ICOA Inc., a publicly-traded Nevada-based company that acquires and operates blockchain-driven ventures, is delighted to announce its appointment of Jeffrey Coats as Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer. 

As part of his role, Jeffrey will oversee ICOA’s investor relations and banking relationships, as well as the required financial and corporate activities to position the company for a future NASDAQ up-listing. 

Jeffrey was recently appointed by Majic Wheels Corp. to fulfil the same role and responsibilities. Like ICOA, Majic Wheels acquires and operates organizations utilizing disruptive technologies. He has previously been a board of directors member of several publicly traded and a myriad of privately-held organizations. 

Jeffrey served as President and CEO of Autobytel/AutoWeb (ABTL/AUTO) for over a decade, and successfully led the organization’s turnaround.

Prior to this, Jeffrey was Managing Director of GE Capital Corporate Finance Group, Inc. (“CFG”), a subsidiary of General Electric Capital Corporation, where he founded and managed CFG’s Restructuring Group, which provided debt and equity solutions. 

Jeffrey continues to serve on Fathom Realty’s board (FTHM), a publicly-traded real estate brokerage enterprise, as Chairman of the Compensation Committee and an Audit Committee member. 

With a BBA in Finance from the University of Georgia and an MBA in International Management from the American Graduate School of International Management, ICOA firmly believes that Jeffrey will make a fantastic addition to the executive lineup. 

Jeffrey comments: “I am delighted to join ICOA. The company’s recent acquisitions and soon-to-launch projects are all centred around blockchain - a technology that has so much to offer in many applications and industries. With the right structure, foundations and mission-critical partners in place, the opportunities are immense.”

Hadria Wong, CEO, ICOA comments: “The team at ICOA is excited to be working with someone of Jeffrey’s calibre, as we expand the brand further within the blockchain sector.”

WiseTech Global, a developer of leading cloud-based logistics execution software CargoWise, has announced the acquisition of Bolero.net Limited (Bolero) and its subsidiaries, a leading provider of electronic Bills of Lading (eBL) and digital documentation capabilities to facilitate global trade.

Headquartered in the United Kingdom and with over two decades of experience, Bolero offers fully digital solutions for carriers to digitise Bills of Lading, creating eBLs that can be transmitted, endorsed and presented electronically to port authorities, customs, financial institutions, logistics partners and other parties. This removes rekeying of paper-based and scanned documents with accurate, efficient digital documentation. All parties to the transaction can securely monitor progress and access information about ownership, progress and payment throughout the supply chain life cycle.

With a network of more than 200 carriers across the globe and some of the world’s biggest financial institutions directly connected, the vision for both WiseTech and Bolero is to enable end-to-end, digital-first trade documentation. This will allow for straight-through processing of all data, converging the physical supply chain with digital financial and trade documentary requirements while offering a single view for all supply chain participants, including manufacturers, cargo owners, carriers, banks and service providers.

Richard White, Founder and CEO at WiseTech Global, said: “As the logistics industry continues to move toward digitisation, the need for paperless solutions that provide end-to-end execution and visibility are critical. We see tremendous synergy in combining Bolero’s capabilities within the CargoWise ecosystem, creating seamless end-to-end digital workflows. The Bolero team’s knowledge and technology stack will be connected directly to the CargoWise ecosystem to provide benefits to existing CargoWise customers through the provision of leading eBL, digital documentation workflows and the digital connection to banking and settlement services.

“Our shared commitment to developing digital capabilities that enable and empower global trade means together we will continue to provide our customers with solutions to meet the future needs of the industry. We are excited to welcome Bolero into our global WiseTech team.”

Andrew Raymond, CEO of Bolero, said: “Joining the WiseTech Global group is a natural progression for our business, and a huge step forward for fully digital supply chain documentation, facilitating safer, smarter and faster global trade. Bolero has a proven track record with importers, exporters, ocean carriers, major banks, and port terminals. We are excited by the opportunity to enhance the leading CargoWise ecosystem and provide some of the world’s largest logistics service providers and carriers with digital documentation solutions. We remain committed to our long-standing customers and partners and continuing to enhance our solutions with the product development and innovation strength of WiseTech.”

The most recent B2Core platform release is one that B2Broker is happy to announce. The update comes with a number of new features, such as:

• Log in with QR code

• Resetting the MetaTrader platform's custom trading password

• Possibility of setting up a default dashboard layout in the admin panel

• iDenfy KYC integration

Everyone involved in trading will benefit from these additional features, which will make it simpler and more practical.

New QR-code Login Option

In order to make our users' lives easier, the B2Core team is constantly working on adding features and improvements. That is exactly what did with our upcoming QR code login feature. You can easily access the login page with QR code by downloading the B2Core app and opening the scanner. Afterwards, the information you need about the device and its IP address will be displayed, and you can approve or cancel the log-in attempt. Instead of entering your login and password manually each time, you can simply scan a QR code with your mobile phone and be instantly logged in. In addition, Two-Factor Authentication (2-FA), as well as emailing codes and entering passwords, is no longer required. As a result, logging into B2Core has never been easier or faster. This new feature is intended to make your life just a little easier, and we hope you enjoy it. 

Custom Password Reset for the MetaTrader Platform

The importance of security has never been greater than it is today. Because of this, we're thrilled to announce that users now have the option of changing their own trading passwords on MT4/5.This gives users peace of mind that their account is secure. Follow these steps to complete this process: 

• In MT5, the user first selects "Platforms," 

• Select "Account Details," 

• Click on "Account Settings." 

• On the next screen, the user clicks "Reset Password."  

• Lastly, you can choose to create a custom or randomly generated trading password after entering their 2FA email code.

It's important to us that your accounts are secure, so we make sure they are.

Default Dashboard Layout

It has never been easier to set up a broker's ideal dashboard. Using this new feature, brokers can customise the default dashboard for their new users. They can choose which widgets to include, their size, and where they should be located. Under the Promotion - Dashboard section of the admin panel, you can easily apply the settings. Your new users will see the features and tools you want them to use when they log in, giving you complete control over what is in front of them. User preferences can be modified and saved after logging in. Resetting the dashboard to its default settings is as simple as clicking the "Reset Dashboard" button. By using this new customization feature, you will be able to maximise the use of your brokerage platform.

KYC Integration with iDenfy 

Our company is pleased to announce our integration with KYC provider iDenfy, which provides identity verification services. Using their technology, companies can quickly and accurately verify their customers' identities. There are now three KYC providers available to our clients: Sumsub, ShuftiPro, and iDenfy. B2Core's admin panel has instructions on how brokers can add iDenfy. Providing more flexibility and options regarding compliance and identity verification will benefit our clients. In the case of any questions, our team is always available to assist.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, you will find these updates as exciting as we do. To enhance your experience with B2Core, our team works hard on future development and improvements. These changes are expected to benefit all of our clients. More features will be added soon to help you boost your sales and productivity. For now, we encourage you to register so that you can try B2Core's demo version and see the benefits it offers. We hope that using our product will be as enjoyable for you as creating it was for us!

Objectway, a global wealth, banking & asset management software provider, achieved its ninth consecutive awards recognition – the fourth in a row as “Best Wealth Management Solution” – by Goodacre, the UK leading specialist consultancy for the securities industry.

The long-established Goodacre Systems in the City Fintech Awards are the leading endorsement for suppliers of services and systems to the regulated financial services sector. Based on an independent and factual annual accreditation process, they are an important point of reference for user firms assessing the suitability of their operational infrastructure.

“We thank all the clients and the market experts who voted for us for their longtime and continued appreciation and trust in our Objectway Suite. This unceased leadership is a concrete result of the strength of our comprehensive and deep competence and support for the sector,” commented Alberto Cuccu, CEO of Objectway UK, on the award recognition.

Stephen Pinner, Managing Director at Goodacre, said: “The digital transformation has encouraged more Fintech providers to come to the market and the pressure on these firms to provide further innovation intensifies year on year. The Award for Best Wealth Management Solution is therefore commendable as Objectway continues to provide systems and support to many regulated investment companies. These firms rely on them to meet the demands of their businesses and keep pace with the ever-changing legislative and regulatory obligations.”

Global analytics software provider FICO® was named the Best Technology Provider for Data Analytics at the 2022 Credit Awards, presented by Credit Strategy at a black-tie dinner in London last week. 

FICO has developed a unified FICO® Platform for decision management that includes capabilities for data management, analytic development and execution, strategy design and reporting. These capabilities can be shared across different functions, giving users a 360-degree customer management tool. Leading banks across Europe are adopting FICO Platform in order to break through the silos in their organization and propel growth while reducing the costs associated with installing and maintaining different point solutions for each area of the business.  

One important capability set that is growing in usage across EMEA is prescriptive analytics or optimization. This involves the use of advanced, AI-powered analytics to determine customer strategies that meet specified business goals under constraints. Banks across Europe have seen dramatic increases in performance by using FICO optimization to grow the business, manage risk and improve customer satisfaction. 

The strength of FICO Platform and its embedded optimization capabilities was acknowledged in late 2020 with The Forrester Wave™: Digital Decisioning Platforms, Q4 2020, an industry analyst report that named FICO as a category leader.  

“The judges felt FICO was industry-leading in terms of driving change through a single decisioning platform,” said Luke Broadhurst, CEO of Shard Media, which publishes Credit Strategy magazine. “It offered an impressive set of metrics highlighting the impact on the customer, with evidence of improved performance and customer outcomes.” 

“We are celebrating this achievement, which validates the strength of our vision for a unified decision management platform,” said Matt Cox, vice president and general manager of FICO in EMEA. “From data ingestion to predictive modelling to prescriptive analytics and decision optimization, our platform gives our hundreds of clients across EMEA a real analytic advantage.” 

Today, Griffin – a Banking as a Service (BaaS) fintech firm – announces it has raised $15.5 million (£12.5 million) in funding to launch the OS for embedded finance. The round was led by Notion Capital, with participation from existing investor EQT Ventures as well as fintech angels including William Hockey, co-founder of Plaid and founder and co-CEO of Column, Nilan Peiris, VP of Growth at Wise, Rob Straathof, CEO at Liberis and Shane Happach, CEO of Mollie and ex CCO Worldpay.

Griffin also welcomes Notion Capital co-founder and managing partner Stephen Chandler to its board of directors. Chandler’s previous investments include fintech unicorns GoCardless and Paddle and he brings a wealth of industry knowledge and operating experience in both banking and software to Griffin.

“We’re thrilled to be working with Notion Capital and to have someone of Stephen’s calibre join our board. His experience fits perfectly with our vision to blend the worlds of banking and technology in one powerful platform,” said David Jarvis, Griffin CEO and co-founder. “With this injection of funding, we can continue to innovate, scale our business, and focus on building the best banking platform possible.”

Griffin is building a full-stack vertically integrated BaaS platform, powered by modern user-friendly technology. The company has raised $27 million of funding to date and recently submitted its application to the PRA and the FCA to become an authorised bank. The notion and other investors recognise this as a key market differentiator for the company. Becoming a bank would enable Griffin to offer banking services and a more comprehensive BaaS platform than middleware competitors. Griffin's vision is to be a stable, long-term banking partner for innovative fintechs who often struggle with long, expensive onboarding processes and integration with legacy tech at established banks.

“SaaS is finally eating the financial services sector the way it has every other industry, and Griffin will empower fintechs to build and launch financial products with a single secure and modern SaaS platform,” Stephen Chandler, Managing Partner at Notion Capital said. “I’m thrilled to support the team as they rewrite the way companies interact with banks and accelerate growth.”

In addition to clear market demand for a full-stack BaaS provider, Notion and other investors also backed Griffin based on the calibre of its leadership. David Jarvis and Allen Rohner, founder and former CTO of tech unicorn CircleCI, founded the company in 2017 and have since assembled a formidable team of tech and banking leaders from the Bank of England - PRA, Visa, HSBC, Form3, SWIFT, Monzo, GoCardless, Atlassian, Snyk, and more.

Since its last funding announcement in November 2020, Griffin has tripled in size and begun commercialising its platform, currently available for exclusive early access. This new round of investment will be used to grow the leadership and operational teams and continue the build of the core banking platform. Griffin is also committed to protecting its company culture as it scales. The company’s culture is based on trust, kindness and transparency and underpins its goal of becoming the bank for builders and innovators.

 “The financial services industry has not kept pace with consumer trends and tech innovation, creating demand for a developer-friendly bank built on modern APIs and intuitive software,” Tom Mendoza, EQT Ventures partner and Griffin board member added. “Griffin aims to challenge the status quo by offering a full-stack banking platform that will make it fast, simple, and cost-effective for brands to launch financial products. This influx of capital will drive the next phase of the company’s ambitious journey.”

FullCircl, the Customer Lifecycle Intelligence (CLI) platform that helps B2B companies in financially regulated industries do better business faster, has launched its latest Premium Data Extension (PDE).  The new HMRC Import and Export Data Pack allows users to understand which of their customers are trading internationally – critical for KYC, AML, and continuous due diligence monitoring, as well as identifying opportunities to support customers and cross-sell products and services.

The risk of trade-based money laundering, regulatory non-compliance, and international sanctions breaches is growing rapidly and becoming ever more complex to navigate.  The FullCircl HMRC Import and Export PDE allows banks, insurance businesses, and FSIs to search for a specific line item by description or code, and filter between import and export data to gain a deeper insight into the international trading activities of their commercial customers.

“The HMRC Import and Export data pack is a highly valuable addition to our existing suite of premium data extensions, which includes Adverse Director Histories, CCJs, legal notices, and US and Ireland country specific data.  PDE’s form an integral part of FullCircl’s ability to help our users onboard customers faster and keep them for life by simultaneously identifying and mitigating risks sooner and creating opportunities to differentiate in terms of high-value account management through tailored propositions, at scale.”

Worldline, a global leader in payment services, and Fintech manager.one, winner of this year's Worldline’s E-Payments Challenge, signed a  partnership to smartly manage expense policies on corporate cards. The partnership will combine Worldline’s pan-European Card Issuing Processing platform and manager.one expertise in business expense management.

This white label solution will enable banks to take a web and mobile banking experience to the next level, simplifying the issuing and management of business cards for their customers. Cardholders will see the management of their business expenses facilitated and will save time avoiding low-value tasks, bringing more productivity at the end of the year.

Better controlling and forecasting employees’ expenses have always been key challenges for organisations to which banks can definitely answer and support their clients by bringing value-added services. This solution will enable companies to improve their efficiency related to business expense management thanks to an easier collection and analysis of receipts (OCR* technologies), the capability to identify suspicious expenses declarations and generate virtual cards; this leads to fraud and costs reductions.

These functionalities will be empowered by Worldline’s card issuing processing platform, which already manages more than 126M cards and processes circa 10BN transactions for financial institutions across Europe.

Christophe L’Helguen, Division Manager Issuing Processing at Worldline Financial Services, said: “Innovation being one of our core values at Worldline and as a leader in issuing & transaction processing within Europe, we constantly look for partners who share our vision to unleash the potential of our issuing solutions. With manager.one, we will be able to offer our customers an end-to-end and cost-efficient white-label solution to manage corporate cards and business expenses.”

Adrien Touati, co-founder manager.one, said: “Worldline is a prestigious player. This alliance will enable us to create many synergies and accelerate our strategy. We are going to be able of equipping an ever-increasing number of users with our innovations.” 

Mambu Enters Strategic Partnership with Visa

Mambu, a leading cloud banking platform, announced a global partnership with Visa in order to utilise Visa DPS – one of the largest processors of Visa debit transactions globally. The partnership will give Mambu customers a seamless connection to Visa DPS for end-to-end card issuing and processing.

Both companies recognised the importance of interconnectivity to meet the growing demand of fintechs along with incumbent financial institutions. Mambu is developing an integration to Visa DPS that will give institutions more flexibility in offering new card products and services to their customers.

Todd Brockman, SVP, Global Head of Issuing Solutions:

“We’re excited to bring our modern API-based processing capabilities to Mambu’s growing marketplace of composable payment solutions and believe our collaboration will create tremendous value for our clients and their cardholders”.

Kevin Trilli, Chief Product Officer at Mambu said: 

“Customer demand for card services is growing rapidly, whether it is incumbent financial institutions or fintechs. Strategic partnerships and interoperability of service providers offer the best value, choice, and flexibility for clients, whether they are embarking on digital transformation or scaling a new card programme. This is a major step to bringing more simple, transparent and connected services to any company offering financial services.

“We’re creating an opportunity for our customers to transform, scale and achieve operational excellence with this integration. Institutions can create their unique customer payment card experiences on Mambu, regardless of whether it is a deposit or loan account and get it rapidly to market. They can then leverage the issuer processing capabilities of Visa DPS to deploy new products and solutions for their customers. This partnership will enable our customers to create powerful, digital-first payment solutions and experiences.”

Kevin Trilli, Chief Product Officer:

“Customer demand for card services is growing rapidly, whether it is incumbent financial institutions or fintechs”.

Todd Brockman, SVP, Global Head of Issuing Solutions, at Visa said: 

“Today’s banking and payment landscape requires agility, and an architecture that can easily adapt to the rapid pace of innovation in our industry. We’re excited to bring our modern API-based processing capabilities to Mambu’s growing marketplace of composable payment solutions and believe our collaboration will create tremendous value for our clients and their cardholders.”

The partnership with Visa DPS extends Mambu's product partnerships marketplace. With payment services being a critical part of financial institutions’ offerings, the integration will help increase access and business opportunities across all regions.