Industry roundup: 15 April
by Ben Poole
Bolero partners with Virtusa for white-labelled trade finance portal-as-a-service solution
Bolero International has announced its worldwide partnership with Virtusa Corporation, a global provider of digital strategy and IT services and solutions, for Bolero’s white-labelled trade finance portal-as-a-service solution Galileo TPaaS for Banks.
This news follows Bolero’s release of the white-labelled trade portal-as-a-service solution for financial institutions. The solution is designed to help financial institutions achieve an accelerated time to market in delivering digital trade services to their trade clients while reducing the total cost of ownership in comparison to an in-house build or traditional software.
Banks can benefit from a greater scope of innovation through integration of external services within the product, improving customer experience and engagement, reducing client administration overheads for high-volume trade activity and increased customer satisfaction across small businesses, SMEs, and multinationals.
"To provide a better solution to banks, we have worked alongside our corporate clients and leading multinational banks to create a portal that offers the fastest way to digitise customer experience and dramatically transform the customer experience," said Andrew Raymond, CEO at Bolero International. "Our partnership with Virtusa is critical to our long-term strategy and the availability of Galileo TPaaS for Banks around the world. With this, we believe we will address a significant pain point for banks."
Kofax solution digitises accounts payable processes
Kofax, a supplier of automation software for digital workflow transformation, has announced the latest version of Kofax AP Agility, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered solution providing organisations with capabilities to digitally transform accounts payable (AP) processes.
The solution provides document intelligence to unlock data within AP processes, workflow capabilities for managing inconsistencies and collaboration, and pre-built connectors that accelerate integration of Kofax software with procure-to-pay, financial accounting and ERP systems. Innovations in the latest release include support for new invoice formats, extended document intelligence capabilities, exception and approval workflows, and expanded out-of-the-box integration to ERP systems such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud ES. Kofax offers the solution with on-premise or SaaS deployment options.
"We see forward-leaning business leaders leverage automation to streamline time- and resource-intensive AP processes, and also as part of a broader enterprise focus on leveraging real-time data and intelligence to improve decision making," says Kathleen Delaney, chief marketing officer at Kofax. "AP Agility extends far beyond a transactional accounts payable automation solution; it provides data that supports business leaders in their efforts to enhance business continuity, improve cash management, and increase profitability."
African fintechs collaborate to interlink mobile money and digital assets
The Seychelles-based Securities, Commodities and Derivatives Exchange (SECDEX), and KOINON, a global digital coin and token based payment platform, have announced a collaboration to foster the intersection of African B2C and B2B payments and dynamic asset conversion between fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies and a broader range of digital assets. This initiative comes at a key time in the mobile payments industry growth as evidenced by Mastercard’s recent US$100m investment in Africa’s Airtel which focuses on mobile payments and financial inclusion.
This latest partnership combines KOINON’s cryptocurrency digital payment coins (KOIN) and stablecoins, plus their retail and payments expertise, products and technology with SECDEX’s digital exchange, digital custody and broader digital capital markets services. Integrating the KOINON and SECDEX API’s enables the KOINON mobile app and the KOIN Pay wallets to interface with SECDEX Digital Custodian, which can then be accessed by SECDEX Marketplace and SECDEX Exchange.
The partnership is fostering cross border distribution of new African opportunities to a broad range of clients encompassing payments facilitation, payments processing, remittances and dynamic asset conversion (the automatic swap of one digital asset received in payment, to another asset or to fiat currency, via live quotes) on SECDEX Marketplace or SECDEX Exchange.
The pair are also in discussions with several African governments regarding opportunities for account-based central bank digital currency (CBDC) development and how CBDC is linked into the wider ecosystem to ensure the circulation of money and cash flows. The firms are also looking at collective synergies and opportunities with decentralised finance (DeFI) by way of their combined technological capabilities.
Tradeweb collaboration with AWS targets data access
Tradeweb Markets, a lglobal operator of electronic marketplaces for rates, credit, equities and money markets, has announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to broaden access to its US Treasury and UK Gilt closing price data through AWS Data Exchange, a service that makes it easy to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud.
Tradeweb ICE US Treasury Closing Prices and Tradeweb FTSE UK Gilt Closing Prices can now be accessed directly via AWS Data Exchange, either as a monthly subscription to daily publication data or as historical data sets. This direct distribution option gives users greater flexibility, and the integration of digital payment methods allows for easier, direct access to the data. The offering comes at a time when market participants are increasingly looking for more personalised and efficient digital solutions, including pay-as-you-go access to data, in response to current virtual and hybrid market environments. In every asset class, Tradeweb data and analytics help market participants make more informed decisions with precise, reliable pricing data for modeling, research and analysis.
The two new offerings are daily reference prices designed to reflect the mid-price for treasury and gilts securities around the market close. The closing prices are administered by a regulated benchmark administrator in compliance with the IOSCO Principles for Financial Benchmarks, and are calculated pursuant to a fixed, transparent and auditable methodology.
The direct distribution channel made available in collaboration with AWS helps to break down the barriers associated with the traditional method of data retrieval from beginning to end. By providing easy-to-access solutions designed to reach a wide variety of databases through a growing global dynamic marketplace, the firm says that market participants will now have an easier way to access Tradeweb data through the cloud, and will have more flexibility in their options by choosing the exact data sets they want to see.
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