Virtual Piggy, Inc. is cooperating with Univest Bank & Trust Company to provide the payment rails for its child focused payment application and services to accommodate the company's unique mobile payment platform. The payment system will enable the 80+ million children 17 and under, who influence over $830 Billion in annual spending, to become direct buyers with full regulatory and parental controls built in. Parents will now have the ability to monitor their child's spending while equiping them with valuable lifelong lessons in financial literacy.

John Coyne CEO of Virtual Piggy states that, "This is a significant step for the company as we are planning our beta testing set for April of this year and it is important for us to have the kind of account services that Univest are providing to ensure maximum efficiency and success. Virtual Piggy offers the ability for children to learn how to use the payment tools of the digital economy.  Our technology will prepare a new generation for responsible financial management that will last into adulthood."

Virtual Piggy is finalizing the architecture in preparation for beta testing of its OINK platform.  Virtual Piggy's tech team and its User Experience (UX) partner Red Interactive Agency of Santa Monica, California have agreed on the scope of the first stage of the beta system test product, so that it is ready for pilot trials with targeted users in the 8 to 14-year-old age range.

John Coyne further states that, "Our focus groups have seen our early prototypes and are eager to work with the beta test product.  These groups have further ratified our monetization strategy.  We are excited to finally reveal our payment platform system through mobile application; where the modern child lives and resides."

Mastercard commits to empowering over 150,000 Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) in Kenya within 2017 by giving them access to Masterpass QR.

Cybersecurity solution provider and systems integrator EC Wise and Silicon Valley analytic software firm FICO announced today that EC Wise has joined FICO’s Enterprise Security Score partner program. Through the partnership, EC Wise will incorporate the FICO® Enterprise Security Score into its EC:Secure portfolio of products and services, which enable clients to accurately assess cybersecurity risk within their own organisation, as well as any organisation they wish to work with.

“Executive leaders need a trusted benchmark to help them gauge cybersecurity risk as well as the performance of their cybersecurity investments,” said Doug Clare, vice president of cybersecurity solutions at FICO. “With EC:Secure, EC Wise has assembled an impressive assortment of policy, process and posture assessment tools, along with the workflow components, that enable the solution to be greater than the sum of its parts. Our cybersecurity score will make it an even more powerful solution.”

“Today the perimeter of a corporation includes the customers and service providers they work with,” said Jack Hakim, EC Wise CEO. “The FICO score for cyber risk is a great complement to other cyber-assessment and mitigation products and services in our portfolio. In the industries where we are most active, including casinos, hotel and hospitality, and public safety, the visibility into the risks of partner connectivity that the FICO Enterprise Security Score provides will yield significant value.”

The FICO® Enterprise Security Score provides an easy-to-understand metric that facilitates empirically informed board-level risk assessment, third-party vendor management, and cyber breach insurance underwriting. Along with a score, the product provides current threat profile characteristics and granular insights into potential security issues to facilitate security posture remediation and continuous improvement processes. It does so by leveraging both quantitative and qualitative insights to assess and understand the risk of an organisation’s network assets.

The score helps organisations manage cyber-risks from vendors, business partners and other third parties. With that insight, EC Wise can provide the automated tool chains and services necessary to mitigate risks for insurance underwriting and portfolio management.

Centrify, the leader in securing hybrid enterprises through the power of identity services, today announced the release of its new Analytics Service. This new service uses machine learning to assess risk based on constantly-evolving user behaviour patterns.  It then assigns a risk score, and enforces an appropriate decision — determining whether the user’s access is granted, requires step-up authentication, or is blocked entirely.

According to a new Forrester study, commissioned by Centrify, an astonishing two-thirds of organizations experienced an average of five security breaches in the past two years. And billions of usernames and passwords have been stolen and made available for these types of attacks, increasing risk of further breaches. The power of these attacks is in their perfect camouflage. Attackers “look” just like legitimate users, raising no suspicion, since all IT sees is regular user activity.

Breaking the cycle of breach

Centrify gives IT the power to break the cycle of account exploitation and impersonation, to stop attacks that lead to data breaches. Not only are anomalous access requests stopped in real time, but potentially compromised accounts are flagged and elevated to IT’s attention — speeding analysis and greatly minimizing the effort required to assess risk across today’s hybrid IT environment. And, arming IT with machine learning frees them from manually creating policy across all their endpoints, apps, sites, services and resources. 

Balancing security and optimal end-user experience

Building security policy for employees, contractors, partners and privileged IT users has typically favored security over user experience.  Behaviour-based scoring means users get a frictionless experience when they present low risk, easing access and improving productivity — while maintaining high security.

“By tailoring security policy to each individual’s behaviour and automatically flagging risky behaviour, we’re helping IT professionals minimize the risk of being breached — with immediate visibility into account risk, without poring over millions of log files and massive amounts of historical data,” said Bill Mann, chief product officer at Centrify. “And thanks to our broad set of enforcement points that include endpoints, applications and IT infrastructure, we can enforce risk-based policy in real time, at the point of access. This means high-risk threats can be blocked, while low-risk users get authorized access to apps, privileged credentials, or privileged sessions.”

Risk-based access gives IT new insights through risk scoring for end and privileged users to control policy and what action should be taken for a given risk level. Examples of risk-based access include:

• Single sign-on (SSO) to applications: As long as end-user’s behaviour is in keeping with typical access, it presents low risk, and IT can provide easy one-click access to their apps.
• Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) for password checkout: When an IT admin checks out a privileged credential or initiates a privileged session to a server or other resource from a location that’s not typical, the risk level is elevated, and the admin is prompted for further authentication.
• MFA for outsourced IT: If an attacker attempts to leverage an outsourced IT credential from an unknown or previously unseen device, access can be blocked entirely, stopping the attack before it can gain traction.

Since this new service is part of the Centrify Identity Services Platform, customers can implement risk-based policy across their boundaryless hybrid enterprise of endpoints, cloud applications, IaaS, and IT servers and resources for more detailed heuristics — and more effective policy. Available as an add-on to Centrify Identity Service and Centrify Privilege Service, the service is a natural extension of Centrify’s adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication, adding machine learning that both eases configuration for IT and eliminates constant MFA challenges to simplify end user access.

Learn more about Centrify’s Analytics Service or start a trial on the Centrify solutions site.

The first of its kind, smart point of sale (SPOS) company Yello has today partnered with cloud-based rewards, loyalty and marketing platform, Izicap.

The partnership means retailers can gain the benefits of all-in-one YelloPad with the added functionality of Izicap’s proven marketing and loyalty solution.

Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Yello, Mike Ausems, says:

“Combining Izicap’s marketing services with the YelloPad platform creates a unique solution for merchants and acquirers and gives them, for example, an edge in terms of in-store customer experience. Retailers now have the power to improve not just the point of sale experience for their customers, but by freeing up cashier staff, they’re also able to provide better, more focused customer service.”

Yello is a smart point of sale device and platform, which for the first time, combines payment with marketing, in a single, sleek and lightweight device.

Daniel Maurice-Vallerey, Co-CEO and Co-founder of Yello, says:

“The YelloPad was developed as the ideal platform from which to offer value-added services during the checkout process. We are delighted to be working with Izicap to deliver these services at point of sale”.

Izicap work with France’s largest banks such as Credit Agricole and are used currently by restaurants, bars and different type of retail shops in France, United Kingdom and Ireland. It is a cloud-based platform designed for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs)and provides a comprehensive marketing solution, covering analytics and a marketing expert service, a powerful loyalty engine and marketing campaign management.

Reda El Mejjad, president and founder of Izicap says:

‘We saw the YelloPad platform as the perfect integrated payments device with which to partner. The device itself is light, portable and adapts to all different retail environments”.

The Izicap and YelloPad integrated solution will start to be generally available from mid-2017.

Brazil’s largest airline by number of cities served, Azul, has selected Worldpay as its exclusive global payments provider, allowing the company to deliver more international flight bookings.

Azul selected Worldpay to match its global expansion in North America and Europe. The airline is using Worldpay’s online payments and treasury services in all markets, and is seeing the most significant boosts from consumers in Portugal and the United States. The partnership allowed Worldpay to act as a single point of contact for payments across all countries.

Having accumulated over 25 years of industry expertise, Worldpay is the world’s leading airline acquirer, and works with more than 80 of the biggest names in the industry. By working with one partner, Azul has been able to avoid the complication and cost of dealing with multiple payment processors across many markets as it continues to expand. With Worldpay, Azul has benefitted from lower website integration costs and faster market entry.

Marcelo Bento, Director of Alliances and Azul Viagens at Azul said: “Working alongside Worldpay has given us a huge competitive edge in the market, as seen by the number of countries we’ve moved into. By giving ourselves the ability to save time, money and resources by operating through a single provider, we hope to demonstrate Azul’s global expansion, supplying frequent and affordable air services to underserved markets throughout Brazil and beyond.”

Juan D’Antiochia, General Manager, Latin America, Global eCom at Worldpay said: “By partnering with Worldpay, the process of expanding abroad is simpler, making it quicker and easier for airlines to set up and gain access to consumers in new markets. Having one payment provider means that airlines gain access to a consistent service across all markets, and aggregated sales data for each market they’re operating in, without needing to deal with multiple vendors. In doing so this allows airlines to save time and money and ultimately improve revenues, as we have seen reflected with Azul.”

• Case Studies
• 14.02.2017 12:45 pm

Uncertain economic times call for the assurances provided by a financial services company that has helped its clients successfully irrespective of many storms. The origins of the company date back to the early 1900s and SMG F.S Ltd has been providing expert Independent Financial Advice for many years. Today, the independently owned company’s core business is focused on running pension schemes for small companies, as well as personal financial planning and wealth management. 

Serial start-up offer ‘win-win’ solution, bank API platform to enhance financial innovation and prevent banks from getting left behind.

TrueLayer has revealed the private beta of its API platform that will link applications with banks and financial institutions. The platform supplies developers with an access to the bank data they need to build new apps and services. Financial providers and other regulated businesses will also be able to utilize the platform to drive their technology innovation.

TrueLayer aggregates and normalizes a wealth of financial data into a single platform alongside functionality that lets developers ask for the consent they will need to connect a customer’s bank information and transactions into their applications while maintaining compliance with industry regulation. In short, it gives developers everything they need to quickly and securely create disruptive new financial services including payment apps, online lenders, robot advisors, personal finance management and much more. TrueLayer’s APIs will make it possible to integrate financial services into any chosen platform or application, making access faster, easier and more efficient.

Under new rules set out by PSD2 (Payment Services Directive 2) and guidelines set out by the CMA in the UK, banks and financial institutions will, for the first time, be required to allow third parties to access customer data. Tied to this, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires businesses to gain informed consent from consumers in order to use their personal data. The burden of connecting to each bank and of building the same consensual access components in every app will slow down new fintech startups, hindering much-needed customer-facing innovation.

TrueLayer removes this barrier by delivering a universal API so that developers can access data from every financial institution, in a simple format, from a single, secure gateway. Fintechs building the next generation of applications and financial services will be able to manage user consent and offer fine grained-permissions so that customers can be specific when allowing access to their banking and financial data. The API supports bank account verification, know your customer (KYC) processes, and account aggregation and also provides transactional data which can be used for credit scoring and risk management.

The company has been co-founded by serial entrepreneur, Francesco Simoneschi, who is also a partner of San Francisco-based VC firm, Mission Market. Francesco previously co-founded Staq, which was acquired by Upsight, and DomainsBot, which is part of the German group Sedo Holding Gmbh.

In 2016, TrueLayer closed a $1.3M funding round, led by Connect Ventures. Other venture capitalists and angel investors that contributed to the round included Graph Ventures, Tony Jamous and Eric Nadalin (co-founders of Nexmo, a leading cloud communication platform), and a number of others with banking and enterprise software background.

Francesco Simoneschi, CEO and co-founder of TrueLayer, said,“Consumer choice is shifting from banks to banking. Our vision is to create cloud infrastructure that will allow banks to connect with applications and make their services available to innovative startups that are keen to re-invent the customer experience. Ultimately, it’s also vital that the traditional banks open up their systems and become more agile – or they risk getting left behind – so the platform we offer is win-win.

“We want to enable a new ecosystem of financial services to flourish by bridging the divide between banks and developers. To date, financial innovation has been hindered by the industry’s reliance on legacy architecture and by the banks’ closed-door approach to technology and data. Although new regulations like PSD2 in Europe will help create a solution to this challenge, they don’t go far enough to drive real change. What is needed is true, open access, and the consistency that’s required to help developers benefit en masse. This is what TrueLayer brings to the market.”

Pietro Bezza, managing partner, Connect Ventures, said, “Technology is transforming banking – but so far we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what’s possible. FinTech developers need the right tools in order to innovate and that’s what TrueLayer provides.

Francesco and team are simply a dream fit for our investment thesis: mission-driven and determined to solve hard problems at scale, obsessed by Product and User Experience, with strong domain insights. The vision to build the leading go-to banking API platform is highly compelling for the developer community and the banks themselves. We see great potential for TrueLayer both as an investment and for effecting change where it’s so desperately needed.” 

 SySGroup announced on 10 December 2014, about acquisition of Q4Ex Limited (“Q4Ex”), which became the Merchant and Distribution division of the Group.

The terms of the acquisition (the “Initial Terms") made provision for deferred and contingent consideration of up to £1,456,000 payable subject to the achievement of certain financial hurdles set (the “Earn-out Consideration"). The Earn-out Consideration comprised three payments being two tranches of up to £520,000 and a further payment of up £416,000, all of which was to be closed through the issue of new ordinary shares ("Earn-out Shares"). The Earn-out Shares are to be issued at an effective fixed price of 68p per ordinary share, following the share consolidation completed in July 2016.

The Group has today entered into a deed of variation to the Initial Terms with the vendors of Q4Ex (the “Revised Terms"), which provides the Non-Executive Directors of the Board of SysGroup with the discretion to settle a portion of the Earn-out Consideration in cash at effective fixed price of 59p per Earn-out Share (the “Cash Price”).  No other terms were amended.

In February 2016 the vendors of Q4Ex received the £520,000 of Earn-out Shares for the period ended 29 February 2016. Q4Ex has since performed in line with management expectations and has exceeded the financial hurdles set for the second earn-out period to 30 September 2016, triggering the maximum earn-out of £520,000 for the period. TheNon-Executive Directors have elected to settle the Earn-out Consideration through the issue of 340,981 Earn-out Shares and the balance through the payment of £250,000 at the Cash Price.

The Board expects, subject to final review, Q4Ex to exceed the financial targets for the period to 31 December 2016, which will trigger a final payment of Earn-out Consideration of £416,000. The Board currently intends to settle Earn-out Consideration through the issue of Earn-out Shares. A further announcement will be made in due course.

Change in Directors’ holdings

In light of the issue of the Earn-out Shares, the percentage holdings of the other directors of the Group will be as follows:

Notes:

1.         The Group's share capital of 22,492,132 ordinary shares of 1p each as enlarged by the 340,981 Earn-out Shares, which are expected to be admitted to trading on AIM on 17 February 2017 (“Enlarged Share Capital”).

2.         Christopher Evans is a vendor of Q4Ex and received 109,114 Earn-out Shares

3.         Representative of Livingbridge VC LLP

Admission to trading and total voting rights

Application has been made to the London Stock Exchange for the Earn-out Shares to be admitted to trading on AIM. Admission is expected to take place on 17 February 2017. The Earn-out Shares will rank pari passu with the existing issued Ordinary Shares. 

Following the issue of the Earn-out Shares, the Company will have 22,492,132 Ordinary Shares, with each Ordinary Share carrying the right to one vote. The Company has no Ordinary Shares held in treasury. The total of 22,492,132 Ordinary Shares may therefore be used by shareholders in the Company as the denominator for the calculations by which they will determine if they are required to notify their interest in, or a change in their interest in, the share capital of the Company under the FCA's Disclosure and Transparency Rules.