FIS, a global leader in financial services technology, and Cardtronics (Nasdaq: CATM), the world’s largest ATM owner/operator, today announced plans to integrate FIS Cardless Cash access across Cardtronics’ ATM fleet in the United States.

Imperial Capital Group, LLC ("Imperial Capital"), and its affiliate, Imperial Capital (International) LLP ("Imperial UK"), announced today the addition of Itish Popat and Jason Kim to its Structured Products Group. Mr. Popat and Mr. Kim will report to Keith Grimaldi, Managing Director and Head of Structured Products Sales and Trading.

"We are pleased to welcome Itish and Jason to Imperial further complementing our existing Structured Products Group team," said Tom Corcoran, President of Imperial Capital, LLC. "Their deep understanding of structured products and robust industry experience will enable our firm to better serve the US and European institutional investor community as well as adapt to the ever evolving market."

Itish Popat joins Imperial UK as a Managing Director in the Structured Products Sales Group in London and brings more than 20 years of varietal capital markets experience. Most recently, Mr. Popat was a Partner and Head of ABS / Financials Agency Broking Business at Vantage Capital Markets LLP. Prior to Vantage Capital Markets, Mr. Popat was an Executive Director of Fixed Income Sales with UBS and Head of UK / Ireland ABS Sales, where he covered UK & Irish Banks, asset managers, SIV's, insurance companies, pension funds and hedge funds. Prior to joining UBS, Mr. Popat spent just under nine years with HSBC in Fixed Income Sales and Trading. Mr. Popat earned a BA(Hons) in Business Studies from the University of Portsmouth.

Jason Kim joins Imperial Capital, LLC as a Senior Vice President in the Structured Products Trading Group in New York and has over 15 years of experience trading a variety of fixed income products. Most recently, Mr. Kim was an Executive Director at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. and primarily traded non-agency RMBS as well as CMBS, CLO and ABS bonds.  Prior to Oppenheimer, he held similar roles at JVB Financial, UBS and Deutsche Bank.  Mr. Kim earned a BA in Economics from Northwestern University and an MBA in Finance and Economics from the University of Chicago.

Genpact, a global professional services firm focused on delivering digital transformation, today unveiled Genpact Cora – an artificial intelligence (AI)-based platform that accelerates digital transformation for enterprises. Genpact Cora is a modular, interconnected mesh of flexible digital technologies that hones in on specific operational business challenges and tackles them from beginning to end, helping large global companies reframe and solve their most pressing real world business issues.

“In an environment being disrupted by new technologies and increasing competition, clients want to buy business outcomes, not just tools and products,” said Peter Bendor-Samuel, founder and chief executive officer, Everest Group, a leading analyst firm. “Genpact Cora is timely for an industry seeking digital transformation.”

As part of its ongoing strategy to drive digital-led innovation and digitally-enabled intelligent operations for clients around the world, Genpact has created Genpact Cora to provide the fastest path to driving meaningful transformation at scale. Genpact believes it is the first in the industry to fully integrate automation, analytics, and AI engines – in a single, unified platform, embedded with and drawing insights from Genpact’s deep domain expertise that comes from running thousands of intelligent operations and processes for hundreds of Fortune 500 companies across numerous industries. Genpact Cora drives digital transformation in a planned and managed fashion, without sacrificing the governance security and investment protection that mature and established businesses need.

“Achieving enterprise impact from digital transformation is challenging with so many disparate, disconnected technologies in the market,” said NV ‘Tiger’ Tyagarajan, president and chief executive officer, Genpact. “Genpact Cora brings leading digital solutions together in one unified platform, combined with the process and deep domain expertise that comes from decades of experience running intelligent operations. The combined benefit creates connected intelligence for our clients at a previously unattainable level of agility and speed to predictive insight, that then drives outcomes.”

Genpact Cora has a mature application program interface (API) design and open architecture that includes Genpact’s own intellectual property as well as leveraging best-in-class providers, integrating advanced technologies across three key areas: 

• Digital Core: cloud, software-as-a-service, blockchain, mobility and ambient computing, robotic process automation, and dynamic workflow;
• Data Analytics: advanced visualization, data engineering, big data, and Internet of Things (IoT);
• Artificial Intelligence: conversational AI, computational linguistics, computer vision, machine learning and data science AI.

The Genpact Cora platform is the foundation for Genpact products and consulting services already in the market, with more than 1 million users processing over 1.1 billion transactions annually, providing unparalleled practical predictive insights and learnings on how to make transformation real and sustainable. It brings together Genpact’s original process and industry domain depth with new digital capabilities through its recent acquisitions of Rage Frameworks, PNMsoft, and others. 

The platform already delivers speed to value in the market today in many industries, including:

• Deciphering data from equipment: A leading large equipment manufacturer leverages industrial IoT, machine learning, and advanced analytics from Genpact Cora to efficiently and intelligently process data, resulting in safer materials, less downtime, higher revenues, and lower maintenance costs.
• Reframing drug safety: A top pharmaceutical company is testing Genpact’s Pharmacovigilance Artificial Intelligence (PVAI) product to redefine drug safety. PVAI uses Genpact Cora’s AI, analytics, predictive modeling, and other technologies to automatically collect and analyze data from numerous sources on drugs’ adverse effects, including quickly translating unstructured data into meaningful, actionable insights. PVAI transforms drug safety operations from simply tracking issues to predicting and solving potential problems, with less human error, higher drug quality, better patient outcomes, and 100 percent regulatory compliance.
• Making customer service seamless: Genpact Cora’s AI and analytics powers Genpact’s LiveWealth product and allows a Fortune 500 financial services institution to speed customer response time, eliminate billing and asset reporting errors for institutional and high-net-worth individuals, and help shorten client cycle time from 45 days to on-demand. Customers now have a holistic view of their portfolio, and the company also cut costs 75 percent while facilitating effective regulatory compliance.
• Driving faster, value-added financial reporting: Inefficient manual financial reporting processes took many employees at a global consumer packaged goods company weeks to interpret both structured and unstructured data from various internal and external systems. Genpact’s AI Reporting product using Genpact Cora’s robotic process automation now generates these reports in a few days, automating 70 percent of data collection. In addition, the AI learns over time, allowing the company to have much faster, more accurate, and more frequent projections that drive better informed business decisions.
• Increasing new product speed to market: A global insurance provider uses Genpact Cora’s dynamic workflow to streamline new product rollouts by quickly capturing data on high-value customers, increasing processing speed and flexibility, and driving analytics real time for decision making – thereby increasing speed to market and driving revenue growth.

Citi announces the rollout of Citi Velocity Clarity, a comprehensive data and analytics platform using Big Data technology delivered through an integrated suite of advanced online functionalities.

The platform consolidates and analyzes data across multiple Citi Custody and Fund Services (CFS) products and will be expanded to include the broader Investor Services content in the future.
It leverages Citi’s private, cloud-based, big data on demand infrastructure to enable fast and efficient consumption of information drawn from multiple sources. Content can be consolidated into Clarity from a variety of Citi’s Custody and Fund Services systems, clients’ own internal data and third party data providers. The platform also offers advanced self-service customization functionalities including data on demand via an application programming interface (DoD API) that provides flexibility in connecting to big data content by using dynamic calculation and analytical engines, business intelligence tools as well as remote client data warehouses.

Drawing from this construct, clients can easily navigate through content tailored to their needs by using a series of dashboards monitoring and analyzing data regarding their investments including portfolio analysis, valuation, holdings, net asset value, counterparty risk, country exposures and trading flows.

“We are pleased to announce this exciting new service as a continued demonstration of our ongoing investment in Citi’s Custody and Fund Service offering globally,” Sanjiv Sawhney, Global Head of Custody and Fund Services said. “Clarity was designed as a turnkey capability, which allows clients to navigate through investment data in a seamless manner without the expense and timeframe usually required to implement a full data warehouse.The feedback from early adopters has been very positive with clients praising the design, ease of navigation, speed and overall user experience.”

Citi Velocity Clarity has been delivered to a core set of pilot clients earlier this year. The platform rollout will be continuing throughout the remainder of 2017 with Custody and Fund Service global accounting clients. Additional client segments and content will follow in 2018. Clarity is fully integrated with Citi Velocity, the award-winning research and trading platform, thereby providing clients with a single point of entry to access Citi’s data, analytics, research and execution services.

Commenting on the platform, Ciara Geoghegan, Director of Operations and Finance, Irish Life Investment Managers said: “As a pilot user of Clarity, we’ve been very pleased with the power and interactive nature of the platform. The dashboards allow for flexible data interrogation and the visualizations are intuitive and insightful. It streamlines what has historically been a much more complex data navigation process.”

“As our clients’ requirement for greater visibility, transparency and automation continues to grow, we are pleased to launch this new solution to help them navigate an increasingly challenging and complex market environment,” Okan Pekin, Global Head of Investor Services and Direct Clearing and Custody said. “The launch of Clarity highlights our commitment to continuously strengthen our Investor Services offering through innovative and integrated solutions that meet our clients’ needs across multiple products and technologies.”

Citi Investor Services provides institutional investors with access to an end-to-end set of flexible investment solutions across Prime Finance and Agency Securities Lending, Futures, OTC Clearing and Collateral Management, Custody and Fund Services.

allpago, the leading payment service provider in Latin America, will announce today at the Money 20/20 Conference in Copenhagen that its state-of-the-art payment gateway has been integrated into Zuora Inc.’s subscription management platform.

allpago provides all relevant local payment methods alongside industry leading levels of security and integrated risk management systems to help merchants improve conversion rates, boost revenues and run compliant e-commerce operations in Latin America.

This partnership enables all Zuora clients to immediately accept card payments made in local currencies as well as a wide range of popular alternative payment methods in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, without further integration or IT development work. These payment methods account for 70 percent of e-commerce transactions made in Latin America.

allpago currently covers more than 80 percent of the e-commerce market in Latin America. It will expand its coverage to more than 90 percent of the region by moving into Chile, Peru and Ecuador over the next 12 months.

Philipp Bock, founder & CEO of allpago, comments: “The payments landscape in Latin America is complex. Less than a third of shoppers have cards that can process foreign currencies, leading to high decline rates on cross-border transactions. By integrating with allpago, Zuora’s merchants can now offer all relevant local payment methods through their existing infrastructure and potentially more than treble the volume of customers they can sell to in Latin America.”

John Phillips, general manager of EMEA, at Zuora, Inc., comments: “Customers have changed and are looking for new ways to engage with businesses around the world. The addition of allpago as a payment provider on our platform will give digital merchants in Latin America the freedom to offer their subscribers the flexibility they are asking for.  Through allpago’s payment gateway and their local teams, our customers can offer the best buying experience for their Latin American subscribers and do business with tens of millions of online shoppers in the region”

Profile Software, the leading financial solutions provider, today announced its recent partnership with the British Bankers’ Association (BBA), aiming at further establishing its presence in the local banking financial sector.

Following another membership enrollment at a large association for the investment industry in the country, the partnership with BBA will allow Profile to better serve the financial services industry with innovative and market leading platforms. In particular, for the UK banking industry, Profile Software has a ready to use banking system that allows start-up, challenger, digital and large banks to deploy the functionality needed, while experiencing unique flexibility.

By becoming an associate member, BBA provides access to a network of 200+ member banks operating across the country and in various product lines. In addition, BBA is a starting point for any new banking organisation that wants to develop its digital and networking presence in the country. This is also in line with Profile’s strategic approach to the industry, as its fintech solutions provide a flexible and tailored service, thus giving the peace of mind to the banks to develop their operations, while deploying cutting edge technology solutions that can be scaled to the business needs.

Jason Cole, Commercial Director at the BBA, said: “We are very pleased to welcome Profile Software as an associate member. We are in discussions with the firm for many years and we follow their progress, as they deliver specialised banking and investment management software to the banking sector with great success”.

IHS Markit, a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions, today announced the launch of RPA Manager, a comprehensive service helping asset managers acquire investment research in compliance with MiFID II.

To reduce the potential for conflicts of interest, MiFID II requires asset managers to separate payments for research from trading commissions due to brokers that provide research.  If an asset manager intends to use its clients’ assets to fund research payments, the manager must disclose research fees, allocate those fairly among client accounts, and receive client approval for research expenses.  Payments must be made from segregated research payment accounts (RPAs) created by the asset manager.   

The new RPA Manager solution provides an online toolset to assist firms in adhering to MiFID II requirements, including research budget calculation, tracking and allocation, managing funding of the RPA through direct debit or commission sharing agreements, reconciliation, reporting and document management.  The solution will also soon integrate with the SWIFT network and help firms manage payments through a single interface for sending payment instructions to and receiving activity notices from the bank of their choice. 

“Commission unbundling creates a series of operational and procedural challenges for asset managers.  Solutions like RPA Manager will help trading, operations and compliance teams ensure they are synchronized and positioned to comply with MiFID II requirements related to investment research,” said Spencer Mindlin, analyst at Aite Group specializing in capital markets technology.  

“Unlike other major regulations in capital markets, which have largely impacted sellside institutions, MiFID II imposes significant burdens on asset managers,” said Michael Aldridge, managing director at IHS Markit.  “With RPA Manager and integrations to our other Brokerage and Research Services tools, we can offer firms an easy to deploy, scalable solution for administering research payments, tracking the quality of research, accounting for commissions and more.” 

RPA Manager integrates with other research management services from IHS Markit, including Broker Vote and Commission Manager, to provide a holistic research, commission and payment management solution.  

“Asset managers are bracing for an increase in operational intensity driven primarily by the looming MiFID II deadline,” said Tom Conigliaro, managing director at IHS Markit.  “We are actively collaborating with customers on the design and implementation of a holistic workflow solution that will bridge our multiple services to help fund managers administer newly regulated activity, such as managing commissions and tracking and evaluating research.”  

For asset managers seeking to outsource the administration of RPAs, IHS Markit plans to offer a service that can perform due diligence, governance and reconciliation activity on their behalf.  

On Thursday, 22^nd June, St. Petersburg hosted a large conference dedicated to blockchain and cryptocurrencies – Blockchain & Bitcoin Conference St. Petersburg. The event tickets to which were sold out one week prior to the end of registration featured 18 speakers from Russia and other countries. They focused on blockchain development in banking, regulation issues as well as a popular topic – ICO realization by blockchain startups.

Over half a thousand people took part in a conference and a demo zone.

What were speakers talking about?

Artem Tolkachev, the director at Deloitte CIS, dedicated his presentation to the world practice of technology regulations related to blockchain. He believes that ICO’s popularity will disappear maximum in a year because law doesn’t protect investors and startups raising money have no obligations. Investors need protection from “sheer lunacy” which is, actually, ICO, claims the jurist.

Dmitry Ermolaev, the project developer at Erachain, talked about difficulties connected to blockchain legalization in Russia. He thinks that blockchain startups getting million investments in a couple of minutes have troubles collaborating with traditional business in view of anonymity. Dmitry is confident that a smart contract cannot be signed without identification. That’s why Erachain has developed a special personal authorization which is personal data included in blockchain and bound to keys.

ICO was also criticized by Waves creator Alexander Ivanov. In his opinion, the community has to prevent “a too painful bubble collapse” which can lead to critical consequences for the cryptocurrency industry.

The founder of Waves claims he worked with ICO long before it became mainstream, “when the majority didn’t know such a word”.

“The current situation surprises me: people are raising crazy amounts of money. But they need to understand that if nothing changes, the bubble will deflate”, announced Alexander. In his judgement, the community needs to create a legal mechanism for ICO’s development and opportunities to protect investors in court.

The head of the department of innovative activity at NRU HSE and an active participant of sector conferences Marina Guryeva presented an update on trends and forecasts within blockchain economy. She paid her attention to collaboration of blockchain solutions and artificial intelligence. According to Marina Guryeva, robots are becoming subjects of economy establishing goods/money relationship without a human factor. “It’s cool when a fridge can order and pay for pizza delivery,” the speaker gave an example.

“Blockchain will have the bright future. Talking about long-term prospects, it refers to artificial intelligence and relationship between robots. We are moving into the world where robots will represent subjects of economy able to buy or sell something to each other within one system,” said the speaker.

The topic of successful cryptocurrency regulation was covered by the vice president at Wirex Alena Korotaeva. She compared approaches to regulation and investments in Russian and Japan, the country where bitcoin is legal.

The speaker demonstrated the statistics according to which an average age of a Russian bitcoin investor doesn’t exceed 30 years while in Japan cryptocurrencies are the subject of interest of people 10 years older and with considerable assets. For example, a Russian businessman often invests in the cryptocurrency sphere without reliable money reserves because he/she hopes to have profit from volatility. A Japanese entrepreneur invests only a part of his/her assets and relies on the practical use of bitcoin.

A representative of Solvena Company Lev Leiman gave practical advice to beginners. In his opinion, bitcoin’s price can grow by 1 000 percent and, besides, new digital currencies appear on the market all the time. The expert also recommended Twitter as a source of information about relevant events in the sphere.

In three years, business has started to understand blockchain much better – an optimistic thought from the director at “Sberbank-Technologies” Danil Kabanov. The reason is efficiency of blockchain in the process of communications and elimination of the loyalty problem.

“Business signs agreements in the world where there is no trust”, said Danil. According to his forecasts, massive transition of business to blockchain will happen by 2020. One of the reasons is development of consortiums like HyperLedger.

Maxim Azrilian, the chief technical architect at “Alfa-Bank”, told listeners about a joint case study of the bank and S7. Companies wanted to understand how blockchain is used in issuing of letters of credit. As a result, developers understood that time of signing the agreement decreased from 10 days to four hours.

According to the speaker, companies are involved in creating a platform for using blockchain in trade financing, factoring and letters of credit.

Nevertheless, companies need to specify the use of blockchain, believes the technical evangelist at Microsoft Konstantin Goldstein. “90% ICOs are bullshit” – such a wording perfectly reproduces opinions of Microsoft specialists.

As announced by the organizer of the conference – Smile-Expo Company – the issue of blockchain is entering the phase of popularity and is discussed even on federal TV channels.

Apart from working on traditional platforms (in Russia, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Ukraine), Smile-Expo is planning to organize similar blockchain conferences in Sweden and other countries

Payment Cloud Technologies (PCT), the London-based FinTech business, has today announced it has expanded its relationship with Unisys, a global information technology company that specializes in providing industry-focused solutions integrated with leading-edge security, to incorporate PCT’s innovative digital.VISIONtechnology as a key component of Elevate™ by Unisys, a new omnichannel digital banking platform that enables startups and established financial institutions to deliver secure banking services anytime, anywhere.

Elevate has been engineered to meet the on-demand requirements of today’s digitally savvy customers. It will use PCT’sdigital.VISION to seamlessly integrate into bank.VISION, PCT’s robust, reliable and fully compliant solution, which will help deliver banking grade financial services to Unisys customers.

The combined technologies enable Elevate customers to pay their bills on the go, transfer funds and apply for loans and mortgages anytime, using their choice of channel, whether on a mobile device, tablet, online or in-branch. Importantly, by allowing people to bank in a manner that fits with their lifestyle, banks can help increase customer satisfaction and drive brand loyalty.

bank.VISION’s agile cloud-native technology will allow Elevate’s users to keep pace with the digital banking age by securely enabling quick-to-market current accounts that overcome high market-entry barriers, at a fraction of the cost usually associated with establishing a brick-and-mortar financial institution.

Ian Clowes, CEO, PCT, said: “Since the official launch of our bank.VISION platform in November, we have gone from strength to strength, rapidly establishing ourselves as a trustworthy provider of quality banking services. Partnering with Unisys takes PCT to the next level, combining our collective global reach to more customers worldwide. Today’s digitally-conscious societies are rightly expecting leading-edge financial services to suit their lifestyles, and we’re proud to have engineered Elevate into a solution that works for everyone.”

PCT’s comprehensive back-office support will help ensure that Elevate is compliant with all supplier, regulatory and integration requirements. Elevate will also benefit from bank.VISION’s core programme and operational support systems, including connectivity to Faster Payments, card manufacture and distribution, provision of digital wallets and full fraud monitoring and dispute management.

Eric Crabtree, Global Head of Financial Services, Unisys, said: “The pace of change in financial services is exceptional. Recent initiatives have opened the doors to a host of customer-focused products and services that facilitate the modern customer’s busy lifestyle. That is why Unisys has partnered with PCT, to provide powerful market-proven technologies for the delivery of Elevate, a banking proposition fit for the digital age. Many of our established financial services customers, as well as new challenger banks, can now benefit from this robust, innovative solution.”

Building on Unisys’ global customer base, Elevate will be sold into the U.S., EMEA, LATAM and APAC markets to further consolidate the business’s international influence. 

The international relationship with Unisys accelerates PCT’s existing momentum in the digital banking industry, having launched bank.VISION with Ireland’s largest postal services provider, An Post, in November. An Post will be rolling outbank.VISION next month across 1,100 branches nationwide and delivering leading-edge financial services to its 1.7 million weekly customers.