Top Innovations
PNC corporate banking platform, PINACLE can now seamlessly integrate treasury management services directly into its clients’ ERP
PNC Treasury Management has announced…
J.P. Morgan and HSBC invested in platform MioTech that utilizes AI to gather and assess unstructured ESG data
AI platform MioTech has secured…
Mastercard’s new accessible card design is to have round notch for credit cards, broad squarish for debit cards and triangular for prepaid
Mastercard introducing a new accessible…
Mastercard will enable bank customers to buy, sell and hold digital assets through Bakkt’s custodial wallets
Mastercard and digital asset platform…
Citi has enabled real time bill payment on the TCH RTP network. Institutional clients can send e-bills via Request for Payment (RfP)
Citi’s Treasury and Trade Solutions…
Sezzle BNPL is to add deep underwriting to reach more customers buying big-ticket items
Alliance Data’s Bread business will…
Key News
Embedded banking platform Bond Financial enables end-to-end launch of personalized credit products with a single integration
Bond Financial Technologies, the enterprise-grade…
N26 adds ‘income distributor’ feature that auto-allocates part of income to ‘Spaces’. The neobank also added budget push notifications
Germany-based mobile bank N26 has…
Betterment’s low-fee IRAs will now be directly available on independent platform to transfer retirement assets
Capitalize, the first independent platform…
Analysts have debunked TikTok influencers’ misleading advice on taxation of Venmo, Zelle, or CashApp users
A recent piece of TikTok…
Australia’s BNPL firms can no longer prohibit merchants from passing on surcharges, giving a level playing field for credit cards
Australia’s central bank said BNPL…
Mastercard’s new working capital platform TrackBPS connects providers of B2B payments to buyers and suppliers
Mastercard has announced a new…
IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite is a SaaS solution designed to help organizations:
- Monitor for disruptive environmental conditions such as severe weather, wildfires, flooding and air quality and send alerts when detected;
- Predict potential impacts of climate change and weather across the business using climate risk analytics;
- Gain insights into potential operational disruptions and prioritize mitigation and response efforts;
- Measure and report on environmental initiatives and operationalize carbon accounting, while reducing the burden of this reporting on procurement and operations teams.
- The suite delivers environmental insights via APIs, dashboards, maps and alerts that can help companies address both immediate operational challenges as well as longer term planning and strategies. For instance, the suite could be used to help retailers prepare for severe weather-related shipping and inventory disruptions, or factor environmental risks into future warehouse locations; energy and utility companies to determine where to trim vegetation around power lines or which of their critical assets may soon be at greater risk from wildfires due to climate change. Or the suite could be used to help supermarkets get a clearer picture of how refrigeration systems are contributing to their overall greenhouse gas emissions and prioritize locations for improvement.
- Companies around the world are already using many of the core weather and AI technologies found within IBM’s Environmental Intelligence Suite.
Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions and NYDIG have reached an agreement where Wolters Kluwer will serve as an exclusive preferred vendor to interested financial institutions seeking assistance in meeting their regulatory and compliance obligations while exploring and implementing services for bitcoin programs. Wolters Kluwer is positioned to provide regulatory compliance solutions and services that range from a deposit disclosure program to regulatory risk assessments for institutions looking to offer their customers access to bitcoin services provided by NYDIG. This collaboration grants Wolters Kluwer rights as the exclusive provider of Bitcoin Deposit Disclosure Program-NYDIG Accounts of those financial institutions seeking deposit documents when their clients open a NYDIG account. The Bitcoin Deposit Disclosure Program delivers compliant content necessary for U.S. banks and credit unions to compliantly offer NYDIG’s bitcoin program. By leveraging the NYDIG platform with Wolters Kluwer compliant content, U.S. banks and credit unions gain confidence to meet the growing mainstream interest in bitcoin to retain and grow their customer base and increase non-interest income opportunities. Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions, which sits within Wolters Kluwer’s Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) division, helps financial institutions efficiently manage risk and regulatory compliance obligations, and gain the insights needed to focus on better serving their customers and growing their business. Wolters Kluwer’s GRC division provides an array of expert solutions to help financial institutions manage regulatory and risk obligations. Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions’ iLien Motor Vehicle provides for the processing and management of motor vehicle titles and liens, helping solve the most unique and complicated challenges in title perfection. Its OneSumX® for Regulatory Change Management tracks regulatory changes and organizes them to create structured, value-added content through a single data feed that is paired with an easy-to-use software solution.
Embedded lending platform Lending Works, has announced a new multi-year partnership with Experian, the global information services provider.
The deal will provide Lending Works with access to Experian’s credit and affordability data to help underpin its credit decisioning engine and fraud prevention strategies. Experian’s Trended Data solution will help Lending Works understand whether consumers are on an upwards or downwards trajectory in their capacity to afford credit. Lending Works will also use Experian’s Affordability IQ service to identify if a customer has experienced a recent reduction in or loss of income as a result of the pandemic. Access to this data will help Lending Works to understand a customer’s affordability. It will also help Lending Works to proactively manage its customers’ financial wellbeing, ensuring they are treated fairly and responsibly throughout the life of a loan. The partnership will allow Lending Works to accelerate its growth whilst maintaining high credit standards.
Fraud becoming prevalent on BNPL platforms is going to contribute to the ‘too good to be true’ reaction that some people have when hearing about the service, and could drive down the flow of new users until it becomes less viable. As with so many other industries in a digitised, highly connected world, BNPL need to be fast and frictionless, allowing as many people as possible to be approved and move through the sign-up process as quickly as possible. Balancing speed and security is difficult for any industry, but for BNPL it will be crucial. This is why real-time data enrichment solutions are particularly suited to the BNPL space. It can carry out checks on every customer, assembling hundreds of data points from anything from whether they use a VPN to how old their Facebook profile is, building a complete picture of every customer to be able to apply adaptive friction – giving customers who exhibit common signs of fraud more security checks than those who show clear evidence of being a real person. If BNPL companies don’t address problems like fraud then the companies who do what they do in a safer, more customer-friendly way will take their market share, and if no companies can manage to find a way to offer BNPL services in a way that keeps customers safe then the industry will sink into obscurity as payday lending did. AI-powered fraud prevention could be a key part of stopping this from happening.
Data management platform Cohesity has announced the general availability of its next ‘as a service’ offering disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). This new offering extends the exceptional disaster recovery (DR) capabilities provided by Cohesity SiteContinuity and adds the ability to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a recovery location for failover and failback in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. This not only provides customers with more choice and flexibility, but also offers the following benefits:
- Minimize downtime and data loss: This greatly reduces the risks of potential downtime and data loss with snapshot-based backup and near-sync replication that together help ensure all data is captured and ready to failover in the event of disaster or cyberattack.
- Meet service level agreements (SLAs): Customers can easily design recovery plans and assign SLAs – and design it in minutes rather than weeks – to deliver the right level of resiliency across a broad range of applications while meeting business requirements.
- Simplify operations: Cohesity uniquely combines disaster recovery orchestration, snapshot-based backup, near-sync replication, and seamless failover to the public cloud in a single comprehensive offering – all managed through a single user interface to significantly simplify disaster recovery operations.
- Lower costs and improve time-to-value: Reduce idle infrastructure by using on-demand pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure from AWS in the event of a disaster or test drill. Cohesity uniquely supports standard AWS infrastructure, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), in a DRaaS model. Customers also can speed up time to value by quickly spinning up a disaster recovery strategy without having to procure additional hardware or physical data centers.
- Security startup Valence aims to help businesses better protect what Valence calls the “business application mesh. Valence helps businesses better understand the connections between the many enterprise SaaS and self-hosted applications they now use. Often, after all, a company may use APIs, automation tools like Workato or Zapier or SaaS marketplaces to get more value from their various tools. But at the same time, this network, which Valence dubs the “business application mesh,” often grows without a lot of governance, leaving the door open for a variety of security issues from the shadow connectivity, over-provisioned privileges and unmanaged third-party access that is the inevitable result of connecting all of these disparate systems.
- Among other things, this leaves a company open to an unvetted third party having privileged access into the ecosystem of their corporate applications and data. By being able to scan the connections to a relatively small number of core systems, Valence can quickly detect potential issues like unvetted vendors and help its users disconnect these — or automate the process if needed. Some customers, are able to reduce their risk surface by dozens and sometimes even hundreds of applications within a few days of getting started with Valence.
- A new phishing campaign is targeting employees in financial services using links that download what is described as a ‘weaponized’ Excel document. The phishing campaign, dubbed MirrorBlast, was detected by security firm ET Labs in early September. Fellow security firm Morphisec has now analyzed the malware and notes the malicious Excel files could bypass malware-detection systems because it contains “extremely lightweight” embedded macros, making it “particularly dangerous” for organizations that depend on detection-based security and sandboxing. the attack chain in MirrorBlast resembles techniques used by a well-established, financially motivated Russia-based cybercriminal group that’s tracked by researchers as TA505. While the MirrorBlast attack starts with a document attached to an email, it later uses a Google feedproxy URL with a SharePoint and OneDrive lure that poses as a file share request. Clicking the URL leads to a compromised SharePoint site or fake OneDrive site. Both versions lead to the weaponized Excel document. The sample MirrorBlast email shows the attackers are exploiting the theme of company-issued information about COVID-related changes to working arrangements. the macro code can be executed only on a 32-bit version of Office due to compatibility reasons with ActiveX objects.
Starling Bank is introducing a new control feature to allow customers to set their own contactless payment limit when the new £100 limit is introduced. The upcoming hike in the contactless spending limit on consumer debit cards has raised fears that they could become a target for fraudsters, who can escape unchecked for at least five transactions up to a maximum of £300 when tapping to pay at high street retailers. Starling bank customers will be able to select a limit of their choice between £0 and £100, in £10 increments via a new control feature in the app. Customers will also be able to turn off contactless payments entirely by setting the limit at £0. For those who keep the contactless limit but then fear they have lost their card they can use the app to lock and unlock it instantly. Alternatively, they can opt to disable contactless, chip and pin or online payments via the app.
Accenture and Splunk Inc. have formed a business group that brings Accenture’s functional knowledge, deep industry and technical experience together with Splunk’s platform technology to help clients maximize insights from data, with a particular focus on AI-powered IT operations, security automation, and intelligent supply chain. The Accenture Splunk Business Group expands the partnership between the two companies as they help clients better take advantage of real-time data from across their business and quickly take action to improve IT operations, supply chain and security processes, as well as manage and explore new revenue opportunities. Supported by approximately 8,000 Accenture people skilled in Splunk®, the new group brings together dedicated professionals from both companies to help equip organizations to be insights-driven. Accenture and Australia-based Coles Supermarkets collaborated to design and develop a solution using the Splunk platform to better manage supply chain disruptions. Leveraging Accenture’s Splunk-based myWizard® AIOps platform, they jointly developed a control tower monitoring solution that syncs critical data — such as sales reporting from store registers, inventory levels at distribution centers, and available in-store stock — to increase inventory and order accuracy, leading to improved product availability and healthier customer satisfaction. This has given Coles better insight into the overall health of their supply chain while enabling them to better meet customer demands.
- Execs from The Community, Alma DDB and Orci, three multicultural agencies that work with clients like Verizon, McDonald’s and Honda, highlighted how brands need to develop a deep understanding of the Latino experience in America in order to gain credibility in their communities. That means reviewing their budgets and how they’re blending their messages together to resonate with the fastest growing group of Americans, according to the 2020 Census.
- Orci has seen budgets drop even as the population rises, with marketers making up that gap with bigger general market media buys that reach a Hispanic audience, but don’t always resonate. Brands need to deliver a number of specialized messages to catch people where it resonates most. Orci wants brands to zero in on measuring results the right way. and tells brands they need think campaigns through end-to-end. That means evaluating infrastructure to ensure if a brand is driving customers somewhere like its call centers or websites, for example, they have Spanish-speaking options.
- Alma, always asks how much of their growth comes from Hispanics, noting that budgets should reflect that growth. It’s important to blend media sources that include mass marketing, Spanish-speaking media and Hispanic-owned media. As brands have committed to spending with more diversely-owned media outlets this past summer, Alma emphasized that brands shouldn’t abandon networks like Telemundo and Univision, which aren’t minority owned. “What we need is to enhance Hispanic culture driven media with minority owned channels and outlets, but not at the expense of something that’s proven,” adding audiences are going to go where they’re going to go and so brands should follow them. clients should be asking about how they can mix creative and media to make those decisions together again. Alma suggested an index for brands to understand the cultural value of the media they are buying against in order to match creative with the right audiences.
- The Community stressed that Hispanic Americans should not be treated as a monolith—or as one segment that can be targeted with a single message. While many share similar experiences that have shaped their cultural identity, Community team tailored messages first to build credibility, followed by mass marketing messages to acknowledge and blend in their experiences. This speaks more directly to them and is more nuanced to them, both in communication messages and also in situational dynamics. “When you look at how Hispanics are living today, in the English language worlds they navigate, [mass marketing] has got to be in a bigger conversation.”
Snapchat is rolling out new tools and educational resources to prevent younger users from buying counterfeit pills and illicit drugs via the platform. The goal of the new tools is to keep its users safe from “the devastating impacts of the fentanyl crisis.” The company says it has improved its proactive detection capabilities to remove drug dealers from its platform before they are able to engage with users and cause harm. Snapchat notes that its enforcement rates have increased by 112% during the first half of 2021, and that it has increased proactive detection rates by 260%. It also claims nearly two-thirds of drug-related content found on the platform is detected proactively by its artificial intelligence systems. It has also worked to improve its in-app reporting tools to make it easier for users to report drug-related content. Further, when users search for drug-related keywords, they’ll now see a new in-app educational portal called “Heads Up.” The portal will show relevant educational content designed to prevent harm. Heads Up distributes content from reputable organizations such as Song for Charlie, Shatterproof and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Additional resources from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be added in the coming weeks.
Snapchat is rolling out a new “Run for Office” in-app tool to encourage young adults to run for local office. The company says the new Run for Office tool is designed to help younger users engage with democracy in an easy way. The goal of the tool is to tackle common barriers that young people face when determining whether they want to get involved in local politics. Powered with information from BallotReady, this simple tool will help Snapchatters explore hundreds of opportunities to run for local office based on the issues they care most about. The tool includes a centralized portal that curates over 75,000 upcoming elections on the federal, state and local levels that users may be eligible to take part in. Users will also be asked to identify issues that they are passionate about so the tool can surface roles that they may be interested in. The new tool also provides access to candidate recruitment organizations and training programs. Snapchat users will also be able to nominate their friends to run for office through the tool. Users will be able to share stickers through the tool to start campaigning on Snapchat with their friends. Further, the tool includes a personalized campaign hub that shows users the steps they need to take to get on the ballot.
Traditional banks can and should get ahead of the curve by integrating more customer-specific perks that could possibly retain digital natives debating whether to take the neobank plunge. Technological integration will be key to this endeavor as customers will expect a fairly seamless, curated experience that larger banks may be more equipped to create. Values-based banking, and mission-based interactions overall, are an integral piece of the neobank approach. In an age of online activism and increased individual expression, customers are looking for more than a reliable financial institution to deposit their hard-earned cash. Rather than competing with larger banks at the generic level by casting a wide net, neobanks aim to offer specific perks that align with their target audience.
- Daylight, a challenger bank that aims to serve the LGBTQIA+ community, lets customers know how LGBTQIA+-friendly their spending is, in addition to receiving up to 10% cashback on LGBTQIA+-owned bars and allied businesses.
- Beyond addressing personal values, neobanks differentiate themselves as drivers of industry, reaching out to small-business owners and gig workers who may have a more difficult time obtaining loans or opening a business account due to poor financial history or a failure to meet a minimum income threshold. E-commerce challenger bank Juni quickly caught on to this phenomenon, crafting a digital banking model with built-in invoice fetching and customizable financial reports while claiming to accelerate cashflow via its own credit product backed by multiple partnerships.
- Philanthropic giving, in alignment with the personal values and identities of neobanks, greatly bolsters their claim to not only be a more efficient, modern option but a purpose-driven one. For example, Daylight promises to donate $10 for every eligible sign-up. Although larger banks may not look to attract new customers in this manner, they could attach such philanthropic promises as an incentive to open a new account or credit card. The essential piece of this giving strategy is that it’s simple and already done, placing pressure on traditional banks to offer giving options just as effortlessly.
UpEquity, a digital mortgage company that makes cash offers on a buyer’s behalf, has raised $20 million in equity funding and secured $30 in debt financing. UpEquity has seen 500% year-over-year growth in revenue and transaction volume. It will originate more than $1 billion in mortgages over the next 12 months. UpEquity has so far worked with “thousands” of buyers. The startup pledges faster closing times, it reduces closings from the industry standard of about 50 days to 18. Its goal within the next year is to reduce that to an average 10-day close. The company also claims to offer lower interest rates than other companies in what it describes as the “power buying” space, with no incremental fees. UpEquity also can turn clients into all-cash buyers so they don’t risk losing a desired home in a competitive situation.
- Fintech Douugh has partnered with Zero Hash to integrate cryptocurrency wallet and trading capabilities into the Douugh app. The partnership will initially allow customers to buy, hold and sell crypto in the US directly through Douugh’s Crypto Jar feature on the Douugh platform. Customers will also be able to spend using the cryptocurrency of their choice through the Douugh Mastercard debit card. Zero Hash is a digital asset settlement and custody platform that specializes in building enterprise-grade solutions. Through its platform, Zero Hash powers the cryptocurrency offerings of other fintechs such as MoneyLion and Wirex.
- This feature further broadens the Douugh Wealth offering, which recently saw the launch of managed portfolios ‘Portfolio Jars’ linked to dedicated savings goals. The Crypto Jar offering will allow consumers to directly participate in digital asset investing and diversify their portfolios across cryptocurrencies. Douugh’s Crypto Jar will allow even more Americans to participate in the decentralized financial ecosystem. Under the partnership, Douugh customers will agree to the terms and conditions of Zero Hash when they activate the Crypto Jar offering. The partners will have a revenue share model based on customer activity.
X1, the challenger credit card for digital natives founded by former Twitter executives, is rolling out of private beta to a waitlist of 350,000 people. The stainless steel X1 Card uses current and future income instead of credit scores to set smart credit limits. The startup’s proprietary technology also lets cardholders cancel subscription payments in one click, end free trials automatically with auto-expiring virtual credit cards, get instant notifications on refunds, attach receipts to purchases, and create virtual cards for one-time use. The firm initially promised up to 5 times higher credit limits than average credit cards but says that in the beta, customers’ X1 limits are 7.5 times higher. Within 60 days of having the card, 45% of customers started using X1 for the majority of their spending.
- The Prince of Wales’ Financial Services Task Force (FSTF) launches a Net Zero Practitioner’s Guide to help the banking industry adopt a consistent and transparent approach to supporting clients’ transition to net zero and deliver real economy emission reduction. The FSTF Practitioner’s Guide combines the knowledge and collective experience of 11 banks. The guide is designed to support the implementation of banks’ net zero commitments and meet the growing need for specificity. Focusing on client emissions related to bank financing, as opposed to banks’ own operational emissions, the guide will help banks deliver on the critical role they must play actively supporting clients to transition. It is written for a wide audience, from senior executives to those building and delivering a banks’ net zero strategy.
- This guide provides a toolkit that can be used across all sectors and geographies. The first part of the guide provides recommendations on key choices banks will face as they develop robust strategies, alongside an overview of the potential trade-offs involved and insight into the decision-making processes, highlighting areas for potential common ground across the industry. The second section explores how banks can engage with clients and policymakers to deliver financing to help accelerate the transition to a low carbon economy, and disclose progress transparently for stakeholders. The guide provides non-binding forward-looking recommendations which address key choices banks will face in looking to develop robust, methodologically sound strategies with positive climate impact, based on the varied experiences and knowledge of the FSTF banks.
- Patch, the API-first carbon removal marketplace, has partnered with climate impact technology firm Doconomy to introduce a first-of-its-kind tech stack for climate fintech. This partnership will provide financial services with the necessary tools to assess their carbon impact and neutralize emissions, marking a new milestone in the global shift to green banking. Patch enables fintech platforms and developers to programmatically purchase carbon removal and offsets from a network of nature-based and frontier negative emission technology projects. Doconomy offers impact calculations on products and individual lifestyle as well as providing banks, fintech companies and financial institutions tools to calculate the climate impact of their digital financial transactions, all in an effort to educate consumers of their environmental impact.
- Now, Doconomy will embed Patch’s API into its platform, enabling banks and financial institutions to not only gather transaction impact insights, but take climate action via the purchase of high quality carbon removal. This partnership also sets the stage for the first-ever Climate Fintech Cards & Payments Challenge, which enables startups to showcase digital financial climate solutions for a shot at a $100,000 prize and the chance to work with established financial stakeholders on proof-of-concept projects.
Sweden’s Klarna Bank AB said Thursday that it has signed a strategic partnership with Israeli cloud-based website development platform Wix.com Ltd. The buy-now-pay-later payments specialist said that with the deal Wix eCommerce merchants across 17 countries can accept payments from their customers with Klarna. Wix merchants will be able to offer Klarna’s Pay in 4 and Pay in 3 solutions that enable shoppers to split their purchases into interest-free payments over time, while retailers get paid upfront and in full.
A new partnership between green banking fintech ecolytiq and climate metrics developer right. based on science is going to bring temperature alignment metrics to bank customers throughout Europe and North America. With this new feature, consumers will be able to clearly understand how their purchasing and investing behaviors relate to the overall heating of the planet. ecolytiq will offer these calculations in conjunction with the CO2 footprinting technologies to inform consumers about the diverse environmental implications of how they use their money. The proprietary methodology, developed by right. based on science, models on a personal level the degree of global warming that would occur, if every consumer adopted one’s spending behavior. ecolytiq equips banks with the digital infrastructure and tools they need to engage their customers in sustainability. The API product integrates seamlessly into existing digital banking apps to improve user experience, generate engagement, and encourage climate action. Its Sustainability-as-a-Service® solution analyzes payment transactions to build individualized climate impact calculations and nudge customers towards smart and sustainable spending choices.
AI platform MioTech has secured investments from J.P. Morgan Asset Management and HSBC Asset Management’s Financial Technology Venture Capital Fund. The new capital will go toward accelerating talent acquisition, expansion into new international markets, as well as developing existing and new product lines. With increasing regulatory pressure and evolving investor, corporate and consumer demand, MioTech expects to capture fast-growing market needs for green tech and sustainability solutions with its proprietary technologies. MioTech’s ability to utilize AI to gather and assess unstructured ESG data sets will provide valuable inputs to fundamental research for J.P. Morgan Asset Management. This will enhance J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s consideration of material ESG risks and opportunities in its active investment processes and help support its global and China clients in making sustainable investment decisions. With valuable expertise into the ESG data and factors that are unique to China, MioTech’s capabilities will also help to advance the development of proprietary quantitative ESG scoring system.
- Growing use of RBC’s digital assistant NOMI justifies the big Canadian bank’s four-year investment in advanced AI and machine learning for improving consumers’ financial lives. The technology enables several predictive features including a new weekly cash-flow tool. Not only are the number of users increasing, but they’re spending more time using features of NOMI. 37% of Americans are living on the financial edge and 14% are living paycheck to paycheck. Experts have been predicting that advanced technology could be a boon for consumers in this situation. RBC’s NOMI now addresses this need specifically. More than half of NOMI users say it is, and less than 1% have left RBC since starting to use the app. A newly added cash-flow forecasting feature could add to the momentum. The bank’s 17 million customers can now get the answers to everyday cash-flow questions like those above using NOMI. Built using machine learning and artificial intelligence software, NOMI Forecast tells RBC customers how much money they will have over a seven-day period based on their preauthorized payment withdrawals.
- The NOMI platform already provides customized insights to customers to create simplified budgets and automated savings. NOMI has about 1.5 million active users. The “active” designation is significant because tallies of users typically include the people who may have downloaded an app, but never actually used it. Further, 53% of NOMI users say the virtual assistant is a game changer for their finances, the bank states. This is partly because RBC has been steadily adding features to the platform. With NOMI Forecast, consumers are less likely to miss paying a bill or run short of cash before payday. NOMI Forecast addresses pain points that consumers have about finances. Over three quarters of Americans feel anxious about their financial situation and more than half (58%) feel that finances control their lives. NOMI Forecast gives customers back that control. NOMI Forecast uses technology from Borealis AI, a research center backed by RBC that is focused on using ML: and AI in financial applications. NOMI Forecast marks the first time Borealis has been integrated into a retail banking offering.
- Startup Rossum, is a platform used by enterprises to automatically process and “understand” all their inbound documents. Rossum leans on deep learning to automate manual document processing and data entry. Powered by integrations with myriad enterprise resource planning (ERP), robotic process automation (RPA), and document management systems (DMS), Rossum uses “cognitive data capture” to read and understand the content of a document just like a human does. Rossum facilitates not only the data extraction, but also the data validation and correction through what it calls “spatial OCR (optical character recognition),” which learns to recognize different structures and patterns of different documents — an invoice number might be on the top left-hand side in one invoice, but somewhere completely different in another.
- Using a “human-in-the-loop” system to learn, Rossum also promises to improve over time. Rossum has transitioned from a “document understanding engine” into what it now calls itself an “all-in-one document gateway.” This includes receive, which is all about unifying all mail channels across paper and digital by connecting inboxes, scanners, and DMS systems; understand, which is concerned with data capture; and communicate and act, which automates workflows such as notifying the document’s senders that it has been received or whether there are any issues.
Startup Deci is developing a platform to optimize machine learning models. By leveraging data science techniques, Deci developed products to accelerate AI on hardware by redesigning models to maximize throughput while minimizing latency. Deci achieves runtime acceleration on cloud, edge, and mobile through data preprocessing and loading, automatically selecting model architectures and hyperparameters (i.e., the variables that influence a model’s predictions). The platform also handles steps like deployment, serving, and monitoring, continuously tracking models, and offering recommendations where customers can migrate to more cost-effective services. Deci’s platform offers a substantial performance boost to existing deep learning models while preserving their accuracy. It designs deep models to more effectively use the hardware platform they run on, be it CPU, GPU, FPGA, or special-purpose ASIC accelerators. The accelerator is a data-dependent algorithmic solution that works in synergy with other known compression techniques, such as pruning and quantization. Deci’s solution is an engine — Automated Neural Architecture Construction, or AutoNAC — that redesigns models to create new models with several computation routes, optimized for an inference device and dataset. Each route is specialized with a prediction task, and Deci’s router component ensures that each data input is directed via the proper route.
Powerlytics and Railz have partnered to provide banks and fintechs with a powerful new benchmarking product via more granular and actionable data to better support small business and mid-market customers’ success. As part of the agreement, Railz will integrate Powerlytics’ proprietary business financial data covering the complete financial statements and performance ratios on 30 million U.S. businesses to augment its Accounting Data-as-a-Service API and platform. The integration between Powerlytics and Railz provides banks and fintechs access to a deep financial profile of their business customers, along with corresponding performance opportunities based on the benchmark data of their customers’ competitors. Together, Powerlytics data and the Railz platform help financial services companies drive deeper and more impactful relationships with their business customers by better understanding their competitive landscape, providing more relevant financial products, and building the most effective credit models to improve decisions around small business loans. It will empower the banks and fintechs using the Railz platform to deliver the most relevant products and services that will best help fuel their business customers’ growth.
Privacy engineering-as-a-service startup Gretel Labs offers a data categorization and identification platform designed to test anonymized versions of a data set automatically. The platform enables developers to synthesize, transform and classify data with an easy-to-use suite of tools and application programming interfaces that eliminate data privacy issues through safe data sharing. Gretel says its platform allows developers and data practitioners to implement intelligent, high-quality data privacy measures so they can quickly and safely innovate with data. The service is claimed to do so at a fraction of the time, cost and risk to their users’ privacy and brand. Under the hood, the platform users artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to provide accurate, private and high-quality synthetic data with significant time savings for engineers. Machine learning is used to categorize data across names, addresses and other customer identifiers and features automatic data labeling, power testing and synthetics with support for experimentation, collaboration and building with customer data.
Mindee offers an API that lets you turn raw data in a paper document into structured data. Many companies rely on OCR services (optical character recognition) from Google or Amazon. But turning text into raw digital text isn’t the most complicated step. After that, you want to turn raw digital text into structured data. This is much more complicated as companies often rely on humans to identify the right information and paste it in the right data field. Essentially, you can process a photo through Mindee API and turn it into relevant data for your product without any manual data entry. Many industries could use this kind of API-based product, from expense management to procurement, accounting, loan applications and more. What makes Mindee special is that the experience for the end user is much better. For instance, when you try to sign up to a service that requires your passport information, you usually have to enter your personal information, take a photo and wait. It’ll ping someone so that they can make sure it’s the same information in the registration system and on the photo. If Mindee manages to capture data in near real-time and with a near perfect level of accuracy, you could get a much snappier experience. And that could lead to more customers for Mindee’s clients.
The Members Exchange, an upstart exchange, is putting its market data on a blockchain network in a nod towards the potential future of how Wall Street accesses its information. The equities exchange is offering free access to its real-time pricing data on the Pyth Network, a distributor of financial market-data that sits on the Solana blockchain. The move will bring MEMX data to new users and is a key step in spurring competition in the space. MEMX’s partnership with Pyth isn’t just about leveraging new tech to distribute data. It’s also about increasing access to market data to a wider swath of users. Market data — which includes everything from the bid and ask price of a particular stock to how much, or little, it is being traded — is the lifeblood of any trading organization. The information is key in helping traders, and their algorithms, make decisions in the market. But access to the data doesn’t come cheap. Global spending on financial market data and analysis totaled $33.2 billion in 2020, a 5.9% year-over-year increase. But despite how crucial market data is to participants, the industry is largely dominated by a handful of players like Bloomberg and Refinitiv.
This year’s big headlines on Google Cloud Next—Google’s annual conference for its enterprise customers and developers, revolved around Google’s entry into the distributed cloud space, a big data push and the introduction of new AI-enhanced cloud solutions.
- Google Distributed Cloud, is a portfolio of fully managed hardware and software solutions that Google says will bring the power of Google Cloud to the intelligent edge and data center. Designed specifically for this frontier, Google Distributed Cloud customers will gain access to various Google Cloud services for local processing. Additionally, Google touts the new offering’s ability to support low-latency edge compute workloads, the modernization of on-prem environments, sensitive workloads with sovereignty requirements and private 5G/LTE solutions. At the heart of Google Distributed Cloud is Anthos, an open-source-based services platform that promises consistent, scalable performance across various environments. For now, there are two initial offerings in the Google Distributed Cloud portfolio.
- Google also launched its new Google Cybersecurity Action Team—a task force of Google cybersecurity experts dedicated to supporting the digitization of governments, critical infrastructure and businesses of all sizes. This support will come via strategic advisory services, trust and compliance services, security customer and solutions engineering, threat intelligence, and incident response services. The new team also revealed a framework designed to guide organizations through implementing a “comprehensive security management program” that leverages Google and its partners’ cloud security technologies.
- Google also announced Work Safer, another well-timed security offering that is essentially a security package for hybrid work. Work Safer’s zero-trust, browser-based security approach negates the need for local devices, apps, security add-ons and email attachments. It employs built-in controls, encryption and verification to support workers wherever they are, on both company-provided or BYOD endpoints—no VPN, patching or strong account takeover protections necessary.
- Google also revealed Contact Center AI Insights, a new offering in its CCAI product suite. By providing customers with a more granular look at their contact center interaction data, Google says CCAI Insights will help them make data-driven business decisions that drive better organizational efficiency. For example, CCAI Insights uses AI to illuminate and identify the topics customers most frequently need contact center support on, allowing analysts to quickly identify problem areas within their organizations that could benefit from further investment.
- Scotiabank and Google Cloud are working to create more personal and predictive banking experiences for the bank’s customers. The strategic partnership will accelerate Scotiabank’s global data and analytics strategy for customers in the Americas and across the globe.
- Scotiabank will move its customer data to the Google Cloud and use its data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in several ways:
- Leverage data for predictive offers: The bank will be able to process data faster, understand customer sentiment insights, and deliver relevant offers in a timely manner. Using Google Cloud’s machine learning (ML) models, Scotiabank can reduce the time spent predicting customer offers from 14 days to hours.
- Improve customer interactions through artificial intelligence (AI): Through this partnership, Scotiabank is empowering its engineers and data scientists with Google AI solutions, such as natural language processing, voice, and vision capabilities to help the bank automate document processes and onboarding, improving customer interactions.
- Unify data silos across the organization: The migration of data to Google Cloud will help remove data silos within the bank, uncovering previously hidden insights that will allow the bank to provide better financial advice to its customers.
11:FS Foundry has partnered with Google Cloud, creating an end-to-end solution for businesses building new financial services propositions. The partnership will give Google Cloud clients a clear solution for embedding finance into their product set, grow their market share and boost their revenue. 11:FS Foundry is one of the first true Financial Services Operating Systems (FS OS), it helps businesses build and launch new financial services propositions, not years. Using 11:FS Foundry, traditional banks, neobanks and non-banks can scale their fintech offerings at speed. 11:FS Foundry itself is hosted on Google Cloud’s platform, enabling significantly increased uptime, global reach and strong security and encryption.
Top hedge funds, investment firms, and private-equity shops are turning to public clouds managed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM..
- Quantitative research is the bread and butter of AQR, an investment manager that typically takes a longer-term view on its portfolio. As with other quantitative funds, that means access to readily-available financial and economic data is paramount. And while transitions to the public cloud carry an up-front cost, more financial firms are embracing the value they see in the cloud relative to on-premise data storage. But for AQR, a move to the cloud was approached much the same way it handles investing: meticulous planning and research.
- Blackstone is looking to Amazon Web Services, as firms across Wall Street embrace public and hybrid cloud strategies to boost their tech prowess. Blackstone is in the midst of a “firm-wide initiative” to migrate much of Blackstone’s technology operations to Amazon Web Service’s public cloud by roughly the end of this year to be able to deliver features and function at the speed that the business needs and that its engineers are truly capable of
- Fund administrator Citco took 18 months to migrate $1 trillion of those assets – from more than 550 hedge funds and other clients that total 10,000 accounts – from physical data centers to the cloud. Hosted on Amazon Web Services, these accounts now have a more streamlined administration of their portfolios, and access to different tools Citco has built out on the cloud, such as a software-as-a-service tool that helps managers with Treasury functions.
- Hedge fund Millenium is using technology as a key value prop for recruitment and retention. It is investing in cloud technology to stand out among hedge funds. The firm saw how much faster its employees could test new tools and datasets using the cloud, which led it to invest more in the tech.
- Point72 is in the midst of a sweeping, multi-year overhaul to transform the $21.8 billion hedge fund into a cloud-first operation. The five-year project, which is slated to wrap at the end of 2024, is aimed at migrating 70% to 80% of the hedge fund’s cloud-eligible applications to the new tech.
- Two Sigma was in need of compute power needed for the quantitative fund’s research workflows was 10 times greater than what its data centers could provide. As a quantitative fund, the problem was particularly salient for Two Sigma. Quant funds rely on mathematical and computer-based modeling to make their bets in the market, meaning their demand for computer firepower can often be enormous.
Managing the lifecycle of permissions includes revoking them automatically rather than manually when they’re no longer needed, which would prevent data breaches like Experian’s. Attackers accessed the data through an API running on a version of the Java Struts framework with an unpatched vulnerability. The reason it hadn’t been patched is that it was set up for a competition by somebody who then left the company. An identity inventory would have caught the API access, and lifecycle management would have revoked that once it was no longer needed.That’s what products like CloudKnox promise.Microsoft is selling and supporting the existing CloudKnox products, but there are obvious opportunities to integrate with services like Azure AD and Azure API Management, and to build on the Microsoft Graph. Part of the appeal of CloudKnox is that it covers multiple cloud services—AWS, GCP and VMware as well as Azure—and Microsoft isn’t changing that. It really complements the strengths of Azure AD, where Microsoft is providing end-to-end identity management, especially for human identities.
- Security keys are making headlines because a new generation of biometric security keys is finally starting to hit the market. The biometric keys are landing in a security key market that is already flush with non-biometric options. The new biometric security keys deliver the security benefits of multi-factor authentication without requiring any additional hardware, and while eliminating the inconvenience of passwords. End users get both a biometric scanner and a security key in one convenient package, and have access to two fully passwordless modalities. The result is a strict security upgrade over a non-biometric key.
- A cybercriminal would not be able to use a stolen biometric security key because they would not be able to spoof the biometric scan (at least not without considerable cost and effort), so biometric keys close the one major security gap associated with physical security tokens. Regardless of the intention, a biometric scan still adds a step to the authentication process. However, that disadvantage disappears if the non-biometric key is being supplemented with an additional authenticator like a password. A biometric scan is usually easier than remembering and typing a string of letters, numbers, and symbols, and a fingerprint cannot be bested with a brute force attack. That makes it more convenient than a traditional key in any situation that requires multi-factor authentication. Biometric keys are a strong authentication option with a solid form factor that provide more security and a better user experience than many of the products currently on the market.
Cloud banking software platform Blend has launched Blend Income Verification, a new product for financial services firms that delivers instant income verification for mortgages and, soon, consumer loans and deposit account opening. The new tool acts as a single income verification provider across banking products and lending scenarios by combining multiple data sources and verification methods, enabling financial services firms to streamline credit risk assessments for all types of consumers. Blend Income Verification is an authorized report supplier for both Fannie Mae’s Desktop Underwriter ® (DU ® ) validation service and Freddie Mac’s asset and income modeler (AIM), allowing financial services firms to easily take advantage of these programs for mortgages they manage through Blend. Additionally, the product will be fully integrated into Blend’s cloud banking platform, enabling customers to rapidly activate and configure the new income verification capabilities across products.
Equifax has rolled out a new Digital Identity-as-a-Service capability, along with a new partnership with Bonifii as the first to adopt the tool. Equifax’s Digital Identity-as-a-Service puts together data and analytics with modern cryptography, enabling a higher degree of trust without sacrificing the user experience. Bonifii will add it to its MemberPass program, helping credit unions (CUs) onboard members. For consumers, the solution can facilitate more control over the information that’s shared, adds more protection against identity fraud and account hacks, and strengthens user profiles with differentiated data. With Digital Identity-as-a-Service, it’s possible to achieve both with greater identity assurance through optimized technologies. CUs must interact with members across various channels like websites, mobile apps, call centers, ATMs and branch drive-thrus. With MemberPass, CUs can get better control and verification options, and Bonifii’s technology can assist with digital interactions. Working with Equifax will allow MemberPass to help credit unions have the confidence to grow their businesses by saying ‘yes’ more to good consumers. That is the aspiration of this innovation partnership.
Startup Elevate has a new approach to how employers and employees access, manage and experience consumer-directed benefits. these benefits are most commonly the out-of-pocket healthcare expenses an employee has, like health savings accounts, flexible spending accounts, commuting expenses, tuition reimbursement or even reimbursement of expenses for adoption or fertility treatments. Elevate platform enables employees to view, plan and manage their pre-tax benefits from one web and mobile dashboard. There is also one contactless card for all of the benefits, and claims are processed instantly with reimbursement taking place within minutes. On the employer side, they can customize their offering with standard templates for many of the common plans and then configure the plan for their particular market or plan.
Anheuser-Busch Light will host an outdoor co-working space called TreeWork in the woodlands of Northern Colorado. TreeWork features a “sleek and well-ventilated” office space, Wi-Fi, Busch Light happy hours, grilling, campfires and the opportunity to camp outside. TreeWork comes as many workers still have not returned to the office as the delta variant continues to upend plans for a full return to pre-pandemic activities. Busch Light’s latest experiential activation is a lighthearted way for the brand to engage with consumers who are still working remotely by providing a shared space that is truly remote: an undisclosed location in the Northern Colorado woodlands. Along with productivity, Busch seeks to help relieve some of the stress and fatigue that is associated with the pandemic, which has disrupted daily life for more than 18 months.
BBVA has rolled out an app for employees to book a desk at the office as it prepares for a new post-pandemic working model. BBVA’s return to work policy is focused around a hybrid system, in which employees spend 60% of their time in the office and 40% at home. This is aligned with a new hot desking system, in which staff are assigned a locker to store their belongings and an app to book a desk. Using the app, staff can book a desk – and parking space – at the office, selecting from a pool of available workstations that are released on the 22nd of each month. Users can book from a menu of options, including a table for individual work, a meeting room or a collaborative space.
YouTube is rolling out a designated “New to you” tab on its platform. The new tab is now available on the YouTube homepage across mobile, desktop and TV devices. The feature will help users discover new creators and content beyond the recommended videos they usually see. The new tab surfaces content that aligns with your viewing preferences from channels that you haven’t previously encountered. It’s meant to go a step further than YouTube’s Explore listings, which help users find content in specific topics, such as gaming or beauty, but doesn’t take users’ specific interests into account. YouTube notes that “New to you” is personalized to the viewer, as it’s trying to strike a balance between content it thinks users might be interested in, along with content that is a bit different than what they’d typically watch. On mobile, you’ll see the tab when you refresh the YouTube homepage. You may also see the tab as you scroll through your feed. It’s worth noting that since the feature is personalized, it may not always be available. Additionally, you’ll need to be signed in to YouTube to see the tab. The new feature could help creators reach new audiences by targeting those who would be most interested in their content but would not have discovered it otherwise. It could also help viewers find new content and discover new interests.
Mastercard introducing a new accessible card standard for blind and partially sighted people, called the Touch Card. With the new Touch Card, Mastercard has improved upon a current design standard by introducing a system of notches on the side of the card to help consumers use the right card, the right way, by touch alone. The new Touch Card credit cards have a round notch; debit cards have a broad squarish notch; and prepaid cards have a triangular notch. The standard has been designed to work with point-of-sale terminals and ATMs, ensuring it can be deployed at scale.
- The digital accessibility team plays a vital role in the creation of digital experiences at U.S. Bank by advising product teams, advocating for inclusive design, and testing for defects. That means ensuring accessibility principles are incorporated throughout the whole project lifecycle, and critically important, that it happens from the very beginning of the design process – not as an afterthought or add-on. That includes collaboration with customers who have disabilities themselves. It created a dedicated function within User Experience that allowed teams to fully consider accessibility as part of the design process. Teams flourished and the benefits of inclusive design became apparent.
- So the bank expanded it even further across the company, and the size of the accessibility team has grown accordingly, from several people to now dozens – a sign of the importance and scope of the work. The team has become a destination for top talent, with the National Organization on Disability (NOD) honoring U.S. Bank as a 2021 Leading Disability Employer and Disability:IN naming U.S. Bank a 2021 Best Place to Work for People with Disabilities, scoring 100% on the Disability Equality Index for the fourth consecutive year.
Banks are increasingly relying on digital tools like smartphone apps and virtual conferences to connect with customers. But such tools are far more limited when it comes to people with disabilities — a segment that U.S. Bancorp estimates accounts for as many as one-quarter of its total customer base. U.S. bank make sure that everything on its mobile app and website can be used by customers and employees regardless of any disability they might have. U.S. bank team serves as advisers during the design process for new features, making sure accessibility principles are incorporated through the whole product lifecycle. U.S. bank involve people who have disabilities themselves, and test for any issues in coding or otherwise. U.S. bank is making significant investment in voice assistance abilities. It allows people to use it hands free. The bank also worked on the smartphone app, so whatever setting you have on your phone for zoom text, the app will load and show correctly. If your setting is to have words and images zoomed in at 200%, the app will still load correctly. Now the U.S. bank continue to improve voice-command abilities so that people with a stutter or someone who had a stroke can use voice-command tools.
Santander Consumer Finance, Banco Santander’s specialised consumer finance unit, has created ‘Simplifi’, an initiative that was conceived with the aim of contributing to the promotion of financial education in Spain. Simplifi includes various online tools, such as Akana, Tu Futuro Próximo, and now also Simple Finance, which offer users free courses on personal finance and tips on savings and responsible consumption.
- Akana is a service that makes it easy to quickly know the situation of accounts using objective data extracted from the movements. After analysing more than 50 parameters, the result is presented to the user in a simple, highly visual way, providing a personalised analysis that can be understood at a glance. It also includes numerous metrics and tips related to the user’s financial situation so that they can apply them in their daily lives.
- Simple Finance is a virtual economy and finance classroom offering free courses on essential topics of personal finance, which help people to learn concepts that are useful to keep their finances under control, know what they do with their money and avoid making financial commitments they cannot afford. The courses are highly educational, with explanatory videos and downloadable materials, which teach each subject simply and accessibly.
TuFuturoPróximo is a blog that uses a simple, accessible language to keep users up to date with the latest financial developments. It includes content and tips on trends, financial health, savings and responsible consumption. Readers are invited to subscribe to a monthly newsletter containing the best articles on trends.
Billie has been around since 2016 and has actually been working in the concept of “BNPL” targeting businesses long before that became an established concept and term, as part of a bigger suite of products to service businesses and their incoming and outgoing payments needs. Its ambition was simple: since B2B transactions make up more than twice the volume of B2C transactions, there should be more tools for businesses — especially SMBs — to make those transactions as easy to handle as B2C ones. Its other main product, in addition to the financing point-of-sale tool, is an invoicing service to help businesses collect money from others. Klarna’s investment comes on the back of a major strategic deal between it and Billie. The two are integrating their services, and it will mean that in cases where Billie has a stronger payments relationship, but a consumer transaction arises, Klarna will handle the sale; and in cases where Klarna is present but Billie is not, and a business is doing the buying, Billie’s services will kick in.
Auto refinancing website MotoRefi is shaking up the long-standing practice of bundling policies putting all their coverage in the hands of one carrier, by offering a new option—bundling insurance with auto loan refinancing. When a consumer comes to the MotoRefi website to seek a better deal on their car loan, they’ll also have the opportunity to be connected with an insurance carrier that may also offer lower coverage costs. The insurance industry’s method of bundling is “horizontal” providing convenience for the customer while boosting a carrier’s profits. MotoRefiis rotating that concept 90 degrees, by launching vertical bundling, the idea that customers can bundle auto insurance with the refinancing of their car. Just how much money can be saved on auto insurance depends on the vehicle, driver and coverage level. But the company is using the same model, that is saving those who refinance their car loans through the site about $100 a month. MotoRefi’s newest gambit combining auto loan refinancing with an insurance matchmaking service is not only a good business move, but an innovative combination of two technologies. This is really bringing fintech and insurtech together in auto to help the consumer using cutting edge technology.
BPL provider Laybuy’s research provides insight into consumer views on credit products following the Government’s recent consultation on future regulation of the sector. When asked which financial products they identify as a credit product, BNPL was more consistently identified (73%) as a credit product than other more traditional forms of credit such as overdrafts (70%) or even mortgages (69%). The top result was credit cards, which 87% of respondents identified as a credit product. When asked whether BNPL providers should carry out credit checks, 81% agreed that credit checks on financial history should be carried out before a customer can access the product. Presented with the choice between a hard or soft credit check, there was strong support for both, but slightly greater support for soft credit checks (75%) compared to hard credit checks (63%). Additionally, when asked whether BNPL should report usage of their products to other credit companies, 71% agreed that sharing the information is necessary. Finally, when asked when they thought it was best to carry out hard credit checks.
PNC Treasury Management has announced new capabilities that strengthen its corporate banking platform, PINACLE. The newly introduced features – PINACLE Connect and PINACLE Payee Account Validation – remove complexities and address client feedback, specifically related to technology integration and fraud prevention. Through PINACLE Connect, PNC can now seamlessly integrate its treasury management services directly into its clients’ existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, providing an embedded banking experience. PNC clients leveraging this new offering can now initiate payments, track payment statuses, and access their account and transaction information all within their ERP, utilizing their existing PINACLE data access controls. PINACLE Connect provides clients with a streamlined interface, keeping treasurers’ day-to-day activity in one platform – removing the need to switch between systems – and ultimately, eliminating friction in the customer experience. This embedded banking experience is representative of customers’ changing expectations and a broader acceptance of new technologies. In addition, PINACLE Payee Account Validation provides industry first integrated account validation directly within the PINACLE payment workflow. This new capability helps clients more easily transact by confirming payee details, and most importantly, alerting businesses when there are signs of potential payments fraud, such as supplier email account compromise.
Bond Financial Technologies, the enterprise-grade platform for embedded finance, announces the availability of its latest product, Bond Embedded Credit. Current and new customers can now build and launch personalized credit products with a single integration, including underwriting, risk management, servicing, and compliance. Embedded Credit, coupled with other Bond products such as Embedded Accounts, Embedded Cards, and Embedded Money Movement, creates the foundational building blocks that support a wide range of financial use cases. Bond’s suite of credit APIs and services — including KYC, KYB, card issuance, underwriting, risk management, funding, and debt servicing — removes friction for Bond’s customers and their developers, which allows greater speed-to-market, personalization, and oversight. The Bond team brings a wealth of knowledge to build the future of finance by leveraging their experience from institutions such as Square, Goldman Sachs, American Express, PayPal, Affirm, and SoFi. Cledara, a SaaS purchasing and management platform, is Bond’s first embedded credit customer. Cledara selected Bond for their entry to the US market over other Banking-as-a-Service platforms specifically because of Bond’s unique credit and data capabilities. Launching their SaaS Management platform enabled by a credit product was key for Cledara in providing greater value to US customers in the form of access to capital and enhanced rewards incentives.
Plaid is fully venturing on its own into the payments landscape. laid is “launching an ecosystem of payment partners to provide flexible options for any company to make bank payments an option in their checkout flows, and streamline digital account onboarding, top ups, and payouts, all at lower costs.” That ecosystem, spanning Europe and North America, is being built around existing partnerships Plaid has in place with companies like square, and new relationships with companies like Marqeta and Checkout.com, among others. The enhanced data connectivity in the ecosystem, significantly reduces the time to enable account-to-account transactions. Those transactions, Plaid said, historically had not been a “popular choice” as they were slow and cumbersome to set up — users had to look up account numbers or wait to initiate transactions after microdeposits went through. Through Plaid’s direct connectivity, the company said — and with that connectivity spanning 11,000 institutions — the account-to-account activity, and open banking activity, is instant. The transactions will not involve credit or debit cards, which is why Plaid contends that the ecosystem would serve as a complement to, and not a competitor to, the card networks.
- TotallyMoney, the credit app to help customers move their money forwards, launches new API integration with loan and credit card platform, Lendable. The credit building Level card prioritises simplicity, flexibility and transparency. TotallyMoney’s API integration enables pre-approval and guaranteed rates, meaning that customers can apply with greater certainty. Those with CCJs and defaults may be accepted for the Level card, which if used responsibly can help customers increase their credit score.
- TotallyMoney’s API integration for Lendable’s Level credit card provides greater transparency as customers will be shown the APR they’ll get before application. In addition to this they can find out if they’re pre-approved for the offer, meaning a more personalised experience that helps them move towards their financial goals. This is a stark contrast to the market norm where only 51% get the advertised APR. With the other 49% potentially receiving a higher and more expensive rate after being accepted. Through TotallyMoney’s credit app users can track their live report and score for free, forever and those who use their Level card responsibly, stay within their limit and make repayments on time may see their credit score improve.
- With flexibility at its core, Level customers can add the card to their phone wallet, use it virtually, and manage spending and payments within the app. As well as credit limits of up to £1,500, and guaranteed rates, the Level card comes with zero foreign usage fees. Those with CCJs and defaults who might traditionally be rejected for credit products are able to apply for the Level card, enabling them to rebuild their credit profile.
Capitalize, the first independent platform to transfer retirement assets, has added new individual retirement account (IRA) partners to its platform, including Betterment. The firm continues to accelerate activity on its platform and is on track to process several hundred million dollars of rollover volume over the next 12 months. Betterment’s low-fee and easy-to-use IRAs will now be directly available to Capitalize users looking for an IRA in which to consolidate their legacy 401(k) assets. The Capitalize platform continues to demonstrate substantial volume growth driven by strong consumer adoption of its free rollover platform that combines the company’s proprietary technology with leading customer service. The platform is also increasingly being adopted by employers and other channel partners focused on the importance of offboarding during a period of increased labor market turnover.
Grayscale Investments plans on applying to convert the world’s biggest bitcoin fund into a spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) early this week. Grayscale’s ETF would be backed by actual units of the cryptocurrency, not simply linked it via derivatives contracts such as futures. Should the proposal gain approval, it would be a further expansion of the leading cryptocurrency as a recognized investible asset. Some analysts predict that the $38.7 billion Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), whose shares already trade in public stock markets, has no chance of winning approval anytime soon for its current plan to convert into an ETF backed by the cryptocurrency. Once the filing is made, the SEC will have 75 days to review it.
Robinhood is unveiling a new feature that allows its users to make automatic recurring crypto investments if they choose to do so. Many people like to use automated investing, which is otherwise known as “set it and forget it,” so they do not have to manually make the decision to purchase assets. The set-it-and-forget-it strategy is a common one that allows people to specify an amount of money to invest in an asset at a particular interval. For example, you could choose to invest $50 every Monday in a particular stock, ETF, or virtual coin. Automated investing at regular intervals is not only convenient, but it eliminates the problem of trying to time the market. If you buy a little bit of a particular asset on a regular basis, sometimes you will end up investing when the price is down and other times you will end up investing when the price is up. This technique is also called “dollar-cost averaging.” This strategy can be especially valuable for more volatile assets that tend to have big shifts in prices — such as cryptocurrencies. Unfortunately, Robinhood investors didn’t have the option to use set-it-and-forget-it investing with cryptocurrencies.
Fidelity Investments announced the launch of four new thematic exchange-traded funds (ETFs) . The four passively managed, self-indexed ETFs utilize Fidelity’s quantitative capabilities, including its proprietary indices.
- Fidelity Clean Energy ETF (FRNW) normally invests at least 80% of its assets in securities included in the Fidelity Clean Energy Index℠ and in depositary receipts representing securities included in the index. The Fidelity Clean Energy Index℠ is designed to reflect the performance of a global universe of companies across the market capitalization spectrum that distribute, produce or provide technology or equipment to support the production of energy from solar, wind, hydrogen and other renewable sources.
- Fidelity Cloud Computing ETF (FCLD) normally invests at least 80% of its assets in securities included in the Fidelity Cloud Computing Index℠ and in depositary receipts representing securities included in the index. The Fidelity Cloud Computing Index℠ is designed to reflect the performance of a global universe of companies across the market capitalization spectrum that provide products or services enabling the increased adoption of cloud computing, characterized by the delivery of computing services over the internet.
- Fidelity Digital Health ETF (FDHT) normally invests at least 80% of its assets in securities included in the Fidelity Digital Health Index℠ and in depositary receipts representing securities included in the index. The Fidelity Digital Health Index℠ is designed to reflect the performance of a global universe of companies across the market capitalization spectrum providing healthcare records management, connected healthcare devices, surgical robotics, telemedicine, and other technology-enabled healthcare products and services.
- Fidelity Electric Vehicles and Future Transportation ETF (FDRV) normally invests at least 80% of its assets in securities included in the Fidelity Electric Vehicles and Future Transportation Index and in depositary receipts representing securities included in the index. The Fidelity Electric Vehicles and Future Transportation Index is designed to reflect the performance of a global universe of companies across the market capitalization spectrum engaged in the production of electric and/or autonomous vehicles and their components, technology, or energy systems or engaged in other initiatives that aim to change the future of transportation.
The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has launched a physical Omny EMV payments card to enable passengers travelling on the city’s subway and bus services to make closed loop contactless ticketing payments. Beginning in October 2021, the Omny card will make its way to retail locations throughout New York City. You will be able to buy a new Omny card or reload an existing Omny card at those retail locations. Pay with cash or card. Users who register for an Omny account will also be able to reload their card online.
Passengers using buses, trains and streetcars operated by Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of the US state of Texas can now make contactless fare payments with their debit or credit card or from a digital wallet on their NFC-enabled mobile device. Passengers using the new payment option will also have their fares capped to a maximum price of a daily or a monthly pass. DART has added the option to pay with a debit or credit card or digital wallet to its existing contactless ticketing system that enables passengers to pay their fares with a prepaid GoPass Tap transit card or purchase tickets and passes via the transit authority’s GoPass app. The contactless payment option gives riders a new touch-free option for paying their fare, along with the GoPass mobile app and GoPass Tap card. DART riders can hold their contactless payment card or payment-enabled mobile device to any DART GoPass Tap card reader. DART riders can hold their contactless payment card or payment-enabled mobile device to any DART GoPass Tap card reader. There is no need to select a fare. The GoPass Tap system automatically selects the best adult local fare for the rider. With fare capping on a contactless payment, you never pay more than the total cost of a local adult day pass in a single day.
Passengers using buses, trains and streetcars operated by Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of the US state of Texas can now make contactless fare payments with their debit or credit card or from a digital wallet on their NFC-enabled mobile device. Passengers using the new payment option will also have their fares capped to a maximum price of a daily or a monthly pass. DART has added the option to pay with a debit or credit card or digital wallet to its existing contactless ticketing system that enables passengers to pay their fares with a prepaid GoPass Tap transit card or purchase tickets and passes via the transit authority’s GoPass app. The contactless payment option gives riders a new touch-free option for paying their fare, along with the GoPass mobile app and GoPass Tap card. DART riders can hold their contactless payment card or payment-enabled mobile device to any DART GoPass Tap card reader. DART riders can hold their contactless payment card or payment-enabled mobile device to any DART GoPass Tap card reader. There is no need to select a fare. The GoPass Tap system automatically selects the best adult local fare for the rider. With fare capping on a contactless payment, you never pay more than the total cost of a local adult day pass in a single day.
Walmart has tapped Argo AI and Ford to launch an autonomous vehicle delivery service in Austin, Miami and Washington, D.C. The service will allow customers to place online orders for groceries and other items using Walmart’s ordering platform. Argo’s cloud-based infrastructure will be integrated with Walmart’s online platform, routing the orders and scheduling package deliveries to customers’ homes. Initially, the commercial service will be limited to specific geographic areas in each city and will expand over time. This latest collaboration will use Ford vehicles integrated with Argo AI’s self-driving technology. The aim is to show the potential for autonomous vehicle delivery services at scale. The announcement illustrates Ford’s two-track system to launch a commercial service that uses autonomous vehicles to shuttle people and possibly packages. The automaker has been testing the business side of how a dedicated fleet of autonomous vehicles might operate in the real world.
Citi’s Treasury and Trade Solutions (TTS) division now facilitates digital bill payment for both institutional billers and their consumer customers via the RTP© network, the real-time payment system from The Clearing House (TCH). With this capability, Citi’s institutional clients in the U.S. can send electronic bills (e-bills) via Request for Payment (RfP) messages to retail account holders at Citi and other participating banks. Consumers, meanwhile, benefit from the flexibility to pay their bills immediately, at any time of day, 365 days a year, with greater control over their finances to help avoid overdraft fees. This full end-to-end solution is a first in the U.S., creating benefits for both Citi’s institutional clients and Citi’s consumer customers, while also supporting RfP messages to and from other participating banks within the TCH network.
For institutional billers, RfP capabilities have multiple potential benefits including:
Acceleration of funding of received payments.
Improving straight-through reconciliation and eliminating operational exceptions often associated with ACH direct debits and other traditional payment methods.
Full transparency and real-time visibility into when payments will be settled, helping reduce the need for calls into biller or bank customer service
For Citi retail account holders who opt to receive e-bills via RfP, potential benefits include:
Paying their bills immediately at any time of day, 365 days a year. Unlike for transactions made via ACH or paper checks, payments tied to RfPs by design are completed and settled in real-time via the RTP network.
Full control over the timing of each payment, including final say over whether and when to authorize and schedule each payment.
The Federal Reserve has launched new resources for the U.S. payments industry to facilitate education, preparation and ecosystem innovation in support of instant payments, a type of faster payment that provides payees with immediate access to funds, enabled by real-time final settlement between financial institutions. The Federal Reserve is offering new tools to help payments stakeholders better understand and address this market, including providing instant payments education and helping them prepare to adopt the FedNowSM Service for instant payments when it is launched in 2023. The Federal Reserve’s new instant payment tools and support include:
- The FedNow Explorer website, an experiential platform designed to educate and engage financial institutions and service providers with curated content and business tools to support their instant payments journey. The website will offer different learning path options for guided or self-guided exploration. Content includes instant payment basics; how the FedNow Service works; information about FedNow features, functionality and use cases; and how to plan and prepare for the FedNow Service.
- The Ecosystem Accelerator Group, a new user group within the FedNow Community that will provide payment processors, core banking system providers, mobile and online banking platform providers, payment hubs and gateways, bill pay/presentment service providers and others the opportunity to:
- Influence FedNow Service design and release priorities.
- Participate in programs designed for the needs and interests of solution developers and providers.
- Ask technical questions and obtain answers relevant to this ecosystem group.
- Network with the broader FedNow Community and potential partners among financial institutions, other service providers and business clients.
- A new Service Provider Showcase to support end-to-end development of the instant payments ecosystem and FedNow Service implementation. The online showcase will enable service providers to highlight their technical and consultative capabilities related to instant payments.
With business-to-business (B2B) showing particularly strong growth, and healthcare claim payments setting a record, the modern ACH Network recorded a 7.7% increase in payment volume during the third quarter of 2021. There were 7.3 billion payments on the ACH Network in the third quarter, 520 million more than a year earlier. The value of those payments, $18.1 trillion, reflects a rise of 13.8%. There were 1.4 billion B2B payments, an increase of 18.7% from the same time in 2020. Healthcare claim payments to medical and dental facilities and practices passed the 100 million mark for the first time, with 109.4 million such payments, up 15.8%. Same Day ACH volume continued to climb with 142.8 million payments valued at $236 billion in the third quarter, increases of 52.1% and 90.4% respectively. Same-day B2B payment and dollar volumes also grew robustly, increasing by nearly 120% and 160% respectively, compared to the same quarter in 2020.
- Pegasystems Inc. , the software company that crushes business complexity, announced enhancements to Pega Smart Investigate. As a market leader in payment exceptions management, Pega Smart Investigate enhancements will help enable users to easily adopt ISO 20022 messages into their workflows so they can process data between inbound and outbound communication formats.
- Users can implement Pega Smart Investigate ISO 20022 and SWIFT CBPR+ support out of the box or customize a specific ISO 20022 message model to help accommodate local market standards. Synced with the latest SWIFT standards supporting multiple financial communications, banks can effortlessly work between message type (MT) and ISO message formats without disrupting workflow. Pega Smart Investigate is an end-to-end case management system for payment exceptions used by more than 25 of the world’s largest global financial institutions.
- PayPal is in talks to buy Pinterest, a leading social media marketing that allows users to pin creative visual content in the form of images on its app. The PayPal-Pinterest deal is expected to be the biggest technology-related acquisition in the modern era.
- PayPal’s bid for Pinterest has the potential to disrupt the e-commerce world and this tie-up could see PayPal transform its business model into an e-commerce platform. PayPal sees a lot of potential in Pinterest’s model, which has 454 million monthly active users worldwide – meaning PayPal values each user at $100 – this is pretty extraordinary, as conversion rates to traditional wallet/financial products would traditionally be seen as pretty low. Pinterest has been testing its digital capabilities for its users for some time now. And, it firmly tasted success by announcing the launch of Idea Pins for the creators that allow users to monetize their content. But, that’s not the only reason why PayPal could be eyeing Pinterest for its biggest martech acquisition in fintech history. Pinterest has a massive user base, along with equally potent social media following across all leading Social Media Marketing channels.
- The tie up with PayPal would therefore herald a much more transactional Pinterest, away from what has until now been essentially an affiliate-type relationship with e-commerce. It has the potential to become a powerful hub for multiple brands and retailers to engage with shoppers and boost sales. Pinterest’s strength is that it has always been at the “curator” end – its flexible model is used first and foremost to inspire consumers who can then go on to make purchases. This is essentially what most retailers are trying to be these days, so it makes sense for it to evolve to be the whole package, especially with a transaction engine like PayPal behind it. Pinterest has built a strong community of users on its platform and allowed those who want to simply be curators to thrive. It’s therefore important that this is not lost if an acquisition goes ahead and is developed into an e-commerce platform, allowing both e-commerce professionals and curators to collaborate and exist in harmony.”
As the scale of cross-border transactions continues to grow, Mastercard is betting on its recent acquisitions of international payments provider HomeSend and global payments company TransFast to help it gain a lead in the space.
MasterCard journey on this path starts with HomeSend. It was a joint venture and MasterCard invested in it about seven years ago and completed the acquisition of minority stake holder in HomeSend in late September. TransFast was all about providing MasterCard with the capabilities so that MasterCard could build a franchise for how it wanted to deliver the cross-border services proposition to customers. So, MasterCard required these two things and had an organic stream of work going on in the background as well to build certain capabilities. Both of these assets are critical enablers for MasterCard to be able to offer and bring to market cross-border services. And that’s MasterCard value construct to core customer groups, which are predominantly banks, digital partners and other fintechs.
Over the last 10 years, what’s really grown is the number of smaller value tickets. So, MasterCard have focused in that lower value payments area. Because the business models they’re flowing through, like correspondent banking, aren’t really cut out for low-value payments. If Boeing wants to go and pay Rolls-Royce for a whole series of engines, you know, that correspondent banking mechanism works brilliantly. But if you’re trying to send money to your family in Kenya, the experience is just awful because it gets pushed through a mechanism that’s not fit for purpose. So, what gets delivered and the values that get extracted along the way are completely disproportionate to the values that are being transferred in the first place. People need predictability and they need certainty.
Visa, in partnership with Verifi, is now enabling issuers in select markets to participate in its Rapid Dispute Resolution (RDR) service within Visa Resolve Online (VROL) to promptly resolve pre-disputes and avoid unnecessary chargebacks. RDR allows sellers to accept financial liability at the pre-dispute stage before a chargeback can be raised, reducing operational requirements and lowering dispute ratios. In addition, the transaction is also identified for issuers and acquirers as being accepted by the seller with an indicator in the VROL system. And issuers and acquirers now have more visibility, giving them the ability to provide necessary tracking and reporting in the pre-dispute space. RDR allows issuers and sellers an opportunity to collaborate to resolve customer disputes that could have easily been settled directly with the seller. By using RDR, disputes can likely be resolved quicker, using fewer resources but with the same clarity and reporting available within VROL. If a seller chooses not to resolve a pre-dispute using RDR, it will go through the full dispute process.
- PayPal is in late-stage talks to acquire Pinterest, which could help PayPal reach users earlier in the shopping journey. The potential deal would add to PayPal’s growing arsenal of shopper-focused features it hopes can help it win and retain merchants and reach its goal of 1 billion active users. For Pinterest, the move serves as a boost to its ambitions to expand beyond its social-media roots and convert its 454 million users into shoppers with the help of one of the biggest payments player in the world. PayPal is increasingly looking for ways to increase its appeal to merchants and justify its fees as its original value proposition — easier online checkouts — faces pressure. PayPal’s checkout button competes not only with other payments providers like Stripe and Square, but also with buy now, pay later players like Affirm and Klarna and one-click checkout services like Apple Pay, Bolt, Fast and Google Pay. Pinterest could serve as a brand-discovery channel for online shoppers, giving PayPal a foothold earlier in users’ shopping journey.
- Pinterest acquisition is interesting as it can help PayPal develop a better understanding of customer’s aspirational shopping needs and preferences.
- Coupled with transaction data, this may unlock incremental value for PayPal merchants. By getting involved earlier in the shopping journey, PayPal can pitch itself as a sales-generating partner for retailers. While acquiring Pinterest may help PayPal boost engagement, it also puts it in competition with its existing partners like Shopify and e-commerce giants like Amazon. Embedding PayPal’s e-commerce capabilities (like one-click checkout and identity verification) into Pinterest could also make it a formidable competitor to Shopify when it comes to winning merchants. Shopify has had lots of success with small retailers, but the PayPal-Pinterest combo could prove more attractive to larger merchants.
- Mastercard has announced a new supply chain finance capability within Track Business Payment Service (Track BPS) – designed to increase access to working capital while lowering costs, reducing complexity and risk, and accelerating automation when businesses pay and get paid. Launched in partnership with Demica, a provider of supply chain finance technology, this new offering empowers Mastercard partners to provide their business customers with access to affordable working capital. Mastercard Track, an open-loop network, can now connect providers of B2B payments and their respective buyer and supplier customers to working capital. Mastercard’s solution unlocks a network for working capital – covering small businesses and global corporations alike, driving speed to market, and offering ease of integration for payment partners.
- Demica brings a global, flexible, multi-product financing platform and expansive network of banks and other funders at scale. Payment partners and their customers can benefit from Demica’s capabilities ranging from advisory services, supplier onboarding, and a white-labelled deployment process. This solution enables payment partners to extend the reach of buyer programs to more of their supply chain partners, strengthening supplier relationships.
- Square has announced two new tools in the UK to help businesses grow their sales and engage customers with just a few clicks. The two tools, Square Marketing and Square Loyalty, are now available as separate subscriptions for UK businesses of all types and sizes. Square Marketing helps businesses reach customers at the right time and all in one place. The tool allows businesses to create, send, and track email marketing campaigns in minutes — from one-time email blasts to personalised automations — expanding customer reach and helping sellers gain key business insights with analytics. Businesses can also now build a loyalty program in minutes with the launch of Square Loyalty. This new to market tool can help turn one-time visitors into regulars and increase repeat visits. It’s easy to set up a customised loyalty program that rewards customers both in-store and online. This double-product launch aims to further level the playing field for businesses of all types and sizes, as it provides all businesses with easy-to-use, powerful marketing tools that have typically only been used by big businesses.
- Square Marketing key features:
Drive buyer engagement & ROI – Square Marketing offers businesses a powerful tool to help grow their customer base, drive repeat visits, and increase buyer spend.
Plan ahead, automate, and send – Businesses can schedule or immediately send emails to customers by leveraging Square Marketing’s automation capabilities, saving them time and effort.
Measure campaign results – Real-time tracking is available in the Square Marketing Dashboard around active campaigns, open and click through rates, as well as attributable sales.
- Square Loyalty key features:
Enable omnichannel selling – Square Loyalty allows businesses to reward customers wherever they choose to purchase, whether that’s in-store or online.
Drive visits and sales – Businesses can encourage repeat customers through the implementation of a loyalty program.
Fully integrated – Square Loyalty is built into businesses point-of-sale and website with no extra devices, logins, or paper punch cards needed.
Mastercard and Previse have announced the integration of Mastercard Cross-Border Services – a global push payments platform that enables funds to be sent seamlessly, securely and with certainty to any account – into Previse’s InstantPay platform. The collaboration will enable instant payments to suppliers in over 100 markets globally. Previse’s InstantPay solution analyzes invoices to identify those that are likely to be rejected, enabling the rest to be paid the same day they’re received. With the integration of Mastercard’s Cross-Border Services, companies using InstantPay can now send digital payments seamlessly and securely to suppliers in over 100 counties via bank accounts and digital wallets. In addition to paying suppliers quickly, business can reduce the cost of transactions and access real-time exchange rates for local currency, while reducing the need for additional documents and manual processes. With Mastercard Cross-Border Services, businesses can expect to receive funds quickly, directly and securely. It’s an innovative solution from Mastercard and Previse, which strengthens global supply chains and is a true win-win for large corporates and SMBs alike
“In a move aimed in part at accommodating digital-only financial institutions, Visa Inc. opened its ReadyLink prepaid top-up network for the first time to debit cards. The expansion makes Visa ReadyLink available to all consumer and business debit cards. The service is optional and issuers need to opt-in,”. ReadyLink is Visa’s prepaid card load network for the U.S. market. It offers cash top-ups at more than 60,000 merchant locations. The addition of debit cards represents a rule change for the network.” With the expansion, Visa says it hopes to add to the convenience of its debit card holders, citing cases where additional trips to the bank aren’t convenient. It also sees the move aiding financial institutions that have emerged in recent years to serve customers in the online channel exclusively. “It … benefits programs like Chime that are branchless, as their accountholders have a new channel to add funds.” Some experts in prepaid services see potential for the expansion to apply ultimately to a broad base of financial institutions. “While this is only … open to a limited number of companies, it could offer a way for traditional banks to expand their own digital bank offerings,”
Amazon has introduced its Product Opportunity Explorer tool for third-party sellers to find ways to roll out products “to serve unmet customer demand. Amazon’s new Product Opportunity Explorer tool “helps take the guesswork out of identifying which products to launch by providing sellers with rich insights into what customers are searching for, clicking on, and buying, as well as not buying. Product Opportunity Explorer also helps sellers to find niches of emerging product opportunities through the use of detailed data on search volume and growth, sales history and pricing trends, which allows sellers to find and act on customer demand. Product Opportunity Explorer tool provides sellers with insights to help them bring new products to market faster and more efficiently. Amazon also offers sellers the chance to use the Fulfillment By Amazon Selection program to boost early sales with lower storage and advertising costs and Brand Registry sellers can use Amazon Vine to establish more complete customer reviews for $200 per enrolled product. New Amazon data unveiled this week shows their third-party marketplace sellers are achieving success even as lawmakers increase their focus on the retail giant’s private-label business practices.
Amazon is rolling out “Local Selling,” a set of services that allow local and regional retailers to offer both in-store pickup and fast delivery to nearby customers. With this new option, sellers can offer in-store pickup for products and services to shoppers in specific ZIP codes. In some instances, customers will be able to purchase items from sellers for same-day pickup at the business’s local retail location. Products that are available for pickup will have a “store pickup” tab on the item page. Once customers place an order, they’ll receive a notification when their item is ready for pickup. When the item is ready, customers will have a five-day pickup window to collect their orders. Shoppers can also choose local delivery, which will be facilitated by the business itself. Once you select the “arranged delivery” option at checkout, the local retailer will contact you to schedule the exact date and time for the delivery. Some sellers may also offer installation services that you can add on top of your order.
Google is launching the latest version of its Chrome web browser on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. Among the many improvements in the latest version are 19 security updates, as well as a secure payment confirmation via WebAuthn. The payment authentication feature adds a new payment extension to WebAuthn, which provides for an entity, including a bank, to create a PublicKeyCredential that any retailer can inquire about via an online checkout process. In addition, the Chrome 95 release features a default Material You redesign for all users on Android 12. Chrome began launching the Material You redesign in part with the Chrome 93 release. One of the main aspects of Android 12’s Material You reimagining is the ability for users to use their current wallpaper colors throughout their favorite apps. The latest Chrome release also limits cookie sizes with the sum of the lengths of the cookie’s name and value limited to 4096 bytes and a maximum length of each cookie set at 1024 bytes.
The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has launched a probe into the consumer data and financial practices of digital payment systems including Apple Pay, Google, PayPal, and others. The CFPB was to query big tech firms about data use, it has now been revealed that the probe is into management of digital payment systems. Digital payment systems “offer significant potential benefits” to businesses and individuals, but that there is a risk to having technology firms monetizing the consumer behavior data they collect in the process. The CFPB will also study the practices of the Chinese tech giants that offer payments services, such as WeChatPay and Alipay. The agency’s questions will be broad in scope, and could include inquiries about how consumer data collected by the companies is used in lending decisions or how consumer data is used to target ads.
Starbucks has been in talks with Amazon to make a new kind of coffee shop with Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology, allowing customers to purchase items without going through a regular checkout. The initial layout of the store shows Amazon Go’s food section within a cafe that has a lounge seating area. Customers would have to use separate apps for pay — Starbucks’s app for drinks and Amazon’s app for food — though the companies eventually want to build an integrated solution. The store was expected to have a newly created brand. Just Walk Out lets shoppers scan a code or their palm when they walk in, then take items from the shelf and leave without going through a traditional check-out. It uses scales, cameras and sensors to detect which items shoppers take, charging their accounts after they leave the store.
Google has upgraded one of the device’s most basic functions: the ability to make phone calls. Google adding new ones — including a tool that shows you the best time to call a business and a new Duplex-powered feature for navigating businesses’ phone trees. With the Phone app on Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, a new feature called “Wait Times” will display the projected time it will take to get through to a person when dialing a toll-free number. You’ll be able to see this information before you place the call not only for the present time, but also for the rest of the week. This information may allow you to make a better decision about when to place the call. Of course, to show this information, Google is leveraging its ability to collect data from its users. Like how Google Maps will show you when a business is the most crowded using anonymized data from Maps users, “Wait Times” are inferred from call length data when calls are placed through its phone app. This data is not linked to individual users. Another new addition is the “Direct My Call” feature, which will help you get through complicated phone trees when you dial a business.
Apple informed developers about a Tech Talks 2021 venture, which will allow developers to connect with Apple experts in more than 100 live online sessions and 1,500 available office hour appointments. Developers can use the sessions to dive into technical content, get answers to questions, and seek one-on-one meetings for guidance. Sessions will be held online from Apple locations around the world in multiple time zones, including Bengaluru, India; Cupertino, California; London; Mexico City; São Paulo; Seoul, South Korea; Shanghai; Singapore; Sydney; Tel Aviv, Israel; and Tokyo. Live sessions will provide developers with details on how to integrate the latest technologies into their apps, while 30 minute office hour sessions can be used to make app improvements, design revisions, and bug fixes.
Apple released new Human Interface Guidelines detailing how developers can best to utilize the laptops’ expanded screen real estate. Apple caused a bit of a stir with its decision to slim down MacBook Pro’s display bezels to the point where a “notch” is needed to house the machine’s front-facing camera, a design language borrowed from iPhone and affordances made for that device’s TrueDepth array. Developers can choose to include a black bar at the top of the screen to hide the cutout — aping the design of past MacBook Pro generations — or take full advantage of the extra space with a new compatibility mode. MacBooks that include a camera housing in the screen bezel provide a special operating mode that prevents full screen apps from placing content under the notch. When active, compatibility mode automatically changes the active area of the system’s display to avoid the housing cutout, ensuring that content is not obscured. Developers can opt for a custom full-screen experience, but they will need to define safe areas in their code using new tools. For example, app makers can specify a large safe area with an inset at the top of the screen that leaves the entirety of the app unobscured.
- HomePod mini uses computational audio to provide a rich and detailed acoustic experience and deliver peak performance. To achieve big sound out of such a compact design, the Apple S5 chip runs advanced software to analyze the unique characteristics of the music. It also applies complex tuning models to optimize loudness, adjust the dynamic range, and control the movement of the driver and passive radiators, all in real time. HomePod mini’s full-range driver, premium neodymium magnet, and pair of force-cancelling passive radiators enable it to produce deep bass and crisp high frequencies.
- HomePod mini is designed to work with Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, thousands of radio stations including the award-winning Apple Music 1 station, and popular music services like Pandora, Deezer, and others, providing entertainment for everyone.
- With HomePod mini, only after “Hey Siri” is recognized locally on the device, or the user activates Siri by touch, will any information be sent to Apple servers. Requests are not associated with the user’s Apple ID, nor is personal information used for Apple’s advertising purposes or sold to other organizations. HomePod mini works with iPhone to complete requests for messages and notes on the device without revealing that information to Apple.
Google Maps is rolling out a significant feature called “eco-friendly routing” to its Android and iOS apps to give folks an option to aid in reducing vehicle emissions. Google Maps will suggest a route that lowers fuel consumption. It may be slightly longer or take more time than the traditional “fastest” route, but the goal is to save fuel here. And in some cases, the fastest route will also be the most fuel efficient route, so it’ll only share the one option. If multiple routes are displayed, Google will show you the relative fuel savings (shows up as a percentage) and ETA difference between the fuel efficient and fastest routes. You can then make your choice between the two — the eco route is singled out with a green leaf to ensure you know which it is. If you’d rather not see the eco-friendly route, you can turn the feature off, and Google will only display the fastest route. Google’s using both AI and “insights from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).” Of course, we all know that different cars might be more fuel efficient in different scenarios.
Apple has given its customers in India another chance to add funds to their Apple ID and to receive a 20% bonus, at a time when Apple and developers brace for a regulatory change affecting App Store subscriptions. Customers in India adding funds to their Apple ID will see a notification advising they will get a “20% bonus” if they add funds to their account before the end of October. The bonus applies for anyone adding between 100 rupees ($1.33) and 15,000 rupees ($200) to their account balance, in a single transaction. Running until October 31, the deal’s availability partially depends on the user’s account information or purchase history. Examples given by Apple, as spotted by developer Mustafa Yusuf and first reported by 9to5Mac, include users gaining a bonus 400 rupees for a 2,000 rupee top-up, or an extra 1,000 rupees for topping up 5,000 rupees.
Telecommunications services provider, Airtel Nigeria, has announced a strategic partnership with Google and Dotgo, a cloud communications and business messaging solutions provider, to offer upgraded SMS experience to enterprises and entrepreneurs in Nigeria. The upgraded SMS experience will be delivered through RCS (Rich Communications Services), a part of the 5G technology and its features include pictures, audio, video, and presence, combined with enhanced security and encryption. The partnership will offer Nigerian businesses, enterprises, entrepreneurs as well as individuals an innovative platform to connect, share, influence and engage. With Airtel coming on board, the RCS adoption in Nigeria has scaled newer heights. RCS messages are delivered into native messaging apps such as Google Messages and Samsung Messages on Android phones. RCS Business Messages uses the richer and interactive features of RCS to enable branded and secure business messaging. Under the partnership, Google will provide the cloud infrastructure for delivering the RCS messages to Airtel subscribers, including the Google Jibe RCS platform for business messaging while Dotgo would provide its MaaP (Messaging-as-a-Platform), integrated with Google’s Jibe RCS platform, along with complete managed services needed to operate and monetize RCS Business Messages.
Google Search is refreshing its UI with a new feature, that will make scrolling easier than before on mobiles. The new feature enables users to continuously scroll results while using Google Search. The update is meant for Google Search on mobile and will automatically display more results when users scroll to the bottom of a results page. This will in turn eliminate the need to tap on a button, to get more results while browsing through a set of Google Search results on mobile. The update is set to make browsing search results more seamless on mobile devices. While browsing when users reach the bottom of a search results page, the next set of results will load automatically with relevant details.
Florida is working with Apple to introduce support for its upcoming digital driver’s licenses to the iPhone’s Wallet app. The state is developing a Smart-ID app that will allow Floridians to provide a secure way to provide identification using a smartphone. Starting in mid-November, the state will issue a smartphone app on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. Although Wallet support won’t be available initially, Apple is to be working with the state to make the digital IDs available in Wallet. Florida’s digital ID will allow users to prove their identity to law enforcement officers in a verifiable and secure manner. In addition, businesses that require age verification will also be able to use digital IDs, although they’ll receive less personal information than law enforcement.
- Google unveiled a range of data-focused products including Intelligent Product Essentials and enhancements to Vertex AI, BigQuery, Contact Center AI (CCAI), and DocAI. The new analytics and industry solutions are designed to simplify how organizations derive value from data.
- Intelligent Product Essentials: Intelligent Product Essentials aims to assist manufacturers in developing hardware products. With it, they’re able to deliver AI-enabled devices that can update over-the-air and provide insights using analytics in the cloud. Intelligent Product Essentials can be used to create personalized customer experiences — for example, a chatbot that contextualizes responses based on product status and customer profiles.
- Vertex AI, BigQuery, and Spark: Google is expanding Vertex AI service with Vertex AI Workbench, a user experience to build and deploy AI models faster, accelerating time-to-value for data scientists and their organizations. W
- Google is making generally available BigQuery Omni, which allows businesses to analyze data across Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure. The managed, cross-cloud analytics solution helps to answer questions and share results from a single pane of glass across datasets, complementing
- Google also announced a preview of Spark on Google Cloud, which the company claims is the world’s first autoscaling and serverless Spark service for Google Cloud. It allows data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts to use Spark from their preferred interfaces, writing apps and pipelines that autoscale without manual infrastructure provisioning or tuning.
- Google debuted new integrations with Looker that it says will allow customers to “operationalize analytics” and more effectively scale deployments.
- Google Earth Engine: Google unveiled Google Earth Engine on Google Cloud, which makes Google Earth Engine’s catalog of over 50 petabytes of satellite imagery and geospatial datasets available for analysis.
- CCAI and DocAI: Google Cloud’s CCAI, which offers AI-powered virtual agents and other features, while the company’s AI-powered document processing service DocAI rolled out in April. Now, the two services are each gaining new features in CCAI Insights and Contract DocAI. CCAI Insights provides out-of-the-box and custom data modeling techniques, and Contract DocAI — now in preview — brings features purpose-built for contract lifecycles and processing.
Apple is looking to expand its CarPlay interface reach within cars. The company is working on technology that would access functions like the climate-control system, speedometer, radio and seats, according to people with knowledge of the effort. The initiative, known as “IronHeart” internally, is still in its early stages and would require the cooperation of automakers. The iPhone-based system could access a range of controls, sensors and settings. That includes: inside and outside temperature and humidity readings; Temperature zones, fans and the defroster systems; Settings for adjusting surround-sound speakers, equalizers, tweeters, subwoofers, and the fade and balance; Seats and armrests; The speedometer, tachometer and fuel instrument clusters. By gaining access to controls and instruments, Apple could turn CarPlay into an interface that could span nearly the entire car. The data also could be used by Apple or third parties to create new kinds of apps or add features to existing functions. Some Apple users have complained about the need to jump between CarPlay and a car’s built-in system to manage key controls. This initiative would alleviate that friction.
Innovations & Trends
We’re on the look out for the latest trends, strategies and innovations. Do you have something to share? We’d love to hear from you.
Share an Innovation with Us.
Digital Brief delivers the latest disruptive financial innovations.