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.

Central 1 Credit Union (Central 1), the primary digital banking and payments provider for credit unions in Canada, has selected Backbase, the omni-channel digital banking market leader, to revamp its MemberDirect® platform and assist Canadian credit unions in staying at the forefront of innovation by deploying technology at an accelerated rate.

Backbase will play an instrumental role in helping to deliver an improved user experience across digital solutions through constant modernization, all while impacting the highly competitive Canadian market. After a competitive selection process, Central 1’s main driver behind selecting Backbase was its expertise in delivering an omni-channel customer experience, as well as the flexibility of the Backbase platform which could integrate into Central 1’s existing architecture.

The launch of this collaboration will not only upgrade the user experience for Central 1’s clients but will drastically accelerate its roadmap for opening up the platform and giving direct control to clients.The new platform will enable Central 1 to unify its management system on an open, flexible platform that provides greater agility to integrate with existing and future solutions.

Customer user experience being its key focus, Central 1 was keen to provide credit unions with a new modernized platform that will support their digital banking needs, offering more control of their websites and the potential for future integration with other third parties.

Jouk Pleiter, CEO of Backbase said: “Having the opportunity to partner with Central 1 provides a great inroad to the Canadian market. This partnership combines the best of both worlds; a strong operational excellence and local market expertise from Central 1 combined with the leading digital banking technology from Backbase. We are delighted that Central 1 has entrusted the Backbase Platform as the foundation of its new digital member experience and we are looking forward to a rapid roll-out of the platform to all its members”.

“Our partnership with BackBase, a global leader in digital omni-channel banking solutions, accelerates Canadian credit unions towards a leadership position in the digital space,” said Oscar van der Meer, Chief Technology Officer at Central 1. “Through our cooperative model for economies of scale, we will be able to provide a leading-edge omni-channel solution to credit unions and their partners that ultimately will build a stronger digital banking eco-system for Canadian credit unions.”

Erste Group Bank AG, one of the largest financial services institutions in Central and Eastern Europe, has selected Asset Control’s AC Plus financial data management platform to help fulfil its PRIIPs and MiFID II regulatory requirements.

Erste Group is using Asset Control’s AC Plus to create a central security master for the institution and most of its subsidiaries in seven countries across the region: Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia. The central security master will enable the input, aggregation, normalisation and distribution of various central and local data sources to aid the production of Key Information Documents (KIDs), as required under the Packaged Retail Investment and Insurance-based Investment Products (PRIIPs) regulation due to come into force in January 2018.

KIDs will be uniform disclosure documents providing standardised information to give retail investors sufficiently clear and comparable information on the range of products available. In order to promote consistency and clarity of language, the regulation sets out mandatory rules for the form and content of the KID, which must be produced before the PRIIP can be marketed in the local country. Areas of the PRIIPs regulation run adjacent to the distribution of financial instruments requirements within MiFID II, with both impacting how firms market products to customers.

Michael Wilhelm, CIO Group Corporates and Markets at Erste Group, comments:

“PRIIPs compliance requires each subsidiary or savings bank within Erste Group to maintain their own products, and therefore the associated KIDs, which include a combination of both central and local data sources.”

“There are very strict guidelines regarding the ownership and management of such data, which led us to recognise the need for a strong data technology solution,” continues Michael Wilhelm.  “We required a platform that could manage tenant-specific data sets side-by-side with a global master data set. Having worked with Asset Control on a previous initiative, we selected AC Plus for the strength of its core functionality in modelling, normalising, consolidating and distributing reference data.”

The platform will enable Erste Group to implement highly complex cases in both a flexible manner and a short time frame. In addition, the distribution capabilities within AC Plus will enable the Erste Group to make central security master changes immediately available to the rest of the group through a ‘push’ architecture using Asset Control’s AC Connect data distribution module.

Erste Group is due to go live with Asset Control for its PRIIPs initiative in September 2017, ahead of the January 2018 compliance deadline. The Group will apply the same central security master architecture to ensure it has the necessary processes in place to meet the regulatory requirements of MiFID II, including accurate instrument classification, trading venues representation, pre- and post-trade reporting and interfacing with ESMA.

The U.S. subsidiary of Mirae Asset Financial Group, one of Asia’s leading independent financial services firms, has selected FIS™ (NYSE: FIS), a global leader in financial services technology, as its technology partner as it enters the prime brokerage, global securities lending, repo, delta one and correspondent clearing businesses in the United States.

FIS’ Securities360 solution will serve as the infrastructure to power Mirae Asset Securities (USA) current business operations as well as its future growth plans. Securities360 is a complete and integrated securities processing suite that automates and streamlines critical operations into a single platform, with industry-leading solutions for investor services, trading, compliance and risk, middle- and back-office services, securities finance, corporate actions, tax services, reconciliation and more.

“As a non-bank financial institution, and given our significant financial resources and experienced team, Mirae Asset Securities (USA) sees unique opportunities to connect with clients whose counterparties, prime brokers, clearing firms and execution agents may be rethinking their position in the market because of Basel III and other regulations,” said Robert Akeson, chief operating officer, Mirae Asset Securities (USA). “Working with FIS will give us the ability to strategically focus on our business and meet all of our clients’ needs securely, quickly and efficiently. This partnership will allow us to establish a strong foundation for growth.”

“The depth and breadth of FIS’ capabilities are unlike those of any other provider in the securities market,” said Marianne Brown, chief operating officer, Institutional and Wholesale, FIS. “Our solutions span the entire transaction lifecycle, which significantly increases our ability to reduce operational and regulatory complexity, and streamline how broker-dealers respond to new business opportunities and client needs. Leveraging FIS for our full set of end-to-end capabilities will allow Mirae Asset Securities (USA) to focus on its growth and success as it enters the market.”

FIS’ breadth of solutions, flexible deployment options and global footprint allow firms to optimize and integrate their securities solutions worldwide. Securities360 combines FIS’ unmatched domain and technology experience to create an enterprise data management system that governs trading and risk activities, simplifies enrollment and provides for content-rich investor portals, while streamlining efforts to execute trades across platforms, instruments and locations.

Mirae Asset Financial Group has a global presence with offices in 15 markets, including the United States, United Kingdom, China, India, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Brazil. Over the years, the group also has made a significant commitment to the alternative investment space, including real estate, SOC, PEF and hedge funds.

Through its various subsidiaries, the Mirae Asset Financial Group has invested, allocated and maintained significant quantities of assets. As of Sept. 2016, the group had assets under management of $100 billion, wealth management-related assets of $203 billion and insurance services operations of $29 billion. Mirae Asset Financial Groups broker-dealer affiliates had a combined $5.8 billion in capital, as of the same period.

Ixaris alongside Amadeus have been selected as winners of the Best Business Card Programme at this year’s Cards & Payments Awards. The award recognises the Amadeus B2B Wallet Prepaid – a virtual card solution launched by Ixaris in partnership with global travel technology provider Amadeus. 

Amadeus B2B Wallet Prepaid has been developed specifically to enable travel agencies around the globe to make payments using a virtual prepaid card – helping them earn additional revenue, make savings on supplier services and avoid unnecessary payment surcharges. The card programme is supported by a joint Ixaris-Amadeus team established to focus on and meet the constantly evolving payment needs of the travel industry. 

On winning the Award, Alex Mifsud, CEO of Ixaris Group, commented: “Winning this award is an endorsement of our strategy, and testament to the progress we have made toward our goal of bringing unprecedented levels of efficiency to B2B payments. All of us at Ixaris are focussed on developing solutions that address inefficiencies that are specific to individual industries. For the travel industry, with ever growing, relentless competition, this means identifying new ways to drive savings and gain an edge.”

Celia Pereiro, Head of Travel Payments at Amadeus said “We are very proud to receive this joint recognition that has been made possible with Ixaris’ advanced technology and brilliant team. B2B Wallet now cements its place in the market as a reference in payments innovation, allowing our travel agency customers the power to fully optimise their cash flow and focus on the customer. We look forward to rolling this innovation out worldwide, following Amadeus’ global footprint.”

HCL Technologies (HCL), has been recognized as a Leader by Everest Group in its recently published report, “Retail Banking BPO – State of the Market with PEAK Matrix™ Assessment 2016”. According to the report, HCL has witnessed best-in-class revenue growth in retail banking BPO, supported by its strong capability in regulatory and risk management support services. It also highlights HCL’s balanced shoring mix with a strong presence in both onshore and offshore delivery locations.

For this study, Everest Group evaluated 19 retail banking BPO service providers and classified them into three categories of Leaders, Major Contenders, and Aspirants. Leaders demonstrated all–round excellence in terms of both market success and delivery capability.

“Retail banking as a market has seen increasing adoption of automation, leading to revenue cannibalization for most providers, especially those focused on more rule-based tasks,” said Manu Aggarwal, Practice Director, Everest Group. “In such an environment, HCL, with its strong capabilities in judgment-driven processes such as risk & compliance, regulatory reporting, etc., has been able to not only defend its position but also grow in a space undergoing massive transformation.”

“HCL is proud to be positioned among leaders for Retail Banking BPS by Everest Group. This recognition underscores HCL’s strengths in automation–based offerings, deep domain expertise, flexible engagement models and a unique portfolio of digital and technology–led solutions across retail origination, helping clients optimize business processes and achieve better business outcomes,” said Anoop Tiwari, Corporate Vice President and Global Head – Business Services, HCL Technologies.

For over a decade, HCL has been providing a range of Business Services to its retail banking clients, covering savings & deposits, loans, underwriting, KYC/AML, customer acquisitions and multi-product services.  With rich experience in retail banking domain, HCL has been at the forefront, addressing the changing needs of industry participants through technology and automation–led solutions and service offerings which transform business operations. HCL’s focus on digitizing operations helps clients deliver enhanced customer experience and resolve customers’ business challenges, which tremendously assists in creating deep customer relationships.