Newport-based Kymin Financial Services has launched Kymin Direct, an automated online investment service via Intelliflo’s Intelligent Office (iO) Personal Finance Portal (PFP) for clients with between £1,000 and £50,000 to invest. Targeted at ISA and GIA savings, the service is competitively priced and does not involve clients interacting face-to-face with the team of advisers unless they request it.

Robin Hall, Kymin’s Managing Director comments: “The government’s FAMR review last year highlighted the gap in easy-access investment routes for people with relatively modest sums of money to invest. We wanted to do something to address this and Intelliflo’s Automated Advice offers the perfect solution.”

People choosing the Kymin Direct service will be guided through an online process to determine their risk appetite and then offered an appropriate investment portfolio supplied by SEI Asset Management.    

The easy-to-use risk profiling tools have been developed in partnership with Oxford Risk, who are leading experts in the field of risk and analysis, dedicated to the practical application of knowledge in risk and risk behaviour. 

SEI Asset Management is one of six fund providers with portfolios available for selection via the Intelliflo service. Other providers include 7IM, Architas, Legal & General Investment Management, Standard Life Investments and Vanguard.

Nick Eatock, Intelliflo’s Executive Chairman comments: “I’m delighted that Kymin has chosen Intelliflo’s system to run their Direct offering. The service has been designed to open up access to the much-discussed robo-advice market in a way that puts – and keeps - advisers at the centre of the process.”

Investments made via Kymin Direct will be available for selected Kymin advisers to view, so they can monitor activity. All investments and selections made will have a complete and comprehensive audit trail and Kymin has implemented an online limit of £50,000. Anyone trying to invest more than this amount at any one go will trigger an automatic alert to the Kymin team, allowing them to make direct contact to ensure clients are making wise decisions based on their financial situations.

Robin Hall comments: “We believe this service will complement our existing offering by delivering instant investment options without the need for face-to-face advice yet with the comfort of knowing that fully qualified advisers are just a click away should they be required.”

Currencycloud, the international Payments Engine behind countless digital businesses, has appointed Ed Addario as Chief Technical Officer (CTO).

Ed brings over 25 years’ professional experience leading both start-ups and large teams in the design, development and delivery of software products across the financial services, telecoms and retail sectors. He joins Currencycloud from Misys, where he was Global Head for Architecture and Integration. Prior to this, he has held a number of senior technology positions in both the US and UK, including SVP Technology with Monitise.

At Currencycloud, Ed will oversee a team of 45 technologists, continuing to advance the next generation API which sits at the heart of Currencycloud’s integration with its customers.

With a B.Sc. in Computer Sciences with minors in Applied Statistics and Machine Intelligence and a M.Sc. in Manufacturing and Quality Engineering, software development is core to Ed’s expertise. He’s a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE/ISO Standards Organization and regularly commits to participating in Open Source projects in the areas of distributed computing, peer-to-peer networks and cryptography.

Mike Laven, CEO Currencycloud comments: “Ed’s passion for technology and years of experience make him the perfect fit to lead a team that is fixated on providing innovative solutions for our clients. New and emerging digital business models should not be constrained in ambition or scope by legacy technology as they seek to find different and creative ways to move money around the world. Ed will play a key role in developing the tools that we provide, to allow our customers to build the best solution for their business needs.”

On joining Currencycloud, Ed commented: “As a tech enthusiast, I’m excited by the opportunity to be part of a company that is leading the digital revolution and to work with APIs that are built by developers, for developers. The team’s passion for providing digital enterprises with the tools to innovate and grow is truly inspiring. I am looking forward to leading the team as we continue working to enable the next generation of companies to realise the true potential of the digital economy.”

A 2016 report from CEB TowerGroup analysts recognises FICO as a leading provider in “Know Your Customer” systems, with FICO^®TONBELLER^® Siron^® Anti-Financial Crime Solutions. CEB TowerGroup analysts’ 2016 “Do You Know Who I Am? Know Your Customer Systems Market Update” shows that FICO TONBELLER Siron system provides all 18 capabilities studied as standard features.

FICO TONBELLER Siron solution also was noted as a leading solution in a CEB TowerGroup analyst 2016 report on anti-money laundering, “Combatting Rising Threats with Aging Infrastructure: Anti-Money Laundering Systems Market Update.”

FICO is hosting two webinars on AML and KYC in the coming weeks, co-presented with CEB TowerGroup Principal Executive Advisor, Andy Schmidt. “Improving AML Compliance through Advanced Analytics” will be held January 24, 2017, and “Hiding in Plain Sight: Is Your KYC Process a Spotlight or a Blindfold? Operational Benefits of New Analytic Technologies” will be held February 23, 2017.

According to one report, “TONBELLER was already a strong vendor in the KYC market prior to the acquisition by FICO, with identified strengths in risk profiling and dynamic assessment capabilities. The enhanced use of dynamic questionnaires and the addition of tax compliance capabilities further strengthens the FICO TONBELLER offer.”

Terrorism and increased banking regulation have put the spotlight on the systems banks use to know the risk of their customers. The analyst report states, “KYC solutions rank among the highest value commercial banking technologies due to their ability to help banks reduce risk and comply with regulations. We believe that the competitive advantage that KYC can bring by expediting the onboarding process is often overlooked. By shortening onboarding times, efficient KYC processes reduce time to service, resulting in improved customer experience, and ultimately an increased propensity to repurchase from and recommend the bank.”

FICO^® TONBELLER^® provides integrated IT solutions for governance, risk, and compliance to banking, insurance, and corporate organisations in more than 90 countries. FICO acquired TONBELLER in 2015, combining their focus on predictive analytics with TONBELLER’s risk-based financial crimes prevention and compliance capabilities. Siron® AML and Siron® KYC are part of Siron® Anti-Financial Crime Solutions, a suite of solutions for financial and white-collar crime, and risk management and monitoring, analysis, and reporting.

“These reports validate the power of our risk-based approach to fighting financial crime,” said Torsten Mayer, vice president for compliance solutions at FICO. “More than 1,100 businesses in 90 countries rely on FICO TONBELLER solutions for governance, risk and compliance. The rise of terrorism worldwide makes this kind of protection more important than ever, which is why FICO has invested heavily in equipping our Siron product with fresh analytics and the latest features.”

Aquila Capital today announces the opening of an office in Oslo, demonstrating the firm’s ongoing commitment to the Norwegian and the Nordic market. Aquila Capital has appointed Joakim Johnsen to run the office, which was opened in January this year.

Johnsen, who will act as an investment manager within the hydropower team, will coordinate the transactions in the renewable energy sector and will be the contact for business partners and investors on-site.

He has more than 13 years’ experience in developing renewable energy projects and previously held a number of leading roles with Statkraft, where he was responsible for several large M&A transactions in the hydropower sector. Most recently, Johnson, who is a Norwegian, was the company’s country head for Brazil.

Along with his longstanding professional expertise, Johnsen has an extensive international network having worked on projects in Europe, Asia and South America. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Management Sciences from the University of Manchester and an MBA from the Manchester Business School. He is fluent in Norwegian, English, Spanish and Portuguese.

Roman Rosslenbroich, CEO and Co-Founder of Aquila Capital, said: “Joakim is a highly regarded investment professional and I’m confident in the level of expertise he will bring to the team. His wealth of experience will be invaluable as we continue our expansion in the renewable energy sector in the Nordic region. These constitute core markets in the fields of wind energy and hydropower in which we remain committed to pursuing investment opportunities.”   

Joakim Johnsen, added: “Aquila Capital is stepping up its activities in the renewable energy sector in the Nordic countries and I’m looking forward to working with the team to continue the firm’s success in this space.”

The office in Oslo will coordinate investment and transaction management as well as operations in the hydropower sector and enable Aquila Capital to intensify deal sourcing. The office reflects Aquila Capital’s approach to addressing the growing importance of the Nordic region and meeting increasing demand.

Joakim Johnsen will be available via the following address:

Aquila Capital, Sandakerveien 138, 0484 Oslo

AxiomSL, the leader for risk data management and regulatory reporting technology for financial services, announces that it will provide an array of broker dealer (BD) and bank holding company (BHC) data aggregation and reporting solutions to Raymond James, the St. Petersburg, Fl.-based diversified financial services firm.

The partnership with AxiomSL grew out of a goal from Raymond James’ larger enterprise data strategy to automate the existing, largely manual processes and tactical functions which were straining under increasing regulatory reporting requirements.

The wide-ranging coverage will include Daily Net Capital (15c3-1) and Customer Reserve (15c3-3) calculations, along with TIC (Treasury International Capital) and FOCUS reports for the BD. In addition, the BHC will be integrating several reports for the Federal Reserve’s FR Y-9C, Call reports, and Basel Risk-Weighted Asset (RWA) calculations.

“As part of our larger goal of data management transformation, Raymond James was looking for a strategic technology partner that could help with a significant portion of our critical reporting,” says David Lesser, senior vice president of technology at Raymond James. “AxiomSL’s expertise working with complex, diversified institutions and ability to implement these solutions over a number of years was exactly what we were looking for.”

Adds Alex Tsigutkin, CEO at AxiomSL: “Today, broker dealer firms like Raymond James are looking to reengineer their reporting function in their efforts to keep up with new prudential regulation demands and as part of broader institutional automation. We are very pleased to work with such a well-respected firm as Raymond James and look forward to providing these solutions for them in the years to come to meet new and evolving regulatory mandates.”

The AxiomSL change management platform enables firms to address quickly and seamlessly internal and external changes while achieving data lineage, risk aggregation, workflow automation, computation, validation and audit as well as disclosures in any format. Further, the AxiomSL’s visual business rules can be easily understood by users who do not have specialist-coding knowledge. These features give clients confidence in the automation of complex reporting business logic, data quality, governance and control in meeting stringent timeframes.

NetJapan, Inc., publisher of disk imaging backup, system disaster recovery, and virtualization software solutions, announces the availability of ActiveImage Protector 2016 R2 SP1, a significant update to its flagship backup product line.

ActiveImage Protector’s Inline Data Deduplication Compression (IDDC) occurs during the backup and not afterwards. This means there is no need to invest in expensive additional storage to accommodate deduplication. With flexible on-site and off-site storage technologies, backup images stored, replicated on your network, or on locally attached storage can benefit from IDDC thus reducing bandwidth, and backup image size by 50%; a 30% or more improvement over standard compression.

Hybrid environments are on the rise. More organizations run their business applications in a mixture of physical, virtual, and cloud environments. ActiveImage Protector can protect hybrid environments using the latest sector-based technology to backup disks and volumes, including the operating system, applications, data files, and configuration settings. When disaster strikes, ActiveImage Protector offers lightning fast granular file and folder recovery, and complete system restore.

ImageBoot, an instant recovery solution to boot backup images as virtual machines, is ideal for testing persistent use scenarios and has been expanded to support additional virtual environments.

Features

• Windows Server 2016 Support.
• Improved Network Client Management Console.
• Enhanced Change Tracking Driver.
• Inline Data Deduplication Compression Support for Large Volumes.
• ImageBoot with additional support for:

Oracle VirtualBox

Hyper-V Server 2016

VMware Workstation Version 12

With the increased threats of ransomware, malware, and hacking attacks against IT infrastructures, backup strategies need be re-evaluated. To help mitigate these threats, ActiveImage Protector can be deployed in a variety of organizations, including business enterprises, educational institutions, non-profit organizations, and government offices.

Settlements relate to conduct that mainly occurred 2004 to 2012;
Company has increased compliance funding 200 percent in the last five years;
Business performance for 2016 in line with previous outlook

The Western Union Company (NYSE: WU) today announced agreements with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that resolve previously disclosed investigations focused primarily on the Company’s oversight of certain agents and whether its anti-fraud program, as well as its anti-money laundering controls, adequately prevented misconduct by those agents and third parties. The conduct at issue mainly occurred from 2004 to 2012.

As part of this resolution, Western Union will enter into a deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ and a consent order with the FTC. The Company will pay a total of $586 million to the federal government, which is to be used to reimburse consumers who were victims of fraud during the relevant period. Western Union also will take specific actions to further enhance its oversight of agents and its protection of customers. Those actions will be reviewed by an independent compliance auditor for three years.

Western Union said: “We share the government’s goal of protecting consumers and the integrity of our global money transfer network, and we worked hard to resolve these matters with the government.” The Company emphasized: “We are committed to enhancing our compliance programs to prevent illicit activity on our network and protect customers who transfer money to friends, family and businesses.”

Over the past five years, Western Union increased overall compliance funding by more than 200 percent, and now spends approximately $200 million per year on compliance, with more than 20 percent of its workforce currently dedicated to compliance functions. The comprehensive improvements undertaken by the Company have added more employees with law enforcement and regulatory expertise, strengthened its consumer education and agent training, bolstered its technology-driven controls and changed its governance structure so that its Chief Compliance Officer is a direct report to the Compliance Committee of the Board of Directors.

Many state, national and international regulators and law enforcement agencies have commended Western Union in recent years for its compliance innovations, such as developing algorithms to help combat terrorist financing, and for assisting with numerous investigations.

Western Union noted that its compliance enhancements have produced significant and measurable results. The incidence of consumer fraud reports associated with Western Union money transfers has been extremely low – less than one-tenth of 1 percent of all consumer-to-consumer money transfer transactions during the past 10 years. And, over the last five years, the dollar value of reported fraud in consumer-to-consumer transactions, compared with the total value of all such transactions, has dropped more than 60 percent.

In late November 2016, as had previously been requested by the Company, the DOJ provided to the Company a proposal for a combined resolution of investigations by the U.S. Attorney’s Offices for the Eastern and Middle Districts of Pennsylvania, the Central District of California and the Southern District of Florida, which the Company sought to coordinate with the resolution of other potential government claims. The Company and the government agencies then engaged in intensive negotiations, which led to the agreements announced today.

In addition to the resolution of the previously disclosed DOJ and FTC investigations, the Company will simultaneously resolve, without any additional payment or non-monetary obligations, potential claims by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) relating to conduct in the 2010 to 2012 period that FinCEN contended violated the Bank Secrecy Act. The Company received a notice of investigation from FinCEN in mid-December 2016. The separate agreement with FinCEN sets forth a civil penalty of $184 million, the full amount of which will be deemed satisfied by the $586 million compensation payment under the DOJ and FTC agreements.

Western Union anticipates taking a charge of approximately $570 million in its 2016 fourth quarter, to record the costs associated with the settlements, fees for the required independent compliance auditor, and related matters. This amount is in addition to amounts previously accrued in 2016 in connection with the FTC matter. The Company intends to claim a deduction for the settlement payment, but because the tax effect is not certain the Company does not anticipate recording a related tax benefit in the fourth quarter.

Excluding the fourth-quarter charge, the Company anticipates reporting 2016 financial results in line with its financial outlook provided on November 1, 2016. Western Union will report its full fourth-quarter results on February 9, 2017.

Crédit Mutuel Arkéa is pleased to announce that it has acquired a 19.5% interest in Vermeg.

Small World Money Transfer, a leading provider of cross-border payment services in Europe and North America, is today announcing its partnership with Allied Bank Limited (ABL), one of the leading banks in Pakistan, through its Home Remittance Division.