In other FinTech news, Deutsche Bank reaches out to IT providers, CGI fights financial crime and Vestmark acquires Adhesion
Synechron to Focus on Financial Services & Insurance Sectors
Synechron, Inc., a financial services consultant and IT services provider, reports the launch of artificial intelligence (AI) data science accelerators for financial services, banking and insurance firms.
The new accelerators “help financial services and insurance firms solve complex business challenges by discovering meaningful relationships between events that impact one another (correlation) and cause a future event to happen (causation),” Synechron says in a statement.
Synechron launched the AI data-science accelerators through its financial innovation labs, which are operating in 11 global financial markets across North America, Europe, Middle East and APAC, the vendor says. The financial markets include New York, Charlotte, Fort Lauderdale, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Serbia, Dubai, Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad, per Synechron.
Deutsche Bank Makes API Overture to IT Providers
German banking giant Deutsche Bank reports that it is accelerating an overture to IT and services vendors that may want to serve “across its corporate and investment banking and private and commercial banking divisions,” officials say.
The bank will be working with Quantiguous Solutions, based in the city of Mumbai, India. The bank acquired the company this past May, and has assigned it to help accelerate the development and adoption of application links globally, officials say.
“The bank is building an ‘ecosystem’ of application programming interfaces (APIs), which will enable third-party providers such as FinTechs to develop new services and applications using the bank’s client data,” according to a prepared statement. “In doing so, the bank aims to establish the broadest possible range of applications linked to its data and systems — expanding beyond traditional financial services.”
Citing enterprise resource planning software giant SAP, online retailer Amazon and PC and consumer hardware vendor Apple “have created ecosystems around their platforms and systems, allowing third parties to play in their gardens,” says Thomas Nielsen, chief digital officer at Deutsche Bank’s Global Transaction Bank, in a prepared statement. “The financial services industry is now undergoing the same evolution. This gives banks much greater potential for innovation and growth than they can generate by being single product-oriented. This will play a central role in driving the platform economy in banking.”
Bank officials say that the bank foresees “numerous opportunities for applications serving commercial clients right across cash and risk management, trade finance and securities services.”
The firm is leveraging the Deutsche Bank Application Programming Interface (dbAPI), “which was successfully launched in the private and commercial arm of the bank in 2017, and which is already linked to numerous external applications,” officials say. “This is part of the bank’s open banking strategy, which encourages partnering companies to generate complementary and innovative products and services. These partners may be financial service providers that want to enhance existing applications with the aid of bank data, or firms that want to build completely new solutions based on that data.”
CGI Launches ‘HotScan’ to Fight Financial Crime
Montreal, Quebec-based CGI Group, an information technology (IT) company, reports the launch of HotScan360, the latest version of its anti-financial-crime technology.
HotScan was built in collaboration with major banks, CGI notes. It employs a “real-time risk engine for scanning and scoring thousands of transactions per second,” the vendor says. It also complies with the “latest and upcoming regulations,” including PSD2, GDPR and SEPA instant-payment requirements, CGI adds.
CGI was founded in 1976.
Vestmark Acquires Adhesion Wealth Advisor Solutions
Wakefield, Massachusetts-based Vestmark, a provider of portfolio management and trading technology for financial advisors and institutions, reports that it has acquired Charlotte, North Carolina-based Adhesion Wealth Advisor Solutions, maker of a unified managed accounts (UMA) platform.
Adhesion has built “tools and services” on top of Vestmark’s technology, intended to allow registered investment advisors (RIAs) to offer an UMA platform as well as support for separately managed accounts (SMAs), Vestmark says. The acquisition, Vestmark says, will make it “immediately … competitive in the rapidly growing RIA market.”
The acquisition is expected to close during the fourth quarter of 2018, per Vestmark, adding that the acquisition’s terms “will not be disclosed.”
Adhesion has been a client since 2008, Vestmark says.
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