Netcracker Technology stated today that it would showcase its comprehensive suite of solutions and services that enable digital transformation. Thus, laying the foundation for virtualization at Mobile World Congress 2017, in Barcelona, Spain.

At Mobile World Congress, Netcracker will show the next evolution of its Cloud-Based Online Charging System (OCS) and highlight the expansion of NEC/Netcracker's partner program, Ecosystem 2.0. Netcracker will also showcase its broad suite of next-gen BSS/OSS and SDN/NFV solutions that enable digital transformation and help service providers commercialize and monetize new services across hybrid environments comprised of physical and virtual infrastructure.

As the industry's first always-active online charging system, Netcracker's Cloud-Based OCS is designed to help service providers rapidly monetize new digital services by addressing all of the key pain points associated with legacy, hardware-based charging systems. Netcracker's Cloud-Based OCS enables:

• Always-on availability and deployment flexibility across physical and virtual environments.
• Unparalleled cloud elasticity and scalability to keep up with the demands of VoLTE, virtualized, 5G and IoT services.
• Converged revenue management scenarios with embedded analytics.

Netcracker recently announced that it has expanded its existing BSS partnership with Videotron, a Canada-based cable, internet, telephone and wireless service provider, by delivering its modernized OCS.

NEC Corporation and Netcracker will also showcase Ecosystem 2.0, the next evolution in partner collaboration, at Mobile World Congress. Ecosystem 2.0 goes beyond VNF onboarding to solve operational and monetization issues associated with bringing new services to market. It enables service providers to:

• Accelerate time-to-market with access to commercially ready services.
• Enable continuous service innovation.
• Leverage pre-integrated, best-of-breed VNFs with minimal risk.

    Ecosystem 2.0 allows partners to:

• Become part of NEC/Netcracker's business-driven solutions.
• Enable seamless onboarding with access to an advanced partner portal with    a dashboard that shows VNF statistics and feedback from service providers.
• Certify their VNFs as commercially ready, working with market-leading service orchestration, service design and business management applications.

Sierra Wireless, is a major supplier of fully integrated device-to-cloud solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT). Today it unveils the world’s first ‘plug-and-play’ cellular modules and routers with pre-integrated global connectivity, IoT operation management, and security. This new know-how will significantly reduce the time to launch IoT solutions, facilitate operations, and enable business model flexibility, thus accelerating the global IoT economy.

These new cellular modules and routers enable customers to select a single pre-certified solution to instantaneously connect and remotely manage a fleet of IoT products and services across the globe, and over the lifetime of the deployment. This is a vast improvement to today’s practice of procuring devices, then sourcing multiple connectivity subscriptions and SIM cards for global coverage, and finally integrating disparate provisioning and management platforms.

“The complexity of deploying IoT solutions is the biggest challenge for businesses today,” said Philippe Guillemette, CTO, Sierra Wireless. “Our new technology is much more than a SIM in a device, it’s an industry breakthrough that truly simplifies the IoT ecosystem. Our customers can focus on transforming their business and rely on Sierra Wireless to securely connect, monitor and collect data from their devices, at the right time, with the right SLA, and at the right cost.”

With built-in security from device, through the mobile network, to the cloud, Sierra Wireless’ innovative technology allows users to remotely provision and change connectivity providers over the air without ever physically accessing their devices. This reduces risk and gives companies the flexibility to develop and scale IoT applications and services over time and around the world.

“Sierra Wireless’ long track record and leadership experience in IoT gives them unique insight into the many hurdles businesses must overcome to bring their connected products to market,” said Dan Shey, Managing Director and Vice President, B2B, ABI Research. “Having both connectivity management and device management on a single platform is a significant advantage that will allow users to leverage data from their devices and the network to drive their business. Sierra Wireless is also bringing the flexibility to access global MNOs over the air, which is a key factor in enabling the global IoT economy.” 

Synchronoss Technologies, Inc., is the leader in mobile cloud innovation for mobile carriers, enterprises, retailers, and OEMs around the globe. Today it has published the results of an Enterprise study that Synchronoss commissioned, which demonstrates the progress of enterprise mobility adoption.  

The independent study conducted by Sapio Research on behalf of Synchronoss found that 38% of enterprises still only use mobility solutions for basic tools like email and calendar, and do not have a firm requirement to secure their staff’s devices. However, these enterprises are 15% less productive and 29% less profitable than those with more advanced mobile capabilities, such as file-sharing apps, collection, and analysis of data, app integrations, and multi-factor authentication. The study examines the different rates of adoption of enterprise mobility across more than 500 businesses in the UK and the US and classifies them into a four-stage Maturity Model: Entry Level, Opportunistic, Additive and Transformational. Progress through each stage was determined by the degree of use of productivity tools and data, and the security measures required.

Synchronoss Enterprise has shown that despite enterprise mobility being an accepted norm, 38% of enterprises have failed to progress beyond the Entry Level stage of its four-stage Mobility Maturity Model, and that 81% remain in the bottom half, however the incentive for enterprises to improve is clear. Synchronoss also proved that those 19% in the third stage of the model, Additive (typified by app integrations, the collection of devices’ contextual usage data, multi-factor authentication and secure data transmission), were on average 15% more productive than those in Entry Level, and 29% more profitable.

“The findings of this study underline the case for companies to dedicate investment to their enterprise mobility strategy. Until now, the benefits of mobility maturity have been anecdotal or theoretical. We now know that those who invest in advanced mobility tools – balancing efficiency with security – benefit from double-figure improvements in productivity, in turn contributing to massive profitability gains,” said Dave Schuette, Executive Vice President of the Enterprise Business Unit at Synchronoss.

The commercial impacts of advanced mobility maturity:

• The most mature enterprises are 29% more profitable and 15% more productive than those in the lowest stage
• CIOs and IT teams who have delivered the most advanced enterprise mobility are perceived 14% and 12% more favorably within their organizations than those who have only introduced the most basic of functionality
• The simple step from Entry Level to Opportunistic (first stage to second stage) delivers the greatest and quickest performance improvements. Just by introducing file-sharing tools, monitoring usage data and requiring at least native OS security measures to be in place on the device, enterprises see a 9% profitability improvement and 7% productivity boost

“Productivity doesn’t come from the availability of mobility tools alone,” continued Schuette. “Collecting contextual data from employees’ devices lets a company make informed, deliberate changes that improve its operations and processes. That same data can also be used for more robust user ID verification, boosting security. The higher the security on a device, the more capabilities an organization can confidently add to it - which in turn improves productivity. It’s the ultimate virtuous circle for enterprise technology.”

“Mobility has always held significant promise for enterprise’s digital transformation programs – for operational efficiencies, workforce productivity, customer engagement, and overall competitive differentiation,” commented Chris Marsh, Research Director of 451 Research’s Enterprise Mobility Practice.

Numerix, the leading risk technology provider, has won two XCelent 2017 awards as part of Celent’s recent research, “FRTB and the Upcoming Renaissance in Market Risk Management – Evaluating Ecosystem Solutions.” Authored by Cubillas Ding and Dennis Kong, the report completes a three-part series assessing the current market and solution landscape for FRTB. 

As FRTB and market risk solutions continue to evolve, Numerix has taken significant steps to enhance and launch new functionality to help financial firms operate effectively under the new upcoming regime. Numerix FRTB is designed to be a flexible component of an institution’s FRTB strategy, for business impact assessment or as a core component of a broader enterprise-wide transformation. This has put Numerix in the unique positon of spanning the Celent categories of Ecosystem Specialist and Risk System Provider.

"We are extremely pleased to have won this industry recognition from one of the most reputable research and consulting firms dedicated to information technology. Winning the awards demonstrates our ability and dedication to establishing the best approach to FRTB at a time when current regulatory uncertainty shrouds the capital markets,” said Steve O’Hanlon, CEO of Numerix. "Establishing an approach to FRTB is not a series of cohesive, chronological steps; it’s a progressive process. Numerix FRTB is designed to align with banks’ FRTB transformation at all points in the process; for early stage strategic decision making and for long term FRTB compliance.  

Building upon its complex derivatives and front office origins, and moving towards solutions that deliver larger-scale firm wide risk initiatives, Numerix Oneview enterprise platform enables users to measure, aggregate, and present a unified view of risk and capital. As a SaaS, cloud based QIS solution, Numerix FRTB further supports this approach – playing a critical role in the analytical and data value chain and working as part of a broader set of applications or components.

The report indicates Numerix as demonstrating sophisticated market risk, FRTB and pricing capabilities but also as early adopters of next-generation technologies for establishing a clear architectural and product vision. The scope and depth of client service, development and implementation partnerships also helped the firm to be recognized as a category leader for service.

"More sophisticated banks are seeing FRTB as a launchpad for market risk platform renewal, in tandem with achieving their broader capital efficiency objectives. Firms are looking to employ next generation technologies into their product offerings to achieve performance enhancements and scalability," says Cubillas Ding at Celent. "As FRTB programmes progress, firms can also look to deploy business/desk optimization capabilities that are flexible, agile, and quickly implementable."

They may be the most closely tracked generation in human history. But it's remarkable how much we've gotten wrong about millennials.

Marketing strategies devised for millennials by older generations have been based on bad intuition, poorly curated data, and unquestioned, incomplete assumptions. That leads to bad guesses. When you're designing banking and payment systems for your next generation of customers, bad guesses can be expensive.

For instance, it is accurate to call millennials (a.k.a. Gen Y's) the original "digital natives." They were the first generation to grow up online, with a comfort with networks that spawned a radically distributed approach to commerce. Peer-to-peer sharing, a threat to existing models, was an opportunity for new entrepreneurs.

By letting millennials reframe peer-to-peer payments, apps like Venmo seemed poised to disrupt one of the primary roles of banks. Rather than fight shifting tides, the industry sought to be the ones surfing the P2P payment wave. Zelle, the supposed Venmo-killer, looked like the right move for banks to retain millennials,

But is a millennial sea change in payments reallyunder way? Does that track with the data? Or is it another bad guess?

Certainly, some Gen Y's have gone all in with phone-based payments. Most, however, are just not that into it. 68 percent of young adults do not use any P2P payment platform at all.And out of the 82 percent of millennial iPhone users who had heard of Apple Pay in another survey, only 8 percent use it.

The case for nouveau payments is just not all that compelling for some. Others may be waiting for the right sweet spot of form and convenience. For now, even among millennials, cash remains king and the traditional payment forms of cards and checks still carry the lion's share of their transactions.

In a 2016 Cardtronics survey, nearly half of the millennials queried said they're more likely to pay with cash now than they did a few years ago, even though most said they were using a greater variety of new payment methods and P2P apps. Millennial usage of low-tech currency increased at a greater rate than any other age cohort, too.In another survey, almost two thirds of millennial respondents said cash was their preferred medium for P2P payments.  And the second-most preferred method was a dead heat between PayPal and checks, of all things.  Venmo came in a distant fourth.

Another sweeping generalization about Generation Y is that it's a demographic monolith of bankless, networked nomads. But, in fact, millennials behave like consumers from other generations when they come of age.

Let's step back and consider Generation Y demographics: Born between 1981 and 1997, millennials are now 20-36 years old. That means department managers, VPs of sales and CEOs of successful startups—probably juggling kids, mortgages and retirement savings—are getting lumped in with college juniors. But older millennials actually have a lot more in common with their Gen X or even Baby Boomer colleagues than they do with Gen Y's in their early/mid-20s, who have consumption and media habits that mirror Post-Millennial Generation Z.

Young Gen Y's may have breezed through college with nothing more than a phone and a couple of payment apps. As they take on life responsibilities, however, like full-time employment, mortgages, investments and savings, Millennials will need their banks just as much as earlier generations. In the developed world, banks are still the very medium through which business gets done and adult lives are lived.

Banks cannot sit on their laurels as they once might have, of course. Digital natives have expectations shaped by instant fulfillment, complete mobility, and the unrestricted choices made in global social networks. To serve these customers in a way that is native and intuitive to them, banks will need to listen and innovate. 

Yet banks should also keep in mind that as the young millennial's life responsibilities evolve, he or she will take on the kind of personal and professional lives in which banks are uniquely suited to play an integral role.

Vested, a new communications agency for a new financial industry, today announced the launch of Vested startups. This new division of Vested will make strategic investments in and provide communications services to startup companies in the finance and technology space.  

Vested Ventures made its first capital investment in an artificial intelligence company, Remesh, that uses machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing to help companies including financial institutions better understand their customers and key constituents by allowing organizations to instantly gather, rank, and filter the collective opinion of crowds. By combining elements of crowdsourcing, machine learning, and qualitative market research, the Remesh platform enables users to have a conversation with a group of people as if it were one person, in real-time.

“Vested Ventures will develop strategic, long-term partnerships with companies that create a positive impact, whether that be by promoting financial literacy, helping bring under-banked people into the financial system or promoting transparency in financial services," said Dan Simon, CEO of Vested and a mentor at Techstars, Barclays’ startup accelerator.

He adds, “Remesh is a revolutionary technology platform that helps companies including major financial institutions better understand the needs of its customers. The firm has enormous disruptive potential, a stellar founding team and an important industry impact, and we are thrilled to help them grow.”

Another successful Vested Ventures company is SPARE, an app that helps people automatically round up their dinner bills to feed the hungry. 

Nomura Research Institute (NRI) is an advanced provider of consulting services and system solutions. Today it has announced that its Valuable OTC Products and Liquidity Control System (VOLCS) received the Best Utilities Technology award at Fund Technology and WSL Awards 2017.

NRI’s VOLCS offering provides a multipurpose management system for financial institutions. Specifically, it establishes strong due-date management for structured bonds and OTC derivatives and cash management. Being designed for financial institutions, the solution can also be separated and utilized individually by non-financial firms.

Most recently, structured bonds and OTC derivatives have been receiving more attention due to the effects of stock price changes and Japan’s negative interest rates. Both financial products are complicated and require detailed calculation and settlement day management, causing a major operational and financial burden to financial institutions.

VOLCS enables its users to reduce the operational burden significantly, which will result in increased trading volume. As well as provides the option to reallocate their resources from due day management to strategic division for more sales power. A couple of major financial institutions have already adopted VOLCS since its launch last year.

“Financial institutions across the globe are looking to drive efficiencies in their day-to-day operations with innovative technologies to lower their cost burden, ease management challenges and increase their bottom line,” said Minoru Yokote, Senior Managing Director of NRI.

“NRI is committed to distributing our system solutions and consulting services that are industry-leading in Japan across the global marketplace to address these key challenges, and it is an honor to be recognized for our contribution.”

The Fund Technology and WSL Awards recognize technology solution and providers catering to asset managers and institutional traders that have demonstrated exceptional customer service and innovative product development over the past year. 2017’s event has been expanded to recognize the efforts of technology providers, data specialists, and exchanges meeting the needs of the wider asset management community, particularly mutual funds.

CLX Communications, Cloud-based communications provider and cloud mobile marketing platform, Waterfall, have declared a partnership with Google to provide the next generation of messaging services. The service will aim to brand marketers using Rich Communication Services (RCS) standard included directly into consumers' native messaging apps.  

The collaboration is part of Google's Early Access Program (EAP) announced today and debuting at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week. The program will enable brands to reach customers in new and dynamic "mobile app-like" ways directly within Android smartphones' native messaging service. It will provide features including suggested replies and actions, dynamic rich media, and company branding. 

With 27 carriers and device manufacturers committed to launching RCS to Android users with Google, the Early Access Program is the first progression towards making RCS messaging universally available worldwide. CLX and Waterfall are striving to provide enterprises access to the growing global RCS user base, enabling feature-rich communication with consumers that use Android and other handsets that support RCS now and in the future.

Through the EAP, CLX and Waterfall will enable enterprises to build with the technology, influence the roadmap, and be the first to offer customers an upgraded messaging experience. Marketers can use RCS Business Messaging to engage with customers, grow subscribers, and drive transactions without leaving the native messaging app.

The rising popularity of OTT messaging apps confirms the demand for a messaging option more powerful and seamless than currently available natively. The new messaging service serves as an alternative to apps by giving brands similar features directly in the messaging environment without the need to build an app audience.

As the first software cloud enabling RCS for enterprises and brand marketers, Waterfall will create a single point of contact for marketers to broadcast messages to their entire mobile subscriber base. The solution made possible by Waterfall and CLX automatically identifies consumers with RCS-enabled handsets and optimizes the content to deliver the best messages to its respective audiences.

Research and Markets has revealed the addition of the "UK IFAs, Investment Managers and Platforms 2017" report.

Independent financial advisors (IFAs) are a key distribution network for investors in the United Kingdom. Product providers will do well to understand the priorities and criteria advisors use in choosing their investment partners and platforms, particularly with an increasing tendency to cooperate with discretionary fund managers (DFMs). As nearly all advisors in the UK use a platform or several platforms to manage their clients' assets, understanding why certain platforms are favored above others remains crucial. Online access to platforms is important for IFAs, which will continue to leverage digital capabilities to remain relevant.

Specifically the report examined the role IFAs have in providing financial services. As well as, details market developments and the evolving landscape of the UK market. It analyzed the most important features IFAs consider when selecting platforms.The companies that offer the most attractive platform packages were identified. The report also features the criteria for selection of pension fund providers.

There is a range of essential findings unleashed through the research. For instance, UK fund platforms continue to grow their market share by providing both advisors and direct investors with access to a range of products. In 2015 these platforms accounted for 52% of industry gross retail sales. The attractiveness of products is driven by cost along with the quality of administrative and reporting functions. Furthermore, beyond these two features, the investment fund range is also important to advisors. Investment product providers are regularly assessed by IFAs, with 47.3% carrying out reviews more than once a year. In addition, 91% of advisors use platforms, with the majority relying on more than one. The three most widely used platforms are Old Mutual, Fidelity Funds Network, and Aviva.There is also increasing interest in the use of model portfolios and discretionary portfolio management, driven by clients' preference for a better investment range and less administration.Finally, cost is the main driver for switching platforms, highlighting the increasingly commoditized nature of the service.