Published
Chris Skinner
Chairman at Financial Services Club
I have no academic papers or historical research view on what I’m about to post, although I will find some, but I was reflecting on my discussions of revolutions in see more
- 04:00 am
The software includes Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven Personalization and Recommendation Engines. These options allow travel businesses to mine data from multiple sources and provide personalised product offerings enabling better conversion rates and, ultimately, better margins. Further revolutionary tools gather insights and customer sentiments to better deliver what customers are looking for and what criteria is most important to them. Plus, new Revenue Manager allows for dynamic pricing, responding intelligently to competitors, and to sales and search trends.
TravelBox, the company’s signature, state-of-the-art reservation platform which is already in use by giants of the global travel industry, is complemented by innovative AI products. Importantly, all of CodeGen’s AI solutions can be integrated with TravelBox. Visitors can also look forward to viewing the cutting-edge online solutions that employ machine learning and natural language processing for more user-friendly search which in turn allows better merchandising of product and ancillaries rather than responding within a pre-determined framework.
Bharat Patel, president, sales, marketing and commercial, CodeGen, explains:
“We are looking forward to EyeforTravel Europe and to demonstrate to visitors how our exciting artificial intelligence led tools work alongside the industry-leading TravelBox. As a company, CodeGen has a long history of investing in the research and development of AI and I am thrilled to be demonstrating our new, revolutionary solutions for the travel industry to visitors at EyeforTravel.”
The technology on display at EyeforTravel Europe from CodeGen includes:
- TravelBox Surf – a multi-device web application which via its advanced algorithms and robust architecture, delivers superfast personalised holiday propositions and post booking management facilities
- Review Spotter – understands the natural language and semantics of travel reviews shared by customers allowing the user to easily extract sentiment-level intelligence
- Personalization and Recommendation Engines – a new intelligent review platform which builds user profile details of the customer to ensure personally tailored product recommendations in search results. This accelerates the booking process for the customer while enhancing conversions and retention
- Revenue Manager – Optimises pricing and product placements to increase revenue
- Artificial Intelligence and bot ready architecture – find out more about how CodeGen is utilising its long history of investing in artificial intelligence and bot technology to power the technical landscape of business with robust, futuristic tools
James Martin
Partner at DMH Stallard
International commerce brings huge opportunity to businesses and individuals that possess a unique product with mass appeal. see more
- 07:00 am
Concurrent, a global leader in storage, protection, transformation, and delivery of visual assets announces the availability of Origin Release 3, offering video service providers the most comprehensive origin platform for ingesting, hosting, distributing, and serving video content to any device, any time, over any network, for content service providers.
Concurrent's Origin Release 3 adds several new capabilities including "Restart TV" for live streams to IP devices enabling viewers to go back to the beginning of any live show they are watching; and new small footprint deployment options providing lower cost entry points without compromising functionality or the ability to scale as capacity requirements increase.
The platform uses a common integrated architecture to enable service providers to launch live video streaming, video on demand, Catch-up TV, Restart TV, and cloud DVR services to IP devices and classic cable set-top boxes. Integrated content adaptation for Just-In-Time IP packaging and encryption ensures the content is delivered using the adaptive bitrate (ABR) format and digital rights management (DRM) supported by the type of IP device.
"As viewers request more video services and flexibility for an ever-increasing array of consumer devices, service providers are challenged to meet new expectations and remain competitive," said Scott Ryan, Concurrent's SVP of Content Solutions. "Concurrent's Origin Release 3 delivers new revenue generating, value-added features supporting live, on-demand, and cloud DVR workloads for any device, from a single platform that is far simpler to deploy and scale."
With new redundancy and scalability features, Origin Release 3 can now be deployed with minimal footprint, without compromising functionality, reliability, and scalability. Instead of multiple separate servers supporting back-office integration, resource management, VOD, live streaming, and DVR, Origin Release 3 enables all these services to exist on a single server, or initially two servers to support seamless failover for high availability. Additional servers can be added to support live recording and streaming capacity scaling requirements.
New and enhanced features include:
- Multiple hardware and software deployment options from software-only, VM, single server, and clustered hardware solutions
- Restart TV for IP Devices, an addition to a comprehensive suite of time-shift TV options for both IP devices and RTSP set-top-boxes including Pause Live TV, Catch Up TV and Cloud DVR
- Content delivery for all devices, all formats, all protocols, to support RTSP/QAM Set-Top-Boxes and IP Devices
- Direct-to-object integration with AquariTM flexible and scalable performance storage
- Just-In-Time Packaging for streaming the correct format required by IP devices such as Smooth Streaming, HLS, HDS, and DASH
- Just-In-Time Encryption with DRM (Digital Rights Management) integration
- VOD ingest and storage, live ingest recording, and live IP streaming
- Comprehensive Back-office integration
- 08:00 am
A recent survey by Liberis, a UK alternative finance provider, reveals that 8 out of 10 consumers plan to use independent businesses in preference to larger businesses this year. The survey was commissioned by Liberis to discover current consumer attitudes towards small businesses. The data further revealed that 65% were aware that using a smaller provider can be more expensive, but responses suggested that the benefits of doing so outweighed the increased costs as 48% still wanted to boost the local economy and support their community.
Convenience and leisure are the main reasons why consumers choose a small business over a larger retailer
58% of respondents said they use a grocery and convenience store the most, with the older generation, 55 – 64 year olds, selecting this as their most used type of independent store.
Clothing, jewellery, books, music and gift retailers were the second most utilised businesses at 45%, followed by cafes, bars, pubs and eateries at 44%, suggesting that consumers spend their disposable income at smaller, leisure focused establishments.
The primary reason for shopping small was due to convenience, suggesting that locality is still advantageous for many purchases. However, almost 50% of those polled said that they shop small to support independent establishments, indicating that this plays an important role in purchasing decisions.
Friendly and personalised service makes ‘small’ successful
51% of those polled said there is a noticeable difference between the quality of customer service offered in small businesses compared to larger stores. One respondent said “small stores seem more genuine and go out their way to help you” and another said at “smaller stores the service is more personal”, suggesting that in order to be competitive against bigger brands, your business must continue to provide a memorable and tailored customer service.
Limited product selection and price are a challenge for small businesses
50% of consumers said that a ’limited product range’ selection is the number one drawback to using a small business. Almost half (48%) said that smaller stores tend to be more expensive, which was their second highest concern.
Very few people stated brand penetration (e.g. online offering, household name and peer recommendations) as an influential factor in their decision to support a small business, where historically, being a household name has gone in a larger brand’s favour. However, when asked why consumers shop at larger stores, price was the number reason at 47%. It was the 65+ age bracket that chose price as their main reason to shop at bigger businesses, which indicates that this age group keep tighter control over their finances than other age groups.
“A more varied marketplace for consumers is dependent on the UK’s small business sector, having another major chain retailer doesn’t increase choice, in fact it reduces the choice. Liberis support local highstreets, domestic hospitality, entrepreneurs and small scale industries here in the UK and in turn they all contribute significantly to the overall economy. Our findings show that consumers share the importance of growing this sector and the value that it brings everyone.”
- 04:00 am
Temenos, the software specialist for banking and finance, today hosts over 1,200 delegates at its 18th annual Temenos Community Forum in Lisbon.
The theme of the conference, “Real-World Fintech”, addresses the truth beyond the fintech hype, with real-world examples of the exciting innovation coming out of banks and fintech companies. The conferences also takes a closer look at some emerging technologies – such as Artificial intelligence and blockchain – highlighting real-world use cases.
Across a series of 12 mainstage presentations and 32 breakouts, 22 customer speakers and 24 industry experts will present alongside Temenos thought leaders, and our platinum sponsor, Accenture, to share experience and shed light on what it takes to be the world’s most successful banks. The program includes interviews with customers such as Nordea Bank, Credit Suisse, EFG Bank and First Abu Dhabi Bank about how technology helps them to build and sustain leadership positions.
Throughout the two-day event, 23 Temenos partner sponsors and exhibitors will further bring to life and quantify the areas where innovation and collaboration - in areas such as cloud, data, and payments - can help banks stay ahead. Delegates will also have the opportunity to learn more about open banking, through and with access to the 18 solution providers exhibiting in the Temenos MarketPlace zone.
TCF will also play host to what is now a regular feature of TCF, the global final of the Innovation Jam. The winners of the regional competitions in Abu Dhabi, Miami, London Geneva and Singapore will compete in Lisbon for the crown of global champion, a prize which will be decided by TCF attendees.
David Arnott, Temenos CEO commented: “The pace of technology and regulatory change is accelerating in the digital age. This opens up new competitive threats for banks as well giving them the opportunity to embrace new, collaborative models that will deliver better customer outcomes. Our goal at this year’s conference is to challenge some conventional thinking around digital banking and make concrete what banks should do to take advantage of the opening banking opportunity. In particular, we believe that for banks to offer rich, engaging, personalized experiences mobile first that are critical for survival over the next 10 years, they will need to undertake full front to back renovation of systems -new channels alone will not be able to offer a single view of the customer and cope with the huge demands of real time processing and high volume interactions. To address the perceived challenges around system replacement, we will be highlighting several customer cases of how progressive renovation de-risks projects and speeds up time to value.”
- 06:00 am
Today, Plaid and Dwolla announced a new partnership to offer a fully tokenized ACH payment integration. The partnership makes it possible to tokenize account and routing numbers and authenticate user bank accounts through Plaid and start accepting Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments in minutes with Dwolla’s ACH API.
Plaid, the technology company whose suite of APIs powers many of the most innovative and fastest-growing companies in financial services, serves as the authentication gateway and data provider while Dwolla, a SaaS platform that moves billions of dollars for developers and businesses of all sizes, is the ACH provider and facilitates the movement of funds via its Access API. The new partnership tokenizes the sensitive financial information from transactions to significantly limit exposure of the data.
“We’re at an inflection point in the world of ACH payments,” said Zach Perret, CEO and co-founder of Plaid. “This partnership brings Dwolla and Plaid together to simplify the developer experience, increase data availability for easier approvals, and increase security for consumers via account number tokenization. The strength of security in card networks is based on tokenization being table stakes, which we hope becomes more common throughout the industry, and we’re working to make a reality with partnerships like this one.”
“Dwolla has specialized in making bank transfers more accessible and secure for years. During that time, Plaid focused on innovating in the bank authentication and consumer data space,” said Ben Milne, CEO of Dwolla. “The partnership demonstrates how fintech companies can come together to introduce easier and safer ways to access the nation’s banking infrastructure.”
The ACH network moves more than $41 trillion each year. To send funds to another bank account, businesses and consumers must authenticate the account. This requires the account owner to provide sensitive bank information to a third-party and validate via micro-deposits, which can take several days to verify, or via an instant account authentication by companies like Plaid. Passing and storing this bank transfer information between third-party platforms and their end users has been traditionally facilitated through best practices by providers like Dwolla and Plaid; however, this new collaboration tokenizes this authentication and transaction data, removing the need for third-party platforms to capture any sensitive banking data from their consumers.
"Tokenizing this data is a huge win for consumers and a boon for companies looking to reduce their information security risk." said Adam Dell, CEO of Clarity Money, a joint customer of Dwolla and Plaid. "Not only does this collaboration between Dwolla and Plaid make it easier and safer for new entrants, like Clarity Money, to get products to market, it underscores the net new value, best practices, and conversations being generated by fintechs in the space.”
Since its founding in 2012, Plaid has set out to enable innovation throughout financial services. Plaid’s technology infrastructure allows innovators to create new products and services that connect with consumer’s bank accounts and improve their financial flexibility. Applications powered by Plaid benefit tens of millions of consumers.
- 05:00 am
Certua, a data driven fin-tech company has today announced its intention to launch to market in 2017.
• Pioneering robo - life insurance
• Modern fintech aims to deliver the cover you want, when you want it
• Next generation technology can reduce costs substantially
Through intelligent use of data, the company has the ability to provide real-time personalisation of financial solutions, and ongoing recommendations with the customer right at the centre of the process.
The fin-tech company, founded by Chairman John Levin, and headed up by CEO and Co-Founder, Tom Williams, will also have the support of advisory board members, data scientist Peter Hayes, ex-CEO of Old Mutual, Jim Sutcliffe, Chris Traynor, Chief Executive of BE Capital limited and Donal Smith, formerly CEO of Data Explorers. Non-Executive Directors include industry experts, Managing Director of SEI, Brett Williams and technology entrepreneur, Jules Pittam.
The proposition aims to allow both individuals and advisers to benefit from financial planning solutions that automatically adjust as people's lives change. Certua's robo-life insurance service, which will be the first service to be launched by the company, is intended to identify risk exposure throughout an individual’s life span, creating products and services that can auto adjust based on customer need.
The service will combine innovative technology and an effortless user experience to enable end-clients to have one insurance policy with multiple different benefits, each driven by a different data source on either an advised or self-serve basis.
Tom Williams, CEO of Certua said: "Financial Services is among the last big industries to be disrupted; but with open data, changing consumer attitudes and the pace at which technology is evolving, we see it as inevitable.
Securing your finances is a continuous journey with needs changing depending on goals and real life situations. Financial services solutions should always be relevant to where you are in that journey at any given time, while also helping you anticipate and protect against what's coming next, and that is what we aim to deliver.
We believe that the future of financial planning is going to involve a combination of advised and self-service solutions powered by technology. With Certua, we wanted to create a proposition that would augment adviser's abilities and provide the option for either advised or self-serve depending on individual needs.
We see the split in protection and investment advice following Retail Distribution Review as detrimental to the end client, and our solution provides a platform to bring it back together with the aim to enable genuinely holistic financial planning; allowing individuals and their advisers to buy rather than be sold and to insure themselves with simple, modern and relevant digital solutions'.
- 09:00 am
Colt announced today that participants can now receive TSE’s Flex Full market data feed normalised with an FPGA solution1 as part of its market data portfolio for Capital Markets customers.
The managed solution enables clients in colocation to consume the feed immediately without requiring any additional investments or footprint, making this a very cost-effective approach. This FPGA market data solution, powered by NovaSparks, provides financial firms with the benefits of a managed solution, faster time to market, and the ultra-low latency offered by FPGA technology.
Novasparks’ FPGA feed handler normalises data feeds in under one microsecond even during times of high market activity, hence ensuring ultra-low latency and deterministic performance. In addition, the full integration with Colt’s MP-API means that firms can easily combine the ultra-low latency FPGA feed with Colt’s software normalised solution to benefit from enhanced functionality and full redundancy.
“Capital Markets firms face significant challenges to remain competitive. A number of our customers have expressed interest in a managed FPGA market data solution, combining ultra-low latency and flexibility to help them succeed - and without upfront investment costs. At Colt, we thrive on putting customers first and setting the benchmark for customer experience. That’s why we are pleased to bring to market this cost-effective solution that addresses our customers’ requirements and further enhances the Colt Capital Markets portfolio,” said Andrew Housden, Vice President, Capital Markets at Colt.
Olivier Baetz, Chief Operating Officer at NovaSparks, said, “We are proud to partner with Colt to accelerate their market data infrastructure offering. The tight integration of NovaSparks pure FPGA solutions with Colt’s MP-API allows banks and trading firms to leverage the speed of FPGA market data processing in a simple and cost effective manner.”
A licensed market data vendor since acquiring MarketPrizm, Colt offers market data feeds for major European, Asian and North American markets. It offers more than 50 feeds from exchanges and liquidity venues for equities, derivatives, commodities and FX, delivering data at consistently low latencies even during periods of volatility.
- 02:00 am
CommonBond, a leading financial technology company that helps students and graduates pay for higher education, today announces the launch of student loans for undergraduate and graduate students.
“Since CommonBond first helped pioneer student loan refinancing nationwide, we’ve seen very little innovation in the student loan industry,” said David Klein, CEO and co-founder of CommonBond. “The student loan experience we’re launching today is one I wish I had when I was in school. It was the frustration with my own student loan experience - dealing with high rates, poor service, and a confusing process - that led me to start CommonBond in the first place. We’re excited to provide students across the country with the transparent and affordable student loan options they deserve.”
CommonBond’s new in-school loans provide:
• Competitive interest rates: CommonBond’s rates are among the most competitive in the industry, with variable rates starting at 2.87% APR with autopay discount[1] and fixed rates starting at 5.50% APR with autopay discount.
• Flexible repayment options: CommonBond offers four different repayment options for students in school: deferment, fixed monthly payment, interest-only payment, and full monthly payment.
• Award-winning customer service: CommonBond knows that paying for college is the first major financial decision that many students make, and provides best-in-class care for prospective and current members. In 2016, the company was awarded a People's Choice Stevie Award for Favorite Customer Service.
• An industry-first social mission: CommonBond enables its members to drive social good when taking out a student loan. For every student loan funded by CommonBond, the company also funds the education of a child in need through a partnership with Pencils of Promise.
Before today, CommonBond’s loans for current students were only available to MBA students. The company quickly became the largest private lender at many business schools, due to its affordable options, easy online experience, and friendly customer service. Customer response to the product demonstrated a critical need for CommonBond to play a larger part in an industry that lacks tech-enabled, customer-centric options.
“Getting my MBA was a huge financial decision, so I decided to research several different lenders," said Alex Kubo, a CommonBond member. "CommonBond offered me the most competitive rates, had an easy signup process, and even invited me to travel to Ghana last year to see its Social Promise in action. Paying for school can be stressful and hectic, but the care taken by CommonBond throughout both the application process and the term of my loan is proof that it doesn't have to be.”
