Atos today announces that it has been selected as the winner for GSI Partner of the Year - EMEA by Amazon Web Services (AWS). This award recognizes Atos’ key role in helping customers drive innovation and build solutions on AWS.

Announced during a Partner Awards Gala at re:Invent, AWS Partner Awards recognize a wide range of AWS Partners, whose business models have embraced specialization, innovation, and collaboration over the past year. AWS Partner Awards recognize partners whose business models continue to evolve and thrive on AWS as they work with customers. In 2022, Atos supported its EMEA customers, leaders in their respective markets across the public and private sector, to run on AWS, in order to modernize critical workloads, secure everything at scale, modernize their business, implement new ways of working and unlock their potential for action to drive progress towards their net-zero targets.

“Atos is tremendously proud to be named AWS GSI Partner of the Year. This is a major recognition by AWS of our strong relationship and ability to support customers in their move towards large-scale, all-encompassing, transformation initiatives that deliver the power of cloud,” said Michael Liebow, Head of Atos OneCloud. “As a Global Systems Integrator with strong cloud-native capabilities brought by Cloudreach acquired earlier this year and that are now merged with our end-to-end service offering, Atos helps customers take full advantage of the business benefits AWS has to offer.”

For the first time, AWS Partner Awards included a self-nomination process across a number of award categories and specialization areas awarded at both the regional and global level where all AWS Partners were invited to participate and submit a nomination.

The AWS Partner Network (APN), is a global partner program, focused on helping partners build successful AWS-based businesses or solutions by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. The APN includes independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) around the world, with AWS Partner participation growing significantly during the past 12 months.

“AWS Partners are at the centre of unlocking value for global customers, across a wide range of industries,” said Ruba Borno, Vice President, Worldwide Channels and Alliances, AWS. “We are honoured to launch the inaugural global 2022 AWS Partner Awards, and thank all the nominees and winners for accelerating our customers’ cloud transformation journey.”

A panel of AWS experts selected the winners based on the below criteria: the GSI Partner of the Year EMEA Award recognizes Atos as an AWS top GSI partners that has provided significant contributions related to revenue, launched opportunities, net new certified individuals, and AWS designations earned.

Financial crime compliance risk and payments solutions provider, Eastnets, has been named as a multiple category leader in the Chartis Research “Financial Crime Risk Management Systems: Watchlist Screening and Monitoring Solutions, 2022, Vendor Landscape (Part II)” report.

It received the leader rating in all three of the Chartis Research RiskTech Quadrants® for Name Screening, Transaction Screening, and Transaction Monitoring.

Eastnets also received a “best-in-class” score for Transaction Screening for data methodology underlying the strength of its data platform and artificial intelligence (AI) data analytics-driven solution.

There are two Eastnets solutions covered by the report. The first is SafeWatch Screening, which includes the industry-pioneering ChainFeedTM product based on blockchain technology. This provides a secure encrypted solution with Real Time List Loading (RTLL) to update sanction lists automatically, with zero downtime, eliminating human errors and the risk of cyber threats. SafeWatch Screening includes advanced algorithms and detection engine including fuzzy matching logic with features to reduce false positives. Together with its advanced analytics and business intelligence-driven dashboards provides powerful compliance insights.

The second solution assessed is SafeWatch AML, which includes advanced AI and machine learning capabilities. It offers AI-driven transaction and relationship analytics to create risk scores and identify anomalous behaviours. Unsupervised AI models optimize and calibrate alerts, significantly reducing false positives. It also includes an Investigator Tool, using graphing technology to connect relationships providing context to suspicious transactions.

The report includes a highly competitive field of 24 vendors with Eastnets scoring strongly across the board. Chartis Research, part of Infopro Digital, is a leading provider of research and analysis on the global market for risk technology.

Commenting on the report’s findings, Nick Vitchev, Research Director at Chartis, said, “Eastnets’ strong, well-packaged set of solutions, combined with its expanding presence across the broad market spectrum, is reflected in its category leader rating for name screening, transaction screening and transaction monitoring. The company has grown into a truly global player in this area, with significant market gains; in our analysis, we also recognized the technical capability of its solutions across the space.”

Saeed Patel, Group Director of Product Development Management at Eastnets added, “2022 has seen an unprecedented level of regulatory change with growing demand by financial institutions to manage regulatory risk in real-time. At Eastnets, we strive to raise the bar in customer excellence through providing innovative solutions. We are delighted to be recognized as a leader in all categories in this Chartis report. We’re dedicated to helping financial institutions to be safe and to deliver business benefits over and above regulatory obligations.”

Finastra today announced that Clinc, the leading conversational AI specialist serving global financial institutions, will deliver its Virtual Banking Assistant technology fully integrated within Finastra’s Fusion Digital Banking platform. The application enables Finastra’s bank and credit union customers, utilizing Fusion Digital Banking as their digital platform, to increase digital engagement and streamline the customer experience. By enabling customers to manage common banking requests through voice and chat, the application creates efficiencies by dramatically reducing call centre volume.

This integration represents a unique banking industry partnership where conversational AI software is combined with FusionFabric.cloud, Finastra’s leading financial technology ecosystem, to create AI-driven digital experiences at cloud scale. Built on Finastra’s industry-leading core technologies and harnessing an extensive catalogue of open APIs, Clinc’s Virtual Banking Assistant helps financial institutions improve user engagement by offering a functional and natural experience.

Jon Newhard, CEO at Clinc said, “We are incredibly pleased to be able to offer our AI solution to banks in collaboration with Finastra, whose FusionFabric.cloud platform is viewed around the world as a leading financial technology ecosystem. Our Virtual Banking Assistant, which can be integrated seamlessly as part of a digital transformation strategy, enables financial institutions to engage customers efficiently but without losing the personal touch. This is vital in an era when increasing numbers of consumers are demanding authentic and intuitive experiences from chatbots.”

Narendra Mistry, Chief Product Officer, Universal Banking at Finastra said, “Financial institutions worldwide will benefit from increased access to Clinc’s innovative chatbot technology. Understanding how real people talk and interact is critical as banks and credit unions work to ensure that the customer experience remains strong while embracing new technologies. We’re delighted to welcome Clinc to our technology ecosystem, and for Finastra’s customers to be able to easily offer conversational AI as part of their digital strategy.”

Bottomline Technologies, a leading provider of financial technology that makes business payments and financial messaging simple, smart and secure, is pleased to report that it won, for the second year running, the Invisible Security category at one of the industry’s leading financial technology award ceremonies in London last night.

Celebrating fintech’s biggest ‘WOW’ moments across financial services, paytech and insuretech, The Fintech Finance Awards acknowledged Bottomline’s Insider Fraud solution as the winner in this year’s Invisible Security category, aimed at vendors who provide exceptional security solutions but with minimal footprint and fanfare while keeping details stealthily safe.

Bottomline’s purpose-built insider fraud solution helps financial institutions and corporates create the best defence against fraud committed by internal ‘bad actors'. Working in a non-invasive manner, the invisible security of its solution captures all user behaviour in real-time, protecting against external and internal threats and intentional and unintentional data leakage.

“Operating in an ever-changing threat landscape and with hybrid and remote working environments here to stay, insider fraud and external collusion remain a hot topic in boardroom discussions globally,” said Omri Kletter, Global VP, Fraud and Financial Crime, Bottomline. “This, together with today’s economic challenges and the rise in the cost of living, have put even more pressure on people to stay afloat financially.”

This year’s Fraudscape report from CIFAS explicitly flags an increasing concern about “the rise in insider threat as a service”, i.e., where employees are actively being recruited through social media by fraud rings to carry out internal fraud through data leakage and financial theft.

Kletter concluded, “This win illustrates how important the industry believes it is for banks and businesses to act. Once deemed unnecessary, safeguarding against those least-suspected and most-trusted is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have.”

Bottomline’s Insider Employee Fraud solution won the category based on a public vote via Fintech Finance’s subscriber base.

Paylink Solutions and Ecospend are celebrating a win after a successful time at the Credit & Collections Technology awards.

Fintech Paylink Solutions and partners Ecospend were named Open Banking category winners at the Credit Connect UK event, which celebrated the impact of technology in the credit and collections sector.

Ecospend’s pay-by-bank technology has allowed Paylink Solutions to collect instant, direct and cost-effective payments underpinned by bank-level security.

Jill Sparks, Payment Services Director at Paylink Solutions, said: "We’re delighted with our award win with our partners Ecospend. The benefits of open banking to the sector are undeniable.

“This partnership is helping customers who are in financial difficulty and in debt solutions make their affordable repayments through a seamless bank-to-bank payment transfer.

“Since going live, we have already seen a strong level of adoption of account-to-account payments, with transaction volumes increasing 66.3% after just one month.”

James Hickman, CCO of Ecospend, said: “It is great to see the success and development of Open Banking in the credit and collections sector recognised in this way.

“Through our partnership with Paylink Solutions, we provide an account-to-account payment solution which is more convenient for customers, not only improving efficiency but also reducing operational costs for the business itself. We are pleased the benefits are already so tangible.”

Atlanta-based global payments technology company Brightwell announced today that its fraud prevention and mitigation solution Arden received the Business Intelligence Group’s BIG Award for Business and was named 2022’s New Product of the Year.

In the U.S. alone, cybercrime costs U.S. companies more than $6.9 billion, with only 43% of businesses reporting that they feel financially prepared to face a cyberattack in 2022. Included on this list are card issuers at risk for significant financial losses because cybercriminals can identify portfolio card data in minutes through programmatic attacks on vulnerable e-commerce sites with little effort. Once identified and validated, the card data is monetized, resulting in significant financial losses.

“We experienced our own brute force bot-attack with fraudsters using trial-and-error to guess payment card details,” said Ernie Moran, general manager, Arden. “While we were fortunate enough to recover the missing funds and return them to customers, it was surprising to discover that no solution on the market existed to minimize this risk. To help other companies better protect themselves from similar attacks, we built and released Arden to the market earlier this year and our technology is now patent pending.”

Getting ahead of fraudulent activity is an enormous challenge for card issuers due to the ever-evolving nature of cybercriminal activity and how quickly it can happen. To minimize the risk for fintechs and other program managers from this growing threat, Brightwell launched AI-powered risk-detection engine Arden to provide near real-time fraud analysis and prevention. Arden provides usable, visible, relevant, and timely data in an easy-to-use interface so risk teams can get ahead of fraud before it occurs.

“Our product and engineering teams specialize in creating simple systems that solve complex problems,” said Larry Hipp, CEO of Brightwell. “We leverage new technologies and flexible architecture to build forward-thinking, future-ready software that scales with our clients' business and customer demands.”

With the rate of payment fraud attacks across the industry increasing by 70% in 2021, it’s vital for fintechs and other program managers to remain agile in the face of a rapidly changing landscape. New products like Arden can help close the gap. In fact, Brightwell has successfully reduced losses from fraudulent attacks down to near zero, with clients observing up to a 95% reduction in prepaid card fraud.

“We are so proud to reward Brightwell’s Arden for its outstanding 2022 achievements,” said Maria Jimenez, chief nomination officer of the Business Intelligence Group. “This year’s group of winners have shown that resilience and determination are ‘must-haves’ in today’s economy.”

Cohesity has announced at Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2022 that it’s seeing exceptional growth and uptake in the adoption of Cohesity Cloud Services. Cohesity Cloud Services, previously called Data Management as a Service, is a portfolio of data management and security software as a service (SaaS) products that are managed by Cohesity and run on AWS. 

Cohesity also announced support for new business-critical workloads, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), that can be protected and secured via Cohesity SaaS offerings. And, in an era of escalating cyber threats, Cohesity is offering customers access to more Amazon S3 storage options for its popular cyber vaulting security SaaS offering, Cohesity FortKnox, that can help customers lower costs.

This announcement showcases the momentum and key advancements Cohesity continues to make after announcing a strategic collaboration with AWS to bring to market a set of data security and management SaaS offerings that are designed to provide customers with exceptional agility, security, scalability, flexibility, cost efficiencies, and reliability.  

Customers Adopting Cohesity SaaS at a Rapid Pace 

Cohesity has seen a significant increase in the number of customers that have deployed Cohesity SaaS offerings, catapulting from under 60 customers at the end of Q4 FY21 (July 2021) to over 500 customers  at the end of Q1 FY23 (October 2022). Additionally, nearly 60% of Cohesity’s Cloud Services revenue comes from enterprises with $1B or more in revenue, indicating that large enterprises are embracing the company’s SaaS solutions.* 

Cohesity is driving innovation with Cohesity Cloud Services in three areas that are critical in business today: security — inclusive of ransomware protection, cloud, and data management.  

Protecting the World’s Most Critical Cloud Workloads

Much of the world’s critical apps and data reside in the cloud and must be protected. With Cohesity’s Cloud Services, customers can further secure and protect their Amazon S3 data as well as Salesforce (SFDC) data via Cohesity’s backup as a service offering.** This complements Cohesity’s data protection already available for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and other cloud service providers. 

Cyber Vaulting as a Service That Meets RTO and Budget Requirements in the Ransomware Era  

In an age of growing ransomware threats, companies know they need to deploy a 3-2-1 strategy, where a copy of an organisation’s critical apps and data are kept in a separate, ‘air gapped’ environment. Many customers rely on Cohesity’s popular cloud-based cyber vaulting service, Cohesity FortKnox, for data isolation and ransomware protection. However, budgets vary and so do recovery time objectives (RTO). Cohesity will provide customers with options to help address these critical needs:

• Cohesity FortKnox on Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access Storage Class (Amazon S3 Standard-IA): for data that is not accessed frequently but requires rapid access when needed. This option is already offered by Cohesity and includes immediate data recovery, with a minimum 30-day retention period. 
   
• Cohesity FortKnox on Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (FR): a new, cost-effective cold storage option that provides SaaS cyber vaulting capabilities with recovery times ranging from minutes to hours, with a retention period of 90 days or longer.** 

With both options, customers benefit from enhanced security including virtual air gapping, immutability with Amazon S3 Object Lock, role-based access control (RBAC), quorum, multi-factor authentication (MFA,) and a Cohesity key management system (KMS). 

Defeating Cyber Criminals with ML-based Threat Protection and Data Classification

Providing protection, detection, and recovery from ransomware or other cyberattacks is key to keeping businesses safe and enabling them to recover quickly with confidence. Announced at Cohesity’s ReConnect virtual conference, which can be viewed here, Cohesity DataHawk is a comprehensive SaaS-based data security solution that includes threat detection and scanning for ransomware attacks, automated data classification with machine learning (ML)-based pattern matching — to identify sensitive or critical data, as well as FortKnox cyber vaulting, all in one solution that’s simple to deploy. 

Customer Quotes Endorsing Cohesity Cloud Services 

“We are the fifth largest school district in the state of Georgia, serving over 50,000 students in the Atlanta area. We wanted to update our 3-2-1 backup strategy with a modern SaaS offering to improve our cyber resiliency and protect against ransomware attacks,” said Kurt Pritchett, senior network engineer, Clayton County Public Schools. “The simplicity and convenience of the Cohesity FortKnox SaaS offering was just what we needed to achieve this. Cohesity FortKnox also enabled the district to qualify for cyber insurance, while realising greater efficiencies, time, and cost savings.”

“Hospitals, labs, and doctors’ offices around the world rely on Beckman Coulter’s diagnostic equipment to provide better healthcare, and secure, reliable data management is critical,” said Kevin Chi, IT Systems Engineer, Beckman Coulter Life Sciences. “We have a cloud-first policy and utilize Cohesity’s backup as a service offering, which has empowered us to reduce our on-prem infrastructure, meet strict SLAs, comply with long-term retention policies, and improve our overall data security posture.” 

"In order to back up on-prem servers and other cloud services, we wanted one cloud-based solution that would also provide ransomware protection. We found our answer with Cohesity's backup as a service offering that runs on AWS," said Michael Stegall, IT Director, Eurecat. "Now, we can monitor and manage backups and restores of all workloads, on-prem and on the cloud, from a single user interface, which also helps free up time to focus on other tasks. We also benefit from fast restores and great ransomware protection that is vital in today's environment." 

Cohesity / AWS Quotes on Momentum with Cohesity Cloud Services 

“We’re seeing rapid adoption of Cohesity’s SaaS offerings running on AWS as customers want to win the war against ransomware, accelerate hybrid cloud adoption, and enable over-stretched IT staff to focus on other business-critical tasks,” said Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President, Cohesity. “Customers also want flexibility in how to secure and manage their data — in the cloud, on-prem, at the edge, or hybrid — and with Cohesity, everything can be managed on one platform, via one UI. That’s simplification defined.” 

“More customers are embracing SaaS offerings from Cohesity that run on AWS to further bolster data security and management,” said Ruba Borno, vice president, Worldwide Channels and Alliances, AWS. “We engaged in a strategic collaboration with Cohesity with the common goal of helping customers be more agile, innovate faster, and do more with data. We’ve made great progress, and we’re just getting started.”

Integrated International Payroll (iiPay), a market leader in cloud-based global payroll solutions, announced that T. Curtis Holmes has been appointed CEO and a member of the Board of Directors effective November 1^st.  Holmes succeeds Bob Foster who previously served as CEO.

Holmes is a proven executive leader with a strong track record of success.  Prior to this appointment, he served as Chief Operating Officer of iiPay for the past six years.  In this role, he provided strategic and operational leadership for the key operating roles including accelerated global sales growth, product transformation, professional services, and client service delivery.  During this period, the company increased its contracted annualized revenues by 10x achieving a 52% compound annual growth rate. This is due to winning significant new enterprise, mid-market and small clients while retaining existing clients at rates beyond the industry norms.  Prior to iiPay, Holmes served in executive roles including CEO, President, and COO, of a publicly traded and privately held company where he demonstrated strategic and operational leadership including experience in strategic M&A initiatives.

"This transition promises an exciting future for iiPay and its employees. The combination of extraordinary talent, innovative technology, and focus on exceptional client journey highlights its increasing leadership in the global payroll market.", stated Ed Olkkola, Managing Director, Teakwood Capital, and Chairman of iiPay.

Holmes stated, "I am honoured to serve as CEO and to lead an amazingly talented team who is committed to changing the payroll experience for global clients and making the complex simple. Payroll is about people and iiPay has made tremendous progress.  We are now entering the next phase of our journey where we enhance our edge on technology innovation, intensify our focus on the excellent client experience, and accelerate our path to profitable revenue growth."

Holmes continued, "On behalf of the Board, we thank Bob for his many contributions and outstanding commitment to the success of iiPay. We wish Bob success in his future endeavours."