The Freelancer and Contractor Services Association (FCSA), the UK’s leading trade association for professional employment services, has agreed a partnership with Modulr, which specialises in providing flexible payments technology to businesses, enabling faster, cheaper and easier payments.

CloudMargin, the multi-award winning creator of the world’s first web-based collateral and margin management solution, today announced it is continuing its rapid expansion in London with the appointment of Filipe Rodriguez as the firm’s new Chief Technology Officer.

Industry veteran Rodriguez will be based in the firm’s London headquarters, where he will lead the global technology advances for the FinTech firm, reporting directly to Steve Husk, CEO of CloudMargin.

Rodriguez joins CloudMargin with more than 15 years of experience in development and technology innovation across various business sectors.

Husk said: “Collateral Management is now a key function within financial firms as they attempt to navigate through an industry saturated in uncertainty. I have no doubt that Filipe’s knowledge and extensive experience will have a positive impact on CloudMargin’s continued product and technological innovation, as increased regulatory constraints upon market participants demand the need for highly automated, robust market solutions.”

Rodriguez said: “I am honoured to serve as CTO for CloudMargin and extremely excited to be a part of the company’s journey. The collateral management tool has made it possible for firms of any size to easily access and afford sophisticated technology that has become ever more important in this global regulatory environment. I look forward to building further upon the firm’s strong technological foundation as we seek to leverage this software that has captured the attention of the financial services industry.” 

Rodriguez has developed innovative web applications for the London Symphony Orchestra as well as global applications for major corporations including DHL, the world’s leading logistics company, Bacardi Limited and healthcare pioneer Roche. He also led several development teams at ASOS.com to deliver high-impact customer experience changes and generate revenue across the business.

Most recently, Rodriguez led the tech team at WeSwap into rapid expansion and introduced a wide range of improvements in processes and delivery life cycle.

Winton, the global investment management business, today announced that the second cohort from the Winton Labs accelerator will pitch at a Demo Day on 9^th February. Featuring five of Europe’s most innovative startups focussed on AI, machine learning and data science, the second Winton Lab programme has been run in collaboration with The Alan Turing Institute, whose academics have provided the startups with technical mentorship.

Unlike other accelerators, Winton takes no equity from the companies who participate in the programme, instead offering each selected business a cash injection to help further their development. The intense programme involves companies meeting potential customers and over seventy leading industry experts, including, investors, advisors and members of Winton’s extensive network. It culminates with a demo day where participants are invited to present their companies to attendees, comprising some of Europe’s best-known investors.

Matt Ridley from Winton Ventures says: “London is home to world-class academics, start-ups, data scientists and innovators. By bringing these ingredients together into an organised acceleration programme, Winton Labs is helping entrepreneurs to build new, value-generating companies that are able to compete on a global scale.”

Sir Alan Wilson FBA FRSE, Chief Executive of The Alan Turing Institute, added: “The SME landscape is a hotbed of innovation when it comes to algorithms, big data and artificial intelligence. As the national centre for data science, part of our role is to nurture the next generation of data science leaders and entrepreneurs and it is fantastic to see this work coming to life through the collaboration with Winton Labs. I look forward to seeing what these five start-ups go on to achieve, and I would like to thank my colleagues at The Alan Turing Institute for offering their support and expert advice throughout the process.”

Startups from Winton Labs’ first cohort have enjoyed subsequent success and have grown significantly. IntelligentX, a machine learning application for making AI beer, is currently raising a seed round of funding in New York and Cognism closed a $500K seed round in January 2017 from investors including FINTECH Circle and South Central Ventures. Meanwhile CheckRecipient, which received a £300K investment from Winton in July 2016, has now signed up its first FTSE 100 customer.

Tim Sadler, Co-founder & CEO at CheckRecipient says: “Since being part of the first Winton Labs cohort in 2016, the Winton team have continued to offer invaluable advice which has helped us to more than double in size. We have increased our client base by over 300% and have won a number of awards and accolades including being named ‘Best UK Security Startup’ by WIRED UK and ‘Best Machine Intelligence Startup’ by LegalGeek."

The second cohort of Winton Labs comprises:

Cognitiv+, an artificial intelligence platform that automates knowledge extraction from legal data, have recently won a major Grant with InnovateUK on the open-programme; one of the most competitive calls in 2016. Since starting on Winton Labs they have started five pilots in Q1 2017 alone. They have also been named Export Champion as part of the CommonwealthFirst programme.

SMAP Energy, who use energy consumption data collected via smart meters to innovate the energy sector, now manages data from 30,000 smart meters in Japan and will be starting engagement with a Middle Eastern client in March. The team launched AIswitch recently, a free smart energy switching service for UK customers, while co-founder Yohei Kiguchi was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list.

Warwick Analytics, who automate predictive analytics even with heterogeneous data, have seen strong commercial progress with key enterprise companies, and will be moving from Winton Labs to the IAG accelerator: Hangar 51. Warwick have recently opened their US office, and current tech development will see a new release in Spark in under a month.

Terrabotics: Transform terabytes of satellite and aerial imagery into very high precision true 3D terrain data to model the Earth. This period of acceleration has brought in clients including a major mining company, a Private Equity fund and an investment research firm, as well as increasing business with existing customers in global Oil & Gas.

Alterest, a cloud platform providing institutional debt investors an efficient way to access the growing non-bank lending market, have seen further product developments, expansion of the team, and officially signed up institutional investors as engagement clients during the programme.

European banks can now see first-hand how they can use PSD2 to generate massive revenues and dominate the market for digital transactions, following today’s launch of a ‘live demo’ iOS app from Token.

“Unlike other PSD2 solution providers, Token does not just offer compliance, it gives banks uncontested control over the post-PSD2 market for digital transactions,” comments Marten Nelson, co-founder, Token. “With Token, gone are today’s payment networks, clearing houses and other intermediaries that take a piece of the bank’s payment revenue. In their place, the bank launches its own Token digital transaction network, allowing it to set its own fees. Thanks to the new direct interface that Token enables, the bank can increase its margins, lower the costs of transacting for merchants, and introduce a fee structure for Account Information Service Providers and Payment Initiation Service Providers mandated by PSD2.

“This is a big change and it can be a lot to take in, so we’ve create a mobile app to help convey the power of the opportunity and enable banks to see first-hand how the system works. It also lets us demonstrate how fast and convenient the user experience is.

“Our app isn’t a first audition either; it’s more like a final dress rehearsal,” adds Nelson. “It uses the live Token network and has been fully integrated with Fidor OS. In short, we’re ready to deploy today and can do so in a fraction of the cost and time it would take a bank to manage themselves.”

Combining Token’s payment network with Fidor OS took a total of ten days, including testing. Customer account data is securely aggregated in a single place, and payments can be made from multiple sources instantly and securely from within a single environment.

“We are glad to unveil the availability of Token on Fidor’s open banking platform FidorOS at Finovate Europe, to support banks that use our platform to easily adopt future payment scenarios, such as the upcoming PSD2 standard,” comments Ge Drossaert, Member of the Board of Fidor. “The synergies between Token and Fidor’s technologies greatly strengthen banks’ role in the new payment landscape. Not only do they reinforce data and payment security in an open environment, they also pave the way for new revenue streams for banks that want to play a key role and strive to innovate.”

To show how an account information aggregator might pool customer data from multiple banks the app also includes a fictional link to Game of Thrones’ Iron Bank of Braavos. Imitation merchants and products have also been generated to enable users of the app to experience the full transaction flow.

Chargebacks911™, a Global Risk Technologies company and an internationally-renowned leader for risk mitigation, has today announced a new collaboration with ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW), a leading global provider of real-time electronic payment and banking solutions. This alliance will enable more merchants to access the services they need to successfully fight illegitimate chargebacks.

Responding to the needs of its dynamic customer base, ACI Worldwide sought to deliver a solution that would more effectively mitigate chargeback risks. Chargebacks911 will assist these merchants as they take a proactive approach to chargeback management.

Recent industry trends reveal this is an opportune time for such a collaboration. According to JP Morgan Chase, the frequency of chargeback issuances is growing at an alarming rate of 20 percent annually, compared to transaction growth of just 7 percent in the same time period. According to industry research, fraud causes £80 billion in losses annually--and chargebacks account for most of that. This is a pivotal moment for merchants that have been searching for a truly effective chargeback management solution.

Monica Eaton-Cardone, CIO of Global Risk Technologies, parent company of Chargebacks911, said: “We’re extremely pleased to team up with ACI and bring our unrivalled chargeback solutions to its merchants. Merchants worldwide want a tactical approach to revenue recovery; one that achieves sustainable growth. We’re honoured the company has recognised our strength in this area, and we look forward to helping these merchants better manage their chargeback issues.”  

“We are excited to work alongside Chargebacks911 to offer ACI ReD Shield customers the best tools and capabilities to prevent fraud,” said Jackie Barwell, director of fraud product management, ACI Worldwide. “Merchants today are aiming to be more proactive with chargeback management, no longer accepting chargebacks, but successfully fighting them to protect their bottom line. We’re pleased to expand our merchant offering through this collaboration with a leader in chargeback mitigation.”

Chargebacks911 and ACI Worldwide will bolster stability and growth of traditional, more secure consumer payment methods across Europe and the United States, providing ACI Worldwide merchants and their consumers with a sensible, accountable, and standardised solution that can halt the rising tide of card-not-present chargebacks.

Thames Water, the UK’s largest provider of water and wastewater services, has reduced bad debt by 11 percent in the last 12 months by innovating its collections process using FICO® Debt Manager™ collections system. For its achievement, Thames Water has been awarded the FICO Decisions Award for Debt Management.

“The introduction of Debt Manager 9 has allowed us to design our treatment strategies from the bottom-up — rather than building strategies to the system limitations, we built them to the business and customer needs,” said Ross Betts, Thames Water’s collections system, strategy & segmentation manager. “This program has been hugely successful, not least because it managed to implement several ambitious goals at once. The implementation of FICO Debt Manager has allowed for the creation of new strategies, processes, partnerships and ways of working, which all rely on accurate data.”

Unlike services that can be terminated should customers default payment, it is not possible for Thames Water to block customers from water access, which makes debt collection challenging. Furthermore, Thames Water’s supply area has a highly transient population with a large number of rental properties, which makes collecting and collating accurate data difficult.

“Our first step towards improving the debt management process was understanding our customers better, making sure we have accurate customer data and segmentation to allow us to treat them appropriately,” said Betts. “The first data cleanse resulted in the update of over 500,000 customer names and the addition of 2.2 million customers’ dates of birth. It also identified a large number of active accounts where the customers where no longer resident with over £28 million of associated debt.”

Thames Water also implemented FICO® Customer Communication Services, which sends reminder text messages and sophisticated interactive voice calls so customers can receive notifications of important account activity through the channel that suits them best. This personal approach to debt collection is a more effective way to engage with late-paying customers and increases the likelihood of customers paying their debts.

“Thames Water is using customer-level collections, with a lot of data management, from different areas,” said Petr Kapoun, retail risk director at Česká Spořitelna, one of this year’s awards judges. “Customer-level collections is hard for many reasons — for example if a customer is paying one account but not another, what is strategy for the former account? Also, Thames Water is not in the position of being able to deny service based on late payments, which makes collections challenging.”

About the FICO Decisions Awards

The FICO Decisions Awards recognise organisations that are achieving remarkable success using FICO solutions. A panel of independent judges with deep industry expertise evaluates nominations based upon measurable improvement in key metrics; demonstrated use of best practices; project scale, depth and breadth; and innovative uses of technology. The 2016 judges are:

• Dan Ariely, expert on human behaviour, author of Predictably Irrational, and Duke University Professor of Behavioral Economics
• Jim Bander, national manager, Decision Science, Toyota Financial Services (2015 winner)
• Ken Elliott, global director of Analytics, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
• Bill Fearnley, Jr., research director, Compliance, Fraud and Risk Analytics, IDC – Financial Insights
• Petr Kapoun, retail risk director, Česká Spořitelna (2015 winner)
• Dr Dalvinder Singh, editor, Financial Regulation International
• Nicole Sturgill, principal, Executive Advisor, CEB TowerGroup

ICICI Securities Ltd, a subsidiary of ICICI Bank and India’s leading integrated financial services firm and Saxo Bank, the online multi-asset trading and investment specialist, today announce a strategic partnership to offer Saxo’s trading and investment capabilities via a digital platform to Indian Investors.

The partnership will enable ICICI Securities’ 4 million clients on ICICIdirect.com, India’s leading investment portal, to diversify their investments outside of the Indian domestic market and access multi-asset investment opportunities, through an intuitive trading experience on the award-winning trading platform SaxoTraderGO.

With ever increasing globalization, diversification has become an important objective for all investors to spread risks and opportunity across geographic regions and asset classes as countries experience and behave differently at various points of the economic cycle. Investing in developed countries such as US, APAC and Europe, not only provide exposure to well-known international companies with stable income and growth, it also provides investors with the opportunity to capture short-term opportunities efficiently.

Commenting on the partnership, Kim Fournais, Co-Founder & CEO, Saxo Bank A/S said, “India is an incredibly important growth market with a growing number of investment professionals and a very tech-savvy population. ICICI Securities has established itself as one of the leading investment firms in India and will now be able to offer their clients access seamless to global capital markets. This partnership once again highlights our ongoing commitment to be atrading facilitator for banks and brokers around the world.”

Ms Shilpa Kumar, MD & CEO, ICICI Securities Ltd said, “For almost two decades, ICICIdirect has been offering Indian investors the opportunity to invest and build their financial goals in a convenient and knowledgeable way. Through our partnership with Saxo Bank, we have now brought investment opportunities in Equity Markets, ETFs and Bond Markets across 24 countries to our customers at their fingertips. This we believe will help them to diversify their portfolio outside of India. I believe the partnership with Saxo Bank will help our clients leverage our combined strong knowledge and superior platforms and ensure they have access to the broadest set of global capital markets investment options.”

SaxoTraderGO is the Saxo Bank’s next generation platform built with Saxo’s OpenAPI technology offering functionality across the entire trade cycle – from pre-trade to execution to post-trade services for Stocks, CFDs, Futures, Options, FX and Bonds. The platform further allows Saxo’s global partners to integrate the trading and investment capabilities directly into their own applications and systems.

Mitek (NASDAQ: MITK), a global leader in mobile capture and identity verification software solutions, has launched in the UK with a new office established in London. The US-based company works with over 5,500 organisations providing its technology to 70 million consumers across the globe. Mitek provides financial institutions and other highly regulated businesses with mobile verification technology underpinned by artificial intelligence (AI) that establishes an individual’s identity remotely to accelerate the digitisation of Know Your Customer (KYC) and Customer Due Diligence (CDD) processes around on boarding and payments.

“Despite market uncertainty over Brexit, we believe that London will remain the heart of global financial markets for decades to come and our presence there is critical to developing our European footprint.” said James DeBello, Chairman and CEO, Mitek.

“Now is exactly the right time to for Mitek to launch in the UK – financial services providers are facing unprecedented challenges in Europe due to new PSD2 regulation, new AML rules, and the increasing sophistication of fraud. Meeting these challenges while competing with new market entrants and remaining digital-first will mean innovative solutions are a must.”

Mitek’s key offering to the European market is Mobile Verify, which allows an enterprise to verify a user’s identity simply by using the device’s camera to check the authenticity of ID documents. The information gathered when verifying an ID can also be used to pre-fill forms, making account opening painless. Mobile Verify uses machine-learning verification technology, built on experience gained from ID documents experts including Interpol and military intelligence, to give it the very best intelligence on identity document forgery. Its AI means that this intelligence is able to respond to ever-changing fraud techniques.

This technology is already used by more than 70 million consumers, and is embedded in over five thousand apps by banks, insurance providers, payments providers, and other financial services. Mitek also offers “selfie authentication”, where the user can use their mobile device’s camera to perform a facial recognition scan in order to on-board into a service or authorise a transaction.

The launch of the new headquarters coincides with Mitek showcasing its unique machine-learning passport verification technology at Finovate London, the conference dedicated to cutting-edge banking and financial technology.

Profile Software, an international financial solutions provider, today announced the latest upgrade in Axia, the web-based wealth management and family office platform. Its functional coverage has been enriched with a number of new attributes such as instrument types, transaction types, analytics, interfaces and features to further boost the operational capability and efficiency of the organisation.

On top of the existing advanced CRM, Portfolio Management tools, that support standard investments like bonds, stocks, deposits, etc., Axia incorporates advanced functionality for alternative investments like private equity funds and real estate properties instruments especially addressing the needs of Family Office operations. In particular, private equity funds incorporate special static data, commitments management and execution of special transactions, such as capital calls and distributions. Axia also supports the appropriate evaluation treatment and a number of specialised ratios like TVPI, DVPI, RVPI and PIC while enabling performance measurement using IRR. Real estate properties also take provision for special static data and transaction types to manage the relevant investments.

It is worth mentioning that a new advanced module has been incorporated in this version for advanced risk analytics. This refers to the “Risk Metrics” module that allows for a comprehensive view and analysis of several absolute risk, relative risk, downside risk, and risk-adjusted return metrics.

In addition, Axia’s sophisticated payments transaction types support Family Offices’ and Wealth Management firms’ operations for outgoing funds transfers, with workflows setup for internal approvals and automatic generation of relevant bank instructions forms. Incoming funds transfer transactions are also supported.

Last but not least, in the new release, additional Custodian Bank’s interfaces have been added that allow for transactions’ and outstanding positions’ reconciliation with international banks, thus saving substantial time and resources while streamlining the firms’ operations. The interfaces are implemented either through Bank-proprietary file formats, or through SWIFT-based message files, using Axia’s easily adaptable and robust integration layer.

Axia’s out-of-the-box, pre-configured solutions for Wealth Management firms and Family Offices include ready-to-use in-built reports, an easy to use “getting started” tutorial, as well as setup wizards and an online context-sensitive help that provide for an easy and quick setup including initial data uploading.

The enhanced and new Axia end-to-end functionalities enable users to support specialised and advanced operations with agility, provide more connectivity and cooperation facilities with Banks, while they offer an improved and optimised setup process.