The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) today took action against two American Express banking subsidiaries for discriminating against consumers in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and other U.S. territories by providing them with credit and charge card terms that were inferior to those available in the 50 states. American Express also discriminated against certain consumers with Spanish-language preferences. Over the course of at least ten years, more than 200,000 consumers were harmed by American Express’ discriminatory practices, which included charging higher interest rates, imposing stricter credit cutoffs, and providing less debt forgiveness. American Express has paid approximately $95 million in consumer redress during the course of the Bureau’s review and American Express’ review, and today’s order requires it to pay at least another $1 million to fully compensate harmed consumers. 

“Consumer financial protections are not confined within the 50 states,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray. “American Express discriminated against consumers in Puerto Rico and the U.S. territories by providing them with less-favorable financial products and services. They have ceased this practice and are making consumers whole. In particular, because they self-reported the problem and fully cooperated with our investigation, no civil penalties are being assessed in this matter.” 

The American Express Company is a multi-bank holding corporation based in New York and a global provider of credit and charge cards, savings accounts, certificates of deposit, and travel services. American Express Centurion Bank and American Express Bank, FSB are both bank subsidiaries of American Express Company that administer American Express Company’s credit and charge card lines of business. These companies offered 45 credit cards and charge cards, which are similar to credit cards but require the full balance to be paid monthly, in its U.S. states market, including cards such as the American Express Green, Gold, and Platinum. In addition to managing cards offered in the 50 U.S. states, these two companies also manage cards offered in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and other U.S. territories, which include Guam, American Samoa, and Northern Mariana Islands. 

Beginning in 2013, American Express self-reported to the Bureau differences between its Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands cards (collectively, Puerto Rico cards) and its cards offered in the 50 U.S. states (U.S. cards), as well as differences with respect to certain consumers with a Spanish-language preference. Through the course of a supervisory review, the Bureau concluded that, from at least 2005 to 2015, American Express’ Puerto Rico cards had different—and often worse—pricing, rebates, and promotional offers, underwriting, customer and account management services, and collections practices than its U.S. cards. The Bureau’s review did not find that American Express intentionally discriminated against its customers but rather found that these differences were the result of American Express’ card management structure, which had different business units overseeing its Puerto Rico cards and U.S. cards. These differences spanned the product lifecycle and included: 

• Charging higher fees and interest rates and offering less advantageous promotional offers: One American Express bank charged Puerto Rico cardholders higher average interest rates and annual fees than similarly situated U.S. cardholders. American Express’ promotional offers (such as 0% introductory rates or waiving first year fees) for its Puerto Rico cards were also inferior. Similarly, for some residents of Puerto Rico and the U.S. territories who did get U.S. cards, including some small business cards, American Express gave less valuable promotional offers than those given to 50 U.S. states residents. These discriminatory pricing practices harmed over 200,000 cardholders.  
• Imposing more stringent credit score cutoffs and lower credit limits: American Express applied stricter credit score requirements to its Puerto Rico cards than its comparable U.S. cards but did not apply more stringent credit score cutoffs to other U.S. geographies. As a result, American Express denied credit to certain Puerto Rico card applicants who would have been approved for comparable U.S. cards had they lived in the 50 U.S. states. American Express also imposed lower initial credit limits on certain Puerto Rico cards and thus provided less access to credit than to similarly situated U.S. cardholders. Additionally, one American Express bank outright denied Puerto Rican residents who applied for certain consumer and small business card products that were offered to U.S. residents. These discriminatory practices harmed over 35,000 consumers and small businesses. 
• Requiring more money to settle debt: In using third-party debt collectors, one American Express bank settled card debt held by Puerto Rico cardholders on less favorable terms than debt held by its U.S. cardholders. On average, Puerto Rico cardholders had to pay 73 percent of the owed amount, compared with only 55 percent paid by U.S. cardholders. It also excluded certain Puerto Rico cardholders from letter campaigns with even more advantageous debt settlement offers through which U.S. cardholders were able to settle, on average, for 42 percent of the owed amount. American Express also did not provide certain collection offers and services that it gave to U.S. cardholders, including benefits for paying all or a part of their past due balance, to Puerto Rico cardholders and cardholders who requested Spanish language communication. These differential collection practices harmed over 53,000 cardholders in Puerto Rico and the U.S. territories, or who indicated a Spanish-language preference. 

Enforcement Action
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act authorizes the CFPB to take action against creditors engaging in discrimination in violation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA). ECOA prohibits creditors from discriminating against applicants and prospective applicants in credit transactions on the basis of characteristics such as race and national origin. Under the terms of the CFPB order released today, American Express is required to: 

• Fully remediate harmed consumers: During the Bureau’s review, American Express provided monetary and non-monetary relief to 221,932 harmed consumers, resulting in approximately $95 million of remediation. American Express must review and verify the adequacy of any redress done prior to the CFPB order. The Bureau is ordering American Express to pay at least an additional $1 million to redress harmed consumers who have not yet been fully compensated, as required by the consent order. 
• Not discriminate against residents of Puerto Rico, the U.S. territories, and consumers with a Spanish-language preference: American Express must develop and implement a comprehensive compliance plan to ensure that it provides credit and charge cards in a non-discriminatory manner to consumers in Puerto Rico, the U.S. territories, and customers in collection who prefer Spanish-language communications. American Express has already modified its management structure such that it manages its Puerto Rico cards under the same division as its U.S. cards. The compliance plan must include any necessary additional improvements to its compliance management system; compliance audit program; credit and charge card business structure, policies, and procedures; employee training procedures; and complaints procedures. 

The Bureau did not assess penalties based on a number of factors, including that American Express self-reported the violations to the Bureau, self-initiated remediation for the harm done to affected consumers, and fully cooperated with the Bureau’s review and investigation.

Concardis has increased its stake in Cardtech Card & POS Service GmbH to 100 percent of the shares. In 2015, the Eschborn full-service payment provider acquired some 70 percent and thus a majority of the shares in the Cologne-based payments company, and now Cardtech will be fully integrated into the Concardis Group. It will continue to exist as an independent limited liability company under German law and Dr. Dietrich Gottwald and Christof Kohns will continue to be the firm’s managing directors.

“By taking over Cardtech we are strengthening our position in technical network operations and bringing crucial IT expertise on board. In this way, we will be able to expand the Cologne site into a central technical hub and press ahead more efficiently there with developing innovative solutions for stationary and virtual Points of Sale,” comments Marcus W. Mosen, CEO of Concardis. “By bundling expertise under a single roof we will be able to work together more closely within the group and thus develop new production solutions for our clients even faster.”

To date, Cardtech has primarily been specialized in POS network operations and payment settlements. To do full justice to the role of an omnichannel payment provider, in the course of the last two years a payment service provider platform for e-payments was set up with Concardis.

“As part of the Concardis Group we will be able to develop our company into a leading technical network operator and IT competence center. At the same time, we will play a decisive part in establishing an internationally active German payment champion, which is the expressed goal of Concardis GmbH. We are very happy to be joining up with our colleagues in Eschborn to realize this vision,” says Dr. Dietrich Gottwald, Cardtech Managing Director. 

The complete buy-out of Cardtech was facilitated by Advent International and Bain Capital Private Equity, the new partners in Concardis GmbH. The consortium acquired Concardis at the beginning of 2017 and announced that by making stronger investments in infrastructure and innovation they wished to accelerate the payment service provider’s growth. They laid the first foundations for this buy-and-build strategy in April of this year when they acquired the purchase-on-account specialist Ratepay, where the plan is likewise to integrate it into the Concardis Group as an independent company.

PayByPhone, the global leader in mobile parking payments, today announced that it has appointed Francis Dupuis as President and Chief Executive Officer effective August 23rd, 2017. Kush Parikh, former President and CEO, has stepped down from the role after his successful 3.5-year term with the business. During his time at PayByPhone, Kush led the business to profitability, established a strong focus on end customers and was pivotal in its ground-breaking sale to Volkswagen Financial Services. 

"With more than 20 years of experience in the software industry and a deep product background, Francis is exactly the kind of leader we need to further grow and innovate in the parking market on an international scale," said Stefan Imme, Head of M&A and Investment Management at Volkswagen Financial Services AG.

Francis, a long-standing member of the executive team at PayByPhone, takes the reins at a pivotal time for the company. The recent acquisition of PayByPhone by Volkswagen Financial Service AG gives the PayByPhone team unprecedented access to the automotive industry at a time when smart parking and smart city initiatives are booming.

"I'm very excited about the opportunity we have to build on our history of innovation and continue to drive the transformation of the parking industry," Francis Dupuis said. "We're extremely well poised to grow the business to its true potential."

Trifacta, the global leader in data wrangling, today announced that Deutsche Börse AG (DB1Gn.DE), one of the world’s largest market infrastructure providers, has implemented Trifacta Wrangler Enterprise to accelerate the preparation of granular and complex data for new insights and data products.

“As one of the few exchange groups globally, we operate across the whole trading and clearing value chain and deal with large amounts of extremely varied data. Taking that data, developing analytics and improving the marketplace through the application of data science are imperatives at Deutsche Börse,” said Konrad Sippel, head of Content Lab, Deutsche Börse. “By using Trifacta, the Content Lab team can develop and implement data driven solutions across the group and implement long-term, strategic projects in areas like risk management, investment decision making and trading analytics.”

Trifacta enables Deutsche Börse’s recently established data science team, the Content Lab, to deliver value across the organization by investing time in strategic data-related initiatives rather than data preparation and cleansing. Along with improving efficiency, Trifacta facilitates collaboration between data scientists and business experts by allowing them to work from one visual interface. Trifacta Wrangler Enterprise allows Deutsche Börse’s analysts and data scientists to quickly examine the properties of a data set and communicate with internal business experts on what types of analysis can be done.

“Deutsche Börse is a leader in capital markets and great example of an organization utilizing data to drive significant transformation in their business. As a global marketplace and transactions services provider operating one of the world’s leading stock exchanges, Deutsche Börse manages a tremendous amount of securities information and recognizes the immense business opportunity this data represents,” said Adam Wilson, CEO, Trifacta. “We’re excited to partner with Deutsche Börse on enabling their Content Lab team to more efficiently wrangle diverse data to create new data products and services.”  

CloudTrade, the leading provider of cloud based e-invoicing services, today announced that its unique e-invoicing solution has been selected by Marketboomer, the APAC based procure to pay (P2P) solution provider, to help drive efficiency and cost savings across the hotel and hospitality sector.

CloudTrade now forms an integral part of Marketboomer’s global procure to pay (P2P) offering, interfacing directly into Marketboomer’s API and many of the world’s leading operators in the hospitality sector have already started to transition to paperless invoicing.

Nathan Gyaneshwar, Marketboomer’s CEO, said “CloudTrade’s integration to Marketboomer’s API provides a simple way for suppliers, who don’t have the technical resources to connect directly to our API to move to paperless invoicing. For hotels, that results in quicker processing, eliminates manual entries and the associated errors, and eliminates all paper from the invoicing process.

“Hotels using Purchase Plus, Marketboomer’s purchasing platform, are already benefiting from efficient buying processes, now they will also benefit from full P2P with purchase orders and invoices flowing automatically to/from all of their suppliers”.

CloudTrade’s partnership with Marketboomer helps hotels and their preferred suppliers to buy and sell in the most effective way, substantially reducing administration costs and the time associated with printing, postage, data entry and document handling, by fully automating their accounts payable (AP) processes.

One business which is already taking advantage of the partnership and e-invoicing is Accor Hotels, the global hotel operator.

Darren Pike, ecommerce Manager at Accor Hotels says: “Accor Hotels has recognised the huge benefits that Marketboomer’s P2P and paperless invoicing solution, with CloudTrade’s technology, brings to our business. One of the keys to the success of the project has been to achieve high adoption rates and to on-board our suppliers as quickly as possible. CloudTrade has helped solve that problem with their unique approach to e-invoicing.

“Rather than suppliers having to change their technology and processes, or duplicate the creation of their invoices, our suppliers can simply create a PDF version of their invoice and CloudTrade’s technology maps the data directly into Marketboomer’s accounting system”.

Richard Manson, CloudTrade’s co-founder and Commercial Director, adds: “CloudTrade offers an e-invoicing service that removes the barriers typically associated with supplier adoption.  We can mop up those suppliers who are not in a position to do the technical development in order to connect direct to Marketboomer’s API. Because the process of on-boarding through CloudTrade is so simple, we achieve extremely high on-boarding rates and can get suppliers up and running within minutes, something no other e-invoicing solution can do.”

Path Solutions, a global provider of Sharia-compliant software solutions and services to the financial services industry, today announces that it was selected Number One Best Selling Islamic Banking Software Provider Worldwide in IBS Islamic Banking Sales League Table 2017. This ranking marks Path Solutions’ leading position in the annual table for the 8th consecutive year, where it has continuously maintained the top position.

IBS has also ranked the leading software firm as the World’s 5th Best Selling Primary Universal Banking System Provider for the period 1st January 2016 - 31st December 2016 in IBS Sales League Table 2017. Path Solutions beat major international IT vendors from around the world and solidified its position among global winners at the top of the pile. These two accolades cement the company’s leadership in the financial software business and confirm the strength of its pioneering solution portfolio.

The 2017 Islamic Banking Sales League Table which ranks niche system suppliers in the Islamic financial services segment, was released in the August issue of IBS Journal. This year’s table - the result of an extensive analytical research conducted both by IBS Intelligence and Cedar Management Consulting - revealed upward momentum in the fintech industry over past year. 

According to the IBS Islamic Banking Sales League Table, Path Solutions achieved a total market share of 30% of the Islamic core banking deals in 2016, demonstrating that the market is in need of pure play vendors with Sharia-compliant capabilities, able to meet industry compliance requirements and adapt to the digital revolution.

As quoted by IBS; Path Solutions’ Islamic core banking system - iMAL maintained its leadership position in the Islamic Sales League Table notching 9 deals in 2016, more than double its number of deals in 2015.

The Islamic banking industry has become a complex battlefield for software providers. The table shows that the market for Islamic core banking systems is characterized by the presence of a growing number of IT vendors offering tweaked software systems in line with the guiding principles of Sharia. Path Solutions is the only Islamic core banking system provider dominating a market expanding at an exceptional rate. 

“We are glad that we are one of the few banking software vendors in the world, who have been able to maintain our growth and sustain our position as the leading Islamic banking software vendor. We have indeed performed well this year, witnessing a strong growth compared to the prior year as we continue to benefit from increasing client demand and favorable market drivers. Given the challenging and complex environment in which we operate, Path Solutions’ industry know-how and trusted expertise is proving to be highly sought after. Looking forward, we continue to see a number of favorable drivers for our business which, when combined with our ambitious growth plans, give us the confidence in our prospects for the current year and beyond. I take this opportunity to thank all our clients, new and old, for placing their faith and confidence in us. We are also grateful to IBS and Cedar Management Consulting for their continued efforts and for giving us the opportunity to continue to highlight our capabilities”, commented Mohammed Kateeb, Group Chairman & CEO of Path Solutions.

In 2017, Path Solutions continues to outperform the competition. The company has reported successful performance and a strong momentum winning several significant deals in new countries mainly in Morocco, Tunisia and Suriname.

Path Solutions has been chosen by over 120 forward-thinking Islamic financial institutions spread over more than 37 countries around the world. The company’s next-generation core banking system is technologically advanced, flexible and extremely robust, providing Islamic financial institutions with a distinct business advantage at a crucial time for the industry.

Check out the Islamic SLT 2017 in IBS Journal August edition.

Nasdaq, Inc. has announced the availability of proprietary U.S. equity feeds from Equinix's London International Business Exchange(TM) (IBX®) data center - LD4 - located in Slough, U.K. As part of Nasdaq's efforts to bring U.S proprietary equities data to a larger audience, Nasdaq now offers Nasdaq TotalView and Nasdaq Basic from LD4. Nasdaq Basic combines Nasdaq Best Bid and Offer (QBBO), with either Nasdaq Last Sale (NLS), or Nasdaq Last Sale Plus (NLS Plus).

"We continue to focus on working closely with our clients around the world in order to help them gain secure, efficient access to our markets," said Jeff Kimsey, Head of Global Data Products, Nasdaq. "Buy-and sell-side clients based in the U.K. can now access our U.S. data products directly from the exchange through the Equinix LD4 data center."

This new Point of Presence (PoP) will allow firms direct access to U.S. market data from the source, as well as the opportunity to subscribe to core and future U.S. market data products out of LD4. It will also provide these firms with increased opportunity to consume valuable U.S. equity data in a location more convenient to their operational base. Those who already have a network connection to Nasdaq at LD4 can use existing connections in order to receive the U.S. market data feeds, further reducing their costs.

"The financial services ecosystem in London and New York are at the heart of global trading. By providing additional market data to the London-based community via Equinix's LD4 data center, Nasdaq is providing participants with the richest information available to ensure increased business performance," said John Knuff, general manager, financial services, Equinix. "This data can be easily and securely consumed through direct interconnection for rapid and secure connectivity."

According to the Global Interconnection Index, a new market study published by Equinix, London and New York are projected to be the top markets for Interconnection Bandwidth in Europe and the U.S. by 2020. Interconnection Bandwidth is defined as the total capacity provisioned to privately and directly exchange traffic with a diverse set of counterparties and providers at distributed IT exchange points hosted inside carrier neutral colocation data centers. The study also forecasts the banking and insurance segment will be the largest consumer of Interconnection Bandwidth, as digitization is forcing this industry to support new customer engagement models.