ACI Worldwide launches instant payment service via Mastercard Send, Visa Direct Source: Mobile Payments Today
ACI Worldwide announced the launch of a service called ACI Disbursement Services, which allows businesses to send payments directly to customer debit cards, according to a press release.
The Naples, Florida-based payments company said the new service, which is part of its Up Bill Payment business, allows businesses, such as banks, insurance companies and other organizations to make real-time payments through Visa Direct and Mastercard Send.
"It currently takes several days to send out disbursements to consumers, which is unacceptable in a world where consumer expectations for instant and digital payments are high," Sanjay Gupta, executive vice president, ACI Worldwide, said in the release. "This is especially true with the Gen Z population, whose biggest challenge is the speed with which they receive money."
ACI cited research from Aite Group that shows 65% of consumers say it’s important for them to receive instant payments from companies or government agencies.
LGT Vestra selects CREALOGIX for new wealth management mobile app
Source: IBS Intelligence
UK-based wealth management firm LGT Vestra is developing new mobile capabilities to enhance the digital experience for their high-net-worth clients. Their wealth management mobile app and client portal is being implemented with products created by Swiss Fintech CREALOGIX. LGT Vestra offers a range of investment management and wealth planning services and manages over £12.7bn in assets.
Ben Snee, CEO of LGT Vestra, said: “We are determined to meet and exceed our clients’ expectations and ensure they enjoy being clients of the firm. We are continuously looking for ways to enhance and improve our service. Developing new digital and mobile capabilities with CREALOGIX will increase accessibility and efficiencies which will benefit our client experience.”
The firm is adding new mobile functionality to enhance digital services for their high-net-worth clients. The app will enable LGT Vestra clients to easily access their account and portfolio information providing an efficient and secure digital experience which will enhance client engagement.
David Joyce, Senior Vice President of CREALOGIX UK, said: “A well-designed digital wealth management platform increases engagement, trust, and loyalty among private clients while leveraging the capabilities the firm’s investment and advisory expertise. We’re delighted that our software will support and continue developing LGT Vestra’s unique strengths with their current customers and future generations.”
It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.
The Max software — plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw — was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.
Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace — notably India.
Boeing 737 Max prepares for take off during testing in 2016.
Photographer: Mike Kane/Bloomberg
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In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max.
The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”
Boeing’s cultivation of Indian companies appeared to pay other dividends. In recent years, it has won several orders for Indian military and commercial aircraft, such as a $22 billion one in January 2017 to supply SpiceJet Ltd. That order included 100 737-Max 8 jets and represented Boeing’s largest order ever from an Indian airline, a coup in a country dominated by Airbus.
Based on resumes posted on social media, HCL engineers helped develop and test the Max’s flight-display software, while employees from another Indian company, Cyient Ltd., handled software for flight-test equipment.
Costly Delay
In one post, an HCL employee summarized his duties with a reference to the now-infamous model, which started flight tests in January 2016: “Provided quick workaround to resolve production issue which resulted in not delaying flight test of 737-Max (delay in each flight test will cost very big amount for Boeing).”
Boeing said the company did not rely on engineers from HCL and Cyient for the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, which has been linked to the Lion Air crash last October and the Ethiopian Airlines disaster in March. The Chicago-based planemaker also said it didn’t rely on either firm for another software issue disclosed after the crashes: a cockpit warning light that wasn’t working for most buyers.
“Boeing has many decades of experience working with supplier/partners around the world,” a company spokesman said. “Our primary focus is on always ensuring that our products and services are safe, of the highest quality and comply with all applicable regulations.”
In a statement, HCL said it “has a strong and long-standing business relationship with The Boeing Company, and we take pride in the work we do for all our customers. However, HCL does not comment on specific work we do for our customers. HCL is not associated with any ongoing issues with 737 Max.”
Recent simulator tests by the Federal Aviation Administration suggest the software issues on Boeing’s best-selling model run deeper. The company’s shares fell this week after the regulator found a further problem with a computer chip that experienced a lag in emergency response when it was overwhelmed with data.
Engineers who worked on the Max, which Boeing began developing eight years ago to match a rival Airbus SE plane, have complained of pressure from managers to limit changes that might introduce extra time or cost.
“Boeing was doing all kinds of things, everything you can imagine, to reduce cost, including moving work from Puget Sound, because we’d become very expensive here,” said Rick Ludtke, a former Boeing flight controls engineer laid off in 2017. “All that’s very understandable if you think of it from a business perspective. Slowly over time it appears that’s eroded the ability for Puget Sound designers to design.”
Rabin, the former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature. “I was shocked that in a room full of a couple hundred mostly senior engineers we were being told that we weren’t needed,” said Rabin, who was laid off in 2015.
Boeing 737 Max Timeline
Boeing could take three more months to fix the latest software glitch on the 737 Max, its best-selling model.
(Source: TicToc)
The typical jetliner has millions of parts — and millions of lines of code — and Boeing has long turned over large portions of the work to suppliers who follow its detailed design blueprints.
Starting with the 787 Dreamliner, launched in 2004, it sought to increase profits by instead providing high-level specifications and then asking suppliers to design more parts themselves. The thinking was “they’re the experts, you see, and they will take care of all of this stuff for us,” said Frank McCormick, a former Boeing flight-controls software engineer who later worked as a consultant to regulators and manufacturers. “This was just nonsense.”
Sales are another reason to send the work overseas. In exchange for an $11 billion order in 2005 from Air India, Boeing promised to invest $1.7 billion in Indian companies. That was a boon for HCL and other software developers from India, such as Cyient, whose engineers were widely used in computer-services industries but not yet prominent in aerospace.
Rockwell Collins, which makes cockpit electronics, had been among the first aerospace companies to source significant work in India in 2000, when HCL began testing software there for the Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based company. By 2010, HCL employed more than 400 people at design, development and verification centers for Rockwell Collins in Chennai and Bangalore.
That same year, Boeing opened what it called a “center of excellence” with HCL in Chennai, saying the companies would partner “to create software critical for flight test.” In 2011, Boeing named Cyient, then known as Infotech, to a list of its “suppliers of the year” for design, stress analysis and software engineering on the 787 and the 747-8 at another center in Hyderabad.
The Boeing rival also relies in part on offshore engineers. In addition to supporting sales, the planemakers say global design teams add efficiency as they work around the clock. But outsourcing has long been a sore point for some Boeing engineers, who, in addition to fearing job losses say it has led to communications issues and mistakes.
Moscow Mistakes
Boeing has also expanded a design center in Moscow. At a meeting with a chief 787 engineer in 2008, one staffer complained about sending drawings back to a team in Russia 18 times before they understood that the smoke detectors needed to be connected to the electrical system, said Cynthia Cole, a former Boeing engineer who headed the engineers’ union from 2006 to 2010.
“Engineering started becoming a commodity,” said Vance Hilderman, who co-founded a company called TekSci that supplied aerospace contract engineers and began losing work to overseas competitors in the early 2000s.
U.S.-based avionics companies in particular moved aggressively, shifting more than 30% of their software engineering offshore versus 10% for European-based firms in recent years, said Hilderman, an avionics safety consultant with three decades of experience whose recent clients include most of the major Boeing suppliers.
With a strong dollar, a big part of the attraction was price. Engineers in India made around $5 an hour; it’s now $9 or $10, compared with $35 to $40 for those in the U.S. on an H1B visa, he said. But he’d tell clients the cheaper hourly wage equated to more like $80 because of the need for supervision, and he said his firm won back some business to fix mistakes.
HCL, once known as Hindustan Computers, was founded in 1976 by billionaire Shiv Nadar and now has more than $8.6 billion in annual sales. With 18,000 employees in the U.S. and 15,000 in Europe, HCL is a global company and has deep expertise in computing, said Sukamal Banerjee, a vice president. It has won business from Boeing on that basis, not on price, he said: “We came from a strong R&D background.”
Still, for the 787, HCL gave Boeing a remarkable price – free, according to Sam Swaro, an associate vice president who pitched HCL’s services at a San Diego conference sponsored by Avionics International magazine in June. He said the company took no up-front payments on the 787 and only started collecting payments based on sales years later, an “innovative business model” he offered to extend to others in the industry.
The 787 entered service three years late and billions of dollars over budget in 2011, in part because of confusion introduced by the outsourcing strategy. Under Dennis Muilenburg, a longtime Boeing engineer who became chief executive in 2015, the company has said that it planned to bring more work back in-house for its newest planes.
Engineer Backwater
The Max became Boeing’s top seller soon after it was offered in 2011. But for ambitious engineers, it was something of a “backwater,” said Peter Lemme, who designed the 767’s automated flight controls and is now a consultant. The Max was an update of a 50-year-old design, and the changes needed to be limited enough that Boeing could produce the new planes like cookie cutters, with few changes for either the assembly line or airlines. “As an engineer that’s not the greatest job,” he said.
Rockwell Collins, now a unit of United Technologies Corp., won the Max contract for cockpit displays, and it has relied in part on HCL engineers in India, Iowa and the Seattle area. A United Technologies spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Boeing 737 Max airplanes at the company’s manufacturing facility in Renton, Washington.
Photographer: David Ryder/Bloomberg
Contract engineers from Cyient helped test flight test equipment. Charles LoveJoy, a former flight-test instrumentation design engineer at the company, said engineers in the U.S. would review drawings done overnight in India every morning at 7:30 a.m. “We did have our challenges with the India team,” he said. “They met the requirements, per se, but you could do it better.”
Multiple investigations – including a Justice Department criminal probe – are trying to unravel how and when critical decisions were made about the Max’s software. During the crashes of Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines planes that killed 346 people, investigators suspect, the MCAS system pushed the planes into uncontrollable dives because of bad data from a single sensor.
That design violated basic principles of redundancy for generations of Boeing engineers, and the company apparently never tested to see how the software would respond, Lemme said. “It was a stunning fail,” he said. “A lot of people should have thought of this problem – not one person – and asked about it.”
Boeing also has disclosed that it learned soon after Max deliveries began in 2017 that a warning light that might have alerted crews to the issue with the sensor wasn’t installed correctly in the flight-display software. A Boeing statement in May, explaining why the company didn’t inform regulators at the time, said engineers had determined it wasn’t a safety issue.
“Senior company leadership,” the statement added, “was not involved in the review.”
JP Morgan’s secretive UK digital bank plans revealed Source: Bankingtech
JP Morgan is reportedly set to launch a new online retail banking project in the UK, according to TechCrunch. The bank’s secretive project comes just weeks after it closed its millennial retail offering Finn in the US.
The US bank has been reaching out to developers to build a product which could challenge Goldman Sachs’ Marcus and the competitive UK challenger bank scene, dominated by brands like Monzo.
Several incumbent banks are known to be developing new digital-first products in a bid to keep the new wave of challenger banks at bay and now it appears that the latest to make that move is JP Morgan.
According to sources, the investment bank has begun recruiting for a secretive skunkworks project within London’s booming fintech industry. Very few details are known about what exactly JP Morgan plans to build, although TechCrunch reports that the bank is busy hiring high level developers with full-stack and cloud-based development skills for the new project, along with other personnel.
One source told TechCrunch that interested candidates are being asked to sign an none-disclosure agreements (NDA) and that the project is still in its formative stages. They say the plan is to essentially build a start-up within a corporation that will be run independently and entirely separately from JP Morgan’s existing technology and businesses.
UOB Malaysia launches transformation programme to help Malaysian companies
United Overseas Bank (Malaysia) Bhd (UOB Malaysia) launched a business transformation programme, the “Jom[1] Transform Programme”, to help businesses in Malaysia adopt technology to drive productivity and growth. The Jom Transform Programme is run by The FinLab, an innovation accelerator under United Overseas Bank Limited. The FinLab first launched its business transformation programme in Singapore in 2018.
During the three-month Jom Transform Programme, participating businesses will attend a series of workshops conducted by industry experts[2] to gain the necessary skills and know-how in specific areas of digital transformation such as business process re-engineering and digital marketing. They will also be matched with specially-chosen technology partners to pilot relevant solutions and to receive guidance to assess the effectiveness of these solutions.
Mr Wong Kim Choong, Chief Executive Officer, UOB Malaysia, said the Jom Transform Programme reaffirms the Bank’s commitment to help Malaysian businesses digitalise their businesses for continued growth.
“The FinLab’s Jom Transform Programme will help businesses digitally transform their operations, and in turn support the national agenda on business innovation. Through the adoption of technology, Malaysian businesses will be able to manage their operations more efficiently, to improve productivity and to upskill their employees to ensure that their business remains relevant in the digital economy. To help these businesses grow further, we will also support them in their expansion both at home and across the region through UOB’s established and integrated network.”
Payzello is a new challenger bank in India, focusing on the retail market that offers a wide variety of products, with a specific focus on personal finance management.
In its list of offerings, the firm includes a single card for both debit and credit, app-based loans, money transfer and request, end to end expense management, Bharat QR, three minutes’ account opening, among others – and all this with zero paperwork.
A chatbot is included in the app, called Ello. It was made for conversations regarding users’ finances and provides suggestions.
Currently, Payzello is not a bank, although it has partnered with multiple banks to provide users with financial solutions. However, Payzello does have ambitions to apply for a banking licence. Its banking partners are Laxmi Vilas Bank and Yes Bank.
Payzello applies an ‘extremely flat hierarchy’ throughout the decision making, as it believes in empowering its people.
The firm is based in Hyderabad, Telangana. The company’s CTO is Udit Prasad Mishra, who had previously founded Instafund Internet, a fintech; and a developer at Zeta Interactive – according to its LinkedIn profile. Payzello is available both in Android and iOS
JPMorgan Chase is shutting down Finn, the mobile-only banking offshoot aimed at millennials, just a year after its nationwide launch.
As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the banking giant began telling Finn customers that their funds are being transferred to other Chase accounts.
JPMorgan designed mobile-only Finn by working closely with millennials for more than a year to understand their unique money challenges and what influences their spending. It launched nationwide last June following a trial in St Louis.
Finn came complete with a set of smart budgeting tools, autosaving features and the ability to use emojis to rate transactions and purchases bought using the app.
JPMorgan Chase is one of several established lenders to launch a standalone mobile offering in an effort to win over younger customers and fend off the challenge of digital upstarts.
But the bank has now decided that Chase is better suited to provide Finn’s services itself, sources tell the WSJ.
Microsoft and Oracle partner for cloud interoperability services
Microsoft and Oracle have entered into a cloud interoperability partnership which aims to enable customers to migrate and run their workloads across Microsoft Azure and Oracle cloud. The cloud service providers state that the partnership is expected to allow enterprises to connect seamlessly to Azure’s and Oracle Cloud’s services, deliver an optimized experience and provide a one-stop shop for all the cloud services.
“As the cloud of choice for the enterprise, with over 95% of the Fortune 500 using Azure, we have always been first and foremost focused on helping our customers thrive on their digital transformation journeys,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and AI division. “With Oracle’s enterprise expertise, this alliance is a natural choice for us as we help our joint customers accelerate the migration of enterprise applications and databases to the public cloud.”
The partnership will allow for the development of new scenarios like running Oracle E-Business Suite or Oracle JD Edwards on Azure against an Oracle Autonomous Database running on Exadata infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. Some of the new set of capabilities defined is the development of unified identity and access management, deployment of custom applications and packaged Oracle applications and a collaborative support model for IT organisations for deploying the new capabilities.
“The Oracle Cloud offers a complete suite of integrated applications for sales, service, marketing, human resources, finance, supply chain and manufacturing, plus highly automated and secure Generation 2 infrastructure featuring the Oracle Autonomous Database,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). “Oracle and Microsoft have served enterprise customer needs for decades. With this partnership, our joint customers can migrate their entire set of existing applications to the cloud without having to re-architect anything, preserving the large investments they have already made.”
Tink, the European open banking platform that recently raised €56 million in new funding, is disclosing that PayPal has become a strategic investor.
The online payments giant joins a long list of existing backers that includes U.S.-based Insight Venture Partners, Sunstone Capital (which recently re-branded as Heartcore Capital), SEB, Nordea Ventures and ABN AMRO Digital Impact Fund. Individuals such as Christian Clausen, former chairman of the European Banking Federation, and Nikolay Storonsky, co-founder of banking app Revolut, are also investors.
Originally launched in Sweden in 2013 as a consumer-facing finance app with bank account aggregation at its heart, Tink has since repositioned its offering to provide the same underlying technology and more to banks and other financial service providers that want to ride the open banking/PSD2 train.
Through various APIs, Tink provides four pillars of technology: “Account Aggregation,” “Payment Initiation,” “Personal Finance Management” and “Data Enrichment.” These can be used by third parties to roll their own standalone apps or integrated into existing banking applications.
Meanwhile, with its investment, PayPal has agreed to partner with Tink to leverage its account aggregation technology to “improve product experiences” for PayPal customers. What this means in practice isn’t entirely clear, although it is likely PayPal could use open banking for easier and more secure onboarding. Another obvious use case would be to check your bank balance prior to initiating a debit card payment or use your transaction history in relation to PayPal Credit.
Adds Jennifer Marriner, VP of global markets and partnerships of PayPal: “Open banking is transforming financial services, allowing customers to more easily move and manage their money. Tink has developed the infrastructure and data services for this new financial world and we’re excited to work together to continue to democratise financial services.”
