National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository, has launched a linked transactions service. 

Abu Dhabi Global Market, the international financial centre in Abu Dhabi, is pleased to join R3 as a new member of its international consortium. 

With the rise of the “sharing” economy, companies across industries are increasingly acting as payment facilitators, building frictionless commerce capabilities for their customers. 

Profile Software, an international financial solutions provider, today announced the enrichment of Axia, its leading web-based platform for wealth management across all service lines, with new advisory service capabilities in light of the forthcoming MiFID II regulation.

Axia is the next generation in web-based, omni-channel solutions for the wealth management industry and can be effectively deployed either on-premises or in a secure private cloud environment, depending on the organisation’s preferences. It already counts successful implementations, having enthusiastic market recognition due to its elegant design, practical and industry-specific functionality as well as its customisable look and feel.

Axia has been continuously enriched to accommodate new functionality across various wealth management services. The latest addition includes new features that enhance advisory services. Specifically, advisory services apart from client onboarding, financial planning, client classification and profiling questionnaires (KYC, appropriateness, suitability), required documents collection and renewal, regular client reporting, notification and secure messaging, now also provide enhanced investment proposals with additional comparison and simulation capabilities, rebalancing, automated recommendations, interactive self-service investment proposal options, ex-post and ex-ante costs analysis, risk assessment and action plan formulation. In addition, investment strategies allow the definition of multi-dimensional model portfolios and tactical asset allocations that can group (if needed) a number of financial products.

Furthermore, Axia incorporates a set of other functions that have been enriched and relate to charges management, portfolio risk analytics, SWIFT interface, integration with numerous major international banks as well as rule-based alerts, to name a few.

The platform with only a couple of years in the market enjoys an exponentially increasing number of implementations that range from front-end only use to end-to-end solution deployment, effectively covering the needs of the Wealth / Asset Management and Family Office businesses.

UK tech firms Appointedd and AppInstitute are partnering to help businesses streamline online services through their own branded mobile app. 

For many consumers, when it comes to browsing the net, making quick purchases, interacting socially or managing day-to-day lives, smartphones have become the go-to device. Now, this new partnership between Appointedd and AppInstitute allows businesses to take a mobile-first approach too.

Appointedd’s seamless scheduling software delivers the world’s first online booking platform that can harmoniously schedule appointments across multiple time zones, enabling businesses to easily make appointments with colleagues, customers, partners and prospects wherever they are in the world. Appointedd’s suite of tools also empowers both enterprise and SME users to save time, streamline administration and enhance service delivery by providing a comprehensive set of additional features, including customer relationship management and marketing automation.

Appointedd’s customers will have access to AppInstitute’s AppSmart service, which offers the ability to integrate existing online services into their own branded mobile app. By enabling businesses to combine multiple online channels and provide a single point of contact, AppSmart removes the friction caused to customers who are forced to interact over a variety of platforms such as email, SMS, phone and web browsers.

AppInstitute offers businesses the ability to create customer-focused apps without any coding or technical skills. AppInstitute’s DIY app builder platform creates an app from scratch in just a few minutes using information from a business Facebook page, or customers can customise a pre-designed template. The platform enables a business to take complete control over its app’s branding and functionality, removing the barrier of expensive mobile app development costs. The partnership with Appointedd aims to enable business owners to streamline existing online services into one mobile-friendly touch point.

Leah Hutcheon, CEO and founder of Appointedd, said:

“AppInstitute is the perfect partner for Appointedd. Our technology enables any business to take bookings from its website and Facebook page and now, thanks to AppInstitute, bookings can be taken from a business’s mobile app. We are excited to be working with such an innovative company, and being able to turn apps into a business’s own booking portal feels like it will add value to a myriad of SMEs in the UK and US.”

Today Coupa Software, a leading provider of cloud-based spend management solutions introduced Coupa Open Buy with Amazon Business.

It is a convenient way for businesses search, find, and buy goods, while all their organizations’ required spending and budget controls are applied automatically. Moreover, this is a great opportunity to close a deal at lower costs, improve compliance, and attract high-end users.

Usually, in various organizations, employees are required to buy from catalogs, maintained by their employers.  However, due to ever-changing needs, employees may not find what they need in the catalogs. Thus, they might purchase the goods, outside of their corporate channels, which may result in non-compliant spending with no proper budget checks or approval. 

Coupa Open Buy supported by Amazon Business, enables Coupa customers visibility and instant access to millions of items beyond the catalogs managed by their employer. This helps decrease the likelihood of employees buying outside their entities’ approved processes.

"Traditional procurement catalogs rarely keep up with the latest products and services and often do not reflect the best prices and volume discounts available in the market,” said R "Ray" Wang, principal analyst, founder and chairman of Constellation Research, Inc. “The ability to access the buying power of one of the world’s biggest retailers from within your own spend management platform ultimately provides choice, flexibility, and control. This is where B2B and B2C come together."

Wolters Kluwer’s Finance, Risk & Reporting business has hired Rajat Somany as Global Head of Strategy, Product and Platform Management – a newly created role. 

Somany will have global responsibility for all aspects of strategy, product management and platform profitability, based in London. He has more than 25 years of strategy, technology and operational management experience in the global financial services sector. For the past 12 years he held a variety of senior management roles as a Managing Director at Citigroup, with international assignments spanning Europe, Asia-Pacific and the U.S.

In his new role Somany reports directly to Clive Pedder, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Wolters Kluwer’s Finance, Risk & Reporting business.

“With this senior hire we are further strengthening our overall product strategy and go-to-market capabilities,” Pedder notes. “Rajat has significant senior experience in the banking world that will allow us to further cement our position as the leading provider of integrated regulatory compliance and reporting solutions. I’m delighted to welcome him to the firm.”

“Regulators are demanding greater integration across business processes at banks and faster reactions to changing regulation,” Somany says. “Siloed approaches are, as a result, a thing of the past, and this is where Wolters Kluwer can help banks adapt. The firm has long proven itself to be a trusted provider of best-in-class regulatory reporting, risk and finance solutions for financial institutions globally, adopting agile and innovative approaches as content-led technology experts. It’s an exciting time to join the firm and I look forward to working with my new colleagues to provide new and existing clients with access to market leading solutions.”

At the end of last year Chartis Research named the company #1 for Regulatory Reporting in its RiskTech100® report. Notably, this is the sixth year running that Wolters Kluwer has achieved this honor, with 2016 also seeing the firm win a plethora of other accolades for its dominant position in regulatory reporting (from the likes of FinTech Finance and Data Management Review). Wolters Kluwer’s OneSumX was also named Best Risk Management System by Banking Technology magazine at the end of 2016.

In the past few months leading banks from every corner of the world have implemented the company’s OneSumX solution for Regulatory Reporting, Risk and Finance (including IFRS 9 solutions). Major financial services providers to have recently announced their use of Wolters Kluwer include Nordea, BBVA, CIBC, Australia’s Queensland Treasury Corporation and The Swedish Export Credit Corporation.

Today announced a solution that will enable ANSYS engineering simulation technology to be rapidly added to applications built on the ThingWorx®Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) platform from PTC. The development of a connector between these two technology platforms will enable customers to transform raw data into new forms of actionable intelligence. The connector will integrate intelligent digital simulation models with products as they exist and operate in the real world. This will open up new opportunities for companies to create value by enabling them to optimize operations and maintenance and to integrate them into their product development processes.

Simulation helps companies understand situations that may occur – such as a product failure – as early as the design phase. When faced with limited access to rich historical data, companies can leverage simulation models to generate an initial "as designed" set of expected outcomes or product performance. The results of these simulations act as a rich source of data that can be used for supervised machine learning and predictive modeling. The ongoing connection between real-world performance, simulation, and machine learning helps companies make sense of data that can lead to predictive models and a more insightful feedback loop, enabling them to improve product design and modeling. 

The physical pump connects to its digital twin using ThingWorx 

The IoT is making it possible to create a digital twin that combines real-time data about a physical product with the organization's digital information about the product. Simulating digital twins provides advanced intelligence and insight into a product's behaviors. The combination of the ThingWorx platform capabilities with ANSYS simulation models will enable companies to deploy powerful applications that can analyze current operating conditions, rapidly identify and diagnose operations issues, predict future operating conditions, and improve product performance. PTC and ANSYS will make the capabilities of this solution available within IoT applications developed on ThingWorx.

"Obtaining value from the data generated by connected products is one of the primary reasons companies invest in the Industrial IoT," said Catherine Kniker, chief revenue officer, Platform Business, PTC. "Simulation technology combined with machine learning can help Industrial IoT solution builders identify and make sense of the data needed to improve product design and performance – and develop next-generation products. We look forward to seeing how solution builders will create new value by introducing our solution with ANSYS, a preferred simulation partner, into their applications."

"Many of our customers are looking to digital twins to disrupt their industries by drastically lowering their operating and maintenance costs and by marketing their products as optimized services in real time," said Eric Bantegnie, ANSYS general manager. "By leveraging the solution that ANSYS and PTC will bring to the market, our customers will bring powerful capabilities to new Industrial IoT applications. We look forward to demonstrating the value of this solution at LiveWorx17."