Category Archives: BI Blog

Citi and Kyriba go API for faster payments
Source: Bankingtech

Citi and cloud treasury and finance solutions provider Kyriba have made a new API integration for faster payments and standardisation. San Diego-based Kyriba offers a Software-as-Service (SaaS) enterprise platform, bank connectivity and an integrated solution.

Mayank Mishra, global head of channel services, Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions, says: “Through embedded APIs our joint clients have access to a seamlessly integrated, fully digital experience accessing their Citi accounts instantly through their preferred treasury platform.”

Bob Stark, Kyriba’s VP of strategy, adds: “APIs represent the next generation of bank connectivity and offer robust advantages over traditional file transfer technologies.” The API integration with Citi will also help with real-time bank reporting and account management.

Kyriba rolls out some big numbers to show what it does. It currently processes more than 83 million bank transactions, 30 million payments and 530 million ERP transactions on behalf of its clients each month through its connectivity hub. Along with its HQ in San Diego, Kyriba has offices in New York, Paris, London, Tokyo and Dubai.

Link: https://www.bankingtech.com/2019/02/citi-and-kyriba-go-api-for-faster-payments/

ey-how-do-you-know-you-are-investing-in-the-right-cyber-risk-control-strategies.pdf

Across Asia-Pacific, financial institutions are making million-dollar cyber investment decisions to mitigate threats. Such investment decisions need to rely on facts and insights to deliver the right return on investment: where threats are mitigated effectively and institutions return to their target risk appetite. We need a fact-based and structured approach to help Asia-Pacific banks, insurers and asset managers achieve this.

As more regulators require businesses to take a structured approach to managing cyber risk, few financial institutions can demonstrate they are investing in the right cyber risk mitigation strategies.

Ever since cyber threats arrived on financial institutions’ risk registers, boards and management have been making mitigation decisions based on the collective experiences of internal security experts and external consultants. But this doesn’t necessarily align to the structured approach required by regulators. Financial institutions are now expected to approach cyber risk decisions in a similar manner to the way they would approach other risk domains, such as credit risk.

The current approach sometimes results in a false sense of security, where boards may mistake action for effective protection, where managers rest easy because “we’re using the latest technologies,” and where strategies are considered successful if an institution simply avoids being “the slowest gazelle in the herd”.

A quick comparison with the strictly quantified procedures for allocating capital investment illustrates the dangers involved in continuing with this approach.

If institutions cannot quantify the value at risk from a cyber threat and the quantum a particular set of cyber control investments will deliver, how can they meaningfully decide how much to invest and where?

How do they know cyber investments are properly focused on their critical assets to mitigate their key threats?

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• Develop a top-down model to quantify cyber risk, enabling board and management to understand its quantifiable impacts
• Define metrics and risk indicators that measure the effectiveness and coverage of controls on your key assets
• Connect an integrate data sources to provide the facts to support these metrics
• Automate data collection and use analytics tools to generate and communicate cyber risk insights via dashboards that support the range of views required by various stakeholders, including executives, board and control owners

• Understand how resilient you are to defend against your key cyber threats
• Identify how much a major cyber incident could cost, how much to spend and how much this will buy down risk
• Improve prioritization by recognizing when further investment provides diminishing returns
• Better forecast when you will return to risk appetite

Ramco ERP Drives Digital Transformation at PT. Cipta Krida Bahari (CKB Logistics)  Indonesia’s leading logistics service provider, PT. Cipta Krida Bahari (CKB Logistics), has gone live with Ramco ERP for Logistics to digitize its supply chain, financials and warehouse operations. Targeted at third-party logistics providers, freight forwarders and courier service providers, Ramco’s multi-functional Logistics Suite will be covering modules to manage finance, rating and billing, assets, transportation and warehousing at CKB Logistics. The mobile-enabled solution also offers capabilities such as auto put away and auto picking configuration and end-to-end resource management that will enable CKB Logistics to track shipments, carry out warehouse operations and monitor costs, efficiently. About PT Cipta Krida Bahari (CKB Logistics): CKB Logistics, a subsidiary of PT. ABM Investama, Tbk., is an integrated logistics services company and has served a number of leading companies in the energy and non-energy sectors with a wide range of services, namely a number of more than 50 operational network locations spread throughout the region Indonesia, including Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, and also Eastern Indonesia such as Sulawesi, Ternate, Ambon, and Papua. 3PL, 4PL companies: Inquiry about RAMCO’s services in Vietnam: [email protected] www.AbnAsia.org

AI is becoming amazing. Here is what an OpenAI GPT-2 robot writes:
Input is given. It writes the output.

Input:
In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English.

Output (quite scary of what it can write, better than most human):

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612975/ai-natural-language-processing-explained/

Temenos gets new CEO

Temenos will get a new CEO at the end of the month as David Arnott is “stepping down to spend more time with his new family and baby”. Chief financial officer and chief operating officer (COO) Max Chuard has been appointed as CEO to succeed him. Arnott spent 18 years at Temenos – and according to the firm this new development is “part of a managed transition to ensure continuity of strategy and execution”.

Panagiotis “Takis” Spiliopoulos will join as chief financial officer effective 31 March 2019. Jean-Michel Hilsenkopf will take the COO position and Alexa Guenoun is joining the executive committee as chief client officer.

Chuard comments: “We have significant breadth and depth of talent in the business, which is key to our succession planning.” Along with these personnel changes, the banking software company has reported its fourth quarter and full year 2018 results. It all seems healthy enough. Its non-IFRS total software licensing revenues were up 15% in Q4 2018, and up 21% for the full year 2018. Temenos explains that tier 1 and 2 banks contributed 66% of total software licensing in Q4 and 53% in FY 2018.

Total revenue was also good – with non-IFRS growth of 12% in Q4 and 14% in FY 2018. On top of all that non-IFRS EBIT was up 15% in Q4 2018, while for the FY 2018 there was a non-IFRS EBIT margin of 31.5%. In Temenos’ view this performance was due to a “broad based demand across geographies and tiers”. In addition, because of “digital and regulatory pressures” and the “move to open banking are driving market growth”.

The firm points to two deals in the US – one a “top tier US bank for visionary front office replacement” and PayPal for loan management in the cloud. There’s no space to list them all, but Temenos says it got 28 new customer wins in the quarter, and a total of 76 in FY 2018.

Fun Facts:

January: The Euro turns 20.
February: Facebook is 15.
March: The UK leaves the EU at 11pm (Brexit).
April: The largest democracy on earth votes (India, 800 millions).
May: Earth’s biggest sport kicks off its world cup (Cricket World Cup).
June: The FIFA Women’s World Cup (France 2019)
July: “Summer of 69” turns 50.
August: Napoleon turns 250.
September: Japan hosts a world cup (Rugby).
October: Mahatma Gandhi turns 150.
November: Mercury puts a dot on the Sun.
December: An asteroid misses the Earth (hopefully). Also: “Star Wars Episode 9” comes out (most likely).

Have a gorgeous new year!

ABN Software

Lloyds Banking Group customers hit by Faster Payments outage
Source: Finextra

Customers of Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland have been affected by a Faster Payments glitch that has left them unable to transfer money on 18th January.

Lloyds Bank took to Twitter to confirm that “some” customers are unable to make faster payments, adding that it is working to resolve the issue and that no users will be left out of pocket.

Halifax and Bank of Scotland, which are owned by Lloyds Banking Group, have issued identical statements.

With no other Faster Payments banks reporting problems, the issue appears to be with Lloyds, which has not yet provided an explanation. However, its service availability page shows that it had planned maintenance between 1am and 6am on Friday morning that was expected to affect internet and mobile banking.

Some customers have also had problems withdrawing money from cash machines, although Bank of Scotland says there “shouldn’t be any further issues with ATMs”. Hi Amy. Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. There shouldn’t be any further issues with ATMs; please let us know if you have any problems when you try again.

Link: