• Case Studies
• 19.04.2017 01:57 pm

Today Pegasystems Inc., the software company empowering customer engagement at the world’s leading enterprises, launched Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered bot that easily turns applications into smart assistants on any channel – from SMS and email to Facebook, Alexa, Slack, and more. Pega evolves bots from simple chat and data fetching novelties into sophisticated digital agents that anticipate people’s needs, make helpful suggestions, complete complex tasks, and provide exceptional experiences. 

Despite the hype, today’s chatbots and virtual assistants don’t provide the human-like experiences they’ve been promised to deliver. Customers and employees are left with one-dimensional interactions in stilted language that perform only the simplest of tasks and add little value. According to Pega’s newglobal survey on AI, only 20 percent of consumers prefer chat-based customer service, and 80 percent still want a live human typing on the other end. Meanwhile, developers struggle to build and manage even more bots for the latest channels and establish a connected experience between them all. 

Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant – part of the Pega Platform – overcomes these shortfalls by elegantly extending any Pega enterprise application to any conversational interface. It turns these channels into intelligent assistants that make personalized customer service and real work possible using natural language in voice or text. This makes bots more intelligent, useful, and gratifying for customers and employees to use in a variety of scenarios, such as:

·         A banking bot alerts a customer checking her balance on Alexa to a suspicious charge, opens a charge dispute, and orders her a new card – all in the same session using natural language.

·         A mobile service provider bot helps a subscriber on Facebook Messenger understand why he went over his data limit, suggests a plan better suited for his lifestyle, and immediately activates it so he can continue to stream the big game.

·         A company’s internal IT helpdesk bot helps an employee diagnose a laptop problem with a series of questions, opens a ticket with the IT staff, and seamlessly connects her to a helpdesk staff member if the issue becomes overly complex.

With decades of customer engagement and operational efficiency technology experience, Pega provides the most complete bot solution in the market by uniquely combining:

• AI with predictive analytics and decisioning that senses user need and offers the right solution at the right moment for a hyper-personalized experience.
• Natural language processing (NLP) and text analytics that make it intuitive for people to engage in the same way that they normally speak or type. 
• A unified architecture that enables people to seamlessly move from one channel to the next – including from a bot to a human agent if needed - and pick up exactly where they left off.
• A code-free development environment that makes it easy for any business user to configure, simulate, and manage the bot to achieve their business goals. 
• Case Management and Business Process Management (BPM) that drive work behind the scenes to make conversational UX (user experiences) more useful, practical, and functional.

Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant comes preconfigured to extend to Facebook Messenger, Alexa, and Google Home. Business users can easily build their own extenders to other popular messaging apps such as WeChat and Skype, as well as business collaboration apps such as Slack and Yammer. Organizations can test their bots with an integrated simulator in the native interface, ensuring the virtual assistant responds as intended before it goes live.

Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant is available today as a key capability of the Pega Platform, Pega’s market-leading model-driven application development environment. It can extend most Pega applications – including CRM apps for marketing, sales, and customer service and any custom-built Pega apps – with conversational UX functionality. The Pega® Customer Decision Hub provides the virtual assistant with AI power to analyze information, anticipate needs, and make optimal decisions.

Today Pay by Bank app reported the appointment of Agnes Woolrich as Marketing Director, the latest in a series of senior level appointments as it prepares for the next stage in its development.  This follows the appointment of Rajiv Garodia, Managing Director, in May 2016.

Agnes brings proven expertise in driving sustained growth and expansion, globally, across the card payments landscape.  Agnes joins from American Express, where she spent 11 years in senior marketing roles, most recently as VP Marketing, Bank Partnerships, where she was responsible for establishing new businesses and driving growth in Africa and the Middle East.

Prior to this, she was responsible for growing the value of American Express’ relationships with its largest global merchants. Rajiv Garodia, Managing Director of Pay by Bank app, commented, “We have spent the past couple of years perfecting a mobile payment solution that will become the UK, and in time global, standard for mobile payments. The solution has significant advantages over other alternatives, as it integrates within mobile banking apps, operates on the Faster Payments system and is linked directly to banks’ current accounts.

“Agnes’ appointment supports our planned growth phase, where we will be rolling out the solution to the UK market and, using our experience and learning gained in the UK, globally.  Her experience in driving growth globally through building bank and merchant partnerships will be invaluable to support our ambitious plans.”

Agnes Woolrich, Marketing Director of Pay by Bank app, commented, “It’s clear that, out of the myriad of mobile payment solutions in the market, those that can integrate seamlessly with people’s bank accounts have the highest potential to achieve widespread adoption. I’m therefore excited to join Pay by Bank app at this exciting stage in its development. I look forward to working closely with Rajiv and the rest of the senior team in their mission to make Pay by Bank app the global mobile payment standard.”

Pay By Bank app has announced the confirmation of significant new bank and merchant commitments in recent weeks, with HSBC and first direct  joining Barclays, Bank of Scotland, Halifax and Lloyds Bank in signing up to the service.  The availability of Pay by Bank app on the mobile banking app of each individual bank depends on that bank’s development priorities/ schedule.

Trax, a leader in providing of regulatory reporting, trade matching and capital market data services, has bolstered its strategic alliance with the CME by integrating the workflow of the CME Global Repository Services (GRS) into the Trax Insight™ platform to facilitate regulatory reporting of derivatives.

The alliance leverages mutual synergies, connecting the regulatory reporting and technical expertise of Trax with the global reach of CME's Trade Repositories. Firms can now seamlessly connect to the Trax Insight reporting system, directing G20 reports to the CME GRS for all in-scope derivatives asset classes, including credit, interest rate, equity, commodity and foreign exchange derivatives. Trax Insight features a customisable, web-based operational tool to actively manage and monitor the status of reporting activity through a single interface. Clients can quickly identify exceptions and data quality issues as well as view industry leading analytics and peer benchmarking reports across multiple reporting jurisdictions.

By connecting to Trax, firms can easily satisfy their EMIR derivatives reporting requirements, as well as satisfy their broader cross-asset class MiFID I transaction reporting and MiFID II/MiFIR trade and transaction reporting requirements.  This alliance aims to provide full G20 coverage, including Dodd-Frank and other derivatives regulations around the globe. As a single connection for derivatives reporting and risk controls, the alliance between Trax and the CME Trade Repositories improves operational efficiency through integrated technology and a single interface.

Trax Insight offers a complete derivatives reporting solution through its state of the art user interface, including eligibility determination through the Droit regulatory rules-based decision engine in addition to reporting connectivity to the CME European Trade Repository, which was originally announced in 2014.

Chris Smith, Head of Trax and Operations Services, MarketAxess and Trax, comments, "Trax and CME Group have a long history of building technology to help improve the functioning of post-trade operations. With CME Group's strong market position in the global derivatives market combined with Trax's reporting experience and technical proficiency, this relationship helps firms confidently meet their cross-regulation reporting obligations."

"CME Group is committed to providing feature rich and value-added multi-jurisdictional reporting solutions," said Jonathan Thursby, Executive Director, Global Head of CME Global Repository Services. "This collaboration with Trax is another way for clients to leverage CME's global portfolio of trade repositories through their market leading and proven processes designed to optimize compliance and efficiency."

Today, HYPER has officially unveiled to market. HYPER is an online cloud platform that confidentially matches up the C-Suite with relevant leadership positions based on their experience.  

Unlike mid-level job positions –C-level positions remain hidden, and recruiting at this senior level is notoriously hard. As is discreet job hunting at this level – when was the last time you saw a job advertisement for a CEO position available? But new independent research commissioned by HYPER shows that over 78% of executives wish it was easier for them to be identified for a new career opportunity, yet over 90%+ of senior opportunities are hidden.

HYPER is a brand new platform created to provide executives with discreet matching into unpublished senior leadership opportunities. Using intelligent algorithm driven ‘tightness of fit’ scoring – senior candidates and recruitment companies can get under the surface of this elusive, hidden job market and drill down specifically to what is available and currently trending against specific geographies, functions, industries, profiles and skills that are in demand.

Highlighting its growing influence in the private markets industry, eVestment reported today a strategic partnership with the Institutional Limited Partners Association (ILPA), the only global, member-driven organization dedicated exclusively to advancing the interests of private equity limited partners. 

Under the terms of the agreement, ILPA members will receive discounted access to eVestment’s private markets solution, TopQ. eVestment TopQ gives institutional investors a powerful tool to collect more granular data from managers, automate and standardize track record calculations and gain deeper insight into performance at the portfolio, fund and deal level, to enhance their private equity manager selection decisions. 

The agreement comes at a time when institutional investors are increasingly considering private equity and private markets investment opportunities, while also making clear their desire for more transparency, better benchmarks and more standardized data. In fact, in a recently released eVestment survey of institutional investors and consultants, 60% said they still find it difficult to compare performance across private markets managers.

“Now more than ever, limited partners are seeking quality solutions to optimize their due diligence and monitoring processes,” said Matthew DeMatteis, Director of Research for the ILPA. “We’re pleased to align with eVestment to deliver valuable options that support enhanced transparency to our members.”

eVestment is quickly becoming the preferred platform for the exchange of private markets performance between managers and asset allocators with the launch late last year of the company’s Private Markets Alliance. The Alliance brings together more than a dozen top industry consultants and investors that have united with eVestment to establish a common approach for communicating quantitative and qualitative data in order to truly optimize how this information is collected and analyzed.

“Since our founding in 2000, eVestment has always been focused on the needs of the instititonal investment community, becoming a leader in traditional and hedge fund data and analytics,” said eVestment co-founder and Chief Alliance Officer Heath Wilson. “We're pleased to announce this new partnership and continue to offer value to those investing across asset classes.”

Ullink, the global leading provider of connectivity and electronic trading solutions, is delighted to unveil a partnership with Valemobi, a supplier of technology to the capital markets industry based out of Brazil, to provide turnkey solutions for clients of its Asset and Wealth Management solutions.