News

BRICKENDON STRENGTHENS SENIOR LEADERSHIP TEAM, PROPELLING FURTHER GROWTH IN 2021

Transformational consultancy appoints new Director of Financial Services, Strategy & Business Development alongside a series of senior promotions

Brickendon, the transformational consultancy is announcing a new senior hire and a set of senior promotions as the business thrives and looks to generate further growth in 2021 through a focus on employee engagement and advocacy.

The business experienced strong growth in the Banking & Government sectors throughout the second half of 2020, due to an innovative focus across its three key areas of specialism: digital, data and automation with particular attention on DevOps and Agile methodologies. This success has been underpinned by its expertise in delivering complex change projects for highly regulated organisations and a continued expansion into international markets.

Among the announcements, Brickendon has appointed Will McDonald as its new Director of Financial Services, Strategy & Business Development. McDonald been tasked with aligning the expertise of Brickendon’s consulting workforce to client needs, fast tracking Brickendon’s growth in international markets and driving customer advocacy. He brings over 20 years of experience in Enterprise technology, working across Asia, Europe and North America and most recently at Telstra Global, where he led the Financial Services Industry segment for EMEA.

McDonald comments “I’m very excited to join Brickendon at such a pivotal time. 2020 has accelerated a lot of change, and all businesses must recalibrate to remain competitive and thrive in this challenging recovery period. The enabling forces of Digitisation, Cloud and Automation are unlocking incredible productivity, yet people and expertise are still critical to success. At Brickendon our people have incredible talent for identifying and solving complex challenges faced by our clients. Our customers recognize this, and we have built a loyal following amongst them. My role is to amplify the work that the team has achieved over the years and create platforms for a loud chorus of customer advocacy to be heard”

Brickendon’s continued success also marks the promotion of Bala Ethirajalu to Partner, Global Head of Delivery and Maureen McKinley to Senior Manager as both individuals played a critical part in the helping the business thrive.

Bala has been with Brickendon for over eight years and has been instrumental in building a high performing delivery team, whilst defining Brickendon’s technology strategy and setting a culture of employee empowerment. Brickendon’s clients and team members have embraced the leadership values, innovation and accountability that Bala has championed and driven across the entire business. Bala has also successfully led the team to win the prestigious TESTA awards in 2013 and 2016 as well as securing seven consecutive finalist nominations.

Bala comments “If we create an environment of employee engagement and empowerment, everything else falls into place, we do better and more creative work for our clients, as well, we more easily attract, nurture and retain exceptional talent in the organization. I’m delighted to take up my new senior position at Brickendon, and look forward to all the future successes of our team as the business continues to thrive”

Similarly, Maureen McKinley has been part of the Brickendon team since 2013, and her new senior role will support the wider leadership team and grow the Poland based Brickendon practice. Maureen is a trusted advisor and contributor to her clients and has continued to raise the bar both in the work she conducts for them and as a leader within Brickendon.

Christopher Burke, CEO, Brickendon, comments “Brickendon was called upon by our financial services clients as they navigated the turbulent start to 2020. As a business leader and founder, I’m proud of our team and how we rallied around our clients as they faced unprecedented challenges. Our new set of senior promotions and hires signify a big step towards the growth trajectory which we’ve planned out for the year ahead and I’m in no doubt that Will, Maureen and Bala will play pivotal roles in driving this forward.”

Finance

HIVERA BRINGS REGULATORY RISK SCORING TO FINANCIAL SERVICES

Financial services Chief Risk Officers and Heads of Compliance can now, for the first time ever, visualise and mitigate the regulatory risk in their entire unstructured data estate, thanks to hivera, a new regtech platform for financial services firms, designed to bring regulatory risk under control.

A new platform from data solutions provider, Automated-Intelligence, hivera enables clients to observe their unstructured data, assigning a tailored regulatory risk score based on the financial services firm’s risk appetite to that data, and automating the identification and remediation of threats to help mitigate associated risks.

Demonstrate Control
An estimated 80 percent of all data is unstructured. Until now, due to the challenges associated with discovering, analysing and managing unstructured data, this has created a significant challenge for compliance professionals, who are under increasing pressure from regulators to demonstrate compliance against policies and regulatory standards over all of their data.

hivera solves this problem. It indexes text-extractable content, providing users with advanced search capability to categorise personal information and commercially-sensitive data through metadata, security, keyword, phrases, and regular expression pattern matching.

Meanwhile, through the hivera dashboard, firms are presented with a risk score which correlates to the regulations they are subject to. In-depth insights enable them to visualise and address key compliance and regulatory risks within their data, whether retention related, security-related or a matter of personal and sensitive data. Moreover, with its user-friendly reporting modules, compliance professionals can quickly and easily provide compliance updates within the organisation or to regulators.

Automate Regulatory Risk Mitigation

In addition to significantly reducing regulatory risk and minimising human error, the hivera platform also offers huge resource, time and cost savings through automation. This is achieved through the application of fully-audited polices to categorised data, which enables ongoing data compliance and remediation. Policies applied against categorised data can perform deletions or archiving according to organisational retention schedules.

“hivera is transforming how financial services firms view unstructured data,” comments Simon Cole, CEO at Automated Intelligence. “By providing greater visibility and control over their unstructured data estate, we’re improving data analysis, data privacy, data protection and risk mitigation capabilities of our clients.”

News

FORTU WEALTH PARTNERS WITH CURRENCYCLOUD FOR SEAMLESS CROSS-BORDER PAYMENTS

The partnership will enable high net-worth (UHNWI) clients to make multi-currency payments globally

Fortu Wealth – a London-based fintech providing a revolutionary all-in-one personal finance platform for high-net-worth individuals and a B2B banking-as-a-service (BaaS) solution for private banks and wealth managers – has today announced that it has partnered with Currencycloud, a leading provider of B2B embedded cross-border solutions, to allow its clients to make multi-currency payments globally through its Currencycloud Spark solution.

The modern world is increasingly interconnected and interdependent, with capital flowing across a variety of different jurisdictions as consumers manage their money. Unfortunately, much of the corresponding infrastructure used by the financial services industry has yet to catch up to this reality, and for many the process of making payments in foreign currencies is both slow and expensive.

Sharing a common mission of wanting to simplify the process of financial management, Fortu and Currencycloud have come together to provide a solution to this issue. The partnership will see Fortu customers now gain access to leading foreign exchange rates, international payments in all major currencies, as well as the provision of virtual IBANs through Currencycloud Spark.

The partnership represents the latest development on Fortu’s journey to revolutionize the worlds of private banking and wealth management. In a sector fraught with inertia, Fortu has created a groundbreaking all-in-one financial solution which meets the everchanging needs of the busy UHNWI millennial, signing up Swiss Banking Group as a pilot customer for their BaaS product.

Speaking on the partnership, Fortu co-founder and CEO, Azamat Sultanov, said: “For too long, our customers have had to deal with slow legacy technology and an outdated approach when it came to making international payments. The partnership will allow all Fortu users to be truly global in their approach, making cross-border payments seamlessly.”

Nick Cheetham, Chief Revenue Officer at Currencycloud commented: “Private banking has been the reserve of a select few traditional names, but Fortu is changing the dynamic of the industry and appealing to a broader, digital audience that has been under-served by traditional institutions. We are thrilled to be working with Fortu to help deliver a 21^st century solution for their customers.”