Vermilion Software, the leading supplier of client reporting and communications software, today announces its victory at the Waters Rankings 2016. The honor, for ‘Best Reporting System Provider’, was received on July 14 at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Club.

Vermilion sells primarily to asset managers, wealth managers, hedge funds and asset servicing firms. The software firm has over 60 successful implementations on four continents under its belt.

Waters Rankings are Anglo-American news website WatersTechnology's only awards program where the category winners are determined exclusively by its global readership, namely asset management firms and consultants. The reporting space was particularly competitive this year, with 24 other vendors in the category.

Simon Cornwell, Global Sales and Marketing Director at Vermilion Software: “Waters Rankings are the asset management world’s premier awards for software vendors, since the votes are cast by clients rather than a judging panel. This award reflects the fact that our clients remain delighted with our service even as our business continues to grow around the world. We would like to thank everyone who voted for us.”

The last six months have borne some important product enhancements for Vermilion, including a completely new user interface and an enhanced version of its pitchbook creation service, V:Pitch. The firm also recently announced a groundbreaking partnership with Chicago-based automated commentary provider, Narrative Science.

Last year, Vermilion made history in becoming the first vendor to ever win the ‘Best implementation’ category at the Buy-Side Technology Awards for three years in a row. It also won the category for ‘Best buy-side client reporting platform’ for the second year in succession.

Experian^®, the leading global information services company, today published its first annual global business report covering the convergence of growth strategies and fraud prevention. The report, Global Business Trends: Protecting Growth Ambitions Against Rising Fraud Threats, is designed as a guide for senior executives and fraud prevention professionals, offering new insights on how the alignment of strategies for business growth and fraud prevention can help a business grow revenues while managing risks in an increasingly virtual world.

The report identifies five trends that businesses should implement to mitigate fraud and improve the customer experience in today’s fast-paced, consumer-centric environment:

1.       Applying right-sized fraud solutions to reduce unnecessary customer disruption: It’s time to move on from a one-size-fits-all approach that creates more customer friction than necessary. Instead, companies should apply fraud solutions that reflect the value and level of confidence needed for each transaction. This means right-sizing your fraud solutions to align with true fraud rates and commercial strategy.

2.       Knowing the universal consumer is the core of modern fraud mitigation and marketing: Achieving a universal profile of consumer behaviour — beyond the traditional 360-degree view — requires access to a combination of identity data, device intelligence, online behaviour, biometrics, historical transactions and more, for consumer interactions not only with you, but across other businesses and industries as well. Companies that translate this knowledge and use it to identify consumers can distinguish a fraudster from a real customer more easily, building trust along the way.

3.       Expanding your view through a blended ecosystem: In addition to using your own first-party data sources, companies need to participate in a blended ecosystem, working across businesses and even industries. Fraudsters have access to more data than ever before, including data traditionally used to verify identities, and they use that data to create an entire digital profile. Therefore, you can no longer get to the digital interaction data you need by managing the process in a siloed manner. Achieving an expansive view of the universal consumer requires multiple data sources working together.

4.       Achieving agility and scale using service-based models: Today, more and more companies are choosing subscription-based systems rather than building in-house or implementing on-premise solutions. Continuous upgrades and the access to new risk logic that come with subscription models provide more agility and faster response to emerging threats, no matter how fast your volume grows or what products, channels or geographies you pursue.

5.       Future-proofing fraud solution choices: Companies need access to a wide variety of traditional and emerging technologies and information sources to fill in knowledge gaps and blind spots where fraudsters try to hide. The ability to modify strategies quickly and catch fraud faster while improving the customer experience is a critical aspect of fraud prevention moving forward.

Bringing together these key trends, the report provides business leaders with the insight they need to fight fraud using the same client-focused approach currently being used to attract new customers and grow revenue.

“There is a persistent mind-set that fraud loss is just the cost of doing business,” said Steve Platt, global EVP, Fraud and Identity, Experian. “But as fraudsters evolve, those losses are climbing, and the status quo is no longer effective or acceptable. We all need to be as forward-looking in fighting fraud as we are in business operations and marketing, and a real understanding of consumers is critical for success. We’re talking about the convergence of business growth and fraud prevention, and we’re pleased to provide the first report in the marketplace covering this topic.”

The full report can be downloaded here. The report also features an interactive Fraud Prevention Benchmark tool that companies can use to explore how these trends impact their business and how the performance of their approach measures up against industry practices.

The report is relevant to functions spanning the enterprise, including C-suite executives such as chief marketing officers (CMOs), chief risk officers (CROs) and chief data officers (CDOs). The report focuses on business processes where fraud infiltrates, including new account opening, account access, money movement transactions, and emerging trends combating fraud, such as advanced fraud analytics. In each area, the report details how multiple business functions can apply responses to create business growth.

Steve Platt added: “We hear from our clients that they are most successful when CMOs along with CDOs and CROs all work together to understand the customer and develop fraud management solutions that create a better overall experience.”

Experian was recently cited in Forrester’s 2016 Vendor Landscape: Mobile Fraud Management Solutions[1] report and listed as having nine out of a possible 10 capabilities needed to combat mobile fraud. Experian was also identified as one of three leading players in the fraud detection and prevention space in a new study from Juniper Research.[2] Experian applied best practices to create a global report on providing fraud management solutions that allow companies to maximize profitability while providing secure, hassle-free customer interactions.

ABBYY Europe, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture and linguistic technologies, has improved and standardised automated invoice processing for Röchling Automotive AG & Co. KG. The business now uses ABBYY’s FlexiCapture for Invoices at branch offices in four countries to process invoices received via e-mail and paper format. The software captures the documents, extracts the invoice data and sends it to the SAP systems. Röchling has now optimised previously complicated and time-consuming workflows, enhancing networking between locations and restructuring invoice processing to become more uniform.

Röchling is a supplier of plastic parts for the automotive industry. The company's subsidiaries in Germany, the Czech Republic, Belgium and the United States receive invoices from around 2,000 suppliers in different languages and formats, totalling up to 50,000 invoices annually. Previously, invoice data was automatically captured at respective locations and imported into SAP workflows and archiving systems. The incumbent solution did not support either distributed capture, which enables the capture at remote locations via web scanning stations and multi-channel input of documents from various devices or electronic invoice processing. Data access was also slow.

"In the US, 90 per cent of invoices are received as e-mail attachments. Invoices in Europe are still very much in paper format, although digital invoices are slowly catching on," explained Andreas Lupfer, team leader PLM / SAP application support for Röchling Automotive SE & Co. KG. "The previous solution was unable to process e-mail invoices – only documents received from connected scanners. In order to process all invoices via a single system we had to first print out electronically received invoices, then scan these into PDF format along with incoming paper invoices. It was a highly labour intensive procedure that is now obsolete."

Now, paper invoices are scanned locally and e-mail invoices are exported directly into the ABBYY solution. ABBYY capture software extracts header and footer data automatically. Documents requiring manual review or correction of capture results are assigned to the responsible administrative personnel at verification stations. Validated data is then forwarded to the specialist departments for invoice review and approval and imported into the corresponding workflows in the SAP system. In contrast to the prior solution, ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices offers automatic system training. Typical invoices are manually selected from the system as models for future invoices from a given supplier (to determine the location of additional invoice fields, for example). This enables continuous optimisation of the quality of extracted data and improves the capture of invoices of new suppliers. With the document router of the ABBYY partner, KGS Software, can extract invoice data from PDFs that are directly entered into the appropriate SAP processes for further processing.

"We needed a solution that was able to process invoices in all formats and languages that enabled uniform processing across multiple locations," said Vivien Rebsdat, IT director at Röchling Automotive SE & Co. KG. "ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices met all our requirements, delivering exceptional invoice capture results and eliminating a huge amount of administrative work for our employees. We are very satisfied with ABBYY support. The next step will be for us to implement processing of invoices compliant with the 'ZUGFeRD' electronic invoicing standards using ABBYY."

ABBYY FlexiCapture for Invoices is a turnkey solution for automated invoice capturing for the accounts payable process. Based on the enterprise capture platform, ABBYY FlexiCapture, the solution provides key functionalities while remaining flexible and agile to customer-specific needs, company-internal processes and IT infrastructures. The solution is essential for efficient streamlining of invoice processes, affording complete transparency across the entire invoice cycle and helping minimise business (e.g. thanks to compliance with legal regulations for invoice validation and processing). The solution is also adaptable to enable capture and processing of other document types used by businesses, such as forms for customer communications, personnel documents, orders and incoming post, therefore maximising security of investment.

Additional information on invoice processing for SAP can be found at http://www.abbyy.com/en/sap-input-management.

• Product Reviews
• 18.07.2016 10:39 am

What does the product do?

CustomerXPs’ Clari5 is an enterprise solution that enables commercial banks to detect transactions in real-time that are fraudulent and/or illegal in terms of Anti-Money Laundering/ Counter-Terrorism Financing (AML/CFT) laws. 

Clari5 facilitates compliance with the requirements of the FATF AML global guidelines and United States Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). In several countries, Clari5 also facilitates compliance with the central banks’ requirements for implementation of cross-channel fraud risk management. It can also provide important insights about customer experience and enable the bank to initiate cross-sell and up-sell at the customer’s  particular touch-point.

Clari5 can efficiently process large amounts of data, operating at a speed of 4700 Transactions per Second (TPS). It can be incorporated within the existing infrastructure of any bank operating across all banking channels – Tellers, ATMs, POS, E-Commerce, Mobile banking, and Internet banking – and covering all core products (Deposits, Loans, Remittances and Cards).

Clari5 aligns with a number of key banking themes and trends that have been identified by Chartis Research. The vast majority of financial institutions agree that it makes sense to integrate control of fraud with monitoring of transactions that could fall foul of AML/CFT laws. Regulators are frequently drawing links between money laundering and fraud. Most institutions are taking an ‘omnichannel’ approach to business. Anomalous transactions should be recognized in real time if the solution is to work optimally. The solution is most effective if it takes a holistic – or 360 degree – view of each customer.

Perhaps most importantly, a fully integrated solution like Clari5 is 30% less expensive to operate than traditional fraud and AML/CFT prevention solutions that focus on only one major product line. The return on investment does not just come from minimization of losses through fraud and violations of AML/CFT laws. It also comes from a better, deeper understanding of customer experience.

Clari5 silently monitors all banking transactions with no impact to the transaction lifecycle in the various source systems. The solution then creates various comprehensive scenarios and patterns of possible risk incidents and false positives. It then forms a decision strategy (reject, hold or allow) for each transaction. Any changes or deviations in customer behavior are tracked immediately and presented to the risk management officers as potential problems.

Actual experience of users points to a very high success rate – in terms of accurate identification of problems – and a high return on investment.

Who needs the product?

Clari5 is ideal for large and medium-sized central or commercial banks. It has been successfully implemented in over 12 financial institutions across multiple countries. These banks’ customer bases range from 1mn to 55mn accounts. Within these banks, Clari5 has been integrated with more than 20 third party systems. Within potential customer banks, the product is most relevant to Compliance Officers, Risk Officers, Internal Auditors, and COO/CTO/CIOs.

Since launch in 2010, CustomerXPs has partnered with financial institutions across India and the Middle East. The company is currently expanding its footprint in South East Asia, the Middle East and Africa and is actively exploring partnering with banks in the UK and the US. Clari5 has emerged a competitor for products such as Tonbeller by Fico, Argo Oasis, BAE Systems Fraud & AML Suite, Bottomline Systems, Fiserv, Jack Henry, Nice Actimize, SAS (Fraud Management & AML Suite), RSA (Adaptive Authentication), Shift Science, ThreatMatrix, FeedZai, Verafin, Brighterion, Socure, Inform, Inteco, Soundbite, Cybersource, Idetect, NCR Alaric and FIS RISC systems.

What other background features are relevant?

Clari5 is very easy to deploy. It typically takes the provider an average of three to four months to integrate Clari5 with the client’s core banking system and other source systems. However, certain functions of Clari5 can be available within two months. Data can be provided in a format that is preferred by the bank’s IT department.

What awards have recognized the product?

Clari5 has been voted Best Fraud Detection Product 2016 by OpRisk / Risk.net and has been positioned as enterprise solution in Chartis’ RiskTech Quadrant for Enterprise Fraud Technology in the Financial Crime Risk Management Report  2016. 

TMX Insights today announced that Razor Risk™, its risk management solution, meets the new minimum capital requirements for market risk standards finalized by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in January 2016.

Razor Risk offers financial institutions the ability to calculate and manage market risk capital and performance across desks, business lines and “top of house”.

Building on Razor Risk’s existing high performance solutions, the first key enhancement provides “front-to-back” analytics where firms can calculate the minimum market risk capital requirements using the expected shortfall based internal model approach or the standardized approach.

The second key enhancement utilizes TMX Analytics’ real-time and historical database platform integrated with Razor Risk for identifying non-modellable risk factors and appropriate liquidity horizons to calculate the capital add-on.

For more information, please visit www.tmxinfoservices.com/razor-risk/frtb

SETL, the London based institutional payment and settlement infrastructure based on blockchain technology, announced the completion of its first round of private fundraising today.

SETL also announced additional appointments to its board. Rachel Lomax, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and Ed Richards, former CEO of Ofcom, join the SETL board, following the appointment of Sir David Walker as SETL Chairman in December 2015. The company will also shortly announce the name of a further appointment to the Board, who is an experienced executive board member and non-executive in government, including at agencies in the national security sector.

SETL was launched in July 2015 to deploy a multi-asset, multi-currency institutional payment and settlements infrastructure based on blockchain technology. The SETL system will enable market participants to move cash and assets directly between each other, facilitating the immediate and final settlement of market transactions. The SETL system maintains a permissioned distributed ledger of ownership and transaction records, simplifying the process of matching, settlement, custody, registration and transaction reporting.

Since launch, SETL announced a breakthrough in technology, allowing the platform to process over 1.4bn transactions per day; launched their blockchain-powered OpenCSD platform, enabling market participants to run permissioned registry service for payments, settlement and clearing of cash and other financial instruments; and demonstrated Australia’s first working blockchain solution in collaboration with Computershare.

SETL’s Chairman, Sir David Walker, said: “This is a milestone in the development of SETL and one which I believe strengthens the company’s position significantly.  At this stage in the company’s growth it is important to choose the right partners and to deliver a dependably resilient product to the market.”  

Sir David Walker continued: “We are also delighted to confirm further appointments to the board.  Joining as non-executives are Rachel Lomax and Ed Richards. Each of these directors brings a wealth of experience in the financial, regulatory and corporate governance spheres.  Their oversight of the growth and development of SETL will be invaluable to the executive team and shareholders alike”. SETL is very mindful of the dependability and resilience of its systems and interfaces and we are delighted to welcome a further colleague to add counsel to the board, regulators, customers and shareholders.

Peter Randall, CEO of SETL, added: “We are pleased to announce that we have closed fundraising with initial partners and have agreed scope on a number of projects. With the recent announcement of our OpenCSD product, the completion of the funding arrangements and our board appointments, I am excited about developments ahead.  

We believe we have a technological lead in this area having demonstrated the ability to process billions of transactions a day and are unique in having a financial grade product on the shelf and ready to go. We have already received significant indications of interest in the OpenCSD product and are in the process of choosing the initial implementation cases”.   

Randall concluded: “I do not underestimate the challenges of re-tooling some of the most fundamental elements of our financial infrastructure but the benefits of doing so are significant and widespread.  We are strongly positioned to commence that transformation and look forward to making further announcements shortly.”

The world’s leading transaction bankers and thought leaders now have a platform to tackle some of the most pressing and complex issues in transaction banking today: the iGTB Oxford School of Transaction Banking, set up by Ted Roosevelt Malloch, CEO of The Roosevelt Group and Senior Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and sponsored by Intellect Global Transaction Banking (iGTB), the organisation behind the world’s first comprehensive global transaction banking product. The inaugural course, scheduled to be held July 13th-15th, is the first in a series that will place transaction banking at the centre of modern business and banking.

The School is being launched to recognise transaction banking’s increasing prominence within financial services and to bring rigour to an area of banking that has previously been overlooked.

The learning programme is open exclusively to senior transaction banking executives from around the world and will be held initially in the prestigious Rhodes House in the uniquely historic setting of Oxford before concluding at the Oxford and Cambridge Club in London. The inaugural programme will be led by Ted Roosevelt Malloch and Andrew England, renowned thought leaders in the domain.

England is an immensely experienced, pre-eminent expert on global transaction banking and has previously held the position of Managing Director, Global Head of Transaction Banking at Lloyds, Head of CEE Global Transaction Banking, UniCredit and Head of Product Management, Global Cash Management and Trade, Deutsche Bank, as well as having been Senior External Advisor on Transaction Banking with McKinsey & Co. He is currently a Director of iGTB.

Malloch, author of fifteen books including the bestseller 'Doing Virtuous Business' on virtuous business and other topics, has previously been a Research Professor at Yale University and held positions on the executive board of the World Economic Forum and ambassadorial level at the United Nations, as well as experience on Wall Street and with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Senate. Malloch is also an incoming Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, Germany.

The comprehensive agenda of the course will centre on the theme: “Transaction Banking by Design”. Attendees will learn about and explore design frameworks for transaction banking at the three key stages of a transaction bank’s maturity: advocacy, growth and innovation; managing to performance; and conflict, disruption and stakeholder management. It will include practical insights from seasoned transaction bankers, punctuated by peer-to-peer learning exercises that will enable participants to grasp a deep understanding of how other executives have addressed common challenges.

Arun Jain, Chairman and Managing Director, Intellect Design Arena Ltd. says: “There is a global spotlight on Transaction Banking. Big business and SMEs alike are looking for more efficient services and more addictive interfaces. In such a complex and increasingly dynamic environment, the importance of collaborative learning simply cannot be overstated. I am sure that the iGTB Oxford School will move the transaction banking conversation ahead by several years, for the industry as a whole.”

Ted Roosevelt Malloch, Senior Fellow in Management Practices, Saïd Business School adds: “Transaction banking is at the heart of supporting businesses and thereby sustainable economic growth, but has previously been viewed as simpler and less worthy of scrutiny. Now is the time to consolidate the paradigms underpinning this key sector.”

Manish Maakan, CEO of iGTB, Intellect Design Arena Ltd. says: “After 400 years of banking, transaction banking is finally coming of age and taking its rightful place not only at the heart of the banking industry, but also with regards to commerce and the economic development of markets. It’s a core banking service that is rapidly growing in terms of size and complexity, so it’s crucial for companies to “get it right” and optimise their operations in light of such a changing, challenging environment. Today’s banking needs to be professionalised, and we want this event to be at the forefront of any developments by offering the highest-quality, senior-level transaction banking learning available.”

For more on the initiative, please visit: www.iGTBOxford.com

A stellar cast of session leaders will illustrate and augment the formal framework taught during the course. List of world-class guest session leaders:

• Huy Nguyen Trieu, CEO, Disruptive Finance, MD, Head of Macro Structuring, Citi and Fintech Resident Expert, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

• Rhomaios Ram, Founding Partner of a new challenger bank, Global Head of Product Management TB, Deutsche Bank

• Matthew K. Lobner, Chief of Staff and Head of Strategy for Europe, Commercial Banking, HSBC

• Brian Webb, General Manager, TB Liquidity & Cash Solutions, NedBank

• Eric Modave, Chief Operating Officer, Arab Bank

• Borna Ljubicic, Global Head, Cash Innovation, Corporate & Investment Banking, UniCredit

• David Page, Founder & CEO, Business Mix, and formerly Executive Director, Transformation, CEO Office, Visa Europe

• Olof Pripp, Vice Chairman, Board & CEO Services, EMEA, Korn Ferry

• John M Casanova, Co-Head, EU Financial Services Regulatory Group, Partner, Sidley Austin

• Anand Pande, CEO, Growth Paradigm Partnership and former Global Trade Head of RBS, Transaction Banking MD at Citi

• Nick Chatrath, CEO Coachify Ltd

• Tim Maltin, CEO, Maltin PR

• The Lord Stirrup KG, GCB, AFC, former Marshall of the Royal Air Force, Chief of the Defence Staff, UK

Swiss-based NetGuardians and Sweden’s BehavioSec are joining forces to leverage their complementary technologies to provide complete fraud protection to financial institutions – and their clients – around the world.

NetGuardians is a FinTech company with specialized expertise in user behavior analytics and profiling to implement controls for fraud and compliance challenges. BehavioSec brings behavioral biometric technology to precisely analyze behaviors at the user transaction level and alert to behavior changes that signal misuse.

Their joint effort will offer financial institutions the ability to protect clients by statistically scoring the behaviors they use during transactions. Users’ actions – for example, the way they swipe their smartphones – are very distinct, so continuous machine learning can authenticate users based not on what they do, but on how they do it.

“This is superior transactional security to older methods such as passwords,” explains Ingo Deutschmann, VP Engineering BehavioSec. “A password can be hacked, but a swipe style cannot. At the same time, because it does not require users to take additional security steps, it offers the ease-of-use that consumers ask for. Users are protected in such a way that they don’t have to think about their security. Security is built into their own actions.”

Financial institutions can add this transaction-level protection to NetGuardians operational risk solutions, which leverage Big Data to correlate and analyze behaviors across the entire bank system from business to IT operations. This provides end-to-end risk mitigation and continuous control for fraud protection and regulatory compliance.  

“Financial institutions today need fraud protection integrated into everything they do,” says NetGuardians COO Raffael Maio. “Bank clients think about fraud risk most at the time they conduct transactions. With BehavioSec, we help financial institutions provide strong security for transactions, contributing to overall security and client confidence.”