Target Group, the financial services outsourcing and software provider is delighted to announce the signing of a new two year contract with the DVLA for their award winning payments system.

In 2014, Target and the DVLA introduced a newly automated system, which provided consumers with an alternative method of paying their vehicle tax. The quick and efficient payments solution was delivered in just 18 weeks and supported the DVLA in revolutionising the customer experience.  

Since 2014, Target Group has set up almost 23 million direct debit accounts for the DVLA and collected over £2.6 Billion with a total of £135 Million processed in a single day in October 2016. As a result of this swift, seamless and highly successful service Target Group and the DVLA were recently awarded “Best Online Payments Solution – Consumer” at the prestigious 2016 Payment awards. 

Ian Larkin, Co-Group CEO at Target Group, says: 

“We are extremely proud of how our team have supported the DVLA in transforming the way they operate and interact with their customers.  This new contract demonstrates our capability to administer high volume payments and will continue to see us run one of the largest direct debit schemes in the UK. Not only have we supported the DVLA with their digital transformation but we have also made an important contribution to their financial and strategic targets.”  

Rohan Gye, Vehicles Service Manager at the DVLA, says:

“We want to make paying vehicle tax for motorists as simple and convenient as possible in a way that suits them.  With the support of Target’s payment services we are pleased to be able to offer millions of motorists an additional choice of paying vehicle tax by Direct Debit in annual, six monthly or monthly instalments.”

Arvato Financial Solutions, a leading global financial services provider, today announced an agreement with NuData Security, an award-winning international expert in passive behavioural biometrics, to join forces. The partnership will enable clients to focus on good customer experience, balancing complex fraud mitigation strategies in compliance with local data protection regulation. In order to provide a one-stop fraud prevention suite, Arvato Financial Solutions has chosen best-of-breed partners combining cutting-edge technologies with their local market know-how and analytics expertise to combat increasingly complex fraud phenomena along the entire customer journey.

As recent winners of the Merchant Risk Council METAwards and CNP Best Antifraud Solution NuData Security has proven their innovative approach towards fraud prevention. The joint solution will integrate behavioural analytics and passive biometrics with a common platform that will offer joint clients in truly understanding their users so they can provide a frictionless and enhanced experience for legitimate customers while protecting against abuse.

Arvato Financial Solutions is increasingly supporting technologies that radically innovate all kinds of fraud detection. Arvato clients who want to prevent cybercrime phenomena, now have access to an internationallyproven solution, which accurately verifies a users’ online identity by authenticating the user based on their natural and subtle interactions online – behaviour that cannot be mimicked or replicated by a third party. These capabilities help to maximize detection, reduce false positives and optimize user identification.

“Our vision is to provide an innovative modular and international solution to stop fraud, prevent attacks and continuously verify good users”, said Frank Schlein, President Risk Management at Arvato Financial Solutions.

“We selected NuData Security as a partner, because together we can successfully provide clients with a comprehensive solution, integrating innovative technologies such as device fingerprinting, behavioural analysis, passive biometrics and profound analytical expertise, specific European market insight as well as local data protection know-how.” “We are excited to be partnering with Arvato and choose best-in-class partners to join forces with, so we can offer comprehensive solutions to deliver results. Fraudulent online behaviour can send ripples through organizations, directly impact the bottom line and disgruntled customers could damage the brand image”, said Michel Giasson, CEO of NuData Security.

Lately merchants experienced increased fraud losses, an increase in the volume of successful fraud attempts, a rise in fraud cost per dollar losses and a bigger bite of fraud costs as a percent of annual revenues. On average, 648 fraud attempts were recorded by companies each month, among them 206 were successful for the scammers. This means that 1.47 percent of their turnover was lost due to fraud. 

Over the holiday season in 2015 NuData found a 167% increase in high-risk transactions from the previous year, and new account fraud has increased to 60% of all new accounts in 2016 from 39% in 2015. The variety and arising speed of fraud phenomena force digital businesses to find effective solutions for these challenges. Technologies such as realtime behavioural analysis and passive biometrics, machine learning and aggregated data intelligence can help clients in financial institutions/banking, e-commerce, telecommunications, gaming, internet, media, entertainment reduce fraud and improve customer experience.

Bitwage, a Silicon Valley start-up launched in May of 2014, announced that the company has won a French Tech Ticket competition. The company will be further granted with €57,000 from BPI France, a large public investment bank owned by French government. The French Program for International Startups is organized by La French Tech, which is a part of the French Government that aimed to develop French technology by either helping French entrepreneurs to internationalize or choosing specific high growth potential international startups to incubate in France.

The French Tech Ticket is a program designed for entrepreneurs from all over the world who want to create their startups in France.

Funding is granted to each Winning Project in the amount of €57,000, split among eligible items of expenditure as follows:

• external costs dedicated to the project (feasibility studies, service provider fees, etc.) up to a maximum of €25,000 with receipts;  
• personal costs up to a maximum of €20,000 and without receipts;
• the cost of hosting the project at the partner incubator, equivalent to €12,000, upon signing the agreement entered into between the incubator and the Principal Winner;

The first payment, for 70% of the total amount of assistance, is paid once the funding agreement has been signed and any prerequisite conditions has been met. Under the signed contract Bitwage will further successfully join 1 of the Top 41 French incubators to spread its activity.

Bitwage is a start-up provider of remote job placement and wage management solutions for overseas workers. The company has been recognized for its innovative invoicing, team wages and my employer products for freelancers, remote contractors, employees, and employers. All three company’s products are available on desktop and mobile devices. Invoicing (70% of volume) does not require the sender to sign up.  Bitwage provides a collections account in the US/Eurozone/UK to receive funds from clients and delivers funds via blockchain to bank accounts.

Jonathan Chester, Founder and President of Bitwage, says: “We are excited to become a winner of French Tech Ticket competition. The program gives us a lot of opportunities. In addition to an influx of funds, we will be brought to France for one year to jumpstart European operations for our company. Despite we have been operating in Europe for almost a year now, we have not demonstrated yet a lot of effort.  It represents only 10% of our monthly outflow volume, which was about 1.2m USD last month. We are hoping to leverage this time in Europe to increase our growth as a blockchain wage and business dispersement solution as well as a job acquisition solution for workers and contracting companies. We are planning to expand our presence in Europe as well as Africa further. France has a particularly interesting relationship with Africa we want to help address.”

For more details visit https://www.bitwage.com

Cobalt DL, the FX post-trade processing network based on distributed ledger technology, today announced that Citi has become an investor and one of the launch clients for their Cobalt FX post trade solution.

Cobalt DL has commenced beta testing with a number of leading FX participants on its private peer-to-peer network that uses distributed ledger technology to significantly reduce risk and cut post-trade costs by up to 80%. Cobalt DL’s FX solution is set to launch in 2017, with 15 leading institutional FX participants already committed to the service.

The Cobalt DL technology is designed to integrate seamlessly with all trading sources and venues, providing immediate efficiency benefits, which analysis has shown to deliver a significant cost reduction when compared with existing infrastructure. Currently, FX market participants incur multiple unnecessary license fees, ticketing charges, IT overheads and staff costs as a result of the complexity of existing structures.

From a single transaction, existing infrastructure creates multiple trade records for buyer, seller, broker, clearer and third parties. By creating a single, shared view of a transaction, Cobalt DL frees up back and middle office resources that are currently overwhelmed by the need for continuous reconciliation across multiple systems.

James Bindler, Global Head of G10 FX, Citi, said: “We have been impressed with the way Cobalt DL is redesigning the post-trade FX infrastructure with its practical implementation of distributed ledger technology. The Cobalt DL solution has the potential to significantly improve post-trade services by cutting costs and reducing risk for our industry.”

As the company moves closer to a live launch, Charlotte Crosswell, former Nasdaq NLX CEO, joins as Strategic Advisor with a particular focus on strategic partnerships.

Charlotte Crosswell, Strategic Adviser, Cobalt DL, added: “I am delighted to be joining Cobalt DL at such an exciting time for the company and the industry. With continued scrutiny on efficiencies within the FX post-trade arena, I believe Cobalt DL is extremely well positioned to drive the changes we expect to see in this industry and deliver on real cost savings for market participants."

Andy Coyne, Co-Founder of Cobalt DL, concludes: “We have set out to radically improve the FX post-trade landscape by removing inefficiencies, duplicative legacy infrastructure and processes, as well as reducing significant costs and risks. As we stand at a point of change for the FX post-trade landscape, we are delighted to welcome Citi as one of our investors and as an active market participant when we go live.”

He added: “We are thrilled that Charlotte Crosswell has joined the Cobalt DL team as our Strategic Advisor. Given her industry experience and insight, we believe she will be instrumental in forging the right partnerships for the future. Collaborating with Charlotte Crosswell and Citi will help us achieve our aim of transforming the FX post-trade landscape to the benefit of all market participants.”

EverCompliant, the cyber intelligence company, pioneer and industry leader of transaction laundering detection and prevention, announced today the completion of a $9.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Arbor Ventures and included existing investors Carmel Ventures, StarFarm Ventures and Nyca Partners. With this investment, Melissa Guzy of Arbor Ventures has joined the Board of Directors of EverCompliant.

The funds will be used to fuel the Company’s continued growth, including the opening of an office in Asia in 2017, an additional expansion in the U.S. and EU markets, and growth of its R&D operations. Leveraging its success in transaction laundering, EverCompliant is now able to expand its cyber intelligence technology to provide more banks and other financial institutions with a wider realm of efficient and automated solutions.

Transaction laundering is a real threat to the modern payment industry, with fraudsters taking full advantage of payment ecosystems by funneling transactions through legitimate emerchant accounts. Transaction laundering is money laundering for the digital age and works based on the same principle of obscuring the true origins of funds and/or transactions. EverCompliant’s research identifies close to two million unregistered merchants in the U.S. alone, demonstrating that merchant-based fraud is a huge problem for the payment industry since they are often unaware of it until it’s too late.

“As ecommerce has evolved, money laundering has morphed into a new digital form. This online epidemic is spreading faster, and is much more accessible and harder to detect. Most concerning is that transaction laundering is occurring right under the noses of regulators worldwide,” said Ron Teicher, CEO of EverCompliant. “The vote of confidence that Arbor Ventures and our other partners have shown will allow us to carry out our vision. Together, we can identify and stop criminals from financing their criminal activity by laundering money in the digital realm.”

As the only cyber intelligence solution on the market designed to detect and prevent transaction laundering, EverCompliant has built on its success in major banks in Europe, Asia, and North America to help battle merchant-based online fraud worldwide. Additionally, its MerchantView™ SaaS solution marked a milestone by being the first and only solution to detect content and transaction laundering on mobile apps.

“As pioneers in the transaction laundering detection and prevention space, we can already see the effectiveness of EverCompliant’s approach and we are excited to be partnering with them to bring their technology to a wider market,” said Melissa Guzy, Managing Partner at Arbor Ventures. “The talented team at EverCompliant continues to develop technology that is protecting some of the world’s largest financial institutions across the globe from association with illicit and brand damaging activities, ultimately saving them a significant amount of money and harm to their reputation.”

IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO), a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions, today announced that Markit FRTB Studio, an aggregation and capital analytics engine, has processed a portfolio of one million trades in single digit seconds on a European bank’s Hadoop infrastructure as part of a successful proof-of-concept. This high-speed performance enables banks to understand the capital implications of business decisions in near real-time in relation to the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book (FRTB) standards.

Part of IHS Markit’s broader FRTB Solution, FRTB Studio is built on big data technology and can be used as a standalone component, integrating easily with banks’ existing risk management infrastructure. The European bank was up and running on FRTB Studio in just two days. Front office and risk teams are using the aggregation and capital analytics engine to assess – almost instantly – how decisions relating to P&L attribution (PLA), desk restructuring and modellability impact their capital charges.

“The financial industry stands at the next frontier of adopting emerging technologies around big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Cubillas Ding, research director, finance and risk practice at Celent. “All of these technologies, in the context of FRTB, can result in augmented delivery of risk analytics, stronger data supply chains and innovative IT models at performance and cost frontiers previously not possible.”

“Markit FRTB Studio can calculate the capital charges for a Standard and Internal Model Approach (SA and IMA) in mere seconds based on a portfolio of one million trades,” said Andrew Aziz, global head of Markit Analytics at IHS Markit. “We are able to integrate FRTB Studio with banks’ existing valuation engines, enabling firms to perform all FRTB capital calculations at scale and speed, and most importantly, on a highly cost-effective technology.”

As firms look to manage growing costs, Markit FRTB Studio enables banks to reuse existing valuation engines, either home-grown or vendor supplied, to produce the required inputs for consistent aggregation and capital calculation, without having to build that capability in-house.

Benchmarks show FRTB Studio can support the capital charges for IMA and SA in single digit seconds based on a portfolio of one million trades with 9 million sensitivities, 18 million P&L vectors and on hardware costing just USD20k.

FRTB Studio can be implemented as a single component or as part of IHS Markit’s broader solution for FRTB

Financial innovation firm R3 has announced Credicorp as the first Spanish-speaking Latin American financial institution to join its consortium to design and apply distributed and shared ledger-inspired technologies to global financial markets.

As the largest financial services company in Peru, Credicorp provides corporate and personal banking, brokerage services, and other financial services across its six principal subsidiaries. The company also operates in other South American countries including Bolivia, Columbia and Chile, and is listed on the Lima and New York stock exchanges.

Credicorp will collaborate with the world's largest financial institutions to develop ground-breaking commercial applications for the financial services industry that leverage the appropriate elements of distributed and shared ledger technology.

The R3 team of financial industry veterans, technologists and blockchain and cryptocurrency experts work together with consortium members on research, experimentation, design and engineering to help advance this technology to meet banking requirements for identity, privacy, security, scalability, interoperability and integration with legacy systems.  

Consortium members work closely with R3 to continue developing Corda™, its open source financial grade distributed ledger platform that records, executes and manages institutions’ financial agreements in perfect synchrony with their peers. Corda is heavily inspired by and captures the benefits of blockchain systems, but with design choices that make it able to meet the needs of regulated financial institutions.

David Rutter, CEO of R3 comments: “R3 is the largest collaborative consortium of its kind in financial markets, now comprising over 70 members from all corners of the industry. Credicorp’s expertise and knowledge of Latin American markets will be a key asset as we continue to establish our footprint in the region.”

Luis Alfonso Carrera, Head of Corporate Banking at Credicorp comments: “From our InnovaCXión Center, we are creating digital, user-friendly products and services that will improve our clients’ banking experience. Joining R3 is part of our digital transformation strategy and will consolidate our leadership in technological innovation in Peru and across the region.”

Mauricio Alban, Chief Architect at Banco de Credito del Peru (BCP), a subsidiary of Credicorp, comments: "As the Internet revolutionized the transfer and sharing of information in the 1990s, blockchain will revolutionize the transfer and sharing of values. Blockchain's social impact will be enormous because it significantly improves the traceability and transparency of financial transactions."

Credicorp will join the global network of R3 members united in the R3 Lab and Research Centre, which has quickly become a center of gravity for collaborative research and testing of distributed and shared-ledger inspired technologies.

FIME’s chip payment test platform Savvi – used by acquirers, processors and merchants globally for terminal integration testing – now supports China UnionPay (UnionPay) certification. The new certification process requires merchants and acquirers to confirm that a terminal meets UnionPay’s credit and debit card standards and will successfully integrate with the payment infrastructure. 

The Savvi Test Platform is an automated testing and certification management tool, which significantly reduces the overall time needed to complete UnionPay terminal integration testing. This saves acquirers and merchants time and money. It achieves this by automatically determining applicable test cases, providing test process guidance, retrieving and validating test results, as well as generating and submitting test reports according to UnionPay’s requirements. The easy-to-use interface is available in Chinese and English.

“As the Chinese payment infrastructure becomes increasingly dynamic with multiple payment brands and the introduction of innovative technologies, it is important that new solutions will perform as intended and interoperate successfully within the existing payment ecosystem,” explains Alex Chen, Business Director Asia Pacific at FIME. “The latest certification requirement from UnionPay promotes this integrity, which is extremely positive for the marketplace. By using the Savvi Test Platform, merchants and acquirers can significantly shorten testing times due to its automation, and launch solutions to market without unnecessary certification delays.” 

Savvi supports an extensive range of international and domestic payment brand qualifications to deliver market-leading multi-brand testing.

FIME is an industry-recognized implementation partner for the payment acceptance community. It enables acquirers and merchants to achieve fast and efficient execution of certification projects, whether they are performed in-house or outsourced. In addition to the Savvi Test Platform, FIME’s experts offer a complete project test service, technical consulting for payment system requirements and terminal-integration training for developers and testers. Find out more.