Published
- 01:00 am
Citizens Bank has announced that it will partner with Bottomline Technologies to deploy a market-leading online and mobile banking platform for its Commercial and Business Banking clients.
The new digital banking platform will provide clients with an integrated suite of cash management and payment services that can be tailored by market or industry segment. Businesses can also personalize dashboards to make day-to-day tasks faster and easier, saving them time and money and providing the insights they need to make good financial decisions. The new platform is designed to manage complex fraud risks and keep business payments secure.
“Clients want to be able to complete their cash management activities with automation, speed, security and flexibility, leveraging the latest technology to make their jobs easier,” said Michael Cummins, head of Treasury Solutions at Citizens Bank. “This is the latest in a series of significant investments we are making in our product offerings to advance Citizens’ objective of becoming a best-in-class treasury management services provider.”
Citizens decided to partner with Bottomline on the new platform following extensive research into industry trends, vendor landscape and market conditions. The new integrated online and mobile application features more intuitive navigation; simplified transactions; integrated payment workflows; a robust set of alerts; user personalization with self-service capabilities; a consistent experience across channels and devices; and secure mobile delivery with the latest fraud and security controls. The Digital Banking platform leverages open Platform-as-a-Service technology that will enable Citizens to provide business and commercial customers with a unified digital banking experience and help the bank to more easily bring new features to the market.
“This new technology platform brings together a unique combination of financial services offerings which, until now, were largely restricted to single-point solutions that can be overly complex and expensive. We can deliver the seamlessly integrated experience now required for banks to engage customers in new and more advanced ways,” said Norm DeLuca, managing director and general manager of Digital Banking Solutions at Bottomline Technologies.
Bottomline’s award-winning platform has been recognized by Aite Group in four categories, including both Best User Experience and Most Open Architecture, in their 2016 Cash Management Vendor Benchmarking study.
Current Citizens clients are scheduled to begin migrating to the new platform in the second half of 2018.
Citizens is a strategic and financial partner, offering deep expertise, great ideas and seamless deal execution. The Citizens Commercial Banking approach puts clients first, and offers solutions that help clients make the best decisions throughout the life cycle of their business.
- 06:00 am
Today the Financial Solutions Lab (FinLab) at the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) with founding Lab partner JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) announced eight financial services innovators as the winners of its third competition, aimed at identifying solutions that can help Americans improve their financial health.
“Over the last three years, we have been incredibly impressed by both the quality and volume of applicants to the FinLab,” said Jennifer Tescher, CEO and founder of CFSI. “This year was perhaps the most competitive yet. We are encouraged to see so many talented startups and nonprofits focused on finding truly innovative solutions that can help the 57 percent of Americans who struggle with financial health.”
“At JPMorgan Chase, we are incredibly proud to mentor and support a data-driven community of innovators who are focused on helping more Americans achieve financial health,” said Karen Keogh, Head of Global Philanthropy, JPMorgan Chase. “We are delighted to see the progress that FinLab alumni have made over the past two years, with their products now serving over a million American consumers, and are confident that this year’s winners will continue to help us reach and empower overlooked populations.”
The broader issue of financial health was selected as this year’s challenge because 57 percent of Americans - some 138 million adults - have difficulty managing their daily financial lives, establishing a cushion for financial resilience, and positioning themselves for financial security and mobility according to CFSI’s Consumer Financial Health Study. Research from the JPMorgan Chase Institute found that expenses fluctuate by 29 percent - nearly $1,300 - on a month-to-month basis for median-income households and that income volatility affects Americans across the income spectrum, with older families exhibiting a wider range of income and expense volatility.
The 2017 winners were selected from more than 300 applicants from across the United States. Winners were announced Thursday morning at the EMERGE Forum in Austin, TX, an event which gathers more than 800 banks, credit unions, fintech innovators and other financial services providers to generate ideas around the new era of financial services.
- 07:00 am
Following a stakeholder consultation started in 2016 to determine industry requirements, PRETA commits to providing a compliance-driven directory solution to support market actors in meeting PSD2 access-to-account provisions.
PRETA’s initiative follows a call by the ERPB on 12th June 2017 for a “common, secure, resilient, reliable and up to date Directory Service on a pan-European level, which should be delivered by the market and should consist of shared information on AS-PSPs and TPPs.”
PRETA recognises that the PSD2 implementation process would benefit from collaborative action on a number of crucial practical elements needed for the PSD2compliant handling of access-to-account requirements.
In this context, the intense debates within the industry over the past 18 months on the pre-requisites for a safe and efficient co-operation between AS-PSPs and TPPs (as payment initiation services providers) have clearly shown the need for an appropriate directory service. To respond to this need, PRETA started looking into the topic with interested banks a year ago and is now gearing up to engage in a development project based on the results of a consultation conducted among this potential user community. At present, an initial working group including 15 banks from 12 countries is discussing the technical requirements for a pan-European directory.
“There is an obvious need for an operational directory to support both AS-PSPs and TPPs. TPPs will need a single point of reference to locate the interfaces of AS-PSPs, which in turn will require a single point of reference to identify TPPs authorised to access those interfaces,” said John Broxis, Managing Director of PRETA. “Beyond these key requirements to be tackled by such a directory, there are many possibilities for additional services aimed at reducing costs, improving security and reducing fragmentation.”
“PRETA has been a forerunner for Open Banking, notably by developing the MyBank service suite, the pan-European e-authorisation solution that today counts 250 connected banks,” said Giorgio Ferrero, CEO of PRETA. “PRETA is an acknowledged industry leader on the PSD2 subject matter, contributing to key industry initiatives, such as the ERPB’s Working Group on Payment Initiation Services, the Berlin Group, the UK Open Banking PSD2 Liaison, the Euro Banking Association’s Open Banking Working Group and the Open Forum on Open Banking. With this expertise, we are well-positioned to engage in this pan-European directory project based on a collective approach.”
PRETA intends to deliver its directory in close consultation with future users and relevant stakeholders.
- 08:00 am
Cinnober has recruited Ninni Pramdell as Group CFO. She will start this newly created position on September 1 of this year.
As Group CFO at Cinnober, Pramdell will be responsible for overseeing and managing the overall company group financials, including Cinnober subsidiaries.
“Ninni has great, solid experience from several international tech companies, and I warmly welcome her to Cinnober,” says Veronica Augustsson, CEO of Cinnober. Since we are growing and expanding our business, we need to expand our finance function as well. I am very happy that Anna Märta Göransson will continue to fulfill her assignment as CFO for Cinnober’s core business. With Ninni as a part of our finance team, we will have the strength we need to continue to expand within our exciting growth areas.”
- 03:00 am
StockViews Ltd, the online equity research platform, successfully completed a second round of equity funding.
The quality of traditional investment-banking research has been in decline for years. Senior investment analysts have departed the financial industry while banks stretch existing resources in an attempt to maintain coverage. This has resulted in a “maintenance research” model, focused on superficial coverage of quarterly results and a bias towards encouraging trading activity.
StockViews approaches research from an asset manager's perspective, focusing on the discovery of substantial opportunities that have been overlooked by the market. The platform combines exceptional talent and a unique research process with powerful technology.
The upcoming regulatory changes under Mifid II will further accelerate the shake-up of the industry and is expected to create growing demand from Asset Managers for high-quality, independent investment research.
With the latest injection of additional capital, the addition of senior industry experts to the management team and regulatory approval, StockViews is now preparing to launch its equity research platform to clients during the summer, ahead of the Mifid II legislation taking effect.
Tom Beevers, CEO StockViews Ltd, said: "As a result of the upcoming regulatory changes under Mifid II, it is clear there is a growing demand for high quality, differentiated equity research. The new capital, our expanding team of leading analysts and the arrival of our new Executive Chairman will position us well for this opportunity.”
Monique Melis
Managing Director at Duff & Phelps
Though individuals will remain firmly under the spotlight this year, with both the Libor and FX scandals resolved the regulator has softened its approach to enforcement action on big business. see more
- 05:00 am
Launching today is Jscrambler's Webpage Integrity module, an anti-fraud solution designed to protect webpages. It identifies fraud by detecting malicious tampering and client-side injections to webpages. Jscrambler is able to identify any kind of client-side injection (MITB, Malicious Extensions, Client-side XSS, Malicious/Compromised third-party code, etc.), be it a known injection or a completely new one (0-day attacks).
Man-in-the-Browser attacks, for instance, are one such example where attackers successfully target the device by first deploying Trojans and by then being able to fully tamper with the application. The number of Trojans has been increasing, spreading mostly through phishing campaigns. Eko and Smartbrowse are recent examples of MITB attacks that made the headlines. Eko, discovered on Facebook Russia in early 2015, spread malware via Facebook direct messages and scam video postings. Victims were sent links to phishing websites replicating Facebook and YouTube, which then prompted users to install video player extensions containing malicious code.
Using Jscrambler’s new module, it is possible to remove injections on the spot in real-time and report back in near real-time to the backend of the application, allowing it to react to the threat. Any organization with an important online presence or dealing with sensitive online assets should assume the end-user cannot be trusted. With Jscrambler in action, they can get precise information on what code was injected and where, giving them an unprecedented visibility on what's happening on the client-side and is an accurate tool to prevent a class of attacks that is growing in frequency and complexity, with serious financial consequences and impacting the reputation of companies and governments.
Other solutions to this problem have been proposed before but, in contrast to other technologies, Jscrambler’s Webpage Integrity module emerged as a solution that does not look for malware signatures. It looks for changes made to the untampered page and, by doing so, it is able to detect 0-day threats. The majority of the solutions available in the market fail because they can be easily tricked or removed from the path of the attacker. Jscrambler’s Webpage Integrity module is protected by Jscrambler’s code protection technology, trusted by more than 30,000 companies and individuals, including Fortune 500 businesses. This protection technology is unfeasible to trick and difficult to circumvent. Finally, it is completely plug and play, not requiring the installation of anything locally on the client device. It is completely transparent to the client device and supports all browsers and platforms.
“Having listened to the feedback from many of our customers and continuing our mission to protect the client-side, we felt that this was the right time to upgrade our solution in order to offer a unique proposition to the market”, said Rui Ribeiro, CEO of Jscrambler.
Jscrambler’s new Webpage Integrity module may be the solution to finally ensure that web applications will look and behave as intended on all browsers and devices and that users can run it safely - even in hostile environments as a compromised computer.
- 05:00 am
Sapient Global Markets, a global provider of business technology and consulting services for the financial and commodity markets, today announced it will deliver highly scalable, reliable and secure business services powered by a financial trade data hub using Microsoft Azure.
The banking and capital markets industries are witnessing increasing complexity of doing business globally, ever changing organizational requirements, rising operational costs and heightened scrutiny of data quality. This is driving firms to evaluate their existing capabilities to accurately perform day-to-day business operations with transformative solutions supported by analytics at scale.
New upcoming compliance regulations and frameworks such as the Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) and Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), will mean supporting a data infrastructure that impacts the organization globally. This includes enlisting new data entities, integrating with new data sources, supporting large volumes of data and processing power at speed and scale that continues to expand exponentially.
The solution powered by Microsoft Azure offers the flexibility and benefit of a proven cloud-based platform, along with Sapient Global Markets’ extensive track record and reputation for delivering business and technology consulting services and solutions. It will enable financial services industry firms to utilize cloud agility and scale for data-related assurance and analysis requirements through a variety of managed services. Using the service will help firms to deliver error identification and meaningful analytical insights for continuous process improvement.
The first offering under the collaboration is for regulatory reporting, powered by Sapient’s award-winning CMRSSM platform that manages reporting for trade, transaction, valuation and collateral data for multiple global regulations and has seen strong adoption from leading Industry customers already.
“After a thorough evaluation of the cloud providers in the market, Sapient decided that Microsoft Azure would be the best fit for our customers. Azure offers lower cost expenditure, alongside security features and privacy options that were unparalleled,” commented Arun Karur, vice president at Sapient Global Markets. “Our vision is to leverage Microsoft Azure capabilities to build out a series of service offerings that will support process related to trade data. Regulatory reporting is an obvious first step, where poor data will lead to inaccurate reporting and open firms up to censure and fines.”
Other managed services offerings under consideration on the Azure platform include targeting valuation modelling service, centralized trade content management service, as well as the use of machine learning tools for cost of trade analysis and failure identification.
“As banks and capital markets firms undertake strategic digital transformation initiatives, one of the top issues we hear from our clients is the ability to comply with complex enterprise wide regulatory mandates,” said Rupesh Khendry, Director, Worldwide Financial Services Industry Solutions at Microsoft. “Sapient’s leading CMRS SaaS solution is powered by Microsoft Azure - the cloud that offers financial institutions the security, scale and agility to manage mission-critical business needs.
Stuart Lacey
Founder & CEO at Trunomi
In less than 1 year the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be enforced. see more
Mike Harris
Financial Crime Director at LexisNexis Risk Solutions
While financial crime continues to be a significant concern, these figures show substantially more is being done today to halt its advance than in previous years. see more
