ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW), a leading global provider of real-time electronic payment and banking solutions, has been named by EBA Clearing as one of the ‘frontrunner service providers’ for the pan-European EBA SEPA Instant Credit Transfer Scheme, due to go live in November 2017. The scheme will enable consumers and businesses to make euro credit transfers in real-time between accounts across an international area that will eventually span over 34 European countries. The first pilot banks are expected to start testing as early as Q1 2017.

ACI Worldwide will support and provide assistance to a number of banks joining the scheme. ACI’s UP Immediate Payments solution provides a single point of access and liquidity control to all Immediate Payments (IP) schemes globally. Available via a SaaS delivery model or on-premise, the solution is fully designed to provide connectivity to the pan-European EBA SEPA Instant Credit Transfer Scheme (SCT Inst).

Barry Kislingbury, Director Solution Consulting, Immediate Payments, ACI Worldwide comments:

“We are delighted to have been named as one of the ‘frontrunner service providers’ by EBA Clearing for the new European instant payments scheme.  ACI’s Immediate Payments experience is unrivalled—we have assisted financial institutions in the UK, Singapore and Australia to connect and integrate payments systems into their domestic schemes.

“ACI’s UP Immediate Payments offers a proven solution for financial institutions that need connectivity to one or multiple IP schemes. We not only provide our customers with a technical gateway, but also full real-time payment processing and liquidity functionality, guidance on compliance, fraud, scheme rules, testing and certification, as well as support throughout the complex on-boarding process.”

ACI has an unmatched global customer base of financial institutions, payment service providers, fintechs and schemes using its UP Immediate Payments solution. In the UK, ACI’s solution has been used by financial institutions to access the UK Faster Payments scheme since its launch in 2008. Currently 9 out of the 14 direct participants of the UK’s Faster Payments Scheme use ACI’s solutions. The central infrastructure of FPSL, widely considered a global model for the industry, also utilises ACI’s UP Immediate Payments solution.

Gemalto, the world leader in digital security, today released the findings of its Authentication and Identity Management Index, which revealed that 90% of enterprise IT professionals are concerned that employee reuse of personal credentials for work purposes could compromise security. However, with two thirds (68%) saying they would be comfortable allowing employees to use their social media credentials on company resources, Gemalto’s research suggests that personal applications (such as email) are the biggest worry to organisations.

Convergence of Personal and Workplace Identities

The enterprise and consumer worlds are merging closer together, with enterprise security teams under increasing pressure to implement the same type of authentication methods typically seen in consumer services, such as fingerprint scanning and iris recognition. Six in ten (62%) believed this was the case, with a similar amount (63%) revealing they feel security methods designed for consumers provide sufficient protection for enterprises. In fact, over half of respondents (52%) believe it will be just three years before these methods merge completely.

Consumer breaches impacting enterprise security

Identity theft accounts for 64% of all data breaches across the globe[1], and consumer service breaches continue to rise, resulting in almost nine in ten (89%) enterprises addressing their access management security policies. Half of enterprises have implemented extra training (49%) to allay their security concerns, 47% increased security spend, and 44% allocated further resources.

Employee expectations around usability and mobility are affecting how enterprises approach authentication and access management.  Nearly half of respondents stated that they are increasing resources and spending on access management. Deployment rates are also increasing:  62% expect to implement strong authentication in two years’ time – up from 51% of respondents who said the same thing last year, and nearly 40% responded they will implement Cloud SSO or IDaaS within the next two years.  

Enterprises are clearly seeing the benefits, with over nine in ten (94%) using two-factor authentication to protect at least one application and nearly all respondents (96%) expecting to use it at some point in the future.

Mobility security still a challenge

As more enterprises become mobile, the challenges in protecting resources while increasing flexibility for employees working on the move increases. Despite an increasing amount of businesses enabling mobile working, a third (35%) completely restricted employees from accessing company resources via mobile devices and nine in ten (91%) are at least part-restricting access to resources. This is backed up as half of businesses (50%) admit security is one of their biggest concerns to increasing user mobility.

In order to protect themselves against threats from increased mobility, enterprises are still most likely to be using usernames and passwords – two thirds of users at respondents’ organisations are using this authentication method, on average. Currently, 37% of users at respondents’ organisations are required to use two-factor authentication to access corporate resources from mobile devices, on average. However, like the rise for access while in the office, on average, respondents believe this will increase to over half (56%) in two years’ time.

“From credential sharing to authentication practices, it’s clear that consumer trends are having a big impact on enterprise security,” said François Lasnier, Senior Vice President, Identity Protection at Gemalto. “But businesses need to make sure their data isn’t compromised by bad personal habits. It’s encouraging to see deployment of two-factor authentication methods on the rise, and increased awareness for cloud access management, as these are the most effective solutions for businesses to secure cloud resources and protect against internal and external threats. For IT leaders, it’s important that they keep pushing for security to be a priority at the board level, and ensure that it’s front of mind for everyone in an organisation.” 

Related Resources

• Download the full Authentication and Identity Management Report here
• Download the Infographic here
• Access full global and regional data on the Authentication and Identity Management website here
• Read more about Gemalto’s Identity and Access Management solutions

 Finimize, the London-based start-up making finance more accessible for millennials, has today launched Finimize MyLife, a revolutionary free-to-use online platform that helps people plan their financial future.

The platform will initially be available in its ‘alpha’ preview version to the first 500 people on the waiting list, which was only soft launched a month ago and is already 8,000-strong and growing. Users can climb the waiting list by sharing and referring friends to the platform.                                                                                               

Requiring no knowledge or experience of finance, Finimize MyLife takes just three minutes to provide a detailed and personalised financial plan guided by Finimize’s deep research and algorithms. The platform will publicly launch in beta in early 2017.

Max Rofagha, the co-founder & CEO of Finimize, said:

“We are proud to launch the alpha version of Finimize MyLife to the first 500 people on our waiting list. We listened to our loyal community of over 60,000 Finimize users, who are mostly in their 20s and 30s, and they told us that they are desperate for help with their financial lives but don’t know where to turn.

“We heard their concerns and we have built a free platform that will give practical, actionable guidance to all those who struggle with their personal finances. We believe that Finimize MyLife will change the way the millennial generation approaches finance and we can’t wait to open the platform more widely early next year.”

Finimize MyLife builds on Finimize’s already phenomenally successful daily news briefing, which demystifies financial news and has quickly amassed over 60,000 subscribers and has open rates of 40-60%. This is unprecedented for financial content – validating the existing appetite of millennials to engage more with financial news, events and services. 

The launch comes shortly after Finimize announced a successful seed-funding round of £450,000, led by Passion Capital and Jason Butler, author of the FT’s Guide to Wealth Management.

Eileen Burbidge, partner at Passion Capital and HM Treasury Special Envoy for FinTech, said: "Financial inclusion and literacy are massive issues for us as a society to solve – and which I'm confident the tech sector can help to address. Millennials in particular have the lowest levels of financial literacy across the United States and other regions around the world.”

Finimize was founded in 2015 by Max Rofagha and Scott Tindle – two university friends who wanted to re-design the way millennials approach their finances. Max was named one of Forbes’ “30 under 30” for 2016, having previously co-founded DeinDeal, a Swiss ecommerce company which now employs 200 people, which he sold in 2015. Scott is a CFA and spent seven years at Barclays Capital in London before helping to start Finimize.

 Register for the waiting list here: http://www.finimize.com/mylife

Qlik®, a leader in visual analytics, today announced that Teachers Mutual Bank (TMB), one of the largest mutual banks in Australia, has deployed QlikView®, Qlik Sense®, and Qlik NPrinting™ to analyze customer data from several disparate sources to improve its marketing campaigns and business performance. By leveraging the Qlik analytics platform, TMB has transformed internal processes, significantly improving reporting times and integrating new external data sources for more targeted marketing campaigns. Marketing and financial reports that once took 16 days to produce are now produced in a few minutes, and as a result of the Qlik implementation, TMB’s data accuracy has improved by 30 percent, whilst reducing IT support costs.

Teachers Mutual Bank has more than $5.5 billion in assets and over 177,000 members primarily employed by the Australian education sector. With a growing customer base, TMB generates significant amounts of data that requires a robust and sophisticated solution to satisfy its current and future analysis needs. Prior to implementing Qlik, TMB’s accelerating data demands had outgrown its original Excel-based technology solutions, which struggled to collate and present data in a visual way. TMB faced business-critical issues, including disorganized data from multiple sources, dated reports, and information that was not structured in a timely and effective way for management use. TMB needed a solution that quickly and effectively provided a simple, visual and interactive snapshot from a trusted source of data.

With Qlik and its partner Satsumas, TMB is now able to effectively visualize and associate member data such as demographics, spatial distribution, and eligibility for home loans. Disparate data that is aggregated from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, census data, and TMB’s customer data are merged and analyzed dynamically to create highly targeted marketing reports and campaigns. This improves business uptake and decision making for a more efficient organization – ultimately creating maximized value for customers.

“Qlik enables us to piece together insights derived from all our data sets far more efficiently so that we understand our customers and their behaviour better,” said Dave Chapman, Chief Information Officer at Teachers Mutual Bank. “We have streamlined the view of our business processes in our analytics and reporting, reduced administrative time and increased workflow efficiency. This has allowed us to leverage the insights we’ve uncovered from using Qlik to market ourselves more effectively to our customers.”

“Qlik provides financial institutions with the ability and agility to derive actionable insights that drive better outcomes for their customers,” said Paul Van Siclen, Market Development Director, Financial Services. “Our work with Teachers Mutual Bank is a great example of how the strategic use of visual analytics can lead to better customer satisfaction and a streamlined operational approach to become a more efficient and profitable financial organization. Data is a powerful ingredient for financial organizations and we are delighted that Teachers Mutual Bank is able to see their whole story in their data to serve their customers better in the future.”

TMB intends to expand the deployment of Qlik solutions throughout the company, including finance, risk and operations. As the bank is maturing in its analytics capabilities and management of big data, it is focused on expanding its functionality to ensure that its customers are able to make better financial decisions.

MackeyRMS today unveiled major enhancements to its research management software (RMS) through an updated user interface and overall enhanced user experience.

Over the last five years,MackeyRMS has seen tremendous client growth with hedge funds increasingly adopting its platform to meet their research management needs in an increasingly digital and mobile world. Mackey has consistently made updates to its platform based on feedback from clients as the company works in partnership with hedge funds and asset managers to meet their firm and individual needs. The latest updatescater to client needs, where ease of use and mobility are top priorities when it comes to enterprise grade systems.

“We have always prided ourselves on having best-in-class automation and mobility functions,”said Chris Mackey, Founder &CEO of Mackey. “This recent set of updates reflects our commitment to removing unnecessarysteps from the research process, making it drastically more efficient and simple – ultimately allowing investment professionals to focus on finding the right investments.”

The re-imagined MackeyRMS platform brings best-in-class usability, automation and mobility, allowing clients quicker and easier access to both external and proprietary research content.The new enhancementswill allow clients to more efficiently multi-task through the system.Additional enhancements include a powerful new search engine, overhaulednote-taking,file sharingand reporting features. 

Fiserv, Inc. (NASDAQ: FISV), a leading global provider of financial services technology solutions, announced today that three credit unions will be utilizing Fiserv solutions as the backbone of planned technology transformations. Each of the credit unions has expanded their relationship with Fiserv by selecting DNA^®, a real-time, open architecture account processing platform, along with integrated surround solutions from Fiserv. The credit unions include Arkansas Federal Credit Union ($1.07B in assets), based in Jacksonville, Arkansas; Consumers Credit Union ($1.12B in assets), based in Waukegan, Illinois; and Andigo Credit Union ($897M in assets), based in Schaumburg, Illinois.

Arkansas Federal Credit Union, the state’s largest credit union, has been a Fiserv client since 1995. The credit union chose DNA for its streamlined processes, capacity to integrate best-of-breed solutions and ability to enable the credit union to quickly deliver innovative products to its members. Along with DNA, Arkansas Federal selected multiple integrated solutions from Fiserv, including Verifast™ for in-person authentication, Nautilus^® for enterprise content management , a suite of CRM and business intelligence solutions, tMagic™ teller capture, card services and Statement Advantage™.

"We see ourselves as a technology company that provides financial services rather than a financial services company that uses technology,” says Rodney Showmar, CEO, Arkansas Federal Credit Union. “Technology is about making things easier, better and more efficient, and that’s what working with Fiserv will do for us. DNA will make it easier for our members to interact with our people, our products and our services, and enhance the efficiency of our employees, branches and back-office operations.”

Andigo Credit Union – the eighth largest credit union in Illinois and formerly Motorola Employees Credit Union – selected DNA along with Verifast™: Palm Authentication and Nautilus enterprise content management as the technology cornerstone supporting a major transformation of the financial institution. The transformation, which includes a new name, new headquarters and branch expansion, is aimed at growing community-based membership and expanding business lending and deposits.

“Fiserv technology is a key component in our vision for future growth,” said Mike Murphy, CEO, Andigo Credit Union. “The modern, open architecture of DNA will enable us to streamline our processes, improve our member and employee experience, and give us the ability to quickly and flexibly develop products and services to meet the needs of our members.”

Consumers Credit Union, a high-performing large credit union and a Fiserv client since 2006, selected DNA to support member business lending, advance its teller automation and centralized services strategy, and provide reliable 24/7 mobile and online support. The credit union has a strong digital focus serving members in all 50 states and through online and mobile channels. Along with DNA, Consumers Credit Union also selected Weiland Account Analysis^TM from Fiserv.

“DNA offers 100 percent uptime, strong business lending support in the core and an open architecture that enables our development group to create the unique member experience we’re looking for,” said Sean Rathjen, president and CEO, Consumers Credit Union. “The relational database in DNA also gives us a full 360-degree view of our member relationships and accurate data to support our sales culture and provide better member service.” 

"Understanding and leveraging the role that technology plays in people’s lives is essential to the success of today’s credit unions,” said Vinnie Brennan, president, Credit Union Solutions, Fiserv. “These three innovative credit unions are using technology from Fiserv in their own unique ways to expand their offerings, create outstanding member experiences and gain the efficiencies that credit unions need to thrive in a fast-changing environment.”

All three credit unions will be running DNA in-house, seeking to accelerate their growth and enhance member service by taking advantage of the relational database, open architecture, person-centric data model and 24/7 real-time processing capabilities of DNA.

KyribaCorp,the global leader in cloud-based treasury, cash and risk management solutions today announcediAccount Services (HK)Limited(hereinafter iAccount(HK)),a subsidiary of Liri Holdings Group,has selectedKyribafor its payments and cash management modules. iAccount (HK) selected the award winning SaaS platform for its economies of scale, extensive world-wide bank connectivity, security, reliability and support for external audit.

iAccount (HK) is a financial company that offers international money platform solutions. iAccount (HK) aims to help corporates and individuals expand into international markets by offering creative international wire transfer and settlement solutions with less complicated procedures and minimal costs.

With iAccount Online Services, customers can transfer funds, make payments, and exchange currency in more than 200 countries worldwide.

Steven Liu, Treasury Manager of iAccount (HK),said: “We are growing our company around the world, and accepting payments in multiple currencies. To ensure the best security and scalability, we selected Kyriba to enable our cash management team with a best-in-class solution so we can do business at a faster pace and offer competitive advantages to our clients.”

Jean-Luc Robert, Chairman and CEO of Kyriba, said: “We are pleased to have iAccount (HK) select Kyribafor its liquidity management as our expansion continues in Asia. Kyriba is answering the demand from multinationals and regional corporates who are embracing the shift from spreadsheets to more secure platforms and investing in cloud-basedtreasury technology, especially for payments and cash management.”

Silicon Valley analytics software firm FICO today announced that it has been named a winner in the 2017 CSO50 Awards from IDG's CSO. The company was recognised for its next-generation application security program, which accelerates the delivery of robust, secure applications. 

FICO was selected by a panel of independent judges consisting of security leaders, industry experts, and academics. Vickie Miller, vice president, chief information security officer, and Kiran Sharma, application security program manager, will accept the award on behalf of FICO at the CSO50 Conference + Awards held on May 1-3, 2017, at the Scottsdale Resort at McCormick Ranch, Scottsdale, Arizona.

“Attackers routinely test the application layer for vulnerabilities, so it’s critical to have confidence in the software that handles sensitive information and is used to make critical business decisions,” said Vickie Miller. “Security is about risk management, and having a seamless process to automatically test and manage the security of an application through its lifecycle means we don’t have to sacrifice security for speed and can demonstrate ROI.”

Miller and her team developed a framework aimed at providing lifecycle visibility of all the software security initiatives for all FICO’s solutions, across the company. The software empowers both product development and the security team to understand and manage security progress, and to benchmark security practice improvement against industry standards.

"The stakes have never been higher when it comes to protecting an organisation's sensitive data from criminals and breach," said Joan Goodchild, editor-in-chief of CSO. "Security leaders are expected to not only deliver protection, but also to drive business initiatives. Our annual CSO50 awards recognise security projects that not only enhance defence, but that also deliver ROI."

Launched in 2013, the CSO50 Awards program recognises 50 organisations for security projects and initiatives that demonstrate outstanding business value and thought leadership. CSO is the premier content and community resource for security decision-makers leading business risk management efforts within their organisation.  Awards will be presented at the CSO50 Conference + Awards.