Gemalto, a world leader in digital security and Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork, today announced that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers can enhance the security of their cloud workloads and reduce the complexity of managing multiple heterogeneous security solutions with an integrated SafeNet Encryption and Key Management offering. 

As companies migrate to the cloud, protecting sensitive information efficiently is a priority, especially with regionalized legislation like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Australia's Privacy Amendment (Notifiable Data Breaches) Act and U.S. State Data Breach Notification Statutes. Gemalto's SafeNet Encryption and Key Management solutions help enterprises easily align data protection policies and business processes without compromising the integrity and security of their data through an easy-to-deploy, centrally managed solution. By extending the existing portfolio to Oracle Cloud, enterprise customers can also maintain full control of encryption and key lifecycle management in either on premise or multi-cloud environments, helping to improve:

• Security - Customers can store and manage keys in central, hardened appliances, and gain the visibility and control they need to consistently and effectively enforce security controls.
• Compliance auditing– The centralization of all key management operations lets Customers  produce comprehensive logs that could be used to demonstrate compliance with stringent security policies and industry regulations 
• Scalability – Customers can easily scale their key management and encryption to address the challenges of securing more data across numerous cloud environments
• Simplicity – Administrators have one comprehensive solution to enable a multi-cloud security strategy that is fast, easy and efficient 

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure gives customers flexibility to choose their preferred cloud operating models and the horsepower they need to run all their workloads in the cloud. Using Gemalto's customer controlled encryption operations with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can help keep an organization's data safe from unauthorized access through the encryption of applications, databases, files, virtual machines, multi-cloud environments and physical servers. For more information, visit Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

"Companies moving to the cloud don't want to have to rely solely on the cloud provider for security, instead many want to manage and maintain control over the security of their data. With Gemalto, Oracle customers have a 'Bring-Your-Own-Security' (BYOS) solution making it easier to enforce, monitor and track how, when and where data is being accessed," said Todd Moore, senior vice president of Encryption Products at Gemalto. "Working across multiple cloud services is becoming the norm. Using a single system helps companies have a holistic view into security operations instead of one with many silos and reduces the amount of configuration of the applications to meet existing and upcoming security models, compliance and regulations."

"Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can provide a straightforward migration path for customers to easily adopt cloud computing functionality. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can support billions of transactions, so it is easy for developers to build and deploy high-performance cloud native applications," said Sanjay Sinha, vice president, platform products, Oracle. "Expanding our partnership with Gemalto allows customers that need to manage their own cloud security operations the flexibility to BYOS to the Oracle Cloud. For customers the integration between Gemalto and Oracle doesn't require any retooling of applications reducing migration friction and the cost of implementation."

Temenos, the software specialist for banking and finance, today announces that Cooperative Bank of Oromia (CBO) has gone live with its UniversalSuite. As the bank increases its footprint in Ethiopia, this new technology will enable the bank’s growth strategy, supported by an agile core banking solution, powerful analytics, and a central platform to drive growth across all distribution channels. United System Integrators (USi) led the implementation of Temenos’ Core Banking platform at CBO.

Akalework Amde, Software Services Manager, USi noted: “CBO is the first bank of its size in the region to go-live on Temenos’ Core Banking platform with a “big bang” of 256 branches and 2.5 million customers migrating from its legacy system onto Temenos Core Banking. USi, adhering to Temenos’ implementation methodology, implemented Temenos’ Ethiopian model bank, successfully bringing the bank live in four and a half months”

Since its foundation in 2004, CBO has become one of the leading private banks in Ethiopia with more than 2.4 million account holders, 256 branch networks and over 1,800 agents spread throughout the country. With plans for continued growth, the bank needed a vendor that could power the operations at their physical locations, as well as their internet and mobile channels, while also accommodating the needs of their Islamic community. On top of that, the platform would need to scale in line with CBO’s future growth, as the bank continues to expand its domestic and international lines of business.

Aman Semir, VP Information Systems at Cooperative Bank of Oromia commented: “As a result of true teamwork between our organizations, we are very pleased that Temenos and USi have completed the implementation of Temenos’ UniversalSuite. This deployment gives us the peace of mind that we have the technology in place to meet the needs of our customers, support our growth and meet all local regulatory requirements.”

The bank's move to replace its existing legacy systems with the Temenos UniversalSuite will support its immediate goal of providing banking solutions that create greater customer experience with emphasis on cooperatives and agro-based businesses, and it’s long-term vision of becoming the leading private bank in Ethiopia by 2025. With Temenos’ comprehensive, front-to-back digital banking solution, the bank will increase efficiency and provide an optimized customer experience across all of their market segments.

Jean-Paul Mergeai, Regional Director at Temenos stated: As part of our winning strategy, we continue to set new benchmarks for delivery, which we strive to beat in our quest to deliver better and faster value creation for our clients and their customers. We are delighted that Cooperative Bank of Oromia has gone live with our conventional and Islamic digital banking offering. We would like to congratulate our Ethiopian partners, USi, for the quality of their services and their expertise which led to this joint success.  This rapid deployment and “go live” demonstrates the operational efficiency of our partnership programme and our ability to quickly equip financial institutions with the right tools to transform in a market undergoing significant regulatory, competitive and customer changes.”

It can now take as little as 9 minutes for stolen card and account data to be used via the dark web. With this in mind, Mastercard today announced the launch of Early Detection System, a new service that provides banks with a unique advanced alert for high-risk cards and accounts that are exposed in security incidents or data breaches.

Just last month, 143 million identities were reported as compromised in one data breach. Knowing that not all compromised accounts will be used fraudulently, and every second counts, Mastercard developed Early Detection System to help banks take action faster, and pre-empt more serious attacks.

Using Mastercard network insights, predictive capabilities and a combination of internal and external data sources, Early Detection System determines if a card or account is at risk and sends an alert to the relevant bank, quantifying the level of risk. The bank then uses the level of risk to more accurately prioritise what action to take – from monitoring transactions more closely to proactively issuing a replacement card.

“Knowledge is power, and this service helps banks act significantly faster and with greater precision to stop potential fraud before it occurs,” said Ajay Bhalla, president of enterprise risk and security at Mastercard. “Our card issuers can now proactively target the fraudulent activity resulting from previously breached or hacked data, helping them reduce costs and maintain the best possible cardholder experience.”

Early Detection System is available to issuers globally and captures all types of fraud across all transaction channels. The system identifies everything from active criminal trading of account data, to identification of cards being tested prior to being used for fraud, to account data that appears at-risk but without sufficient evidence to declare an Account Data Compromise event. This provides issuers with alerts on a much broader set of at-risk accounts at least 6 to 18 months ahead of traditional alerts.

Part of Security by Design

Mastercard has a long history of investing and innovating across multiple layers of technology – like EMV, tokenisation, physical and behavioural biometrics, and artificial intelligence – to protect every transaction.

At FinovateFall in New York, Sensibill shared their vision for personalization in banking with a demonstration of their new data insights tool, Pulse. Sharing the stage with over 70 industry leaders, Sensibill's cutting-edge technology earned the crowd's favor and won the "Best of Show" award.

Pulse builds off of Sensibill's Receipts solution to map customers' purchases to psychographic traits, like attitudes, lifestyles, and preferences. The tool, which is a personalization-enabler as well as a business intelligence tool, augments transaction and cardholder data with receipt data to create an end-to-end view of customers' spending behavior. The solution is intended to help financial institutions refine their customer profiles into more unique segments, derive actionable insights about them, and ultimately power personalization efforts.

"Tech giants, like Amazon and Netflix, have set a new precedent for personalization. Customers expect recommendations for services and products that are uniquely suited to their interests or needs. These expectations extend to their banks, too. It's critical then that banks move away from broad customer typologies if they want to deliver personalized experiences. Sensibill helps them break that mold," said Corey Gross, CEO and Co-Founder at Sensibill.

What can banks expect with Pulse? 
Beyond improving the bank's targeting and marketing efforts, the tool can be used to optimize decision-making across business departments and explore new value propositions for customers. The tool intends to drive business for financial institutions in various ways, including but not limited to:

• Increasing share of wallet. Visibility into off-card behavior helps banks understand when customers prefer cash or a competitor's card. Banks can use this intel to create retention incentives for disaffected customers and become their primary card providers.
• Retaining the most profitable/valuable customers. With a 360-degree view of customers' payment behavior, banks can more accurately evaluate customers' profitability, price sensitivity, and long-term value.
• Identifying life stage events. Certain products are patently linked to life stage events with financial consequences. Banks can position themselves to address these needs.
• Improved pipeline management. Banks can better identify customers who would benefit from different accounts, services or products and migrate those customers accordingly (i.e. a SME customer using personal banking).
• Discovering new segments. For example, freelance workers are an emerging market with unique spending behavior and financial needs.

In addition to product innovations, Sensibill is extending its services to more banks in the United States through their partnership with FIS - the world's largest global provider of financial technology solutions. "We're really excited to be working with FIS to deliver Receipts to the broader market. A go-it-alone approach isn't viable for all banks. This way, we're making services accessible to institutions that are embracing innovation and customer experience, but may not have the capacity to take it on themselves," said Gross.  

Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, believes waiting for digital threats to materialise will soon be consigned to history as we enter a new age of predictive cyber security capability able to ward off cyber threats even before they occur.

Digital Vision for Cyber Security offers a range of expert views on the scale of the challenge as cyber criminals become more sophisticated and Internet of Things security comes to the fore. The paper highlights new thinking to build cyber security resilience for the next generation by harnessing automation and machine learning to understand – and predict – the threat landscape. 

Presented by some of the leading subject matter experts within Atos and across public and private sector including McAfee, Darktrace and techUK, this new paper positions cyber security as a critical element of digital transformation - demonstrating that organisations across the public and private sectors cannot truly transform without securing themselves against an ever-expanding range of ubiquitous, sophisticated and rapidly changing cyber threats.  

Digital Vision for Cyber Security covers the role that cutting-edge technology will play in responding to these challenges and the balance organisations have to achieve between risk management, data sensitivity and the costs that these challenges present. It also touches on the cyber skills shortage and how it might be tackled.

Speaking ahead of its publication this week, Adrian Gregory, CEO, Atos UK&I said: “For years, the received wisdom for how to secure technology and data was a firewall, equivalent to a ‘lock on the door’. Today the answer is more complex.

“In a world where technology has burst out of the comms room into almost every area of life, how do we install walls and locks everywhere? Clearly, our approach to cyber security must adapt.

“In this paper we have collected a range of expert views on the size of the challenge and also the new thinking that can give us confidence in the face of the vast array of threats that exist in the cyber world.”

Pierre Barnabé, Executive Vice-President, General Manager Global Division Big Data & Security, Atos: “A more automated cyber security approach is essential to address the sheer scale, complexity and volatility of risks in the digital age. As Robert S. Mueller, ex-Director of the FBI once said, we cannot undo the impact of technology – nor would we want to. We must use our connectivity to stop those who seek to do us harm.”

Mariana Pereira, Director at Darktrace, the world leader in AI technology for cyber defence, said: “In an age of limitless data and complex networks, there is simply too much happening, too quickly, for legacy security tools to be able to deal with. Instead of trying to predict the hallmarks of the next WannaCry, organisations are increasingly turning to the latest advancements in artificial intelligence to detect and autonomously respond to in-progress attacks, before they have inflicted damage.”

Beehive, MENA's leading peer to peer lending (P2P) platform, has secured $5m investment as part of a Series A round led by Riyad TAQNIA Fund and supported by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Fund (MBRF), the financial arm of Dubai SME, as well as several other regional investors. This latest fundraise brings the total raised by Beehive to $10.5m since its launch.

Craig Moore, Beehive Founder and CEO, said:   

"We're delighted to have the support of our strategic investors in this latest round which demonstrates the appetite for investment into fintech businesses in the region and will enable us to further expand the Beehive digital model and drive product and market expansion."

To date, Beehive has successfully facilitated finance over $35 million (AED 130 million) to more than 200 business funding requests and registered more than 5000 international investors. In March, Beehive became the first peer to peer lending platform in MENA to be regulated. Launched in 2014, Beehive uses innovative technology to directly connect businesses with investors, giving SMEs faster access to lower cost finance and investors attractive returns and diversified risk.

"Beehive has attracted us as the pioneering regulated P2P lending platform in MENA. It has engaged in building strategic agreements with government and large corporates in the UAE, where it fulfills a clear financing need. We are particularly excited to support the company's expansion into Saudi Arabia where it would finance Saudi SMEs," commented Adel Al-Ateeq, Acting CEO, Riyad Capital

Abdul Baset Al Janahi, CEO of Dubai SME, who will also be joining the Beehive board said, "Beehive is a fintech pioneer and we've already seen our strategic partnership with them translate into immediate and tangible results for SMEs and our investment will further strengthen that commitment."

"Beehive is an SME for SMEs and our focus is on continued growth and broadening our reach to create further opportunities that will drive the ecosystem," added Rick Pudner, Beehive Chairman.

Riyad TAQNIA Fund (RTF) is a Saudi Arabia-based venture capital fund founded by Riyad Capital and TAQNIA. It is backed by leading institutional investors in Saudi Arabia and invests in the areas of ICT, Energy & Sustainability and Advanced Materials.