Published
- 01:00 am
Today, fscom, an award winning financial services compliance consultancy firm, launched its refreshed brand, unveiling a suite of new logos and branding that is aligned with the evolving financial services market.
The continued growth in FinTech companies represents a major shift in the financial services sector. While these organisations fall under the same regulatory rules as the market incumbents, their needs and the way they operate differ dramatically. The refreshed fscom brand reflects the company’s more personalised, collaborative focus.
Jamie Cooke, Managing Director at fscom, comments, ‘Our clients want someone who understands their business from a commercial and compliance perspective. We offer a highly personalised service, working with our clients to deliver bespoke solutions that add real value. While we are experts in financial services compliance, we’re very much a client-focused company. The new brand marries these values and helps us stand out from the rigid, corporate image associated with the industry. ’
Growing Niche
In recent years fscom has established itself as a go-to compliance advisor for FinTech and AltFi companies operating in the UK. In tandem with the rebrand a detailed communications strategy has been developed, following extensive consultation with its niche markets, to address their concerns and support future growth.
Central to this is the company’s new website, which will act as an information hub for financial services professionals. Leveraging its wealth of expertise and experience, fscom will advise technologically advanced firms on complex regulatory issues to help them make more informed decisions.
Mr. Cooke, continues, ‘We took a long, hard look at ourselves and the market, asking what we stood for, who we wanted to work with and how we could add real value to them. Many consultancies strive to be something they’re not – a Big 4 company. Our size is one of our strengths. Being smaller, we’re more attuned to the wants of our clients and the nuances of their businesses. We’re agile and innovative in the way we approach client challenges and that sets us apart from our competitors.”
- 02:00 am
Avangate, the global eCommerce and subscription billing platform for software, SaaS, and digital solutions, announces its acquisition of 2Checkout, a global payment processor. The combined company will offer the industry’s most comprehensive product and service suite in the subscription billing and eCommerce space, linking payment model flexibility with advanced eCommerce, recurring revenue management, and marketing capabilities on a global level.
The two companies bring complementary strengths and capabilities, combining to create a comprehensive offering that features:
- World-class subscription management, eCommerce, and payment services from a single provider
- Flexible payment model options, from the largely outsourced merchant of record model to API-driven payment facilitation and payment gateway models, with the ability to pick and choose the products and services that best fit each customer’s unique needs
- The ability to conduct business and settle transactions in more than 30 languages and 130 local currencies
- Support for both digital and physical goods and services in more than 250 merchant categories in 200 countries and territories worldwide
- Enhanced customer service globally due to increased operational scale and support
- Increased innovation and operational efficiency due to the acquisition of additional talent with deep industry expertise in a number of functional areas
The combined corporation will use the 2Checkout name and will be led by Alex Hart, Chief Executive Officer of Avangate. Ken Benvenuto, current Chief Executive Officer of 2Checkout, will continue to serve the company as a Board member and advisor.
“The ability to sell products and services all over the world, both in-country and cross-border, and to use as much or as little of the platform as the client desires, is the driving force behind the combination. The resulting company creates a unique offering in the marketplace, bringing added scale and flexibility that will help merchants further accelerate revenue growth. The acquisition of 2Checkout will enhance Avangate’s ability to simplify the complexity of selling products and services globally, whether via one-time purchases or recurring transactions,” said Hart. “We are also excited about welcoming Ken Benvenuto to our Board of Directors. Ken's extensive payments industry expertise and operating experience will add considerable value to the combined company’s Board,” added Hart.
“Joining the 2Checkout payment service provider and gateway capabilities with Avangate’s subscription management and merchant of record services will position the company for significant growth in attractive markets around the world. By coming together, we can lead the eCommerce and subscription management space, accelerate our payment offerings, and expand our footprint worldwide. I’m excited about helping the new 2Checkout deliver a unique set of capabilities to the growing eCommerce marketplace,” said Benvenuto.
- 03:00 am
Appian is partnering with MuleSoft to provide an API-led approach that simplifies integration and connectivity, enabling organizations to more easily connect applications, data and devices to achieve their digital transformation goals. This collaboration is designed to enable Appian customers to integrate their enterprise third-party data faster and quickly deliver new digital applications to their end-users whether on-premises or in the cloud.
Over the years, organizations have utilized massive amounts of data and created software solutions to better maximize their business and enhance the customer experience. Too frequently, those applications become isolated silos of critical business operations and the failure to unite them seamlessly exposes the organization's inefficiencies. Appian's low-code enterprise platform combined with MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform(TM) is designed to enable customers to drive agility at scale and to provide digital solutions faster.
"Digital Transformation is changing the way businesses must operate and the education industry is no exception," said Sidney Fernandes, CIO, University of South Florida. "We recognized the need to rapidly modernize and mobilize the student experience. By leveraging Appian's low-code enterprise platform in conjunction with MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform and API-led approach to connectivity, we could streamline data and drastically reduce integration needs, saving us critical time and resources. Their partnership brings substantial value to any organization that is working to digitally transform their organization quickly and at scale."
Legacy systems make it difficult to restructure IT investments, making it critical to unite and leverage an infrastructure that drives new solutions to define new customer journeys, eliminate operational inefficiencies, and adapt to a fast-changing market. MuleSoft's Anypoint Platform is designed to increase integration capabilities for our customers in several ways including:
- Maximize Data: Unlock data with APIs and provide repeatable, managed, and secure access to core systems that would normally be siloed and lost across your organization.
- Unify User Interfaces for Increased Agility and Scalability: Take core assets exposed via APIs and map, transform and combine them with business logic to create standardized ways for users to access customer, partner, or employee information.
- Eliminate the Need to Build Point-to-Point Connections: MuleSoft's hybrid integration platform reduces reliance on brittle point-to-point integrations and creates a more flexible, reliable network of reusable assets through API-led connectivity, enabling Appian customers to launch new products faster.
"Appian is committed to providing a comprehensive approach to digital transformation and that is why we have chosen to partner with MuleSoft," said Michael Beckley, Appian's chief technology officer. "Appian's low-code application platform already unites users with key functionality they need to do their jobs better - data, processes, documents and collaborations - in one intuitive interface, on any device. MuleSoft adds new value for our customers, making it easier to access, transform, and reuse data from legacy and SaaS applications through well-governed APIs."
"This partnership with Appian is empowering companies to quickly unlock invaluable information, enabling them to create an application network both on-premises and in the cloud," said Brian Miller, vice president of business development, MuleSoft. "By eliminating time spent on complicated integration projects, organizations can focus on delivering the best customer experience."
- 08:00 am
Today Sierra Wireless, a major provider of fully integrated device-to-cloud solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT), announced it has completed the acquisition of substantially all of the assets of GlobalTop Technology’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) embedded module business for total cash consideration of approximately $3.2 million, subject to working capital adjustments.
GlobalTop’s GNSS embedded module portfolio will become part of the Sierra Wireless OEM Solutions product line, and the GNSS staff from GlobalTop will join Sierra Wireless. GlobalTop’s GNSS products generated approximately $5.0 million U.S. in revenue during the last 12 months, and the business is approximately breakeven.
“With a wide array of modules and established sales channels, as well as a proven engineering team, we believe that the GlobalTop GNSS business is an important addition to Sierra Wireless,” said Dan Schieler, Senior Vice President and General Manager, OEM Solutions, Sierra Wireless. “Building on our portfolio of Cellular, WiFi and Bluetooth modules, we will have additional products to offer to our customers in markets where positioning data is critical, including high-value asset tracking, telematics, drones and automotive.”
Maryse Gordon
Senior Pre Sales Consultant at UnaVista, Information Services
- 01:00 am
Today Compuware Corporation announced the availability of Application Audit, an innovative cybersecurity and compliance solution that dramatically enhances the ability of enterprises to stop insider threats by fully capturing and analyzing start-to-finish mainframe application user behavior.
This enriched mainframe user behavior intelligence is especially important to large enterprises given the fact that their most sensitive data and most business-critical systems of record typically reside on the mainframe.
Most enterprises still rely on disparate logs and SMF data from security products such as RACF, CA-ACF2 and CA-Top Secret to piece together user behavior. Highly advanced IT security organizations may even go as far as to apply advanced analytics to these logs to deduce who did what when. None of these approaches are sufficiently complete, reliable or streamlined to meet the relentlessly escalating demands of cross-platform enterprise cybersecurity and increasingly burdensome global compliance mandates.
Compuware Application Audit provides a significantly superior approach by directly capturing complete, rich start-to-finish user session activity data in real time—including all successful logins, session keyboard commands and menu selections, specific data browsed, and more.
Application Audit’s intuitive web interface empowers anyone—including security and compliance staff without extensive mainframe platform experience—to set session recording parameters, review audit data, configure feeds and perform other administrative tasks. Plus, because Application Audit doesn’t require any changes to mainframe applications, it starts delivering benefits immediately.
Enterprise IT organizations can use the rich, complete and comprehensive mainframe session data provided by Application Audit both by itself and in conjunction with their security information and event management (SIEM) systems to more quickly and effectively:
- Detect, investigate and respond to inappropriate behavior by internal users with access
- Detect, investigate and respond to hacked or illegally purchased user accounts
- Support criminal/legal investigations with complete and credible forensics
- Fulfill compliance mandates regarding protection of sensitive data
The data collected by Application Audit is particularly valuable for maintaining control of privileged mainframe user accounts. Both private- and public-sector organizations are increasingly concerned about insider threats to both mainframe and non-mainframe systems. Privileged user accounts can be misused by their rightful owners, motivated by everything from financial gain to personal grievances, as well as by malicious outsiders who have illegally acquired the credentials for those accounts.
Through collaboration with CorreLog, Syncsort and Splunk, Compuware is enabling enterprise customers to integrate Application Audit’s mainframe intelligence with popular SIEM solutions such as Splunk, IBM QRadar and HPE Security ArcSight ESM. Additionally, Application Audit provides an out-of-the-box Splunk-based dashboard that delivers value on Day One. These integrations are particularly useful for discovering and addressing security issues associated with today’s increasingly common composite applications, which have components running on both mainframe and non-mainframe platforms. SIEM integration also ensures that security, compliance and other risk management staff can easily access mainframe-related data in the same manner as they access data from other platforms.
"Effective IT management requires effective monitoring of what is happening for security, cost reduction, capacity planning, service level agreements, compliance, and other purposes,” said Stu Henderson, Founder and President of the Henderson Group. “This is a major need in an environment where security, technology, budget, and regulatory pressures continue to escalate. I welcome a product that provides us a straightforward, comprehensive basis for such monitoring."
With the introduction of Application Audit, Compuware has now released an innovative new mainframe software solution every 90 days for a remarkable ten consecutive quarters.
“As large enterprises continue to leverage the unmatched power and performance economics of the mainframe, they need better, more modern ways of doing everything from advancing mainframe DevOps to protecting invaluable data from cybersecurity threats,” said Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley. “Compuware is relentlessly and uniquely innovating to meet these evolving enterprise mainframe needs.”
- 08:00 am
Trust, from both customers and investors, is the most important currency for financial services companies. A breach of trust can break a bank, while maintaining trust leads to long-term success. At its core, financial services customers expect their banking institutions to protect their money and their information. And it starts with the most basic of 21st century communications – email.
So how are the globe's leading financial institutions doing?
The good news is that the five largest banks in the U.S. are deploying the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) email security protocol to prevent their brands from being hijacked and protect consumers from data theft, according to a new study from the Global Cyber Alliance (GCA). However, there is still much more work to be done.
Only 11 of the top 50 U.S. banks and just 9 of the 50 largest European banks have deployed DMARC to block spoofed emails or have them marked as spam. Further, NONE of the 50 fastest growing independent banks in the U.S. use DMARC at all. An additional 22 banks out of the top 50 in the U.S. and 10 out of the top 50 in Europe have not fully deployed DMARC, preventing those organizations from gaining the benefits of DMARC. Reasons for this can vary, including that a bank is only beginning the process of DMARC implementation.
"We have tested and used DMARC in monitoring mode and are moving into "reject" mode to protect the more than 60 million emails we distribute monthly," said Troels Oerting, Group Chief Security Officer, Group CISO for Barclays Plc. "We need more companies to deploy DMARC to strengthen the ecosystem. I call on my peers across the financial sector and other industries to implement DMARC as part of email security and anti-phishing efforts."
Banks that deploy DMARC can stop spammers and phishers from using an organization's name to trick unsuspecting customers and conduct cyber attacks. DMARC provides insight into any attempts to spam, phish or spear-phish using an organization's brand or name. DMARC is supported by 85 percent of consumer email inboxes in the United States (including Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.) and more than 2.5 billion email inboxes worldwide.
"At U.S. Bank, we work to earn the trust of customers every day," said Jenny Menna, Senior Vice President and Cybersecurity Partnership Executive at U.S. Bank. "U.S. Bank utilizes DMARC, and I always recommend that our clients consider implementing DMARC to protect their brand and their clients."
"DMARC prevents the hijacking of a company's brand, protecting its reputation and its relationships with customers and investors," said Philip Reitinger, President and CEO of GCA. "DMARC is proven, and it is free. Deployment is quite simple for many small and medium-size organizations, and reasonable for large organizations especially given the significant return on investment. If a customer can't trust your email correspondence, they will be looking elsewhere rather quickly."
- 07:00 am
Today Trading Technologies International, Inc. (TT) reported that its TT futures trading platform now has execution and connectivity services through Interxion’s London data center. This move strengthens TT’s presence in Europe, improving the platform’s accessibility and providing users with regional resiliency and enhanced performance.
With this rollout, partners are now able to peer with the TT platform via cross-connect or extranet providers that maintain points of presence in the data center. Additionally, the TT Reserve and TT Prime premium services are now accessible in Europe, allowing traders to run automated trading decisions on dedicated servers within the data center.
The new London presence also completes TT’s global resiliency in Europe, with London serving as a regional backup for services hosted in TT’s Frankfurt data center. Failover between London and Frankfurt is a low-impact event to customer business—TT users can take advantage of the low-latency connectivity between TT’s European data centers with round-trip times of sub-nine milliseconds.
“The addition of the London data center is critical to our long-term resilience and performance objectives for the TT platform,” said TT CIO Mike Mayhew. “TT users will see a significant performance improvement when accessing regional markets through the London environment, and ecosystem partners can take advantage of lower-cost access to the TT platform.”
“We look forward to offering our clients colocation at LME and connectivity to DGCX on the TT platform,’’ said Andrew Woodward, Director of Berkeley Futures Ltd. “With TT’s new connectivity and execution services in London, we expect our clients will achieve even lower latency and higher levels of performance from trading on the world’s major exchanges through TT. This will be particularly beneficial to our arb and algo traders.’’
This is just one part of TT’s comprehensive efforts toward expanding the company’s hosting presence around the world, which will positively impact the performance of both the TT and X_TRADER® platforms. In addition to London, TT plans to open data centers in Hong Kong and Tokyo this year and make other enhancements to its global infrastructure in the Asia/Pacific region.
- 01:00 am
Today Euronext, the advanced pan-European exchange in the Eurozone, announces it has signed an agreement with ICE Clear Netherlands, a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange for the provision of clearing services for its financial derivatives and commodities markets. Under its “Agility for Growth” strategy, Euronext has deployed significant effort to establish clearing optionality for its clients, including acquiring a 20% stake in EuroCCP and subsequently launching the preferred clearing model for cash equities.
On 3 January 2017, Euronext announced that it had been granted exclusivity to acquire 100% of the share capital and voting rights of LCH.Clearnet SA (“Clearnet”), contingent on the closing of the merger between Deutsche Börse AG and LSE Group. Euronext has communicated to the management and the Board of Directors of both LSE Group and LCH Group that the transaction remains a strategic priority of Euronext and that Euronext will remain a willing buyer of Clearnet, irrespective of the outcome of the merger between LSEG and DBAG, under the terms agreed.
Considering the European Commission’s prohibition of the merger between Deutsche Börse AG and LSE Group and the refusal of LSE Group and LCH Group to engage in discussions about completing the agreed sale of Clearnet, Euronext is now obliged to ensure its clients obtain the best, most cost effective and competitive clearing solutions beyond 31st December 2018, at which time the current clearing services agreement with Clearnet will expire.
The agreement with ICE Clear Netherlands covers the clearing of financial derivatives and commodity derivatives for a period of 10 years with ICE Clear Netherlands. Euronext will contribute a €10m upfront investment in ICE Clear Netherlands. Clearing operations will be run from Amsterdam and a new and innovative solution for asset financing, inventory management and physical delivery for commodities will be built by Euronext and operated from Paris. The parties intend to significantly reduce explicit and implicit costs for customers, through a 15% reduction in headline clearing fees, lower treasury management fees and the delivery of strong capital efficiencies.
In addition the agreement provides for a continued income stream for Euronext, with EBITDA levels that should be comparable to FY2016. Overall this represents a long term, open access, sustainable and innovative Eurozone based clearing proposition for Euronext and its customers. Euronext will appoint one representative to ICE Clear Netherlands risk committee and will chair a product committee dedicated to Euronext‘s clearing service. The formal clearing services agreement is expected to be completed during Q2 2017. In respect of its cash equity markets, Euronext has launched a Preferred Clearing service, providing trading participants with the choice of CCP of Clearnet and EuroCCP, in which it owns a 20% equity stake. This model will be followed by a fully interoperable service and will be open to other CCPs in due course. In order to ensure a seamless migration of Euronext derivative markets to the new clearing house during H2 2018, Euronext and ICE Clear Netherlands will immediately engage in a joint client consultation.
- 04:00 am
Growth Street, the SME finance platform, announces that founder Greg Carter has replaced James Sherwin-Smith as Chief Executive Officer. 2016 was a stellar year for Growth Street, which saw it reach a number of important milestones, including gaining Appointed Representative status, welcoming over 500 investors to its marketplace following a successful launch in November, and building on its significant business borrower growth. The company has now matched over £54m on its innovative lending exchange to date.
The appointment of Greg Carter - who has been Growth Street’s Chief Risk Officer since its launch - represents a return to the company’s original founder. Greg founded Growth Street while working at Arts Alliance, the venture capital investors in Graze, Shazam and Lovefilm, before appointing James as CEO to launch the company in 2015.
Commenting on the change, Greg said: “I would like to thank James for all the hard work he put in over the last two years in growing Growth Street. We would not be where we are now without his diligent and expert leadership. The whole Growth Street family is incredibly excited for the year ahead and I look forward to building on James’ fantastic work.”
James Sherwin-Smith commented: “It has been a pleasure building the Growth Street business over the past eighteen months. I wish Greg and the team the best of luck for the future and will watch Growth Street’s developments with interest”.
