Published
- 08:00 am
Today HID Global, a world’s leading provider of trusted identity solutions, unveiled a new application, HID Approve. The new solution transforms mobile device into authenticator that authorizes online access and transaction requests, including banking transactions or corporate VPN access. HID Approve upgrades the level of trust for consumers and employees to make safe transactions.
The HID Approve mobile app integrates public key-based cryptography and push technology to create a new experience for clients of banks, retailers, and healthcare providers. It enables customers to have more control over who is accessing their confidential and property information.
The new technology adds security that is far more sophisticated and user-friendly with regards to existing methods of authentication. Furthermore, it increases cyber security for digital businesses and enterprises, at the same time improving customer and employee satisfaction.
Brad Jarvis, Vice President and Managing Director, IAM Solutions with HID Global commented: “HID Approve will transform secure digital transactions in ways similar to what Uber did for car service and mobile keys did for hotel check-in. HID Approve significantly simplifies and empowers consumers to better protect their finances, reduce fraud and have greater peace of mind.”
- 03:00 am
Eze Software Group, a global leading provider of investment technology, has bolstered its Eze Portfolio Accounting module with a Reconciliation Summary dashboard.
The Reconciliation Summary dashboard is one of many features of Eze Portfolio Accounting aimed at making reconciliations simpler, easier and more accurate. Users can now view all of their reconciled and unreconciled positions by fund and custody account, and filter the information further by fund and currency. The dashboard also shows all closing cash balance differences, grouped by cash account and currency, including records with breaks and any mapping issues. Users can auto generate missing trades without having to swivel between screens.
“Reconciliation in today’s market is complex, and funds need seamless, effective tools that automate the process. The Reconciliation Summary dashboard makes it easy to see at a glance where they stand at any given point in the day,” said Bill Neuman, Managing Director, Product Management. “Eze Investment Suite’s ability to automate our customers’ toughest workflows, coupled with unparalleled support by our expert staff, ensures our clients can dedicate their resources to investing, without having to devote significant time and effort to the daily operational tasks that need to get done.”
The technology is supported by a deep bench of fund accounting experts, with Eze steadily adding to staff throughout the year. There are currently more than a dozen fund accountants and staffers with extensive fund accounting and operations expertise working across the Development, Client Services and Sales organizations. The Client Services organization in particular is skilled at facilitating reconciliation, trade management, portfolio management and accounting implementations and migrations across multiple asset classes, currencies and various types of managed funds.
“We firmly believe there’s value in having in-house experts help clients set up their Portfolio Accounting functionality and best practices to be able to create a shadow NAV as well as facilitate reconciliations and data migrations,” Neuman added.
- 06:00 am
Financial professionals using Thomson Reuters flagship desktop can now integrate their internal and partner applications through the launch of its Side by Side Integration API. Together with App Studio, Eikon’s third-party developer suite, users can extract even greater value from Eikon through a more seamless workflow on a single desktop.
“Allowing the integration of Thomson Reuters news and data with other applications on a single open platform offers our customers a customized, time-saving, and seamless workflow solution.” said Debra Walton, managing director, customer proposition, Thomson Reuters. “Leveraging our Eikon and Elektron platforms in the FinTech community gives us the ability to deliver quality solutions to financial markets. We are also delighted to be working with OpenFin as one of new FinTech partners in this effort.”
Side by Side Integration allows for external applications to hook into the communications network that Eikon apps use to exchange information. Examples include Instrument Identifiers, Portfolio, or Trade Orders that can be passed between applications.
With Side by Side Integration, partners in the fintech industry could expand the value of their targeted propositions through seamless workflows for users in an open environment. For example, Side by Side Integration makes Eikon interoperable with the OpenFin common operating layer for desktop applications, enabling easy context sharing between Eikon and all desktop applications that run using OpenFin.
“It’s vital in the financial industry to encourage interoperability, especially so on the desktop. Better connectivity across apps and services, as aided by the Side by Side Integration, makes for time-savings, productivity improvements and corresponding financial gains,” said Mazy Dar, CEO, OpenFin. “Side by Side Integration expands and empowers this trend of interoperability. OpenFin is the first platform to integrate with the Side by Side Integration API, connecting hundreds of apps to Eikon’s powerful desktop in one fell swoop, which fits perfectly with our mission."
Thomson Reuters Eikon is a powerful and intuitive next-generation open platform solution for consuming real-time and historical data, enabling financial markets transactions and connecting with the financial markets community. Its award-winning news, analytics and data visualization tools help its users make more efficient trading and investment decisions across asset classes and instruments including commodities, derivatives, equities, fixed income and foreign exchange. Eikon is a leading desktop and mobile solution that is open, connected, informed and intelligent.
The API is available through the Thomson Reuters Developer Portal. With over 20,000 external developers using APIs across all Thomson Reuters business segments, the Thomson Reuters Developer Community Portal is an enhanced developer experience, designed and built by developers for developers to meet ongoing business challenges. More information is available here, including a link to a recent webinar introducing SxS.
Side-by-Side API and the Developer Community are just two of several ways Thomson Reuters delivers open systems and solutions for the financial community. App Studio - Eikon’s app development suite - enables clients and vendors to embed their applications, content and workflows into Thomson Reuters Eikon, creating an integrated end-to-end solution.
- 04:00 am
Wipro Limited, a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company has joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) as a founding member.
EEA is a collaboration of enterprises to promote, develop and implement enterprise grade Ethereum-based blockchain applications across industries for specific business use cases.
Ethereum is an open-source, blockchain-based distributed computing platform, featuring smart contract functionality. The EEA seeks to augment Ethereum adoption as an enterprise-grade technology, with research and development focused on privacy, confidentiality, scalability and security.
Wipro has been actively working on Ethereum to develop enterprise blockchain-based industry solutions and assets on a number of industry use cases. These solutions include Delivery versus Payments (DvP) settlement for securities and capital markets, skip-trace consortia for banking, peer-to-peer (P2P) insurance for the sharing economy, anti-counterfeit solution for supply chain traceability and many more.
Jeremy Millar, founder of Enterprise Ethereum said, "The EEA benefits from a diverse, yet enterprise-focused membership base. Wipro brings a global perspective on IT strategy and operations to this alliance. We are very pleased to have Wipro as a member as we launch the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance."
“We are excited to be a part of the founding team of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and contribute towards key aspects such as security, privacy and scalability as they will be the key determinants in accelerating blockchain adoption within enterprises. Enterprise Ethereum is a great way to fast-track enterprise adoption and Ethereum is one of the fastest growing technology platforms used by our clients for developing and deploying enterprise blockchain,” said Krishnakumar N Menon, Vice President, Service Transformation, Wipro Limited. “Enterprise Ethereum Alliance also fosters collaboration within the emerging community of blockchain developers. We look forward to working actively with the members of this alliance to shape the blockchain adoption by enterprises.”
“It’s great to have Wipro as a founding member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Having organizations like Wipro driving purpose-built solutions and accelerating innovation for businesses, adds significant credibility to the Enterprise Ethereum ecosystem,” said Marley Gray, Principal Blockchain Architect, Microsoft.
Wipro’s Blockchain Innovation Lab, which is part of its Blockchain COE (Center of Excellence), fast tracks the provisioning of blockchain environments to build use-case specific blockchain industry solutions. The COE focus is to enable client businesses innovate and to stay in tune with the emerging technology trends in blockchain by conducting proof of technology experiments around areas like scalability, performance and security of blockchain platforms. To enable enterprise level talent development on blockchain technologies like Enterprise Ethereum, Wipro has also created a Blockchain Academy to build in-house competency through a multi-level program.
- 09:00 am
Symbiont, the market-leading smart contracts platform for institutional applications of distributed ledger technology, today announced a strategic partnership with Chinese software giant Hundsun Technologies Inc, which includes an investment by a division of Hundsun in Symbiont’s Series A-1 round.
The investment is Hundsun’s first in both the United States and in distributed ledger technology. Symbiont’s board of directors granted Hundsun a board observer seat.
Hundsun is the dominant financial technology company serving China’s institutional securities, banking and insurance industries. Publicly traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, its market capitalization is approximately CNY 24 billion.
The strategic partnership brings Symbiont’s market-leading smart contracts software to Hundsun’s extensive customer base in China and Hong Kong, where the parties intend to streamline business processes in both public and private securities markets.
“We selected Symbiont because of its superior, mature and highly differentiated DLT stack. Its data layer is protected by market-leading security and privacy solutions, and its smart contracts have a proven ability to automate complex business logic, such as highly tailored employee compensation waterfalls for private companies,” said Guan Xiaolan, executive president of Hundsun.
“We are very pleased to have the backing of such a strong partner in Asia, and we look forward to working together on near-term opportunities,” said Mark Smith, CEO of Symbiont. “To have the support of such a prominent and respected partner is a clear vote of confidence for Symbiont.”
- 06:00 am
The carrier neutral data communication specialists at Custom Connect are making the cloud easier to navigate, cheaper, and more reliable with the launch of their Cloud Application Performance service. With a clear understanding of how mission-critical the cloud is to enterprises all over the world, Custom Connect will now offer CAP to connect global clouds with just one port and fixed, predictable, and transparent pricing.
The service will transform how enterprises navigate the quickly growing cloud technology sector, but also offer customers guaranteed bandwidth performance - one of the biggest challenges facing the cloud today.
Custom Connect’s CEO, Olav van Doorn: “Everything is moving into the cloud, and at Custom Connect, our vision is to secure the ever-important cloud application performance for our clients anytime, anywhere. We’re shifting away from the rest of the industry that’s focusing on their own ‘cloud islands’ instead of securing cloud network performance for global enterprises. With CAP, you gain full control over your global interconnected clouds, get guaranteed performance, as well as fixed predictable and transparent pricing”.
Custom Connect’s CTO Rutger Bevaart: “With Custom Connect’s newest service, the Cloud Application Performance, innovative businesses can now connect to every single cloud service in the world via one port, manage global cloud connections with one partner, and can rely on guaranteed bandwidth with end-end application performance. It’s never been easier to connect to the cloud”.
Custom Connect is a global data communication specialist that provides solutions to connect your offices, data centers, or cloud environments anywhere in the world. Our carrier neutral operating model is not bound to any single provider, meaning we can access any operator, carrier, or network worldwide. With our connectivity-model, we secure engagement with your customers, partners, and employees.
- 01:00 am
TIM Group, the global provider of software, services and platforms for institutional investors to achieve market-beating returns has recruited a new Sales Director in its New York office to increase its footprint in a key market and to continue to support its US clients.
Jeff Bauman joins the team from Thomson Reuters where he was responsible for selling quant datafeeds and analytics. Bauman joined Thomson Reuters as part of the StarMine acquisition in 2008. He began his career as an equity research analyst for Prudential Securities and Smith Barney. Jeff holds an MBA in Finance from Fordham Gabelli School of Business. Jeff will report to Michael Chiappinelli, Head of Sales - North America.
“Jeff’s career is the perfect combination of equity research, strategy and technological expertise, that will help TIM Group further connect financial industry professionals through our proprietary network,” said Chiappinelli. “TIM Group is revolutionizing how investment advice is distributed, analyzed and monetized and the appointment of Jeff will go a long way to expanding our network into new firms. We are looking forward to further growing our US team.”
The appointment of Jeff is the latest move the TIM Group has made as the company grows into its new office space at 888 Seventh Avenue, New York where it provides local delivery of client services and assists clients with specific requirements generated within the US market. Today, TIM Group’s network includes more than 2,800 sell-side contributors providing trade ideas to more than 250 buy-side firms globally.
“Market changes around the world are driving the need for trade ideas and market analysis delivered in real-time to provide the buy-side with demonstrably predictive insights into future stock prices,” said Jeff Bauman. “I look forward to growing TIM Group’s buy-side client base and contributions from the sell-side in the U.S. as the financial industry seeks the information necessary to make informed trade decisions.”
- 07:00 am
CloudCraze, the enterprise B2B commerce platform built natively on Salesforce, has collaborated with Deloitte Digital and awarded the leading creative digital consultancy Platinum Partner status, the highest level in the CloudCraze partner program. Together, they deliver full-service cloud-based B2B commerce solutions for enterprises in the manufacturing and consumer goods industry that are quick to implement, Salesforce-integrated and more profitable long term.
The alliance enhances the value that both companies bring to B2B commerce customers through the combination of Deloitte Digital's deep technological experience, industry insight and full suite of implementation services and CloudCraze's cloud-based B2B platform delivering speed to revenue, flexibility and customer focus. Deloitte Digital's vast industry experience and robust offerings have already made them instrumental for implementations with several of CloudCraze's high profile customers, including a large multi-national beverage and brewing company and one of the largest member-owned agricultural cooperatives.
"Deloitte Digital's creative, cloud-based approach to digital transformation has been a major asset for our customers over the years and our combined solutions provide unmatched value," said Ray Grady, president and chief customer officer at CloudCraze. "We look forward to leveraging Deloitte Digital's vast industry experience and are excited to have them on board as an integral CloudCraze Platinum Partner."
CloudCraze has worked closely with Deloitte Digital to build accelerated solutions. They combine a unique set of solutions and platforms, including Salesforce and CloudCraze commerce on Salesforce, to offer Deloitte customers a unified customer experience across the digital enterprise. The interactive platform was developed in response to customer need for a more robust integration of digital cloud platforms across CRM, commerce, digital marketing, and other customer engagement channels.
"Working with CloudCraze has allowed us to create even more engaging, strategic and flexible B2B commerce solutions with CloudCraze's unique speed-to-market and cloud-first, SaaS-based approach to customer engagement," said Paul do Forno, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and commerce and content practice lead at Deloitte Digital. "CloudCraze's unique offerings strengthen the digital ecosystem platform we have built and we're excited about the value the strategic alliance will bring our combined customer base."
This alliance comes at a time of growing importance for robust digital offerings in B2B. Estimates from Gartner show the digital commerce platform market will have grown at a compound annual growth rate of over 15 percent from 2015 through 2020. With a cloud-first, customer-centric approach to commerce, the CloudCraze and Digital Deloitte's joint services will enable B2B companies to stay ahead of the SaaS adoption curve, offering them a more efficient and engaging approach to commerce.
- 06:00 am
Analogic Corporation, enabling the world's medical imaging and aviation security technology, today announced the Middle East debut of ConneCT(TM), a breakthrough in checkpoint security scanning technology. ConneCT is designed to dramatically improve security, lower airport screening costs, and increase passenger throughput using an upgradeable computed tomography (CT) platform that makes it easy for airports and regulators to respond to changing security and operational requirements.
With features including an open network architecture, industry-leading 3D imaging technology, and automated threat detection, ConneCT represents a transformative advancement in the security industry, comparable to the advent of the smartphone in the telecom industry.
As the recognized leader in medical and security CT technology, Analogic has leveraged its decades of imaging innovation across platforms to improve airport security. Analogic CT technology is deployed in over 1,200 airports globally for high-throughput screening of checked or hold baggage, and Analogic threat detection software has achieved the highest levels of EU and US TSA certification for hold baggage screening.
"The ConneCT has an open architecture, which will allow regulators to respond to threats much faster than current proprietary systems," said Jim Ryan, senior vice president of Security and Detection Systems. "This 'open system approach,' combined with Analogic's superior 3D imaging technology, automated threat detection software, airport friendly user interface, and streamlined design, will give airports in the Middle East the world-class security solution they require."
"We are bringing the most advanced checkpoint security technology coming to market with a cutting-edge design that lends itself to the innovative atmosphere of this region," said Mark Laustra, vice president global business development and government relations. "International hubs need security solutions that let passengers move smoothly through the security process. ConneCT is designed to minimize the inconvenience associated with security requirements such as the recent electronics ban that slows throughput. ConneCT uniquely provides that level of security."
Airports worldwide have been exploring new types of security lanes and tray return systems intended to streamline the security process. Analogic's ConneCT was engineered to integrate with a wide variety of tray return systems, allowing airports to optimize checkpoints with the tray return system of their choice. Analogic will feature the ConneCT scanner at the Dubai Airport Show 2017, May 15-17, DICEC, Dubai, Booth #6170.
The ConneCT screening system is currently undergoing testing with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in the US and has entered European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC) certification protocol in Europe. Analogic continues to work closely with international certification agencies and airports to bring the ConneCT system to the global market in 2017.
- 03:00 am
Research on the global payment cards market forecasts continued strong growth in the Middle East and Africa and highlights significant opportunities for the international card schemes
Many people still do not have a payment card
According to RBR’s Global Payment Cards Data and Forecasts to 2021, the number of cards in issue in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) increased by 13% to 611 million in 2015, making it the world’s fastest growing region. Large unbanked populations mean that many people do not yet have a payment card, and indicate significant potential. RBR forecasts that the number of cards in the region will rise to 910 million by the end of 2021.
Domestic scheme cards favoured in some markets because of lower issuing costs
By far the largest payment cards market in the region is Iran, where all payment cards are domestic-only, as a result of the ongoing imposition of international sanctions. The RBR study shows that domestic schemes are also present in Israel, Morocco, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. Domestic scheme cards are sometimes favoured because of their lower issuing costs – in Morocco, for example, Centre Monétique Interbancaire (CMI) cards are frequently issued as entry-level products.
Share of Cards by Scheme in the Middle East and Africa, 2015
Source: Global Payment Cards Data and Forecasts to 2021 (RBR)
Rapid growth presents a large opportunity for international schemes
Mastercard and Visa make up a large and growing share of the remaining cards in the region outside of Iran and RBR’s report shows that they have made notable gains in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. This is through both organic growth and agreements for their brands to be added to domestic scheme cards to enable cardholders to use them outside the country of issuance. Cards featuring both a domestic and international brand were most recently launched in Saudi Arabia, where “mada” debit cards were introduced by the Saudi Payment Network (SPAN) in 2015.
According to RBR’s Chris Herbert: “International schemes are using various strategies to take advantage of the fast growth in the Middle East and Africa and they will continue to increase their share in most markets. Nevertheless, ongoing sanctions against Iran mean that domestic schemes are likely to be the only cards present in that country for the short term at least”.
