Insights

The new release of the Aquarius Securities Settlement module evolves towards an agile and modular management of all the features referred to domestic and international Settlement . The strength of the solution is given by an advanced management of the Standard Settlement Instructions (SSI), which allows the highest rate of Straight Through Processing within the settlement chain. The combination guarantees an innovative, flexible and effective solution, both for Banks that operate directly with CSD / ICSD, and for Banks that use Depositaries or Global Custodians. The application works in perfect synergy and synchronous with Aquarius Cash and Collateral functions, improving the efficiency, response and operational extension of the overall Aquarius platform. With regard to regulatory compliance, a new module has been released to cover CSDR Penalty specifications (whose go-live is scheduled for February 2022). This module allows users to check the calculations received by the CSDs or the Depositaries and, at the same time, verify them with a simulation mechanism. The support provided to the Back Office is complete and allows the customer to better manage the new penalty mechanism, through the following main features:

• immediate loading and management of received reports, whether in standard or proprietary format;
• calculation simulations to verify the penalties applied;
• data extraction to create statistics and highlight the riskiest situations;
• User dashboard, to monitor the daily and monthly trend of the penalty amounts, with aggregated and detailed data reachable with a simple drilldown mechanism;
• penalties total amounts forecasting ;
• Risk Dashboard to highlight potential buy-in situations, with dedicated analysis depending on the financial instrument type.

The CSDR Penalty module also provides features for the transmission of the received information of the daily and monthly reports to the Back Office applications and to any Institutional Customers. Contact our experts to find out more.

Milan, September 14, 2021 – TAS Group, (Italian Stock Exchange: TAS), a global provider of innovative solutions in card management, digital payments, financial messaging and capital markets, has announced that it has been ranked among the Top 100 in the 2021 IDC FinTech Rankings for the 13th consecutive year. This annual vendor ranking represents the leading hardware, software and service providers to the financial services industry from around the world. Vendors are ranked based on 2020 calendar year revenues attributed to financial institutions.

“Being named in the IDC FinTech Rankings is a significant accomplishment, demonstrating a provider’s commitment to the success of its financial institution clients,” states Marc DeCastro, Research Director at IDC Financial Insights. “The IDC Fintech Rankings, now in its 18th year, is the global standard list of fintech providers to the industry, and we congratulate the 2021 winners.”

Executive Chairman of TAS Group, Dario Pardi, remarked, "We are proud to be firmly positioned, year after year, between the top financial technology providers in this prestigious ranking. 2020 was a year marked by extraordinary events and consequently particularly demanding and challenging. Nevertheless, we closed it with significant growth in revenue and margins, thanks to our continuous commitment to investing in human capital and offering renewal. This enables us to successfully bring competitive and technologically advanced solutions to the Financial Industry." 

The Financial Services ecosystem, an industry in which IDC Financial Insights forecasts worldwide spending on IT across the globe to reach $590 billion (USD) by 2025, is changing at an unprecedented pace. Well-funded new market entrants, as well as big tech companies, have raised the bar for all providers. TAS Group’s efforts are heavily focused towards accelerating challengers’ next-gen financial experiences implementations, while supporting incumbent customers in meeting disruption with modernization and staying agile and responsive through TAS’s outstanding technology and expertise.

At Eurosystem level, TAS keeps strengthening its key role in supporting Europe’s financial community meeting the deadlines of the T2/T2S Consolidation in 2022 and the wider upcoming challenges, such as the migration towards ISO20022 and the new centralized ECMS infrastructure planned to go live in 2023.

In the Issuing and Acquiring domain, TAS continues to lead the way towards the seamless convergence between cards and alternative payments through its cloud-native, Open API-based platform PayStorm, adopted by a growing FinTech customer base throughout Europe and the Americas.

Among TAS’s strengths is the flexibility to adapt to the needs of customers and partners, guaranteed by its solutions and delivery models that promptly evolve with new regulations, market trends and technologies.

This short paper, recently issued by the EBA Liquidity Management Working Group (LMWG), highlights the major trends that the pandemic helped crystallise in the liquidity management ecosystem and outlines the questions that financial institutions will have to address as they continue to support their corporate clients.

TAS Group has been part of EBA’s Liquidity Management Working Group for several years already, in order to contribute with its domain expertise to the group’s mission to improve liquidity managers’ understanding and ability to face ongoing market developments as well as related technical, operational, regulatory and organisational challenges.

The migration of liquidity management practices into the digital area and to real-time processes can’t wait longer. The pandemic crisis has shown that, going forward, corporates need technologies and services that can be more readily adopted or more easily adapted to handle unforeseen situations.

TAS Group has proudly sponsored two key EU conferences in June, Payments CEE Summit and EBAday 2021, that have clearly shown how deeply the acceleration in digitalization was able to positively impact the banking DNA.

With over 1000 professionals registered at the CEE Summit, connecting primarily but not only from the Balkans, and over 2000 delegates participating to EBAday 2021, the paramount annual conference curated by the European Banking Association, all hot payment trends were deeply debated by speakers coming from all segments of the stakeholders landscape: incumbent banks, challengers, paytechs, payfacs, regtechs, regulators, corporate clients, market infrastructures, academics and market research companies.

Hottest in the agenda: Instant Payments and their convergence with card payments, Request to Pay, Buy Now Pay Later, Fraud Detection in the Real-time era, ISO 20022 migrations, API enablement, and many more core topics, including the power of the Payments as a Service paradigm as a way to accelerate the banking modernization journey.   

In case you missed our speeches at the conferences, by Dragan Spanovic, VP Sales TAS Eastern Europe, and and Mario Mendia, SVP TAS International, you may learn more about TAS Group’s 35+ years expertise as a PayFac in the evolving European Financial Services Market on our website.

Thanks to the Harmonizer Hub implemented by Mantica (TAS Group), Nexi PayTech has managed to harmonize into a single taxonomy all descriptions used by banks. A goal achieved through the use of Intelligent text mining and Machine learning technologies integrated in Nexi’s Active Gateway. Gianluca Finistauri of Nexi and Amedeo Borin of Mantica explain more about the initiative.

Wages, remunerations, emoluments: three different terminologies for the same identical statement. This is just one example of the wide variety of descriptions that banks use to report the same customer account transaction. An array of definitions that becomes a serious problem in the era of open banking and PSD2. In particular, but not only, for the Account Aggregation and Personal Financial Management (PFM) services, which allow the customer, with his consent, to have a clear vision of his finances at multiple banks, categorizing incomes and expenses with unique accounting definitions.

Nexi has managed to overcome this ambiguity by leveraging Intelligent machine learning and Text mining technologies that are at the basis of the Harmonizer Hub solution created by Mantica, TAS Group’s subsidiary specialized in these technologies.

Let’s unveil some key takeaways arising from the interview with 2 main actors of this successful project: Gianluca Finistauri, Head of Digital Corporate Banking of Nexi and Amedeo Borin, CEO of Mantica-TAS Group.

Reducing the complexity

“Active aggregation services are meant to descale complexity”, explains Finistauri. “But today it is still very hard to interface multiple banks to retrieve customer data, despite the PSD2 mandate acting as a fundamental aspect of open banking. In addition to carrying out the connection to all customer’s banks in a transparent way, Nexi has decided to take a step further and reduce the complexity of interpreting the contents. In fact, every single bank uses descriptions decided independently, as there is no standard in the banking industry for it, making it difficult to interpret them and, consequently, to be able to offer a clear view to the end customer. “We needed an engine capable of interpreting and ordering the collected descriptions, not really those of the large banking groups, with which we already collaborate through the Italian national corporate banking scheme CBI, but particularly those of the other 700 medium-small banks operating in Italy”, explains Finistauri.

This is where Mantica comes into play, offering a solution that is currently unique on the market, capable of bringing the babel of bank dialects back to a shared taxonomy. "By combining Intelligent text mining technology with Machine Learning algorithms, we were able to create an engine, the Harmonizer Hub, which dynamically analyses the enormous daily payment traffic of all banks, reconciling every single entry with a standard dictionary, and learning and improving performance day after day,” says Borin. “An absolutely not simple activity - he continues - because it involves interpreting natural language and analysing and comparing huge amounts of statements. And, moreover, because we had to respond to a new need driven by the PSD2 and therefore unprecedented to refer to. We took the challenge seriously, and quickly developed a system capable of giving very reliable answers that have been integrated by Nexi into its active gateway, which is already operational”.

A solution capable of managing millions of pieces of information

“We chose Mantica's solution after a careful software selection, which also involved international suppliers, and after a pilot that proved the excellent functioning of the technology on which Harmonizer Hub is based”, recalls Finistauri. A decision that turned out to be a winning one: “Today a customer of any of our banks - continues Finistauri - who has current accounts with multiple institutions that use different terminologies, can see all his expenses correctly classified. And the system is able to dynamically maintain this functionality updated over time, continuing to map every new description potentially introduced by future regulation, learning from the millions of transactions it analyses every day".

Mapping completed

The Harmonizer Hub is now close to automatically recognizing the totality of bank descriptions. "A great job has been done - Finistauri says satisfied - because at the beginning we were reconciling no more than 20% of the transaction descriptions and already in April we could match about 85% of the terminologies used by banks. Then, week after week, the engine learned to recognize and correctly catalogue more and more descriptions, effectively eliminating the need to intervene manually”.

The customer appreciation in all segments

“As of today, only Nexi offers such a service which is so accurate and continuously updated thanks to machine learning. – proudly underlines Finistauri - The market has immediately perceived the high quality of this new feature and we have received highly positive feedback from both end-customers and third-party operators who offer their PFM service based on our data aggregation. The latter type of customers need to have data already sorted and classified to better carry out their own analyses deep diving into the rest of the details of the statements".

But a great deal of attention, perhaps even exceeding expectations, came from our corporate customer base, which quickly began requesting it from their banks. “Little is said about it - explains Finistauri - but the PSD2 is also very important for corporates, who are natively multi-bank and have to manage the wide variance of the descriptions from bank to bank. With the Harmonizer Hub we have the ability to connect and harmonize corporate accounts, for example by managing collections through PISPs or feeding corporate treasury solutions for intraday balances. A more sophisticated value proposition compared to the one offered to retail customers, but one that we are able to provide in an equally reliable way".

Another aspect appreciated by Nexi is the ease with which the new service can be implemented by banks. “From the moment the request arrives - says Finistauri – our banks can activate it in about 4 weeks to their end customers. And this allows us to have a very good time-to-market ".

Ready to learn other languages

The engine created by Mantica is potentially capable of interpreting bank descriptions in other languages as well. Currently it is operational to manage Italian, but for Finistauri the opening to English, French, German etc. represents an obvious evolution considering Nexi's new international footprint deriving from the acquisitions of Nets and SIA which will lead the PayTech to interconnect with open banking gateways in other countries already by end of this year.

“The system is solid and the textual analysis and machine learning mechanisms have now been fully tested, so it won't be a problem to expand the linguistic base by retracing the steps taken to implement Italian,” confirms Borin.

Harmonizer Hub, not just for bank descriptions

The versatility of the engine made by Mantica allows its use also in other fields. Nexi is also using it to make some processes more efficient and faster, for example in order to understand whether a balance presented by the customer by a bank is the current Account Balance or the Available Balance. Furthermore, machine learning engines are very useful for customer profiling and to promote personalized offers, obviously always requiring the conscious consent of the customer. “We are starting to work in this direction because the demand from banks to use it as a tool to improve marketing campaigns is very strong”, confirms Finistauri. But the normalization of bank statements and payments is also important for credit scoring and behavioural analysis, helping to improve fraud detection and fraud management, because it makes it faster to intercept and analyze suspicious transactions.

Author: Flavio Padovan– Bancaforte (Italian version)

Source: Nexi: così abbiamo superato la babele delle causali bancarie 

Milan, 28 June 2021 - TAS Group is excited to be again exhibiting at EBAday which goes live today. The event, curated by the Euro Banking Association’s subject matter experts and Finextra Research, is expected to be a hub of intense conversation and debate during these transformative times on the path to digitalization, with the banking community coming together digitally to make the decisions that will shape the future.

The key theme this year is Payments transformation in 2021 – The road to success, which ties in perfectly with TAS Group’s own mission. TAS has been working with major European banks and Industry bodies for over 35 years, helping them to transform and modernize their infrastructures, adapt to ever-changing regulations and streamline their processes to better serve their customers.

Having been among EBA’s Ecosystem Partners since over a decade, TAS Group is used contributing to the development of new collaborative ideas through the multi-stakeholder working groups led by the Euro Banking Association, and the annual EBAday event is the perfect venue to share the insights and enlarge the debate to over 2000 registered delegates.

We look forward to sharing our insights, offering solutions to today’s challenges and joining the conversation on the major topics addressed by the conference.

Delegates can talk to TAS experts at our virtual booth, discover the latest product innovations, receive a tailored demo, learn how to meet new requirements and stay relevant in a changing payments landscape. TAS payments specialists will be on hand to advise on key topics including Open Banking, ISO 20022 Migration, Instant Payments, Request to Pay, Intraday Liquidity, Correspondent Banking and Cloud Modernization.

Mario Mendia, SVP International Markets at TAS Group, will be taking part tomorrow in the panel session of Stream 2, starting at 11AM, titled: Payments in a real-time world – reality, future or utopia? Mario will give his view based on TAS's very unique PayFac experience in the market.

For more info visit our EBAday 2021 page
or go to our virtual booth.

Download the press release

Sophia Antipolis, 24 June 2021 - TAS Group unveils a new brand and a new service line: TAS Group Cloud Services. The operational heart of TAS Group's SaaS and cloud services is concentrated in the Sophia-Antipolis Datacentre supported by other Datacentres in Europe (Milan, Bologna, Paris). By virtue of the large SME clientele with which it has worked since 1997, TAS France, the French subsidiary of TAS Group has developed a unique expertise in offering flexible, tailor-made hosting and housing solutions adapted to the different stages of the digital transition of businesses. TAS Group Cloud Services combines all this know-how that companies have been benefiting from for many years. Thanks to the synergy with TAS Group as a whole, TAS France can now go beyond regional borders and operate on a global scale, providing innovative solutions that reinforce the independence of SMEs and the protection of their data. Its IT outsourcing value propositions are adapted to each company context (business activity, existing infrastructure, organization, projects, ...) thanks to the provision of added value services to meet the new technical, regulatory and data protection requirements imposed by the challenges of digital technology. Therefore, TAS France is certified ISO 9001, ISO 27001 (information security), HDS (health data protection) and PCI-DSS (credit card data protection), resulting in a superior level of certification in terms of quality of service and data protection. In addition, a SOC (Security Operation Centre) prevents, identifies and tracks cyber-attacks and anomalies detected on the network, which could cause a risk to the company's business continuity. Francesco de Simoni, General Manager of TAS France, commented: "Until now, TAS Group's cloud service offerings were not grouped under a single name. Given the growing demand for services in this area and the quality of TAS Group's offer, we decided to communicate our value proposition more clearly ". Download the press release