Published
- 05:00 am
Diebold Nixdorf, Incorporated today announced it is adjusting its full-year financial outlook for 2017.
As previously disclosed, the company's banking business is increasingly made up of large, complex projects with higher software content, resulting in a longer customer decision-making process and order-to-revenue conversion cycle. As a result, the timing and volume of orders to date leads the company to adjust its 2017 guidance.
In addition, the delay in systems rollouts also has a negative impact on the company's service business. This change in volume, combined with investments in hiring and training in the service organization as part of the company's transformation, will pressure near-term margins.
"We are encouraged by the positive feedback we are receiving from customers, which demonstrates our strong competitive position," said Andy W. Mattes, president and chief executive officer, Diebold Nixdorf. "Clearly, we are disappointed in our near-term financial performance. That said, we continue to improve our operating expenses from the prior year and are taking steps to further accelerate our cost reductions. As a result, we are increasing our DN2020 net savings target to $240 million. We are committed to realizing the full potential of our new company and delivering results for all our stakeholders."
- 01:00 am
First Data Corporation, a global leader in commerce-enabling technology and solutions, and CardConnect Corp., a payment processing and technology solutions provider, today announced the successful completion of First Data’s tender offer to purchase the outstanding shares of CardConnect common stock for $15.00 per share in cash.
The tender offer expired one minute after 11:59 p.m., Eastern Time, on July 5, 2017.
First Data subsequently completed the acquisition of the remaining CardConnect shares of common stock not acquired in the tender offer through a merger pursuant to Section 251(h) of the General Corporation Law of the State of Delaware. As a result, CardConnect is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of First Data and CardConnect shares will no longer be traded on the NASDAQ.
“We are thrilled with the acquisition of CardConnect and the opportunity to partner with Jeff Shanahan and his team and to integrate and expand the innovative products and skills that they bring to First Data,” said First Data Chairman and CEO, Frank Bisignano. “This acquisition allows us to improve our service offerings for our JVs and other distribution partners, accelerate our integrated solutions strategy, and enter the ERP integration business.”
As of the expiration of the tender offer, 22,987,356 shares were validly tendered and not validly withdrawn in the tender offer, representing approximately 72 percent of CardConnect’s outstanding shares of common stock, according to the depositary for the tender offer. Notices of Guaranteed Delivery were delivered with respect to 499,747 additional shares, representing approximately 2 percent of CardConnect’s outstanding shares of common stock, according to the depositary. First Data has accepted for payment and expects to promptly pay for all validly tendered (and not validly withdrawn) shares.
All CardConnect shares of common stock that were not validly tendered have been converted into the right to receive $15.00 per share in cash, without interest and less any applicable withholding taxes, the same price paid in the tender offer.
CardConnect CEO Jeff Shanahan will continue to lead CardConnect operations and will serve as an Executive Vice President and as a member of First Data’s Management Committee, reporting to Frank Bisignano.
CardConnect and First Data’s merchant acquiring businesses will be consolidated in First Data’s financial statements starting in the third quarter of 2017, but CardConnect will continue to operate under its own brand and will remain headquartered in King of Prussia, PA.
- 06:00 am
Visa today announced the availability of Visa Checkout with Air Canada, Canada's largest airline. With Visa Checkout, Air Canada customers can spend more time planning their trip and less time filling out payment and billing information.
With more than 22 million enrolled accounts worldwide, Visa Checkout enables millions of consumers to pay in just a few clicks, and only have to fill out payment and shipping information once. Visa Checkout is currently available on aircanada.com for desktop and mobile web formats and will be available on Air Canada's mobile app next year. Air Canada and Air Canada Vacations customers now have a simpler way to pay for tickets, seat upgrades or bag check fees online with Visa Checkout.
"At Air Canada, we are focused on making our customers' purchasing experience as convenient as possible. Integrating Visa Checkout as a payment option for both Air Canada and Air Canada Vacations offers our customers a quick, secure and easy checkout experience," said Duncan Bureau, Vice President, Global Sales, Air Canada.
"This summer, it will be faster and easier for Canadians to fly away with Air Canada, using Visa Checkout," said Stacey Madge, President and Country Manager, Visa Canada. "We are pleased to team up with Canada's largest airline to help make paying for travel online faster than ever."
Visa Checkout is live in 23 markets, including: U.S., Australia and Canada, where the product first launched in July 2014, as well as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, France, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Poland, Singapore, Spain, South Africa and United Arab Emirates and United Kingdom.
The rapidly expanding list of merchants continues to make it easier for consumers to buy online, on any device, using Visa Checkout.
- 06:00 am
Financial Risk Solutions (FRS), a Dublin-based provider of unit-linked investment administration and compliance oversight software, is pleased to announce that Friends First, one of Ireland’s leading life assurance companies, has selected its Invest|GRCTM (Governance, Risk & Compliance) software to produce Key Information Documents (KIDs), a central requirement of the upcoming Packaged Retail and Insurance-based Investment Products (“PRIIPs“) regulation.
PRIIPs Regulation:
PRIIPs regulation will take effect in January 2018 and will ensure that PRIIPs manufacturers prepare a Key Information Document for each PRIIP that they produce and publish each KID on their company website.
KIDs will be more than a regulatory requirement to provide additional documents – they will be a key component of point-of-sales illustration material and must be provided in good time (before the consumer is bound by any financial decision) and must clearly outline;
· key features of the investment product
· risks
· rewards
· costs of each investment product
Friends First: Ahead of the Industry:
In selecting the Invest|GRCTM solution, Friends First is demonstrating industry-leading preparedness for PRIIPs regulation, as well as deepening an existing relationship with Financial Risk Solutions which already supplies Friends First with Invest|ProTM, an investment administaration software solution.
The compilation of KIDs is extremely complex for PRIIPs manufacturers. Once compiled each KID requires quarterly updates based on the previous five years’ unit prices and current positions holding data. The KID also needs to demonstrate a range of performance scenarios showing possible returns. For Friends First this means that the Invest|GRCTM solution will be generating in excess of 200 KIDs each quarter.
Shane Quinn, Commercial Product Director at Friends First commented on the decision to choose Invest|GRCTM:
“Following a competitive tendering process we are delighted to choose the FRS Invest|GRC™ software to generate our KIDs and view this important legislative change as an opportunity to showcase our strong investment products.”
Frank Carr, Chief Marketing Officer at FRS commented:
“It is a testament to the quality of our software, thought leadership and the relationship between our two companies that Friends First have again chosen FRS to provide their software solution. Invest|GRCTM (Governance, Risk & Compliance) is an award-winning solution* and we look forward to our continuing relationship with Friends First.”
- 08:00 am
Santiment, the datafeeds platform for showing the true state of the crypto-markets, has successfully closed its two-stage token crowdsale on July 5, 2017, raising a total of $12,215,250 USD worth of ETH.
Santiment raised 32,000 ETH in a preliminary community sale, followed by a pre-sale facilitated by Cofound.it’s Priority Pass community, which raised 13,000 ETH in less than 60 seconds. Santiment became the first project to partner with Cofound.it, a platform for nurturing and incubating the world’s most innovative startups planning crowdsales.
Santiment Founder Maksim Balashevich said: “Santiment is proud to announce the successful sell-out of our token crowdsale. Now that the offering is complete, we can accelerate our mission to give crypto critical information packaged in an ideal interface so that traders can make optimal data-driven decisions in rapidly-surging markets. We are immensely grateful for the support of our community. Their support makes our quest to deliver data and analytics to the crypto-markets possible.”
Santiment’s crowdsale commenced with a community sale on July 4, 2017 for its most engaged supporters, followed by a sale via Cofound.it’s Priority Pass community on July 5 that reached the overall cap. The result means Santiment will not hold its public crowdsale planned for July 6, 2017.
Cofound.it CEO and Co-founder Jan Isakovic said: “Cofound.it is delighted to have partnered with Santiment in their crowdsale process, and cemented Cofound.it Priority Pass as a best practice for crowdsales in 2017. The highly successful sale will help to establish Santiment as the leading datafeeds platform for the crypto community and mature the rapidly growing crypto-market.”
Santiment provides investors with a comprehensive way to identify and avoid duplicitous crowdsale projects. Using objective data feeds and expertly crafted content, Santiment offers investors an open database of projects that gives them a trading advantages and minimizes the risk of their investments.
Santiment will focus its efforts on assisting three consumer bases: wealth and hedge fund managers, novice crypto traders, and data vending channels. Wealth and hedge fund managers will be able to leverage the Santiment platform to obtain a variety of datafeeds for quantitative trading. Traders new to the crypto-markets can use Santiment to obtain easily understandable market insights and trends. Data vending channels — including exchanges like eToro, Bittrex,
and Bitfinex, as well as asset management platforms like ICONOMI and Melonport — will benefit from real-time data solutions that will provide them a key edge while trading.
The crowdsale funds will be distributed as follows: 50% will be used to develop datafeeds, 15% for datafeeds and service acquisitions, 15% for marketing and business development, 10% for operational expenses, 5% for legal expenses, and 5% remains as a reserve fund.
The SAN token provides users and exchanges access to streams of information and feeds. Moreover, SAN is the sole means of accessing auctions for exclusive datafeeds and content related to token sale and team analysis, market research, project due diligence, and country-specific regulations. Non-exclusive services will also be available through subscriptions payable in fiat currency.
Maksim Balashevich said: “Already in an alpha stage, Santiment has developed a working mobile app offering historical price feed and charts, a trollbox sentiment feed, and a sentiment journaling game. Thanks to the enormous support of our community, Santiment can continue to build out its mobile and web terminal. Moreover, the crowdsale places Santiment in prime position to establish itself as the financial market data and content platform of choice for the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, comparable to the position that Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters hold in traditional financial markets.”
- 07:00 am
Product sourcing’ and ‘bottom line’ have been negatively impacted the most since the drop in the pound, say SMEs
- 41% of over 500 SMEs surveyed said the triggering of Article 50 has had a negative impact on their business
- 65% said leaving the EU will not affect their ability to hire staff
- Product sourcing and bottom line have taken the biggest hit since the vote to leave, according to SME owners
According to a recent survey by small business lender, Liberis, 62% of British SMEs voted to remain in the EU.
The survey asked over 500 UK small business owners how they voted in the 2016 EU Referendum and what effects Brexit has already had on their business. Since negotiations to leave the European Union began, 41% of those surveyed said that they have felt a negative impact due to Brexit. Product sourcing and services have been hit the hardest with 27% of businesses citing these areas a struggle since the leave vote.
SMEs voting to leave or remain
Almost two thirds of those surveyed said they voted to remain in the EU, with the IT, online and marketing sectors comprising 77% of this total - more than any other sector.
Of business owners who voted to leave the EU, retail was the sector who voted to leave the most at 17%, suggesting that access to the free market might not be as important to UK retailers.
According to the survey, the highest earning businesses with a turnover of over £1,000,000 a year voted to leave the EU more than any other, at 30%. At the opposite end of the spectrum, 60% of micro businesses, with a turnover of up to £50,000, voted to remain.
Negative Effects of Brexit
41% of those polled said that the triggering of Article 50 has had a ‘negative affect’ on their business. However, 54% revealed they haven’t felt any positive or negative effects on their business.
When asked which areas of their businesses have been negatively affected by the decision to leave, the majority, 47%, said “none of the above”, which included sales or leads, business relationships, bottom line, business development, product or service sourcing and hiring staff. However, 27% of SMEs surveyed said that product and service sourcing has suffered, with bottom line also being negatively affected by the referendum results at 24%.
Positive Effects of Brexit
When asked which areas of their business have been positively affected by Brexit- including sales or leads, business relationships, bottom line, business development, product or service sourcing and hiring staff- 76% said ‘none of the above’ have been positively affected, with only 12% saying sales and leads have benefited.
The survey also found that 65% of respondents don’t believe leaving the European Union will affect their business’ ability to hire staff.
Imports and exports at risk?
Businesses, who said they import and export, were split on how leaving the EU would affect their ability to source products, services or materials at a reasonable price with 52% assuming a negative impact. -ends-
- 03:00 am
Concurrent, a global leader in storage, protection, transformation and delivery of visual assets, and Alluxio, developers of the world's first system that unifies data at memory speed, today announced a joint solution that provides real-time data analytics and machine learning to help service providers analyze viewers' preferences and video consumption patterns.
The joint solution brings together Concurrent's Aquari(TM) Storage platform with Alluxio Enterprise Edition (AEE) to provide a faster and more scalable alternative for Hadoop users than the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). This combination allows service providers to quickly extract and analyze vast amounts of data that were previously discarded as useless, helping to identify actionable insights and discover new revenue and customer retention opportunities.
"It is imperative that media service providers have the tools and resources they need to deliver content and take advantage of market opportunities immediately and without limitation," said Haoyuan Li, CEO at Alluxio. "By combining Alluxio's virtual distributed storage system with Concurrent Aquari scale-out storage, service providers will be able to deliver instantaneous information essential for targeted advertising and optimized content libraries, thereby growing revenue while keeping operational expenses under control."
Alluxio provides a unified view of enterprise data that spans disparate storage systems, locations and clouds, allowing any big data computational framework to access stored data at memory speed. Alluxio runs critical workloads for numerous Global 2000 companies that include Baidu, Barclay's Bank, CERN, ESRI, Huawei, Intel, and Juniper, among others.
Concurrent Aquari Storage is a modern, intelligent storage system that features simultaneous support for multiple file- or object-based workloads. Built on a true scale-out architecture, Aquari Storage seamlessly and independently scales throughput and capacity. This translates into increased flexibility and scalability to better manage growing visual asset libraries and the applications that process them.
"Concurrent has been providing tier-one service providers around the globe with high-availability storage solutions for decades," said Scott Ryan, Senior Vice President, Products at Concurrent. "By partnering with Alluxio, we are able to further enhance the availability and personalization of the services that our customers offer their end-users. This joint solution provides critical insight into how and when media is consumed and ensures that service providers can take advantage of real-time analysis at memory speed."
- 06:00 am
Thomson Reuters today announced the launch of Thomson Reuters Labs™ – The Incubator. Located in Switzerland, the Incubator will host early-stage entrepreneurs building next-generation products in big data, advanced analytics, distributed ledgers, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other transformational technologies. As part of the official program, startups will receive access to Thomson Reuters world-class data and content sets, mentoring from experienced executives and networking opportunities for investment and commercialization.
The Incubator is the next horizon of the company’s significant investment in the Thomson Reuters Labs network. With locations in innovation ecosystems around the globe, the Innovation Labs collaborate with customers, universities and startups to rapidly prototype and validate solutions using data science and lean experimentation to develop products and solutions to quickly meet evolving market demand.
Mona Vernon, Chief Technology Officer for Thomson Reuters Labs, commented, “Technology is evolving at an unprecedented rate and corporations need to keep pace. Partnering with startups and other market disruptors is essential for us to be agile and responsive to our customers. The Incubator will become an essential part of our corporate strategy to drive organic growth through innovation.”
The Incubator has officially enrolled two startups focused on Fintech.
- Open Mineral is an early stage Swiss start-up disrupting the commodities market. The team has developed a multi-sided platform which will directly connect the mines and smelters of physical commodities such as copper, zinc and lead, increasing transparency and lowering fees.
- WealthArc is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform for the $120 trillion investment management industry offering digital client interaction and real-time new generation investment management for family offices, wealth managers and private banks. The platform handles the integration of data, consolidation of assets and digital reporting as well as a robo-advisor offering to clients.
Måns Olof-Ors, Head of Thomson Reuters Labs – Zurich Region and the Incubator added, “Our ultimate goal is to help our entrepreneurs realize their vision and get their solutions to market. In turn, we gain valuable insight, working with creative disruptors to identify new opportunities and ensure we are providing our clients with the most up to date trends impacting their professional markets.
The team is currently reviewing a pipeline of additional applicants for the six month program. Applications can be submitted direct through the online website here.
Carlo R.W. de Meijer
Economist and Researcher at Independent at Financial Services Advisor
Just like banks, a growing number of exchanges worldwide have already taken a serious look at the way they can leverage blockchain technology. This in order to ‘get rid of’ the existing time consum see more
Susan Horne
Head of the International Employment Practice at Paul Hastings
One of the HR issues that the banks have been wrestling with as part of their Brexit insulation and response strategies is the contrast in labour laws in other EU jurisdictions. see more
