ICS Financial Systems Limited (ICSFS), the global software and services provider for banks and financial institutions, announced that Al-Arabiya Islamic Bank, a newly established Bank located in Iraq, selected the multi-awards winning system ICS BANKS ISLAMIC System.

The signing ceremony took place in Amman Jordan Attending the ceremony were the General Manager of Al-Arabiya Islamic Bank; Mr. Duraid Yaseen Hamdan and the Executive Director for Business Development of ICSFS; Mr. Wael Malkawi.

Following the signing ceremony, the General Manager of Al-Arabiya Islamic Bank Mr. Duraid Yaseen Hamdan stated: “We chose ICS BANKS ISLAMIC System for its successful and dynamic accomplishments around the world, especially in the Iraqi market. We understand that the challenges we are facing today are quite difficult considering the growth of the Islamic banking in the region.” Yaseen added; “We  are looking forward to this significant partnership where ICSFS will support us in achieving our desired growth targets, on all aspects and levels.”   

Al-Arabiya Islamic Bank (AIB) will enjoy many offerings and advantages, by implementing ICS BANKS ISLAMIC Core Banking and Credit Facilities & Risk Groups (Murabaha, Musharaka, Istisn’a, Ijara, Mudaraba, Qard Hasan), Trade Finance, Remittances, Investment Accounts & Profit Distribution, Time Deposit, and from ICS BANKS DS (Delivery Channels); ICS BANKS IBS (Internet Banking System) and Credit Cards and ATMS Management System.

On this occasion, the Executive Director of Business Development at ICSFS; Mr. Wael Malkawi commented: “We are very optimistic towards this partnership where Al-Arabiya Islamic Bank joins our flourishing community in Iraq. At ICSFS, we provide innovative products by using the latest technologies to cover all financial services’ sectors from Universal, Islamic, Corporate, Investment and Retail banking solutions to Commercial, Finance Lease and Microfinance banking solutions and activities.” Malkawi added; “The project is planned to go live in a record time of two months, where Al-Arabiya Islamic Bank will be deploying the latest version of ICS BANKS ISLAMIC and enjoy its new look and feel unlimited benefits and our system’s unlimited offerings and advantages.”    
 
ICS BANKS provides a complete suite of banking business modules with a rich sweep of functionality and features, addressing business needs and automating accounting processes, as needed, to improve a bank’s business performance. ICS BANKS has always been a pioneer in utilizing the latest technology to serve financial institutions. In addition to its embedded Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA), the system is deployed in a multi-tiered setup that runs on a web thin client.

Kofax^®, a leading provider of software to simplify and transform the First Mile™ of business, and TR Process, a Kofax authorised partner in Latin America, announced that Kofax TotalAgility^® has been deployed at Caruana Financeira, an innovative financial services company in Brazil, to automate a “hybrid” debit /credit card application, approval and delivery process.

The “hybrid” card can be used as a prepaid debit card for mass transit, utility and other payment purposes and as credit card for purchases of goods and services. Individuals can apply for the card at Caruana Financeira branches located in mass transit terminals in Brazil.

Kofax worked with TR Process to digitally transform the entire account opening and new customer on boarding process in only six months. The solution allows individuals to manually enter data into an electronic application form using tablet computers with touchscreens, and Caruana Financeira employees to take pictures of or scan identification documents used to initiate the credit review and approval process. The solution then automates the extraction and validation of data, verifies the authenticity of the identification documents and is integrated with a credit scoring engine that approves or denies the issuance, embossing and delivery of a new “hybrid” card.

The time to issue the “hybrid” cards was cut from three weeks to under 10 minutes realising 80 percent cost savings and enabling immediate card delivery and usage, which results in faster and greater transaction fee revenue for Caruana Financeira.

Kofax TotalAgility automates and manages 80 percent of the entire application, approval and delivery process.

Today at Finovate, Meniga introduced its new Challenges module, a digital offering to support banks in helping their customers manage their finances by using fun and social incentives.

Meniga Challenges improves people’s financial health by making it possible to save money in small attainable increments. It does this by combining proven community-reinforcement and gamification techniques, such as those popularised in consumer fitness trackers and health apps (e.g. Fitbit and Strava), letting users share and compare their weekly or monthly goals and achievements with peers.

Based on Meniga’s extensive research on how to engage users with any financial personality type, the Meniga Challenges user interface applies proven logic that short term goals drive long term gain. With only 20-30% of the population “conscientious” about financial planning, early testing of Meniga Challenges shows high levels of engagement from people who struggle financially while also keeping the motivated groups engaged.

The unique new product offers a variety of habit-forming challenges. Examples include category-based spending challenges e.g. “no fast-food for a week”; one-off challenges such as “the Chopping Block” shows users their subscriptions so that they can unsubscribe from redundant ones; and The Meniga Money Monster that “steals” variable, random amounts from a user’s current account and puts it into savings. This is useful for anyone who is trying to manage their finances including the least motivated people who find it difficult to save. (See “Notes to editors, below, for details.)
 
Finnur Magnússon, Chief Product Owner: “We developed Challenges to help people with any financial personality type gain financial independence. By combining social online fun with techniques that drive positive daily lifestyle changes, we applied an approach to finance already proven in other areas like health. Small everyday changes can make a huge impact on the customer’s long term saving and spending pattern.”
 
The result: Meniga Challenges supports personalised, better financial habits for end users, and a new way for banks to engage and retain customers.

Georg Ludviksson, CEO and Cofounder Meniga: “Digital banking should be both personal and inspiring: by offering a single compelling app that appeals to all types of customers banks can finally provide value beyond simple financial transactions. Ever-changing regulatory hurdles such as PSD2 and the threat of a rapidly evolving fintech industry are forcing retail banks to innovate to maintain meaningful relationships with customers and their role in society.”

Meniga’s suite of services enables banks to remain compliant to regulatory changes, apply data for targeted marketing, and truly engage all of their customers with relevant activities and content.

Meniga Challenges will be available from February 2017 as part of the company’s Digital Banking Solutions package that also includes the activity feed and personalised insights for banks and their customers.

Atos today announces its global partnership agreement with omni-channel banking software company ebankIT. Atos will now offer ebankIT’s omni-channel offering as part of its “Now Banking” Digital Banking leadership programme, thus supporting banks in their journey towards digital transformation.

Together driving omni-channel Digital Transformation in Banking

The evolution of Banking continues to accelerate at cruising speed. Customers want fast and consistent transactions and expect to be able to access and control their finances using any device and any channel, at any time. Financial institutions have often been held back by cumbrous, inflexible legacy systems. Omni-channel banking enables banks to deliver a seamless and consistent customer experience, whether customers are accessing their bank via a mobile, tablet or visiting a branch in person.

“Digital Banking requires a willingness to think differently, develop collaboratively and move fast. To test, learn and improve. These are the traits that characterize the success of a digital transformation” said RemcoNeuteboom, Global Chief Digital Officer, Financial Services at Atos. “Our partnership with ebankIT perfectly fits our ambition to support our clients in their digital transformation journey, and enable them to make the most of every customer contact to drive long-term competitive advantage.”

Carlos Oliveira, CEO at ebankIT said: “We are happy to work with Atos who has long-standing relationships within the financial services industry globally and the technical implementation expertise our customers are looking for. Their Digital Banking vision on the future of financial services is strongly aligned with our thinking.”

This partnership between Atos and ebankIT enables banks to design and deliver the services demanded by today’s and tomorrow’s customers, and offer an improved customer experience with real-time, speed, agility and security.

EbankIT and Atos are both at Finovate Europe 7-8 February 2017 in London. Come and discover our WL Connected Piggy Bank demo enabling smart savings for kids at Atos’ subsidiary Worldline on stand 89.

GFT, the global provider of advisory, business consulting, IT and software services to the financial sector, has announced an award win, alongside their client Banco Original in Brazil for “the most innovative business model of the financial industry”, according to the Executivos Financeiros, eFinance Awards 2016.

The service, developed by GFT, offers the world’s first 100% digital process for account opening, providing a strong competitive advantage for Banco Original, with their Seja Original application. Launched in 2016, the App enables users to open a new current account, with the possibility of adding all additional products using the digital channel, resulting in the top eFinance Award in the category ‘Innovation in the business model.’

The App is available in both the Apple and Google stores. The Seja Original application is used by people who are interested in opening a new current account. Users are able to send personal data, images and documents directly to the bank, with the convenience and flexibility of doing all of this online, using a mobile device.

Behind the intuitive front-end, there is an efficient system integration solution, the automation of business processes, outsourced services orchestration and advanced analytics that receive and process the multi-structured information coming from the application. The analytics engine enriches the information and evaluates the individual risk, taking into account the policies of the bank.

If an exception arises from the analytical processing of information from potential new customers, the negotiations are carried out through automated processes, within ‘back office decision cells’ which perform the data analysis. All analytical enrichment of the data is made available to back office professionals, so that the decision making process is of the highest possible quality.

This analytical intelligence within the App allows refinement, from the perspectives of both marketing and risk, regarding the demographic segments being targeted by the bank for the development of its customer base. The operational efficiencies achieved with the integration and automated processing of such data means Banco Original now sets the global benchmark for best practice client onboarding.

Christian Ball, Head of Retail Banking for GFT’s Atlantic Region commented: "The innovative and efficient App provides a fantastic competitive advantage for Banco Original in the market. Its disruptive innovation is already being recognised by domestic and international competitors alike, and has been widely adopted by new prospects seeking a seamless account opening experience".

Wanderley Baccalá Junior, CIO at Banco Original commented: “Without the multidisciplinary approach and collaboration of GFT professionals, it would not have been possible to achieve the results we have today. The flexibility and commitment of all the GFT team involved, who applied their multidisciplinary expertise in banking, architecture, systems development, testing and management led to the successful delivery", adds Baccalá.

The industry expectation is that the Seja Original App will be a key driver helping the bank to achieve their business goals, even with the economic crisis that is sweeping the country. This is a pioneering and successful project in Brazil, and its performance will certainly influence the strategic positioning of all existing financial institutions in the market.

The Finovate conference, described as the ‘Super Bowl’ of online personal finance, is taking place on 7 – 8 February 2017 and will bring together an international cohort of FinTech innovators. Firms will showcase their work in live demonstrations of the latest technologies which are shaking up the sector. A wide range of financial areas will be covered at the event such as peer-to-peer lending, payments, mortgages and how technology is being leveraged to boost efficiencies and streamline the customer experience.

The mortgages sector in particular has seen a great wave of change in recent years as automated technology handles more and more mortgage processes from approvals to underwriting. Lengthy waiting periods for approvals tend to be a cause for complaint from consumers, but new technology is being introduced to reduce these delays. Recently it has been demonstrated that this period can be reduced from 11 days to approximately 48 hours. 

The modern customer still expects traditional banking services in-person, with 86 percent of customers in a recent survey expressing they will use a physical branch in the near future. However a range of digital services are being leveraged to blend the customer journey and create a hybrid experience where human interaction is assisted, instead of being phased out by automation.  New innovators are increasingly putting pressure on traditional financial institutions, as mortgage lending from non-banks has doubled since 2007.

Bhupender Singh, CEO of Intelenet Global Services®, commented: “Mortgage providers find themselves in a highly competitive market as smaller players seek to disrupt and undercut traditional banks. New technology in the form of automated approval and processing systems, can streamline mortgage transactions resulting in a win-win for companies and customers.

He continues: “Analytic technology that can intelligently examine speech and customer behaviour is revolutionising the sector. We are going to see smaller providers bring new software and algorithms to free up precious resources within banks, and this will allow them to provide better care for their customers. The rise of automation in the mortgage sector is an opportunity for banks to get closer to their clients and give them a more personalised service.”

OpenLink, the global leader in trading, treasury and risk management solutions for the energy, commodities, corporate and financial services industries, has been named as the number one technology vendor for both Commodities Trading Systems and Commodities Pricing and Analytics in the 2016 Risk Technology Rankings.

This is the fifth straight year that OpenLink has topped the Risk Magazine rankings, which are assembled via a poll of derivatives and risk management technology users who rate systems based on functionality, usability, performance, return on investment and reliability.

Ken Knowles, Executive Vice President of Enterprise Strategy and Business Development for OpenLink, said: “This year's Risk Technology Rankings highlight the importance of integrated and flexible solutions that drive greater value, efficiency and performance for clients while adapting to their changing technology landscapes. OpenLink’s continued position at the top of the rankings underlines the sustained quality of our platform: a single, integrated solution across trade capture, position management, valuation and risk analytics, accounting, collateral and cash management.”

Bernard Delahaye, Senior Vice President at OpenLink EMEA, received the awards on behalf of OpenLink at the ceremony in London and said: "We would like to thank our clients and partners for voting us top once again in commodities trading and risk solutions. It was a fantastic awards evening, surrounded by specialists in their fields, and we were delighted to host important clients at our table.”

The new recognition builds on continued success for OpenLink, which recently advanced its position in the Leader’s Quadrant of Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for Trading Platforms, was named as the category leader for energy trading risk in the 2017 Chartis RiskTech 100 rankings, and received a 2016 FTF News Technology Innovation Award as the best derivatives operation solution.

Gresham, the leading software and services company that specialises in providing real-time transaction control and enterprise data integrity solutions, is pleased to announce a strategic win in the European banking sector.

One of the largest financial service providers in Central and Eastern Europe has selected Clareti Transaction Control (CTC) to provide greater control and integrity within their treasury function and capital markets business, covering foreign exchange (FX), over-the-counter (OTC) trading, exchange traded derivatives (ETD) and inter-company transactions.

Ian Manocha, CEO, Gresham says, “This is the first customer win for our new continental Europe sales office which we opened in September 2016, and is an indication of the potential we see for our technology in Europe’s regional banks.

Irrespective of whether you are a global, regional or niche financial markets player, being in control of your data is a business imperative. It is a time of unprecedented change and uncertainty in global markets and firms cannot afford to be constrained by inflexible monolithic systems or by spreadsheets and other manual intensive processes. The Clareti platform gives firms confidence in the integrity of their data and helps them be more agile.”

Infosys Finacle, part of EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infosys (NYSE: INFY), along with its partner Let’s Talk Payments (LTP), today released a global survey report - “Blockchain Technology: From Hype to Reality”. According to the report, over 80 percent of bankers surveyed expect to see commercial adoption of the technology by 2020, with nearly half (50 percent) of the financial institutions already investing or planning to invest during 2017. This announcement builds on the recent announcement by Emirates NBD and ICICI Bank on the deployment of blockchain technology in international remittances and trade finance.

The aim of the study, which included a survey of more than 100 financial services professionals, was to understand the sentiment of blockchain technology in the following areas:

·         The technology’s current understanding in the banking industry

·         Adoption strategies and investments being pursued

·         The opportunities and challenges that the industry is dealing with

Sanat Rao, Chief Business Officer and Global Head, Finacle, said, “This research reaffirms our belief that the blockchain technology has potential to help banks reimagine banking processes. The technology can help banks automate inter-organization processes, significantly improve transparency and reset existing operational benchmarks. Several progressive organizations have already executed pilots to validate these propositions. We believe, in the coming quarters, the industry will experience greater momentum towards rolling out lab-pilots to real-life use cases.”  

Survey methodology

LTP surveyed 100 business and technology leaders from 75 institutions ranging from regional banks to multinational banks on behalf of Infosys Finacle.

About Infosys Finacle

Finacle is the industry-leading universal banking solution from EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Infosys. The solution helps financial institutions develop deeper connections with stakeholders, power continuous innovation and accelerate growth in the digital world. Today, Finacle is the choice of banks across 94 countries and serves over 848 million customers – estimated to be nearly 16.5 percent of the world’s adult banked population.

Finacle solutions address the core banking, e-banking, mobile banking, CRM, payments, treasury, origination, liquidity management, Islamic banking, wealth management, and analytics needs of financial institutions worldwide. Assessment of the top 1000 world banks reveals that banks powered by Finacle enjoy 50 percent higher returns on assets, 30 percent higher returns on capital, and 8.1 percent points lesser costs to income than others. 

To know more, visit www.finacle.com

On 27th January, Bolero International, the leading trade finance digitisation platform, was named as one of the recipients of Corporate Treasurer 2016 Asia's Best Treasury and Finance Strategy awards.

The annual awards honour those with proven vision, but also those who have endeavoured to share their ideas and broaden the treasury knowledge base within Asia, covering a wide range of categories including “Best Trade Finance Strategy” for which Bolero was a joint recipient alongside HSBC and Reliance Industries.

The award recognises the collective efforts of Bolero, HSBC and Reliance Industries in facilitating an electronic letter of credit (LC) for an export deal in a single day, rather than the standard 15 days it would take to exchange a physical LC. This is the first document exchange of its kind to take place in India.

Bolero welcomes the award win as it continues to strengthen its expansion into Asian markets. Late last year, Bank of China (BOC) became the first of the “Big Four” banks in China to offer exporters the multiple benefits of using the Bolero electronic trade document platform.

Prompted by increased requests from BOC’s extensive global customer-base, Bolero’s straight-through ePresentation processing technology will dramatically reduce turnaround times for all parties involved in export deals between China, Europe, Singapore and South East Asia.

“We’re honoured to have been recognized for our part in facilitating this transaction,” Ian Kerr, CEO of Bolero, said. “It’s immensely gratifying to receive this award which validates the global demand for a more efficient, cost-effective and secure method in successfully completing trade transactions between global organisations”.

Ross Wilkinson, Head of Global Accounts for Bolero, added: “Facilitating these significant transactions between organisations such as HSBC and Reliance Industries proves there is a growing requirement for ePresentation solutions in key global industries. Bolero is poised to instigate the revolution in ePresentation and digital transactions with the speed, ease-of-handling and security for which we are known.”