In a sign of further commitment to its high-security standards, Nethone, the AI-powered fraud fighters that protect online payment flows, has gained SOC (System and Organization Controls) 2 Type 2 attestation - resulting in the company now being fully SOC 2 standard compliant. 

The SOC 2 Type 2 attestation signifies Nethone’s continuous efforts to ensure its internal systems and security procedures meet the highest standards possible to give its clients and partners the confidence that its operational integrity is the best it can possibly be. The announcement follows ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 1 certification in early 2023. 

SOC 2 is a framework developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) to assess and report on trust service principles of security, availability, processing integrity, and ensuring confidentiality and privacy of all data processed by a company’s systems. The core difference between SOC 2 Types 1 and 2 is that the first step reported on Nethone’s internal security and control measures during a specific point in time, whereas the second step evaluated it over an extended period. 

Continuing high-standard of information security procedures 

Mark Burton, Chief Technology Officer at Nethone, comments: “We are delighted to be able to offer our customers the additional reassurance of knowing that we have achieved SOC2 type 2 attestation in addition to ISO27001, demonstrating our commitment to ensure that Nethone meets the very highest standards of security and privacy.” 

Nethone is at the forefront of helping businesses enhance customer experiences and payment flows with frictionless profiling of users with its modular Know Your User™ solution. This allows it to combat threats such as ATO, bot attacks, CNP fraud, and chargeback fraud, among many 

other types of fraud. The company solves fraud challenges for over 100 global eCommerce and financial industry players including BlaBlaCar, Azul, Grover, Ramp, Grupo Boticário, Wema Bank. 

By analysing behavioural, device, network and hardware/software data attributes in real-time and providing actionable recommendations, Nethone’s clients can feel safe knowing that not only their data but that of their customers, is protected to industry-compliant high standards.

Commenting on his appointment, Mitch Partoglou says: “For over 15 years I have been looking to solve a customer's needs. I wanted to find a finance company that shares my values and ambitions of trying to do better things for businesses and their customers, which would enable me to build and scale new products in the market. A lot of people talk about that, but it's another thing to put it into practice at scale.

 

“I’m thrilled to join etika at such an exciting time in its growth journey – the company’s ethical principles and mission to promote financial inclusion were huge draws for me, and their ambition to expand their product line is one that I wholeheartedly support. I can’t wait to start working with etika’s outstanding people to deliver fair, transparent and affordable finance to Australia’s hard-working business owners.”

Finastra, a global provider of financial software applications and marketplaces, announces that BKN301 Group, a fintech committed to creating a world without financial barriers, has gone live with Finastra’s Essence to bring digital and cross-border payments solutions to San Marino and subsequently emerging markets around the world. Finastra’s partner Corvallis, Tinexta Group, a leading IT provider in the Italian financial services sector, managed the project, last mile payments integration and the fast implementation of the solution in line with local requirements.

With Essence, deployed on Microsoft Azure cloud and integrated with Salt Edge’s Open Banking Compliance, BKN301 Group can effectively manage payments accounts, international payment methods such as SEPA and SWIFT transfers, and all book-keeping data for its corporate customers. It will also launch a feature that enables customers to open accounts and issue cards quickly and seamlessly. With the digital banking platform in place, BKN301 Group will accelerate its longer-term strategy to bring a Banking as a Service (BaaS) payments solution to corporates in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

“Our objective has always been to tear down financial barriers in fast-growing markets, bringing the best and most innovative solutions to foster economic growth and open up their markets to opportunities in the west and vice versa,” said Stiven Muccioli, Founder and CEO at BKN301. “We selected Finastra due to its holistic and integrated offering, enabling us to dramatically reduce time to market while incrementally developing our services, adapt quickly to new legislative and customer demands and pursue new markets in line with our roadmap. The MENA region is a major growth area for us as despite its young and digitally savvy population, it is still largely reliant on cash, presenting a big opportunity for payments innovation. Going live with Essence represents another milestone in our strategy towards becoming a trusted partner for corporates and financial players in both San Marino and the MENA countries.”

Essence is a next-generation digital banking platform which combines sophisticated functionality and advanced technology to increase enterprise agility, reduce costs and improve operational efficiency. Its open architecture enables financial institutions to incrementally add value-added services and accelerate revenue growth. Salt Edge’s Open Banking Compliance provides full coverage of regulated markets with cross-bank and pan-European API standards.

“BKN301 Group needed a robust and flexible digital banking platform integrated with value-added services, to enhance its offering today and support its future growth plans, such as for the MENA market,” said Siobhan Byron, EVP, Universal Banking at Finastra. “Our open API-based, scalable SaaS solution, which enables seamless integrations with services such as Salt Edge’s Open Banking compliance, gives the fintech the flexibility to adapt and grow quickly. Through our solution and Corvallis’ implementation support, we have enabled BKN301 Group to facilitate seamless cross-border payments and digital payment wallets for its customers, and eventually deliver a new BaaS payments offering.”

“Our success with BKN301 Group demonstrates the strength of Finastra and Corvallis’ partnership capabilities for the Italian market,” said Francesco Magnani, Client Manager at Corvallis. “Corvallis’ local expertise helps customers and end users to easily adopt Finastra’s solution and speed up their digital transformation. BKN301 combined the power of Finastra’s digital banking solution and Corvallis’ knowledge of the rules and environment in which to deploy and run.”

The Wealth Today and Forensic Risk Alliance announce the Forensic & Restructuring (fore) Summit 2023, set to take place on Tuesday, June 6 in Dubai. The summit will delve into the rapidly evolving landscape of white-collar crimes, sanctions, and corruption, specifically focusing on the role of Big Data and Data Analytics in investigations and prosecution.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have been leveraging data analytics to detect and prosecute these crimes, and the same proactive approach is expected from companies.

The Summit will also explore emerging trends in corruption, including the impacts of rising global wealth inequality, conflict-prone environments, and technological advancements. As the wealth of the world's top 1% is projected to grow, corruption risks are expected to surge, necessitating proactive measures from anti-corruption agencies.

Third-party intermediaries' compliance issues will also be in the spotlight at the Summit, as Stanford Law School estimates about 90% of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) matters alleging bribery involve intermediaries. The Summit will emphasize the need for robust third-party due diligence programs to mitigate these risks.

The Summit also aims to discuss recent statistics related to white-collar crimes in the U.S., including the fast-growing crime of identity theft, which affected over 10 million Americans in 2020. The DOJ has announced plans to hire additional personnel to combat pandemic-related fraud, indicating the escalating fight against white-collar crimes.

“Recent corporate failures have further put a spotlight on the approach toward risk management and regulatory adherence and make this topic, a critical one to discuss,” said Hiteshwar Bhakhri, Executive Director of Strategy,The Wealth Today.

Bhavin Shah, Managing Partner MEA, Forensic Risk Alliance said “ UAE has emerged as the region’s leading center for financial services, with many global financial institutions including investment banks, funds and asset managers. The scale of financial services business and corporate governance weaknesses create significant opportunities for white-collar crime. Many clients often lack the awareness to protect themselves against sophisticated fraud, with investment scams and cybercrime being significant problems. Understanding these emerging trends is crucial for businesses, regulators, and law enforcement agencies.”      

Tilta, a Berlin-based fintech, announced the successful launch of its greenfield lending solution on Mambu’s cloud banking platform today. Powered by Mambu, Tilta can enhance the payment experience for B2B merchants and their end customers, while closing the working capital gap on eCommerce marketplaces. 

Tilta provides a white-label, embedded purchase finance infrastructure built for eCommerce marketplaces. Its solution features a range of payment options, including Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL), which are available to customers during checkout. Tilta’s revenue-share model enables marketplaces to earn on every financed transaction and thus to increase their margin. Mambu’s cloud-native banking and financial services platform enables Tilta to bring solutions to market faster, drive down cost barriers, and allow ecosystems to expand through its API-driven approach.

This comes at a time where 67 per cent of business owners cannot secure the amount of funding they need–or any funding at all, according to Mambu research. In addition, for those unable to secure sufficient funding, 35 per cent have experienced cash flow issues. As business owners continue to face barriers securing capital, alternative financing options become instrumental to operations and growth. 

Julian Förster, Head of Growth at Tilta: “B2B marketplaces is a relatively young but steadily growing market segment. With its rise, we aim to provide merchants with a financing solution designed around their continuous needs. We share the same mindset as Mambu of being a technology-enabler, so our customers can focus on growing their business and worry less about securing working capital. We implemented Mambu from the start in a greenfield environment, and the initial set-up took only six to eight weeks. Many Tilta team members worked with Mambu in previous roles, so we knew the solution could improve our speed-to-market. Mambu’s agility and high level of support is crucial for our success, and we not only have a world-class platform in Mambu but a trusted partner.”

Unlike many BNPL providers that only use publicly-available credit data, Tilta incorporates customer relationship data in its credit decisioning processes to ensure one of the industry's highest financing limits. According to a Mambu report with Deloitte, merchants that offer BNPL typically experience growth through increased sales conversion and greater basket size. In addition to consumer convenience, widespread merchant adoption is a key driving force behind BNPL’s success.

Scott Wilson, Regional VP EMEA at Mambu: “There is a growing appetite for seamless payment methods during the B2B purchasing experience. As consumer behaviour shifts, many are rethinking credit decisioning and how to best capture key customer data points. By offering BNPL as a payment method, among others, Tilta is improving the marketplace experience for an increasing number of eCommerce buyers and sellers. On Mambu’s robust cloud banking technology, Tilta can scale its offerings without limitation.”

In a second phase, Tilta is focused on geographic expansion, with aims to support merchants that sell to customers worldwide. eCommerce has no borders, and with a cloud banking platform that supports financial experiences in over 65 countries, Mambu will provide the infrastructure to support Tilta’s growth.

The French fintech Skaleet announces a partnership with the open banking pioneer Salt Edge. An alliance that will considerably facilitate the compliance of banking and electronic money institutions with the strict regulatory requirements of open banking.

A collaboration between two pioneers of the banking digital transformation

Founded in 2013, Salt Edge has quickly become one of the world leaders in open banking and can now offer financial institutions across the globe API solutions which enable them to conceive and commercialize innovative banking services. The company provides a full-stack open banking compliance solution that is adjustable to meet the requirements of any new jurisdiction, currently offering compliance with European’s Berlin Group, UK’s Open Banking, Australia’s CDR, Brasil Financial-grade API, Saudi’s and Jordan’s API standards. Salt Edge develops unique expertise on open banking regulatory compliance issues but also in interoperability between banks and third-party services.

Skaleet's core banking platform will now be able to offer its customers the benefit of this know-how. Its all-in-one and highly customizable solution aims to quickly develop innovative banking applications that answer entirely to the requirements of the different regional and local regulations.

By automating the compliance of new banking services, Skaleet allows its customers to focus on the construction of state-of-the-art offers and customer relationship management.

“Salt Edge’s compliance solutions are among the most demanding and complete on the market. So, this partnership will therefore allow us to offer our customers a perfect serenity in terms of protection against reglementary risk.
It is a decisive way to facilitate the entry of numerous financial institutions in the open banking world.” Hervé Manceron, CEO, Skaleet

A unique gateway to facilitate a secure data flow

Besides helping with regulatory compliance, Salt Edge provides a unique gateway to customers’ accounts, both business and personal, in more than 5,000 banks and financial institutions.

Therefore, this partnership is also a major opportunity for Salt Edge, whose ambition is to provide a universal gateway enabling instant payments and secure access to aggregated data from the largest number of banking institutions to the largest number of final users

“This partnership will enable us to accompany new financial institutions in the highly regulated universe of open banking and therefore enable them to develop in complete serenity innovative services which are efficient and corresponding to the highest standards in terms of compliance.” Alina Beleuta, Chief Growth Officer, Salt Edge

Eastnets, a global leader in compliance and payment solutions for the financial services industry, has achieved “Category Leader” status in the Chartis Payment Risk Solutions 2023 report. Eastnets also ranked as an “Enterprise Solutions” provider for the Alternative Payments quadrant.

This recognition is for Eastnets’ portfolio of payment products, including PaymentSafe, Universal Translator, Messaging Warehouse, Message Duplicate Detection and PaymentGuard. The company’s centralised payment hub provides financial institutions with comprehensive and effective tools for managing multiple payment networks, message archiving requirements as well as fraud detection and prevention. In addition, Eastnets is one of the first providers in the market to enable financial institutions to adopt new instant and fast payment schemes including SWIFT Go.

Eastnets PaymentSafe facilitates the real-time processing, automated workflow management and orchestration of cross-border and domestic payments in a centralised platform. This helps to simplify and streamline the payment reconciliation and settlement process, reducing time, costs and complexity.

Eastnets messaging warehouse is a single repository for financial messages providing a comprehensive view of message activity by enabling access to both live and archived messages from the same interface, eliminating the need to switch between different systems. This aids the creation of intelligence on years of financial data, including detailed reports and dashboards, analytics, trends and investigations. 

Eastnets’ PaymentGuard is a robust, real-time, and multi-channel fraud prevention solution. It features a comprehensive suite of AI models that cover a wide range of fraud patterns. The solution also includes an Investigator Tool and Link Analysis, which provide detailed contextual visual insights using intelligent graphing technologies.

In the ever-evolving landscape of financial institutions and their regulatory requirements, Eastnets’ payment solutions are vital. The company’s PaymentSafe, Messaging Warehouse and PaymentGuard solutions help financial institutions keep pace with global payments industry standards and the workflow complexities that come with managing a wide range of payment networks. Eastnets’ solutions also protect against the increasingly sophisticated techniques used by cyber criminals to inject fraudulent payments and transfer money across country borders.

“Eastnets’ category leader position in Chartis’ inaugural Payment Risk report reflects its experience in the payments market and its focus on innovation,” said Nick Vitchev, Research Director at Chartis. “In separate payment categories, its advanced technology, focus on speed, breadth and depth of solutions, and technological strength were reflected in its quadrant ratings for card and account-to-account payments – and in the emerging market for alternative payments risk management.”

Commenting on the recognition, Saeed Patel, Group Director of Product Development Management at Eastnets, said, “We’re immensely proud to have been recognised as multiple category leader in this inaugural Chartis report in the payments industry. This recognition is a testament of the depth of our solutions, our extensive subject matter expertise and the trust our valued clients place in us. At Eastnets, we remain committed to delivering innovative, smart, real-time solutions using best in class technologies that help our clients meet the demands of the business-critical payments landscape and to stay ahead of evolving risks in the financial industry.”

Temenos today launched a fully-Integrated front-to-back, mortgages solution with a smart decision engine powered by Explainable AI, helping lenders to deliver a personalized digital mortgage experience while reducing their costs and time to close.

The solution enhances productivity and reduces delinquencies for lenders through automation and intuitive workflows to make quick and prudent decisions, using AI to provide affordability assessments that are transparent and explainable.

Temenos Digital Mortgages provides borrowers with hyper-personalized experience in every touch point through the partner ecosystem model, resulting in seamless customer experience and increased customer satisfaction.

Reducing the time to close is important to customers, particularly during turbulent times with rising interest rates, helping them meet real estate contracts or rate lock periods to secure a property or afford a mortgage.

The composable and highly scalable solution is suitable for banks of all sizes, building societies, credit unions that want to enhance their service offering and fintech or challenger banks looking to enter the mortgage market.

Lenders can deploy the complete pre-integrated front-to-back solution that comes with pre-configured user journeys and out-of-the-box integrations for documents generation and management, ID verification and Analytics to accelerate time to market. Alternatively, they can take individually deployable components that easily integrate via APIs with their existing infrastructure.

The low-code configurability of business rules and overall workflow design makes it easy for lenders to tailor the product to suit the varied regulatory and credit requirements.

The solution is cloud-native and available for lenders to deploy in their own data centres and on any public cloud or as a SaaS on Temenos Banking Cloud, enabling them to launch and scale up services rapidly.

Prema Varadhan, President Product and Chief Operating Officer, Temenos, commented: “The mortgage experience from many lenders is slow and fragmented, resulting in customer leakage in the application process. With this new solution, lenders can easily upgrade their mortgage capability, elevating the digital experience and leverage explainable AI for fast, responsible lending decisions. Despite the economic headwinds, the mortgage market continues to grow and by modernizing their systems in this way, we’re helping lenders increase volumes sustainably while ensuring affordability and transparency.”

Stewart Watterson, Strategic Advisor, Aite-Novarica Group, commented: “Mortgage lenders should take this time to rethink their existing workflows while starting from a clean whiteboard.  Digital straight-through processing is no longer just aspirational; lenders have an opportunity but will need to divest themselves of the patchwork of paper, batch files, and legacy technologies that have been strung together over time.  Making the capital investment in true digital end-to-end solutions sitting on a modern tech stack will provide a positive boost to efficiency ratios through the cost of errors expenses alone, coupled with the ability to redeploy FTEs to higher-impact business areas.”

Leading digital asset custodial service provider and wallet infrastructure ‘Liminal’ has obtained the Trust or Company Service Provider (TCSP) License from the Hong Kong Companies Registry. This license enables Liminal to provide regulated digital asset custodial services in Hong Kong, further solidifying its position as a top-tier custodian in APAC.

This marks a significant milestone for Liminal, making it a regulated entity providing full custody services. Hong Kong is one of the world's most dynamic financial centres and a hub for digital asset transactions. The TCSP Licence will allow Liminal to offer its clients a comprehensive suite of solutions which includes wallet infrastructure, institutional-grade custody solutions, wallet automation and much more, to a wide range of clients, including exchanges, hedge funds, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals.

"We are thrilled to have obtained the TCSP Licence, which is a testament to our commitment to regulatory compliance and best practices in digital asset custody," said Manan Vora, SVP of Strategy and Business Development at Liminal. "With the rapidly growing adoption of digital assets and currencies, the need for secure and reliable custodial solutions has become paramount. Hong Kong is a strategic location for us, and we look forward to serving the growing demand for secure and reliable digital asset custody."

The licence is issued by the Hong Kong Companies Registry under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Ordinance. Liminal Custody Solutions has undergone rigorous due diligence and compliance procedures to obtain the TCSP Licence. This includes undergoing stringent AML policies checks, a compliance and money laundering officer on the ground and an interview with the authorities to achieve the license. It demonstrates the high degree of expertise, experience, and professionalism required to attain this licence.

With the TCSP Licence, Liminal is well-positioned to meet the increasing demand for digital asset custodial services in Hong Kong and beyond. The company has also secured ISO 27001 and 27701 certifications, SOC 2 Type II certification, and CryptoCurrency Security Standard (CCSS) compliance-QSP Level 3, the highest standard in wallet keys and operations management. With its expanding global presence, Liminal is well-positioned to lead the institutional custody adoption across the APAC and MENA regions.

Investment strategy platform, Stratiphy, has announced the launch of its new investment application on the Apple App Store and Google Play. The solution provides users with bespoke investment strategies and insights, democratising access to the approach of professional investors.