With TPS as its trusted technology partner, Mobilink Microfinance Bank Limited is proud to be the first microfinance bank in Pakistan to launch Internet Banking for its customers. By adding digital banking in its product offerings, the bank is enabling its customers to process key financial and non-financial transactions at their fingertips.

Powered by TPS technology, MMBL's internet banking is quick, easy & secure, allowing customers complete control over their accounts. Customers can view their account / debit card balances and assigned transaction limits. The solution also allows customers access to a wide range of features such as ability to generate e-statements, add beneficiaries, setup & schedule inter & intrabank fund transfers, and submit request for ATM card, cheque book, on-demand statement of account and account suspension. Furthermore, the customers will soon have an option option to pay utility bills right from their internet banking account. A mobile banking app will soon be launched to enable customers to make transactions on the go.

MMBL chose TPS solution because of its depth of functionality including multi-country, multi-lingual and multi-currency capabilities. The teams from TPS & Mobilink collaborated to successfully execute this project. TPS Project Management team also received a Project Management Award at P@SHA ICT Awards 2016 for demonstrating superior performance and swiftly executing this project enabling the bank to quickly roll-out the service for its customers.

“We decided to partner with TPS because of its history of successful implementation of retail and internet banking solutions in Asia, Middle East, and Africa. By partnering with TPS, we have been able to provide our customers with the best possible services. Once we go live with PRISM Internet Banking solution, our customers will have access to the latest online banking technology.”- Ghazanfar Azaam, CEO, MMBL

“Consumers today, expect the ability to access their finances swiftly and reliably. PRISM internet banking solution will help Mobilink Microfinance Bank Limited deliver the digital banking experience that will enable the bank stay at the heart of their consumers. With the flexibility inherent in PRISM’s architecture, the bank will be able to offer new service offerings as customer demands evolve.”- Shahzad Shahid, CEO, TPS

Xura, Inc. ("Xura"), a leading provider of digital communications services, today announced that its affiliates have entered into definitive agreements to acquire Mitel Mobility, Inc. ("Mitel Mobile"), a division of Mitel Networks Corporation ("Mitel") (Nasdaq:MITL) (TSX:MNW), and Ranzure Networks, Inc. ("Ranzure").            

• Mitel Mobile, formerly Mavenir Systems, is a leading provider of Voice-over-Long-Term Evolution ("VoLTE"), Voice-over-WiFi ("VoWiFi"), video, Rich Communication Services ("RCS"), messaging, radio access and packet core solutions
• Ranzure, founded by former Mavenir Systems CEO Pardeep Kohli, is an early-stage venture focused on developing 5G Cloud Radio Access Network ("RAN") technology

The Xura Board of Directors has appointed Pardeep Kohli, formerly CEO of Mitel Mobile's predecessor (Mavenir Systems) and Co-Founder and CEO of Ranzure Networks, to succeed Philippe Tartavull as CEO of Xura, effective today. Upon completion of the transactions, Mr. Kohli will serve as the CEO of the combined company. Mitel Mobile President, BG Kumar, will join Mr. Kohli's management team and former CTO of AT&T and former President of AT&T Labs, Krish Prabhu, will join the Board of Directors of the combined company. The combined company will operate from Dallas, Texas.

Hubert de Pesquidoux, the executive chairman of Xura and future executive chairman of the combined company, commented:

"Xura has undergone a significant transformation over the past two years, and in the last several months has successfully transitioned to private ownership with the backing and support of Siris Capital, a financial sponsor with deep experience and operational expertise in telecommunications. I would like to acknowledge Philippe Tartavull for his significant contributions to the company during this transformational period. Today's announcement marks a new and exciting chapter for Xura, and will accelerate and enhance the combined company's ability to grow and deliver value to its customers, partners and employees."

Well Positioned to Partner with Customers to Bring the Next Wave of Digital Services to Market

The transaction enhances each standalone company's ability to help CSPs bring the latest monetizable services to market, while driving operating efficiencies, increased service levels, and greater flexibility and scalability as they adopt the cloud and virtualize their networks. The combined company is positioned for long-term success in the digital communications ecosystem across multiple dimensions:

• Product Portfolio: The combination diversifies and bolsters each predecessor company's standalone product portfolio, delivering a comprehensive 5G ready, fully-virtualized solution set across voicemail, VoLTE, VoWiFi, video, RCS, messaging, security, radio access and packet core
• Innovation and 5G Focus: The combination leverages each company's significant investments to date in fully-virtualized and 5G ready solutions, a combined team of over 2,000 talented people dedicated to bringing 5G ready solutions to market, and a mutual focus on continued innovation
• Customers at the Core: The combined company will keep customers at the core of its strategy with the vision to be the trusted partner of choice for CSPs as their business needs evolve
• Operational Excellence: The combined company will have scalable R&D centers of excellence in the United States, Israel, Czech Republic, India and China, enabling first-rate global support capabilities
• Management Talent: The combination adds talented and experienced executives to supplement the Xura team, complemented by a strong Board of Directors

Hubert de Pesquidoux commented:

"This is an exciting day for the three companies' stakeholders. The combination of Xura's offerings in voicemail, messaging, monetization and security solutions with Mitel Mobile's offerings in next-generation voice, video, RCS, network access and core solutions, alongside Ranzure's 5G Cloud RAN technology, will offer a comprehensive, best-in-class solution set to the combined company's global CSP customer base. Mitel Mobile and its heritage Mavenir brand and technology are synonymous with world-class innovation and customer support, and we are delighted to welcome Pardeep Kohli, who is uniquely positioned to lead the combined company."

Combined Company to Benefit from World-Class Management and Board-Level Support

Pardeep Kohli is a widely respected wireless veteran with over 20 years of industry experience, primarily focused on driving innovation in the telecom infrastructure space. He most recently served as the CEO of Ranzure, an early-stage developer of 5G Cloud RAN technology, and was President and CEO of Mavenir Systems from 2006 to 2015. During his time at Mavenir, Mr. Kohli grew the business from zero to $175 million in annual revenue and led multiple industry-first innovations, including the first at-scale deployments of virtualization and software defined networking to mobile core networks.

Commenting on the announcement, newly appointed Xura CEO Pardeep Kohli said:

"I am honored and excited to lead Xura and the combined company during this important and transformative time. Both Xura and Mitel Mobile have strong legacies of market-leading innovation and commitment to customer success. Our new company will offer a fully-virtualized, software-based solution set across every layer of the mobile network infrastructure stack, including radio access, packet core and 5G applications.

"We will be the only pure play solution provider with no vested interest in maintaining and promoting proprietary solutions. We look forward to partnering with our customers to achieve operational efficiencies as they prepare to handle the exponential traffic growth that the industry's IoT and 5G applications will bring."

Krish Prabhu, who will join the combined company's Board of Directors upon completion of the transactions, most recently served as the CTO of AT&T and President of AT&T Labs from 2011 to 2016. He previously served as Interim CEO and President of Tekelec, as CEO and President of Tellabs Inc., as a Venture Partner of Morganthaler Venture Partners, and as COO of Alcatel Telecom. Mr. Prabhu's deep industry experience, thought leadership, and strong relationships with mobile operators will serve the Board of Directors and management team well.

Conditions to Closing and Advisors

The transactions are subject to customary closing conditions, including the expiration or termination of the applicable waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act and other foreign antitrust regulatory approvals, as necessary. Upon completion of the transactions, Mitel Mobile and Ranzure will become wholly owned by affiliates of Xura. The transactions are currently expected to close in the first quarter of 2017.

An affiliate of Xura has secured committed financing consisting of a combination of equity and debt. The equity financing will be provided by affiliates of Siris Capital Group, LLC ("Siris Capital") and the debt financing will be provided by a lender group led by Cerberus Business Finance, LLC.

Goldman Sachs & Co. is acting as financial advisor and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP is acting as legal advisor to Mitel in connection with the transaction. Guggenheim Securities, LLC is acting as financial advisor and Sidley Austin LLP is acting as legal advisor to Xura in connection with the transactions.

Monica Eaton-Cardone, co-founder and CIO of Global Risk Technologies, has been appointed to the advisory board of the Emerging Payments Association(EPA) for 2017.

The EPA is a commercial membership association of payments industry influencers, delivering projects to drive change and encourage innovation and profitable business growth. Advisory Board members are nominated and elected to the board based upon their experience and ability to lead and influence the payments industry.

Tony Craddock, Director General of the Emerging Payments Association, commented: “We are delighted to have Monica Eaton-Cardone join our Advisory Board. Her knowledge and expertise in payments, chargebacks, legislation and understanding merchant challenges will help drive the growth of the emerging payments industry. Our industry is one of the fastest-moving in the world and Monica will join international payment leaders in collaborating under the renowned EPA umbrella to help guide and shape the industry, creating a profitable, sustainable payments ecosystem.”

“The payments industry is moving at hyper-speed,” says Eaton-Cardone.  “In the blink of an eye, we’ve evolved into an international, global economy, with consumers all over the world unified by the Internet. Only through innovation and collaboration will we be able to help consumers and merchants buy and sell their goods and services safely, quickly, and free from fraud. I look forward to working with my colleagues in the industry to ensure the continued growth of safe payments worldwide.”

Eaton-Cardone has long been recognised as a thought-leader in payments and innovation, sought after by the likes of Money20/20 Europe and Forbes magazine for her insights. She won a 2016 Stevie Gold Award for Innovator of the Year for Women in Business. 

Global Risk Technologies is based in Ireland and provides cutting-edge, highly-scalable enterprise solutions and specialised consulting for chargeback compliance and dispute management. To find out more, visit www.globalrisktechnologies.com

Misys FusionInvest has been named the best investment management system by financial services professionals across the globe. Fighting off competition to top this category in the Banking Technology Reader’s Choice Awards 2016, Misys is celebrating the win as testament to the simple, fully integrated approach to all aspects of investment management that the solution delivers.

"Banking Technology’s readers have spoken – Misys FusionInvest has been named the best solution in the asset and investment management space,” said Tanya Andreasyan, Editor at Banking Technology. “Banking Technology and our worldwide community of banking, financial services and technology professionals congratulates Misys on this win."

The solution provides a flexible and modular platform for portfolio management, risk management and investment operations. It boasts unrivalled asset class coverage and a world-class analytics framework, with a real-time investment book of record (IBOR) at its core.  

“As generating alpha becomes increasingly hard in today’s market, investment managers are diversifying their portfolios by moving into new asset classes and strategies. Simplifying the complexity in operations is a must from an efficiency, cost and scalability perspective and technology provides the transformative catalyst,” said Boris Lipiainen, Global Head of Product Management at Misys. “This recognition of our solution by the industry is a real achievement and a triumph we are very proud of.”

Misys FusionInvest clients manage more than $5 trillion of global assets under management. Buy-side organisations typically experience between 15-20% revenue growth and 68-74% cost reduction in IT costs once the solution is fully deployed.

Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the software specialist for banking and finance, and Capgemini, a global leader in consulting, technology and outsourcing services, today released the results of Temenos’ ninth annual customer survey. This year’s report, entitled “Open for Business”, highlights the shifting attitude of banks towards open banking[1] as they seek to foster customer loyalty, the retention of which, the report identifies, is the top industry challenge. The report’s data reveals 69 percent of respondents see open banking as more of an opportunity than a threat compared to 50 percent a year ago. Open banking is also now viewed as a priority by 51 percent of respondents, up from just 30 percent a year ago.

To leverage the open banking opportunity, banks are realizing that they must capitalize on their vast stores of customer data and strong position of customer trust to become digital advisors to customers enabling them to make smart financial decisions and introducing them to a broader-range of services through third parties. The report findings also show that banks believe that capitalizing on data is not an easy task as it requires banks to bring together disparate data sets and real-time useful insights.  Data capitalization also is a chief topic for new regulation, such as the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2[2]), which will require European banks to share customer data with third-party providers.

“One of the clearest indications of how the banking industry is changing is in its shift to embrace open banking and to partner with the FinTech community,” said Anirban Bose, Head of Global Banking and Capital Markets, Capgemini. “With the potential to turn disruptions to business opportunities, open banking has evolved from a CIO/CTO discussion and is now a CEO and Board of Directors level topic.  The use of Application Programming Interfaces (PIs) to drive FinTech collaboration, in particular, provides ways to open up new channels, increase revenues and encourage innovation, all of which in turn, strengthen customer loyalty.”

Today, the use of cloud services is widespread in banking, especially for certain application types such as email (which more than 70 percent of institutions run in the cloud). For core processing however adoption is still much lower, at 5 percent, but now this is changing as banks’ concerns over data privacy and regulatory resistance continue to quickly diminish.

Correlating the Findings with Investment

As more and more banking services move to digital, it is not surprising that the survey found digital channels are the most commonly cited information technology (IT) investment priority at 24 percent, followed by product innovation (22 percent), and IT modernization (19 percent.)  IT budgets are forecast to be up strongly again in 2017, with the gap between technology leaders and technology laggards expected to widen to unprecedented levels since this banking survey was first launched. .

Ben Robinson, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer at Temenos, said: “As last year, there was significant year on year change in our survey results reflecting the rapid pace of change in the industry. We are not surprised that banks are placing much more focus on data since analytics are key to delivering the right level of customer experience and regulations like PSD2 will up the ante in the fight for banks to hold onto customers. What is more surprising is that respondents see less of a threat from external players, suggesting they see a path through open banking to take advantage of the innovation coming from the FinTech sector to ward off the threat from internet platforms.”

To learn more, visit Capgemini’s World Retail Banking Report and the first edition of its World FinTech Report.

About the survey

For the past nine years, Temenos has conducted a comprehensive banking survey, covering areas such as banks’ corporate and IT priorities, their challenges, and their view of the competitive environment. Because the questions posed are largely consistent from one year to the next, our survey tracks how trends and attitudes have changed over time. Moreover, because the respondent sample is highly diverse, both in terms of types of banks and geographical location, the results give a broad view of banking sentiment.

This year’s survey canvassed the opinions of 235 senior bankers and the results are presented in association with Capgemini, a global leader in technology, consulting and outsourcing services.

Token, Inc., a crypto-payment software provider that enables Banks to establish dominance in the digital transactions market, and Fidor AG, the software and services provider of banking solutions for the financial, telecom and retail industries, today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). This MOU will see Token’s software made available within Fidor OS, Fidor AG’s digital banking and open community middleware solution, enabling Banks to offer secure digital payment services to third parties.

When PSD2, the revised European directive on Payment Services, comes into force, Banks will be required to grant third party providers access to their customers’ data. In this context, Banks must now establish how they will accomplish this task while ensuring their data remains highly secure throughout the process.  

Together, Token and Fidor AG will bring a uniquely valuable turnkey solution to Banks and licensees of the Fidor OS platform.  While using Token and Fidor OS, Banks not only benefit from Fidor’s open banking middleware platform, saving them the cost, effort and time required to design a new open banking interface, it can also use Token to generate new sources of revenue from Payment Initiation Service Providers (PISPs) via the execution of digital transactions and fulfilment of account data requests. This puts Banks in total control of the digital transaction chain, mitigating disintermediation from today’s payment-enabling third parties, like payment schemes and token service providers.

Steve Kirsch, founder and CEO, Token, comments: “Token’s software enables Banks to call the shots in digital payments by launching their own transaction network. This capability, when combined with Fidor’s digital banking and open community middleware, creates a seriously compelling proposition for Banks looking to get ahead in the digital age.”

Steve Kirsch added: “Banks will be able to tap into a comprehensive and fully operational API banking infrastructure complete with the transformative attributes offered by programmable money. In the short-term our platform can be used as a springboard to generate revenues from PSD2 and XS2A. In the longer term, it can be applied to enhance the security, speed, cost and efficiency of a massive range of transaction-based banking functions which currently rely on traditional legacy processes, from bill pay, to e-commerce checkouts, international money transfers, B2B payments, intra-bank transfers and more. Ultimately, we enable Banks to launch programmable money services and new methods of transacting, the use-cases for which are yet to be defined.”

“Fidor OS is a true enabler of next-generation banking, so it makes perfect sense for us to team up with Token,” said Matthias Kröner, CEO, FidorAG. “Like Token, our OS is modern, modular, open, API-based and free of legacy code. This enables Banks to use our suite of technologies to tailor their digital infrastructure to the precise needs of their customers. Adding Token to the mix simply extends the power and control we give to Banks in the digital age. Token’s technology has the potential to revolutionise how transactions, of all kinds, are performed. We want to give our customers this competitive edge as quickly as we can.”

Token combines smart tokenisation and public-key cryptography to provide the industry's simplest and most secure transaction-based open banking API. In practice, Banks use Token’s software to issue and redeem payment authorisations as smart tokens which can be programmed with any number of terms and conditions in accordance with the instructions of the account holder. This enables each smart token to be uniquely specified to the transaction it represents. They can also execute API callouts to external web services, enabling value added services to be integrated in just the same manner. Sensitive card or account data never leaves the Bank’s systems, masked or otherwise, vastly reducing the Bank’s security vulnerabilities.

By putting a Bank in sole charge of their own digital payment network, Token eliminates the Bank’s need to rely on partners to execute digital transactions and launch new services, making them immune to competitive encroachment and disintermediation. The respective Bank’s brand remains front and centre at all times.

Today we're delighted to announce the release of Curve 1.0 on Android! We've launched on Android with a brand new interface and a host of great features that current Curve users have been enjoying since we launched on iOS earlier this year, and we're excited to bring it to Android users.

Senjō Group (“Senjō”), a global payments operator and FinTech investment firm, has entered into an agreement with GVC Holdings PLC to acquire its payments processing business Kalixa Group (“Kalixa”) for a total consideration of €29.0 million payable in cash on completion, subject to a completion accounts adjustment. The total consideration is capped at €35.5 million.

Completion of the transaction (“Completion”) is subject to a number of domestic and international regulatory approvals but is expected to close during the first quarter of 2017.

Kalixa is one of the leading providers of payment services in the world and enables consumers, small business and merchants to make and accept payments. The Company processes transactions worth €11 billion annually for more than 800 merchants and supports 100 of the world’s most popular payment methods. In addition to acquiring and gateway capabilities, Kalixa has innovative wallet and issuing technologies and operations. It has offices in London and Vienna. Kalixa generated revenue in the financial year ended 31 December 2015 of €22.7 million.

Senjō is a privately-held global payments investment company specialising in providing innovative and disruptive solutions in global electronic payments, trade finance and e-commerce. It was established by a team of experienced payments and corporate finance experts bringing together a portfolio of companies with a presence in over 32 countries.

Gavin Lock, Chief Operation Officer, Senjō, noted: “The acquisition of Kalixa fits well within Senjō Group’s strategy of building out a global payments ecosystem. We believe Kalixa will be complementary to our existing portfolio of payments businesses around the world and will create a combined group that leverages the best of both companies. This transaction will provide Senjō with a significant bridgehead in Europe supported by a strong Kalixa management team. In return Senjō Group will provide Kalixa with access to a network in Asia and the benefits of being a part of a global specialist payments operator. We look forward to working with the Kalixa team.”

Kalixa will continue to process payments for GVC and its customers post-Completion.

Daniel Stewart & Company Plc, Linklaters LLP and BTG Financial Consulting are Senjō Group’s advisers for the transaction.