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IBM Garage underpins Bank of China’s first Global Innovation Lab

September 27, 2019 – Bank of China (BOC) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that they will expand their existing relationship to co-create a new innovation model for the financial industry. The two parties will collaborate on the digital transformation, customer experience enhancement, business innovation, eco-system construction and cognitive technology deployment to accelerate the Bank’s digital transformation and the implementation of BOC’s innovation-driven strategy.

Financial technology is rapidly becoming a disruptive force in the industry today. Banks are facing ever intensifying inter-bank and cross-industry competition. In order to meet this challenge, many banks are taking the initiative to actively embrace technological innovation and digital transformation.

To stay competitive and find new ways to engage with both existing and potential customers, BOC has opened a Global Innovation Lab in Singapore that will unify digital systems, introduce automation to processes and establish efficient means to comply with regulations.

Co-created in the IBM Garage, BOC plans to build a further 5-8 Innovation Labs globally to fully leverage global resources and establish a BOC model of financial innovation. The new lab, is a combined client center, an experience center, and a factory for innovation at the same time.

The IBM Garage will help accelerate how the bank unlocks insights and business outcomes by helping modernize existing applications with technology such as AI, blockchain and IoT.

By leveraging experts from across IBM Services, bank subject matter experts, user experience designers, as well as system integrators, IBM will help BOC to build its innovation strategy, enable BOC’s own talent and upskill the organization for its business transformation, to drive technology deployment and incubate innovation.

In the new lab, the BOC teams will sit shoulder-to-shoulder with IBM professionals to jointly integrate IBM’s enterprise design thinking with BOC’s innovation processes, to innovate and upgrade quickly with agility and efficiency. An agile and diverse innovation team will bring together sales, technicians, and clients, enabling them to innovate with online and offline platforms and tools, so as to provide the accompanied service for product design, pilot projects, promotion and publicity.

Initial co-creation work has already started across five initial areas along with the comprehensive training of talent and consolidation of creative incubation resources. Two of the initial projects are already showing quick results with the prototype applications displaying key functions in just two weeks, which originally would have required three months from incubation to prototype.

“Bank of China is committed to becoming a world-class bank with technology and innovation as the cornerstones of our vision,” said Wang Fang, Bank of China Singapore branch vice president, Bank of China Innovation Lab Singapore General Manager.  “We look forward to having IBM as our partner, because we believe that in addition to the assistance they offer with technological leadership and industry expertise, we can learn even more from IBM’s own transformation and innovative models.”

“Reaching out across the globe from the heart of China, Bank of China is without a doubt a visionary enterprise with the power to get things done,” said Wenchao Liu, VP, Managing Director, Bank of China, Integrated Account, IBM GCG. “We are excited to work with them and share IBM’s Garage model, as well as our experience in innovative practices, to help them in the construction of their innovation lab. We believe that with the completion of the eight major global innovation centers and the whole innovation system, that Bank of China will be able to more efficiently incubate and rapidly iterate innovations. Thus, they will be able to achieve their strategic goal of building a world-class bank for a new era.”

As BOC’s first innovation lab globally, it will also act as a base for the bank to cooperate with governments, industries, academia and research institutions to jointly innovate and create new financial ecosystems.

After successful transition to help ensure ISO 20022 compliance, Switzerland’s second largest cantonal bank will use IBM payments platform to offer new digital services to customers

LONDON, Sibos 2019: — Banque Cantonale Vaudoise, Switzerland’s sixth largest lender and a major player on the Swiss banking scene, will expand its longstanding use of IBM (NYSE: IBM) Financial Transaction Manager to explore new use-cases in digital banking. Within the next few years, the plan is for transactions ranging from account openings to mortgage originations and transfers will be seamlessly integrated into the Financial Transactions Manager, a single, extensible platform for orchestrating and monitoring financial transactions.

“The banking sector is undergoing major upheaval,” Serge Messin, BCV’s head of IT solutions, said. “With more people choosing digital payments over cash and governing bodies changing regulations to keep pace with that change, it can be difficult to keep up. We are thrilled to have IBM by our side as we reinvent ourselves for this new landscape.”

BCV, the second largest of Switzerland’s so-called cantonal, or “state” banks, has a longstanding relationship with IBM. Most notably, BCV turned to IBM to help it prepare for compliance with ISO 20022, a new regulatory requirement established in 2015 by the Swiss National Bank to unite the country’s roughly 250 financial institutions on a single, unified standard for electronic data interchange.

By implementing FTM, BCV was able to leverage and streamline its existing and very stable payments core processing engine that still runs on a COBOL framework, similar to when it launched in the 1980s, while also letting FTM do all the ISO 20022 XML heavy lifting.

“IBM has a long history with Banque Cantonale Vaudoise, one of the most respected banks, and we are thrilled to be expanding the scope of our work as they prepare for the world of digital banking,” said Rajesh Venkatraman, director IBM payments solutions.

GMEX Fusion Digital Capital Markets Technology Suite to power live transactions for DAG Global across two leading cryptocurrency exchanges

LONDON,  — GMEX Technologies Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of GMEX Group providing multi-asset post-trade business and technology solutions, today announced the latest release of its GMEX Fusion Digital Capital Markets technology suite (GMEX Fusion), built on IBM (NYSE: IBM) Blockchain Platform, this technical advancement empowers institutional investors with a hybrid solution supporting multiple digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, security tokens, and more.

Already used by multiple exchanges and custodians in both traditional and hybrid environments accessing distributed ledgers, GMEX Fusion is designed to support multi-cryptocurrency transactions. DAG Global is now using it to execute and settle Bitcoin and Ethereum trades, transferring BTC/ ETH between customer accounts held by the two leading cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase and Kraken. GMEX Fusion uses the latest state-of-the-art blockchain technology to offer trading and post trade digital asset solutions to traders, exchanges, clearing-houses, central securities depositories (CSDs) and custodians.

Institutional investors interested in digital assets require enterprise-grade market infrastructure which can be integrated with existing technology and processed in regulated, accountable environments. GMEX Fusion now offers a new approach for supporting these assets in areas such as trading, clearing, settlement, registration, custody and management of traded cryptocurrencies.

IBM Blockchain Platform helps enable GMEX Fusion to manage digital assets that represent multiple types of financial instruments simultaneously, including cryptocurrencies, security tokens, tokenised commodities and margin traded crypto derivatives; with inter-bank message flows to facilitate settlement downstream, and exchange messaging upstream.

Sean Kiernan, CEO of DAG Global commented: “Our partnership with GMEX guarantees our success in completing live transactions using GMEX Fusion technology on IBM Blockchain Platform.” He added, “This enables us to trade on multiple exchanges and off exchange over-the-counter (OTC) with consolidation of trading activity and finality of settlement with a single solution.”

IBM Blockchain Platform is a flexible, enterprise-grade blockchain platform built on Hyperledger Fabric. It provides a secured platform to build, govern, operate and grow blockchain networks, with the ability to deploy components in multiple cloud or on-premise environments.

Jerry Cuomo, IBM Vice President Blockchain Technologies commented,” The work underway with GMEX and DAG Global is further evidence that IBM Blockchain Platform is addressing important financial services industry demands in real production environments and across multiple clouds. It is a foundational technology that can help merge old architectures with new, creating a hybrid approach to support the growing demand for digital assets and we’re excited to be working with GMEX on this pioneering approach.”

Hirander Misra, CEO of GMEX Group and Chairman GMEX Technologies added, “We are delighted to collaborate with IBM to power our market leading GMEX Fusion and provide an institutional solution which satisfies the growing demands for digitally enabled market infrastructure fit for regulated environments.” He added,” This is a unique industry approach as it will enable multiple pools of liquidity to connect with multiple custodians with a single aggregated trading, clearing and settlement solution.”

The deal was signed in third quarter of 2019.

ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 5, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) has announced that Gartner Inc. has positioned IBM as a Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Outsourcing and Hybrid Infrastructure Managed Services, North America. This year, IBM was positioned the highest in ability to execute.

“We believe IBM’s recognition in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Center Outsourcing and Hybrid Infrastructure Managed Services, North America, is a testament to the efficacy of the IBM Services portfolio in this era of Cloud and AI,” said Archana Vemulapalli, IBM General Manager for IS Offering Strategy, Management and Development. “We are dedicated to continually delivering highly resilient, scalable and secure services, so clients can adopt hybrid cloud with confidence and know that our services integration model will give them the competitive advantages they need.”

According to the report, “Gartner analyzes execution, strategic vision, and data center outsourcing and hybrid infrastructure services offerings for North America of 20 DCO/HIMS providers. Sourcing, procurement and vendor management leaders should use this analysis to select the best provider for their strategic initiatives.”*