Compass Plus, an international provider of retail banking and electronic payments software to processors and financial institutions, is leading the support for the Emerging Payments Association’s (EPA) first Retail PayTech Forum. The event aims to create a platform for Retailers to discuss issues they have around payments.

Earlier in 2016, the EPA invited retailers across a range of industries – including Sainsbury's, McDonald's, Ocado and The Post Office – to share and discuss the challenges they faced when assessing and adopting PayTech innovations. In openly sharing and discussing the challenges individual retailers faced, a lot of common ground was found between the participants.

Juan Andrade, Payments Manager at Secret Escapes, attended one of these meetings. He said:"Retailers have a clear requirement for a platform that brings together payments expertise from across the retail industry – a demand that is not currently being met.”

Now, with support from sponsor Compass Plus, the EPA has addressed the lack of such a platform by bringing together a PayTech-focused retailer community at the first Retail PayTech Forum. The Forum will educate delegates on new technologies, regulations and products; allow delegates to share knowledge on both current and anticipated issues; and provide a platform for discussion of retailer-led collaborative opportunities, such as establishing a standard for PayTech companies to conform to when developing application process interfaces (API) or software development kits (SDK).

Commenting on Compass Plus’ support for the Forum, which takes place today at London’s Andaz Hotel, Paul Love, Principle Product Manager at Compass Plus said: “The EPA’s Retail PayTech Forum is the ideal setting to explore the opportunities made available by new technologies, regulations and products, as well as providing a platform for sharing knowledge and experience of their adoption by consumers.

“Compass Plus is delighted to be helping bring these forward-thinking companies together to engage in some very constructive discussions around PayTech.”

Speakers at the inaugural Retail PayTech Forum will include Nathalie Oestmann, Director and Head of Samsung Pay Europe, Caroline Rolfe, Co-Founder and Commercial Director of Runninginheels.com and Ben Fricke – a long standing figure in the food industry.

About the Emerging Payments Association:

The Emerging Payments Association (EPA) is a community for the world's most progressive payments companies. The EPA helps them to have influence over the payments landscape and get access to the people operating in it, whether they are buyers, sellers or partners.

The EPA’s goal is to establish the UK as the global hotspot for payments innovation. Its mission, to advance payments innovation, has the potential to improve lives everywhere, not just in the UK but around the world. By attracting investment capital and creating a hospitable regulatory environment for innovators, new entrants and disruptors, the UK can make a material contribution to the world around us.

 Bpm'online, whose unique process-driven CRM for marketing, sales and service helps thousands of organizations win more customers, has been included in the September 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management (1) based on its completeness of vision and ability to execute.

According to Gartner, “the market for CRM lead management applications continues to grow, evolve and mature… CRM lead management integrates business process and technology to close the loop between marketing and sales channels, and to drive higher-value opportunities through improved demand creation, execution and opportunity management… This Magic Quadrant evaluates 17 providers to help IT leaders find the right choice for their company, in collaboration with marketing, sales and digital commerce leaders.”

Bpm’online believes its recognition in this year’s Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management is based on its unique offering - process-driven CRM designed to align marketing, sales and service on a single platform.

Bpm’online customers appreciate the value they get from extended business process management capabilities and an ability to automate all lead management processes in one application. No additional integrations, single user interface and interconnected marketing and sales processes in bpm’online is what makes thesystem appealing to the majority of companies looking for a lead management solution.

With its easy-to-use yet powerful products,bpm’online offers robust tools to better align marketing and sales departments, orchestrate lead management processes and boost performance, while reducing costs.

Bpm’online marketing,a holistic multichannel marketing management software, offers comprehensive capabilities and out-of-the-box best practice processes that enable companies to gain demand generation excellence. Backed by a robust BPM engine, bpm’online helps organization to effectively manage leads from the first stages of customer acquisition to lead nurturing, and hand-off to sales. This allows sales teams to work with the most qualified and sales-ready leads.

The system features intelligent capabilities to help marketers achieve better results through effective marketing resource management, campaign design and execution, lead management, and personalized communications with every customer through various channels. Additionally, thanks to bpm’online’s platform that connects the dots between marketing, sales and service, organizations can streamline processes across the entire customer journey which provides them a distinct competitive advantage in the era of ever-changing customer expectations.

“We are proud to be included in Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management with our unique process-driven CRM.We believe this recognition is a further validation of our position as a provider of top notch marketing automation tools with advanced lead management capabilities,” said Katherine Kostereva, CEO and Managing Partner at bpm’online.“In addition, one of the biggest values bpm'online customers get is an opportunity to align marketing, sales and service on a single platform.This approach enables bpm’online clients to nimbly manage a complete customer journey, ensuring a true connection between key business operations.”

Bpm’online’s inclusion in the Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management is the most recent recognition by Gartner received over the past 12 months. Earlier this year, bpm’online was recognized in Gartner’s August 2016 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation, the May 2016 Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center and listed in five categories of the May 2016 Gartner CRM Vendor Guide 2016.

Learn more about award-winning bpm’online CRM>>

As part of the CRM Lead Management Magic Quadrant evaluation process, Gartner collected input from 155 reference customers. We believe Gartner’s evaluation of lead management vendors will help organizations to choose the solution that best fits their requirements.

Download the Magic Quadrant report as an important reference for your evaluations >>

Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Misys and essDOCS, the leading enabler of paperless trade, have joined forces to further eliminate the paper-based and manual processes that hamper international trade finance business. The partnership will see essDOCS’ CargoDocs electronic documents (eDocs) capabilities integrate natively with Misys FusionBanking Trade Services solutions. Digitised documents along the physical supply chain can now be leveraged for use in the financial supply chain, creating new trigger points for working capital finance while reducing cost and operational risk for banks and corporate customers.

“The digitisation of trade finance is an important step in bringing efficiency and automation to an industry which is crying out for an alternative to manual processing,” said Alexander Goulandris, Co-founder & CEO at essDOCS. “We are the only company providing a next generation, market-ready solution for paperless trade finance. It makes sense to team up with a forward thinking software provider like Misys first to combine our strengths and to help our many joint clients to make the leap into the digital age.”

Trade finance generates roughly $23 billion of direct banking revenues worldwide, according to a recent report, but it suffers from extensive frictions – with about 50% of banks’ cost for a letter of credit arising from manual document handling and checking, which creates delays, errors and expense¹.

The partnership, the first of its kind in the trade finance space, strengthens the Misys and essDOCS offerings and will deliver a one-stop shop for banks, reducing interface and maintenance costs. It will also provide a single solution for corporate clients and supply chain participants to link eDocs to transactions and allow all parties to see and manage documentation and track goods along the physical supply chain. With more readily available digital documentation, banks will be able to reduce transaction processing times for clients, minimise discrepancies and provide greater visibility to clients around the movement of goods. Banks will benefit from additional transparency and a better way to assess working capital, reduce risk and identify new opportunities for post-shipment finance.

“In today’s world of trade finance, gaining visibility of trade and shipping documents can take up to five days, and that is simply too slow. The digitisation of trade flows will benefit both corporates and banks in a big way. Automating paper-based processes saves valuable time, drives efficiency and, importantly, enables banks to make data-driven decisions, given better oversight. This allows banks to serve their corporate customers more effectively,” said Simon Paris, President at Misys. “We’re combining our expertise with essDOCS to support the digitalisation journey towards greater sustainability in trade.”

CargoDocs is a digital trade platform which enables companies to manage trade and shipping documentation required for exports, imports and trade finance paperlessly. FusionBanking Trade Services provides a front-to-back platform for trade and working capital services through FusionBanking Corporate Channels – a unified digital platform for trade, supply chain, cash, treasury and lending services – integrated with FusionBanking Trade Innovation, the market-leading back office solution for the processing of trade and supply chain finance products.

This relationship further bolsters the Misys partner ecosystem, which helps to drive a one-stop shop for trade finance and supply chain finance solutions. Other key partnerships include Fircosoft, the risk and compliance brand of Accuity, and HiTec Labs.

Notes to editors:

¹ Source: Distributed Ledgers in Payments: Beyond the Bitcoin Hype, July 2016

CGI (NYSE: GIB) (TSX: GIB.A) today announced it is the first commercial enterprise to implement the Ripple Validator Node. Ripple validators are servers that confirm Ripple’s distributed financial technology transactions on the network. The CGI-hosted Ripple Validator Node provides banking clients with a trusted network partner for Ripple’s distributed financial technology that settles international and domestic transactions in real-time.

CGI is taking public ledger technology out of the innovation lab and bringing its practical benefits to clients. This announcement follows the recent release of CGI’s Ripple-enabled Intelligent Gateway. The Intelligent Gateway is one of the first payments solutions in the industry to integrate Ripple’s distributed financial technology and provides a solution-agnostic, transformational wrapper around a client’s payment processing systems.

"Given our ongoing efforts to further decentralize the Ripple network, we couldn’t be more excited for CGI to implement a validator," said Asheesh Birla, VP of Product at Ripple, “Having a major enterprise player contribute to the consensus process on Ripple fortifies the resiliency of the network, and it plays a key role in our work with CGI to make it even easier to put blockchain technology into commercial production.”

“CGI is at the forefront of payments modernization, and our partnership with Ripple provides added value to our clients,” said Pamela Smith, Vice-President of CGI’s Financial Solutions Group. “We are excited to continue to expand our use of distributed financial technology to help banks reduce implementation risks and shorten time to value.”

Ecobank, the leading independent pan-African banking group, has won the awards for Best Trade Finance Services in Africa and Best Treasury Services in Africa in this year’s Treasury Services Awards, organised by financial trade magazine EMEA Finance. The awards were handed out in Geneva today on the margins of Sibos, the major annual banking conference organised by SWIFT.

According to EMEA Finance, Ecobank’s strong pan-African platform and its extra level of detail impressed the judges, differentiating the bank from its competitors on the continent.

Commenting on the Best Trade Finance in Africa win, Amin Manekia, Group Executive, Corporate & Investment Banking at Ecobank, says, “Ecobank’s broad pan-African footprint, coupled with its international network, makes it a perfect banking partner for trade finance. This award is a great recognition of our work across Africa. We are committed to developing solutions that enhance the overall client experience and this win shows we are on the right track.”

Ecobank, via its treasury platform based in Paris, is able to deliver all the major local currencies in Middle Africa. Its unrivalled capability to trade currencies as well as sovereign and corporate fixed income securities played an instrumental role in securing the Best Treasury Services in Africa award.

The award ceremony took place at Sibos, the annual conference and exhibition in Geneva. Sibos is organised and facilitated by SWIFT, the global provider of secure financial messaging services. It is the premier conference for financial services and banking technology. For the fourth consecutive year, Ecobank is present at the exhibition together with its alliance partner Nedbank.      

Amin Manekia says, “As one of the fastest growing regions in the world, Africa keeps on attracting attention from investors. Together with our partner Nedbank, our scope and knowledge of the continent are unmatched. Sibos, being the premier financial services event, is an excellent platform to highlight our competitive edge.”

The Ecobank-Nedbank Alliance stand is located at stand D17 in Palexpo.

Worldwide, people make more than $1.7 trillion in non-cash payments every year. Making those payments as instant and open as cash is a top priority for FIS™ (NYSE: FIS), a global leader in financial services technology and, it has made great headway toward such a goal by putting payments solutions in place around the world.

FIS’ Open Payment Framework (OPF) and the applications derived from this state-of-the-art technology are built to enable customer-facing organizations to offer more insight, lower costs and enhanced flexibility to better manage consumer adoption. OPF already has been implemented this year by financial institutions in Hong Kong, India and Canada to facilitate cross-border, ACH and wire transfers, and to provide customers with a single view on all their payments.

Meanwhile, in Australia, FIS secured several wins in the National Payments Platform (NPP) program, which is designed to bring real-time payments to consumers across the country. In Australia, FIS will provide open, flexible payments support that will move money instantly across any channel.

FIS’ OPF regional solutions, which branch from its global standard payment hub, also will be able to support new schemes as they appear in the Eurozone and the United States.

“Real-time payments are about more than just speed. They’re about creating frictionless commerce, and a financial world in which the entire payment process – from the sale and invoicing to funds transfer to processing to reconciliation – occurs easily and immediately,” said Anthony Jabbour, chief operating officer, Banking & Payments, FIS. “An open payments system can also provide opportunities for financial institutions to help both commercial and retail customers better understand and manage their financial picture with greater ease.”

FIS will demonstrate its ability to help banks succeed with a full demo of new solutions around instant payments and open API banking at Sibos in Geneva. The demo will highlight fully open and instant ways to initiate, settle and clear payments, as well as show the superior operations and bank liquidity insight that comes with instant account and transaction reconciliation. Visit FIS’ booth E28 at Sibos to see these solutions close up.

SmartStream Technologies, the Transaction Lifecycle Management (TLM^®) specialist, today announced that Raiffeisen Bank International AG has taken a proactive approach to Basel III and implemented a cash and liquidity reporting solution – to monitor and manage cash positions on an intraday basis, throughout the group.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has released ‘Principles for Sound Liquidity Risk Management and Supervision’ for intraday liquidity management with a target date of January 2017. In 2014, Raiffeisen Bank International AG decided to take a forward thinking approach to combat the impact of the regulation by implementing the Corona Cash & Liquidity reporting solution throughout the Raiffeisen Banking Group Austria. The solution was the result of a successful collaboration between SmartStream’s product development team in Vienna and the bank’s treasury domain experts.

Having a centralised view on all cash positions throughout the bank is critical for cash management, forecasting and trading needs. The solution is able to generate complete reports also incorporating, for example, central bank deposits – helping the bank allocate funds and feed into this report.

Christian Schiebl, Executive Vice President, Corona Business Unit, SmartStream, says: “Basel III highlights how data has to be ‘trusted data’ – with Corona, we have a unique advantage in supplying exactly what the regulators expect. Raiffeisen Bank International AG is the first bank in the region to take such a proactive approach in protecting themselves, as well as their customers, we are proud they have taken such steps. In addition, Corona Cash & Liquidity provides best practises for Corona customers with low effort and implementation risk. ”

Wolfgang Pollak, Senior Asset Liability Manager, Raiffeisen International Bank AG, stated: “SmartStream demonstrated that their data was accurate and supported our strategic goals. The Corona solution also provides real time data from external sources. This is clearly unique and works well for us”.