupled with improved system control and data integrity enhancements. For example, updating screening filters with the latest regulation will be easier and completely traceable.
Add these new developments to the existing machine learning capability, which allows the Fircosoft technology to learn from past decisions, and the result is a substantial change to transaction screening, with increased productivity, reduced false positive rates, as well as helping compliance teams respond to regulatory queries more efficiently and collaboratively - which ultimately drives down cost.
This launch marks a new phase in the development of our Fircosoft portfolio. The launch of Firco Continuity 5.9, together with the Firco Live Services capabilities being released shortly, will continue to build on these themes of control, efficiency and insight into compliance systems. Firco Live Services, which is coming in 2018, will provide clients with enhanced control of their compliance systems via dashboards of risk views and simulation environments that allow for configuration testing, optimisation and collaboration ahead of release to the live filtering environment.
Tom Golding added: “Our clients asked us for greater oversight of their transaction cycle. With this release, clients can understand what has happened to every transaction, whether risky or not; they can easily access evidence of their compliance policy in action and have the context to explain it to regulators. We see this as a big step towards helping our clients be regulator-ready.”
Sacey Small
Business Development at The Glue
The word innovate was first recorded in 1540. see more
- 09:00 am
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has today launched its new asset management authorisation hub.
The authorisation hub will not lower entry standards to the market and entrants will need to meet the same rigorous standards as current firms before they receive authorisation.
Today marks the start of phase one of the hub which will offer new firms pre-application meetings, dedicated case officers and access to the new website portal. This will make it easier for firms to understand how the FCA works, make a complete submission, and transition from our authorisation to supervision regime. Future phases will feature open days and surgeries for firms.
Megan Butler, Executive Director of Supervision - Investment, Wholesale and Specialists, said:
“The asset management sector is important for the UK economy.
“We want to aid new entrants to the market and the hub will help new firms understand us better as an organisation.”
The user friendly system is based on four principal objectives:
· To clarify expectations - and support firms with better guidance on regulations and processes.
· To make information easier to access via a dedicated portal for investment managers on the FCA’s website.
· To foster better engagement between the FCA and new entrants.
· To provide end-to-end support for firms moving through the start-up cycle.
The FCA currently regulates more than 3000 asset managers and approved 300 new firms in 2016.
Further phases of the hub will be rolled out throughout 2018.
- 06:00 am
The next generation Bitcoin and digital asset trading platform, NakamotoX debuts its Alpha and starts inviting users for Alpha testing and trading contest.
NakamotoX, the next generation digital asset trading platform is launching its Alpha release. Following the launch, the platform extends an open invitation for the community to test its various features and functionalities.
NakamotoX is the next generation Bitcoin and digital asset trading platform, made in the Czech Republic. Since 2012 the team behind the platform are extensively involved in cryptocurrencies and blockchain, their mining and related system design.
The team's goal is to provide the highest quality, low fee and maximum user-friendly interface experience (simple enough for beginners, customizable for professionals). And all of that on the top state of the art technology stack with maximum reliability and security currently possible.
The team's expertise in digital assets, trading and strong technical background has encouraged their full commitment to the mission of becoming one of the largest exchanges for cryptocurrencies in the world. This belief is strongly based on current market overview, platform's financial liquidity (both in FIAT and digital currencies) and professional approach.
The platform has been built completely from scratch with a field-tested matching engine able to handle hundreds of thousands of trades without any lags or unresponsive UI. Even though it's not fully decentralized, the platform is going to offer some decentralized features, which will be introduced later on.
The main platform features include:
- Build with highest security standards
- Implementation of the fastest and most reliable trading engine capable of handling transaction rate of 1M/s
- Complete data encryption and storage in accordance with GDPR
- Voluntary adoption of EU AML directives
- Completely decentralized infrastructure
- All risk engine procedures derived from standard banking systems
- Instant settlement processing as per pre-defined verified limits
- Extended support and FIAT withdrawal options
Signing up for NakamotoX – "NKX" will take only a few seconds. One just needs to enter the name and an email address. The login process will be secured by password-less login using TREZOR device. The company ensures that all customer funds will be secured by multi-sig, HSM and securely held in cold storage secured by HW wallets.
The NakamotoX team describes the platform saying,
"NakamotoX has a simple and easy-to-use interface that ensures a straightforward trading experience for beginning and advanced traders. The exchange is also fully responsive [and] is available on all desktop and mobile browsers with Android and iPhone apps coming soon."
NakamotoX will offer 24/7 support through NKX's customer service department, which has a guaranteed response time of 12 hours. The platform is excited to bring efficient, transparent, and versatile Bitcoin exchange for the bitcoin ecosystem.
- 02:00 am
Fintech start-up fidentiaX is in the developmental phase of creating the world's first marketplace for tradable insurance policies by disrupting the status quo by empowering policyholders to monetise policies on the blockchain. fidentiaX will also be setting up fidentiaX Open Source Foundation (fSOF) to proliferate the embracing of blockchain technology for the insurance industry.
In 2016 alone, the total market size for insurance premiums in the 40 OECD reporting countries was estimated to be in the north of $3.86 trillion dollars and Asia is projected to the be fastest-growing market for life insurance with an estimated real annual compounded growth rate of 10.2%.
The tradable insurance market is faced with inefficiencies such as:
Lack of awareness – Policyholders are unaware that policies are tradable assets which could be sold in the open market for a higher value. In 2015, out of the US$112 billion worth of policies surrendered in the U.S., US$57 billion (estimated 250,000 policies) could be resold.
No Recognizable Marketplace – The lack of a recognizable marketplace makes it challenging for sellers and buyers to connect.
Dependency on 3rd party – In the rare occasion where seller and buyer actually connects, parties need to place trust on a 3rd party to effect the transaction.
fidentiaX's marketplace will be a membership-based ecosystem focusing on the key stakeholders and providing the following services:
Policy ledger – Break traditional reliance on intermediaries by creating a digital ledger for policyholders.
Trustless Marketplace – Provides a platform for buyers and sellers to connect and trade policies via the blockchain.
fidentiaX will focus on building its operations within Asia before executing its global expansion strategy. Key countries within Asia are Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore.
To learn more, please visit fidentiaX's official website at https://www.fidentiax.com and stay updated on their Crowd Token Contribution launch announcement by subscribing to their mailing list. Stay connected through their social channels:
- 09:00 am
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new blockchain banking solution that will help financial institutions address the processes of universal cross-border payments, designed to reduce the settlement time and lower the cost of completing global payments for businesses and consumers. Using IBM Blockchain, and in collaboration with technology partners Stellar.org and KlickEx Group, the solution is intended to improve the speed in which banks both clear and settle payment transactions on a single network in near real time.
The solution is already processing live transactions in 12 currency corridors across the Pacific Islands and Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Using a blockchain distributed ledger, all appropriate parties have access and insight into the clearing and settlement of financial transactions. It is designed to augment financial flows worldwide, for all payment types and values, and allows financial institutions to choose the settlement network of their choice for the exchange of central bank-issued digital assets.
For example, in the future, the new IBM network could make it possible for a farmer in Samoa to enter into a trade contract with a buyer in Indonesia. The blockchain would be used to record the terms of the contract, manage trade documentation, allow the farmer to put up collateral, obtain letters of credit, and finalize transaction terms with immediate payment, conducting global trade with transparency and relative ease.
IBM has convened an initial group of diverse banking leaders as part of the development and deployment process, including Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, Bank Danamon Indonesia, Bank Mandiri, Bank Negara Indonesia, Bank Permata, Bank Rakyat Indonesia, Kasikornbank Thailand, Mizuho Financial Group, National Australia Bank, Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. (RCBC) Philippines, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, TD Bank, Wizdraw (HK) of WorldCom Finance, and other financial institutions.
“With the guidance of some of the world’s leading financial institutions, IBM is working to explore new ways to make payment networks more efficient and transparent so that banking can happen in real-time, even in the most remote parts of the world,” said Bridget van Kralingen, Senior Vice President of IBM Industry Platforms. “Making distributed ledger technologies more interoperable is the latest example of IBM’s leadership driving the rapid advancement of blockchain.”
"TD Bank is pleased to participate along with fellow banking leaders to observe how IBM Blockchain can support more secure and effective payments solutions," said Rizwan Khalfan, EVP and Chief Digital and Payments Officer, TD Bank. "We're focused on innovation that adds value for our customers and our business, and blockchain presents a tremendous opportunity to transform and enhance payment systems, enabling us to continue to evolve the products and services we can offer."
In keeping with IBM's commitment to open source, the solution is run from the IBM Blockchain Platform on Hyperledger Fabric and was built in collaboration with Stellar.org, a non-profit organization and associate member of Hyperledger, and KlickEx Group, a regional financial services company in the Pacific region. Stellar is an open-source blockchain network that is purpose-built for the issuance and exchange of digital assets. Digital assets are issued on the Stellar network as a foreign exchange bridge to allow for near real time settlement. KlickEx Group serves as the founding financial institution for the region, servicing banks, retail clients and consumers using this new network.
IBM will continue to advance the solution with the goal of expanding capabilities in order to support central bank-issued digital currencies, securities, bonds and structured financial assets. IBM Blockchain provides high performance orchestration to move payments among parties. Each payment is immutable once recorded, and settlement instructions are provided via smart contracts on Hyperledger Fabric. Initially, Stellar will provide the network and digital asset to facilitate the settlement of transactions cleared on Hyperledger.
"This new innovation and collaboration represents a significant milestone for Stellar as well as the financial technology industry as a whole," said Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Stellar. "We are using blockchain technology in production to facilitate cross-border payments in multiple integrated currency corridors. Currently, cross-border payments tend to take up to several days to clear. This new implementation is poised to start a profound change in the South Pacific nations, and once fully scaled by IBM and its banking partners, it could potentially change the way money is moved around the world, helping to improve existing international transactions and advancing financial inclusion in developing nations."
The network is currently in use by Advanced Pacific Financial Infrastructure for Inclusion (APFII) members, a public-private partnership initially funded by the United Nations and SWIFT. It is expected to process up to 60 percent of all cross-border payments in the South Pacific's retail foreign exchange corridors including Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga by early next year. Commercial banks such as Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, Bank Danamon Indonesia, Bank Mandiri, Bank Negara Indonesia, Bank Permata, Bank Rakyat Indonesia, Kasikornbank Thailand, Mizuho Financial Group, National Australia Bank, Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. (RCBC) Philippines, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, TD Bank, and Wizdraw (HK) of WorldCom Finance will be invited to join the network and help it expand in different parts of the world beginning in 2018.
“This is the first time anyone has made blockchain work at an institutionally viable scale,” said Robert Bell, Chairman of APFII and founder of KlickEx Group. “Through KlickEx, the Pacific has had relatively low-cost, real-time, multi-currency payments for most of the past decade, and this project was a natural next step following our work to create seamless and borderless payments across the Pacific. We look forward to the results with using IBM Blockchain as we continue to push forward with our mission to remove payment friction across borders.”
This production blockchain network with KlickEx and Stellar is one of many blockchain projects underway by IBM in financial services including foreign exchange payments netting, private equity administration, securities lending and trade finance.
- 01:00 am
INDATA, a leading industry provider of software, technology and services for buy-side firms, today announced that BTC Capital Management has implemented INDATA’s iPM Epic software suite on a front, middle and back office basis via iPM Cloud, INDATA’s private cloud solution.
BTC, a new INDATA client, was looking for a fully-integrated investment management system to streamline its investment operations from portfolio management, compliance and trading - through to back office accounting, performance measurement and reporting. Additionally, the firm was looking for a system with open architecture and flexibility, specifically the ability to connect efficiently with its other key systems.
“At BTC we place a high value on being able to offer our clients sophisticated solutions along with flexibility, open architecture and unparalleled service,” commented Scott Eltjes, CEO and President of BTC Capital Management. “Similarly, when looking for our investment management software provider we were seeking a true business partner that employed the same full service approach. With INDATA we now have a complete solution that includes the software, technology and services that can be tailored to meet our own specific business requirements.”
“We are very pleased to have been selected by BTC Capital Management as their investment management solution,” commented David J. Csiki, President of INDATA. “We look forward to serving as business partner for their current and future needs,” he added.
- 01:00 am
Nedbank is one of South Africa’s major banking groups, offering the full range of wholesale and retail banking services through a growing footprint across Africa.
China Systems is the world’s leading trade services technology vendor with offices throughout Europe, US, Asia, and the Middle East. It is focused on providing an integrated front-end and back-office platform catering for internal and external deployment at a domestic, regional or global level. Eximbills, their proven flagship solution, which is installed in more than 150 banks and 75 countries worldwide, can be tailored to adapt to changing real-world requirements in any business or regulatory environment for Trade Finance, Payments, and Supply Chain Finance without the need for programming modification.
Having partnered with China Systems to implement a trade platform for both online clients and bank operations staff, deploying Eximbills Enterprise (SWIFT 2017 certified platform for Trade instruments and Supply Chain Finance), along with Customer Enterprise (the China Systems portal that enables Nedbank’s clients to transact quickly and securely for Letters of Credit and Collections from the convenience of their premises), Nedbank was able to go live on import and export trade finance products in an impressive time of five months, which included a Discovery Phase.
According to Mike Thomas, “Our Global Business Unit, in conjunction with Group Technology, Corporate Shared Services, Project Management and China Systems, have exceeded all expectations and raised the bar by demonstrating their mettle in cross-functional project management. Post an intense negotiation period, the team managed to deploy this complex technology with the official ‘go-live’ date on 25 August 2017. It is a remarkable achievement, with confirmation from the vendor that this is officially a record-breaking deployment timeline achieved by any bank across the globe, placing Nedbank at the top of the podium.”
The greater project includes a progressive rollout of further trade products and functionality in the immediate term, including Guarantees and Supply Chain Finance, along with additional integrations, streamlining of business processes and technology rationalisation.
China Systems has been working continuously on a strategy of improving its business product ‘baseline’ and ‘toolkit’ offerings (for Trade Finance, Supply Chain Finance, Payments and Treasury) with a view to achieving more rapid solution deployment. This achievement of a five-month, start-to-go-live implantation of both a portal and back-end system, with integrations, ’look and feel adaptations’ and Single Sign On (SSO) for a large bank is unheard of and is proof that the strategy is successful. Digby Bennett, Regional Sales Director China Systems Middle East stated, “All projects include client-specific enhancements for integration and local regulatory processing and also changes for a bank’s internal workflow (and security), configurations, etc. This is where our rapid development tool called CS Toolkit differentiates China Systems in the technology market and has clearly provided a significant leg-up for this record implementation.”
Nedbank has installed the Global Enterprise and Global Enterprise Portal on the latest IBM and Oracle releases and with banks actively pursuing emerging technologies to re-engineer the trade value chain, the bank’s investment in best of breed platforms will ensure that Nedbank is poised to be at the forefront of such innovation.
