Daily Archives: March 31, 2021

When John Collins joined LivePerson in 2019 as senior vice president of quantitative strategy, his mandate was to automate the back-office function and create systems to collect, clean, and connect all the data the company was generating to drive growth and improve margins.

A year later, after he had been promoted to CFO and had two quarters in the top finance seat under his belt, the company went from negative margins to meeting the rule of 40:achieving 40% growth and profitability.

We achieved that partly through revenue acceleration, but another big component was bringing down G&A as a percentage of revenue by automating so many workflows, Collins said last week in a CFO Thought Leader podcast.

The company, which provides an AI tool for businesses to text back and forth with their customers, took a chance on giving him the CFO job, Collins said. He had never held the position before, but the quick margin improvement his work helped drive validated the decision and the resources it gave him to build out the automation project, Collins believes.

John Collins

Courtesy of LivePerson.com

The results spoke for themselves, he said. The impact we had in just the first six months before I took over the CFO role, and in the subsequent quarters Ive been in the seat for a year now was so rapid and impactful that [analysts] got on board with the vision pretty quickly.

To execute on the automation plan, Collins pulled together data scientists and engineers into what he calls the data models and decisions (DMD) team. They designed and implemented the systems for collecting and processing the companys front office data sales, revenue which help fuel its growth. But, equally importantly, they designed and built the systems for collecting and processing back-office data, which helps fuel its margin improvement.

These are additional metrics that I'm focused on because I have a vision for reshaping what internal operations does for the business and the kind of data advantages we can generate to propel our organization ahead of the competition, he said.

Those metrics include how much staff are tapping into the companys data lake to improve decisions and performance.

Years earlier, both as an MIT MBA student and as head of his own investment company, Collins had been involved in building data systems, so he tapped his network of data scientists and engineers to staff up his DMD team.

There are not many highly skilled data scientists that work in the back office, he said. Same for engineers. Most of these people have their choice of jobs [and prefer to] work on product development for the core of a business that is put out in the market. Thats where the interesting and desirable work has been.

But he was able to attract them, he said, by giving them the opportunity to turn back-office automation into a value-driver for the organization.

The vision Ive set is so novel and appealing weve been able to attract the same caliber of talent in science and engineering that our core technology arm under the CTO is attracting today, he said.

The team also likes how quickly it gets rewarded for its work.

The work weve done presents many rapid wins, he said. We have stakeholders coming to [us] saying, Please free me from this repetitive, manual workflow. In many cases, because of the data lake architecture weve built, and the data weve onboarded and cleaned, and connected, were able to deliver those automations in mere days.

The first improvement Collins and his team made was enabling the ability to track customer usage of the platform.

Part of the problem was due to dirty and disconnected data, he said. Most large enterprise customers had dozens of sub-accounts through which they access the platform that werent necessarily mapped to the parent account. In addition, attempts to forecast customer usage, which is critical for billing, go-to-market, product development, strategy, were basically simple averages of incomplete data. But despite the simplicity of these models, wrangling the data was manually intensive and error-prone.

The team deployed automations and leveraged time-series analyses and data features relative to specific products and industries to map accounts to their relevant parents in the data lake.

The strategic value-add here was not only saving the time of the people who were responsible for the manual work, but also revealing revenue leakage, because of those manual oversights, he said. We werent billing for all of the usage because we didnt know all the usage without this enhanced data cleanliness.

The improvement also enabled finance to implement usage-based billing automations, which saved significant time for the billing team and provided upsell opportunities to the go-to-market team responsible for developing the companys enterprise base.

The ripple effect from this one automation, from connecting and cleaning this one subset of data, had a really profound effect across the organization, he said.

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CFO used automation to turn back-office function into value driver - CFO Dive

Every company can benefit from faster and more efficient contracting processes, such as CLM software automation and AI, that enhance risk and spend management, improve revenue and profit margins and increase visibility into counterparty relationships. In a recent webinar for the World Commerce and Contracting Association, the Lenovo Legal Department described a transformation journey that can deliver value to any business.

The webinar paints a picture of the ideal overall transformation of the legal function, going from a bespoke system of subject matter experts to a legal function that combines that bespoke talent with standardized operations and digital efficiencies. The result is a legal department thats digital, scalable and value-driven. This is achieved through the right combination of contract lifecycle management (CLM) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Lenovo identified three ideal outcomes that guide contract management transformation.

AI is critical to the CLM automation process, according to the Lenovo team, because it not only improves the efficiency of the work, but its also actually doing some of the work for you. AI-powered CLM software helps remove the productivity bottleneck that plagues many areas of the legal function today.

While CLM software and AI have already established a strong foothold in legal departments across the country, their prevalence is only going to grow in the coming years. By 2023, Gartner estimates that 90% of multinational global enterprises and 50% of regional midsize organizations will have invested in CLM solutions, and that AI will bring 30% more efficiency to the contract negotiation and document completion processes in organizations that deploy leading CLM solutions.

CLM handles your contracting from end to end, starting with legal review intake, leading you through drafting and negotiation to approval and execution, and finally creating a repository and empowering intelligent reporting to support informed decision-making. CLM with AI does all those things even more accurately and efficiently.

The panel walked through the major goals of any successful CLM automation and AI program:

Additionally, the webinar highlights a number of key themes that are critical to anyone on the CLM transformation journey, including:

Download the webinar here to learn more about Lenovos strategy for a global rollout of CLM technology and why AI is key to the services delivery model of the future.

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The Future of Contracting: CLM Automation with AI at Lenovo - JD Supra

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today at the companys virtual product launch event, Klaviyo, the leading customer data and marketing automation platform, unveiled two new products to support the growth and success of its customers, Personalized Benchmarks and Conversational SMS. Personalized Benchmarks is a tool that offers merchants data-driven insights on marketing efforts, comparing performance to their peers, and offers tangible recommendations for improvement. A new version of Klaviyos conversational SMS marketing platform helps online brands to communicate with customers in fast, casual format.

We continually use data to inform and evolve our technology, guiding retailers to better performance and results. Because our platform can bring in and analyze massive amounts of data from ecommerce platforms and about customer engagement, brands are able to create personalized experiences and improve the customer experience, said Andrew Bialecki, co-founder and CEO of Klaviyo. Benchmarking how you are doing against your peers gives relevant insight into where real possibilities lie. Being able to communicate with customers on the platform they prefer helps to deepen frequency and quality of engagement.

Benchmarks for Growth

The Personalized Benchmarks tool is built natively into Klaviyos platform and evaluates the performance of online businesses in comparison to other similar brands. The function was born out of customer requests asking for performance feedback. Previously solved manually via customer service representatives, Klaviyo developed technology to automate and scale these data-driven insights.

Data is aggregated from Klaviyos more than 65,000 global customers, which span from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. A report is created keeping other brands' identities anonymous and is customized for merchants based on six key business attributes: industry, average price point, revenue, growth rate, channel, and frequency. The metrics are delivered via Klaviyos Benchmarks dashboard and offer visibility into where individual businesses are performing strongest, and where there are opportunities for improvement. The tool also offers suggested courses of action. Merchants can better understand how they competitively fare on average order values, open rates, click-throughs and abandoned carts, which can be used to inform and prioritize future marketing efforts.

Comparing your brand to others within your cohort is essential, continued Bialecki. A small business with less than 50 SKUs looking at data and best practices from a Fortune 500 company with thousands of SKUs is irrelevant and useless. By providing a true benchmark, online merchants can make smart decisions and deliver positive results.

Omni-Channel Customer Engagement

Klaviyo empowers entrepreneurs and online businesses to deliver customer experiences that produce measurable results without relying on platforms like Facebook or Amazon. Klaviyo provides direct access to customer data in a single source and allows brands to communicate via multiple channels such as email and SMS from one intuitive platform. Klaviyos SMS marketing product was introduced in 2020 to allow e-commerce retailers a faster, more intimate way to reach customers and initiate conversations when they are most likely to engage with the brand. Today, the addition of Conversations improves the mobile-first experience and further personalizes brand and customer exchanges over SMS. The feature allows real-time text responses within the platform, so retailers dont need to move between various software dashboards to collect information and respond. The functionality is built-in, with data and action residing together on the platform.

Additional Text Messaging updates include:

Headquartered in Boston, Klaviyo employs more than 600 people. It has raised $358.5 million in funding to date, from lead investors Summit Partners and Accel. Klaviyo continues its rapid growth through R&D, hiring, increased sales, customer support and international expansion.

ABOUT KLAVIYO

Klaviyo is a world-leading marketing automation platform dedicated to accelerating revenue and customer connection for online businesses. Klaviyo makes it easy to store, access, analyze and use transactional and behavioral data to power highly targeted customer and prospect communications. The companys hybrid customer-data and marketing-platform model allows companies to grow by fostering direct relationships with customers, without giving up their valuable data to Facebook or Amazon. In 2020, Klaviyo reached coveted unicorn status with a robust Series C of $200m at $4.15B valuation. Over 65,000 innovative companies like Unilever, Custom Ink, and Huckberry sell more with Klaviyo. Learn more at http://www.klaviyo.com.

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Klaviyo Unveils New Marketing Automation Innovations with Personalized Benchmarks Tool and Conversational SMS - Business Wire

In a 1970s commercial, a boy askedawiseowl, "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?"The owl, who was obviously a tester, decided tosee how many licks it would take; in a humorous twist, he concludedthat the answer was three.Buton the third "lick," he crunched down on the pop and ate the candy.

Like the Tootsie Pop, test automation has a core as well, but it hasthree parts: stimulus, response, and some number of checks. Here's what you need tounderstand about each of these parts, so that you will be ableto createstacks and adjacent stacks that add greater flexibility to your test automation.

At its most simplistic, a stimulus is an action that causes a reaction. For example, striking a drum causes a sound to be made; the strike is the stimulus.

In terms of testing and automation, stimuli come from many different sources, such as:

Each action causes something to happen.

A response is a reaction or result from applying a stimulus; it's the thing that a stimulus causes to happen. Following from the drum example above, the sound made by the drum is a reaction to the stimulus of striking that drum.

Based on our stimulus examples above, corresponding responses could include:

Note that a single stimulus may cause multiple responses; also, a specific response may be caused by more than one stimulus. These are important to notebecause it may be valuable or necessary to check multiple stimulus/response combinations.

Checks are what you use to determine whether you received an appropriate response from your reaction. Again, from the drum example, checks for the result of striking a drum could include "Did you hear a sound?"and "Did you feel contact with the drum?"Note that thisis also an example of multiple responses to the same stimulus.

For the previous automation and testing examples, checks could include:

When programmed into automation, these checks are usually implemented as assertions, as opposed to the question style used in the abovebullets.

At the core of the implementation, there are certain commonalities about how to generate the stimulus, receive the response, and evaluate the checks. Though they typically differ per technology, the abstractions are similar; they differ only in the implementation details.

If you think at a high enough level, you can abstract your automation steps into behaviors, such as "Add an item to cart"or "Perform checkout." Using "Add an item to cart"as an example and assuming your GUI is backed with a web serviceAPI, there are at least two different ways that you can accomplish adding an item to a cart.

Conceptually, you could write a test script that looks like the following:

cart.addAnItemToCart(item)Assert.assertTrue(cart.contains(item))The interesting part of the above pseudocode is the call to addAnItemToCart. This method can be implemented by interacting with the GUI, or it can be implemented by calling the appropriate API action(s).

Understanding this helps yourealize that behaviors can be implemented throughdifferent actions, and each of those actions can have a different implementation. (For a more detailed explanation of behaviors and actions, see this article about the automation stack.)

Following the automation stack concept, you can have one stack based on an API raw tool and a secondbased on a browser-based raw tool. In doing so, you can have different automation approaches for the same behavior.

The need and value of this kind of semi-repeated implementation of a behavior are absolutely context-dependent; some organizations might find great value in this implementation, while others may find it's redundant. The concept does, however, lead to the notion of adjacent stacks.

Again, based onthe automation stack concept, the idea of adjacent stacks is exactly that: automation stacks that can be exercised in a single test script that differ in their specific implementations but have "mostly the same"actions and behaviors. Here, "mostly the same"is context-dependent as well, but generally means that if one stack has a behavior or action, the adjacent stack also has that behavior or action.

Why are adjacent stacks valuable? Some organizations may want to exercise the system at different levels for the same function or feature. Perhaps, since API tests execute faster than GUI tests, the API-level test suite is testing deeply for the message, data, and business logic aspects. This allows for fewer of the slower GUI tests, but GUI tests can still provide value even if duplicating a behavior that's previously been tested by an API test.

Duplication is not inherently bad; in actuality, it's only bad if you are duplicating without having a specific value proposition for that duplication. Also, it could be argued that if you are getting value from the duplication because you're getting additional information from it, then it's not a duplication.

The real value from adjacent stacks, however, is in cross-technology test scriptsscripts that can use more than one automation technology in the same test script. For example, perhaps you want to test that an update to a profile is correctly saved in a database. This could be automated by driving the GUI to log in and make the update, followed by an API or SQL call to check that the data was stored as expected.

Even if cross-technology scripts are not currently useful to you, having all of your scripts using the same logging and execution frameworks can require less effort to debug and store automation results.

The application to the automation core concept is that these automation stacks can encapsulate the implementation specifics but provide the same or similar interfaces across the stacks for similar actions. This level of consistency can be used to create general approaches fordesigning test scripts where the details of the automation implementation are no longer leaked into the scripts, which reduces maintenance and, in many cases, increases readability and supportability.

As with most implementations, your mileage may vary depending on your specific needs, implementations, and goals.

Anautomation's core contains some number of checks,as stated above,but how many is "some number"?

Some teams follow an automation philosophy of one (explicit) check/assert per script. In concept, this is a great idea. Keeping automated testing scripts small and focused can help an individual script run quickly and reduce the likelihood of "lots"of failures due to the same issue.

This failure reductionis largely due to being able to check Step B of an application without having to pass through Step A first. Thismeansthat issues in Step A will cause failures in test scriptsfor Step A, but are less likely to cause failures intest scripts for Step B because youskip Step A.

This approach works, however, only if you can start testing Step B directly.Ifthe application requires thatyou perform Step A before starting Step B, you can introduce appreciable repetition across your test scripts.

For example:

When following this one-checkapproach for a messaging interface such as a REST endpoint or a telecom interface, the amount of time that each step takes may be sufficiently small that the pass-through time for these prerequisite steps is insignificant.

Sadly, this is not always the case; most of us don't work exclusively at the protocol messaging level for telecom or REST, which, by its very nature, allows endpoints to be poked at will.

Usually, these prerequisite stepscenarios occur when automating via a GUI.Interacting via GUI is slow. In these cases, having multiple checks or asserts in a single test script may be the most appropriate implementation.

Typically, the tradeoff here is a shorter duration for an automation run versusthe risk that a problem in a particular test step prevents testing of later steps in a specific script. Certainly, some of the automation run duration can be shortened by parallelizing automation runs.

Apart from GUI tests, there are often instances in API and messaging tests for which multiple assertions in a single test script are appropriate. Take, for instance, the case where you want to check many fields in an API response message. You could write a test script that checks Field 1, then write a script that checks Field 2, etc. Yes, since you are testing at the message level, the tests are typically fast to execute, most often sub-second.

If, however, you want to check 60 fields, you could be adding approximately 30 seconds to testing that response message. You likely will also need to check different configurations of that response; you likely will have to check other response messages as well. It could add multiple minutes to each automation execution's duration. In cases such as this, it can make sense to have multiple asserts or checks per test script.

Conventional wisdom says that your checks must be deterministic, i.e., you can always programmatically determine whether an assertion's condition is true or false. After all, if you can't determine whether or not an assertion fires, you don't know if a test script should report a pass or a fail.

If you can't reliably determine pass or fail, you lose trust in your automation and the data it provides to you. Therefore, only deterministic checks are useful, right? Not so fast.

Most of the time, deterministic checks are required to produce trustworthy and valuable results; this is true for traditional automated test scripts,in particular.When you go beyond traditional automation into nontraditional automation or automation assist, non-deterministic assertions can still provide value.

With this approach, automation is not about passing and failing; it's about computers helping testers do their jobs by doing things at which computers excel, namely repetitive operations and data comparisons.

When intentionally allowing non-deterministic checks, you understand that your automation is not living in a pass/fail world, but in aworld where some unexpected things happenthat might indicate an issue. Anda human needs to evaluate thoseresults to make that determination.

Want to know more? Come to my talk, "Stacking the Automation Deck,"on April 28 at the STAREAST Virtual+ conference. The online event runsApril 26-30. For my full schedule of appearances, visit my upcoming eventspage.

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Stimulus, response, check: The core of test automation - TechBeacon

Amid the upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, two healthcare firms turned to IT automation tools to weather the crisis.

As with many companies, the pandemic prompted Healthfirst, a not-for-profit insurance provider in New York, and Accuhealth, a telehealth startup in McAllen, Texas, to accommodate a shift to remote work. For these companies, however, that work was different from the average business -- not office employees signing on to a VPN to work from home, but rather patients seeking medical information and physicians treating patients without risking in-person visits.

"The mobile app was the first thing we've developed that went through a DevOps cycle," said Anthony Mongiovi, director of release management at Healthfirst, which has 1.5 million health plan members in the New York City area. "It was in the works, but the pandemic expedited it -- we released in July and it was originally not supposed to be released until the fall."

The mobile app replaced many of the services Healthfirst previously offered in storefront locations.

"We have community-based offices where somebody can walk in off the street, but when the pandemic hit, that all shut down," Mongiovi said.

DevOps at Healthfirst, founded in 1993, is still in progress for most of the insurer's 150 applications. Developers at the company use Agile workflows to write software, but most of the company's apps are monolithic, and deployed manually on a monthly cycle.

However, a release management automation tool from Plutora, which Healthfirst began using in late October 2019, helped the company deliver the initial release of its mobile app more quickly. Mongiovi uses it to supervise automated releases for that app on a three-week cycle while ensuring those updates adhere to the company's governance requirements.

"Before Plutora we had disparate tools, and it was a mess," Mongiovi said. "Before Plutora, I had to guess what was in a release, and a week before the release, [the developer] would think, 'Oh, no, I have to go create a change record in ServiceNow.'... That would be my first indication which applications were being touched."

With Plutora, the mobile app is updated through a DevOps pipeline that includes the CollabNet VersionOne Agile collaboration tool, Jenkins continuous integration software, HP Application Lifecycle Management and ServiceNow's change management system, along with ServiceNow's Ctask, which orchestrates app deployments.

Plutora compares application builds to developers' stories from the Agile planning process and ensures that features match between the two. The tool also updates change management data in ServiceNow, and will soon automate change approvals as its use expands to include pipeline orchestration.

Plutora gives me a single view into, 'what do we have?' Anthony MongioviDirector of release management, Healthfirst

Plutora, known for value stream management, as well as release management tools, is often brought in to orchestrate existing DevOps workflows, but at Healthfirst, its initial purpose was to organize and automate release management, whether that was done through a DevOps pipeline or not.

"Everybody's using VersionOne, but they're not all using it in the same way," Mongiovi said. "Plutora gives me a single view into, 'what do we have?' I can see out to June and July, and for a few things I can see past that ... which applications are making the most changes, and as things progress, I can tell which are going to be at risk."

This visibility proved crucial to keeping the business running smoothly as the ongoing pandemic coincided with the company's regular open enrollment period in October. One team planned hundreds of changes to an enrollment app for a release scheduled in September, which had the potential to disrupt that application at a crucial time of year.

"I reached out to the IT lead for that application and said, 'What are you guys doing? This is a major risk.'" Mongiovi said. "I was able to ask that question months in advance, and they moved the changes to a release in November."

Accuhealth is at the opposite end of the DevOps curve from Healthfirst, as a startup founded in 2018 to provide technical services to healthcare clients. The company manages a SaaS platform doctors use to make treatment decisions based on data collected from remote patient monitoring devices such as blood pressure monitors, glucometers, pulse oximeters and weight scales. That platform, hosted in the AWS cloud and built on Splunk's log analytics system, is managed by DevOps engineers and integrated with artificial intelligence systems for data analysis.

Still, while remote patient monitoring was growing in popularity before the pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis caused a traffic spike on the company's platform that needed further IT automation to handle.

"We went through a massive surge in demand because of COVID," said Stephen Samson, CEO at Accuhealth. "We were scaling our Splunk instances and having performance issues."

Accuhealth, which has about 10,000 patient customers, collects no more than 5 GB of data daily, but had to accommodate a manifold increase in the number of searches on the company's Splunk log analytics system when COVID-19 struck.

"We were signing up five clinics a day," Samson said. "And then everyone was pressing the 'search' button ... we kept adding [instances], but that wasn't the answer -- there's a point where there's diminishing returns. We had to come up with a better architecture."

In March 2020, Accuhealth's Splunk developers suggested adding the free version of Cribl LogStream, an IT automation tool that enriches logs with metadata and parses them before they're loaded into the Splunk system, to make searches more efficient. Cribl support helped Accuhealth engineers set up and tune the product before they paid a license fee, which impressed Samson. The company now pays about $1,500 a year for a LogStream license.

Cribl helped us reduce the load and spend on Amazon EC2 by 30%. Stephen SamsonCEO, Accuhealth

"Cribl helped us reduce the load and spend on Amazon EC2 by 30%," Samson said. "Before, we anticipated we'd be able to scale to accommodate about 100,000 patients -- now we estimate we'll be able to scale up to 100 million."

Remote patient monitoring is still a developing industry -- Samson estimated just 4% of that market has been tapped so far. Even when COVID-19 subsides, he expects remote patient monitoring to continue to grow.

"The pandemic was a telehealth catalyst, but eventually that will go down -- doctors still need to see patients in person," he said. "Remote patient monitoring can help people maintain a better connection with their doctor for when they do go in."

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IT automation helps healthcare companies adjust to pandemic - TechTarget

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cloudmed, the leader in Revenue Intelligence solutions for healthcare providers, announced today that it has acquired Databound, a healthcare technology company specializing in Robotic Process Automation. Together, Cloudmed and Databound deliver unprecedented accuracy, productivity, and revenue opportunities through sophisticated automation technology and human expertise.

It has never been more important for healthcare communities to get paid for the care they provide, states Lee Rivas, Chief Executive Officer, Cloudmed. Databounds achievements in intelligent automation enrich Cloudmeds market-leading Revenue Intelligence platform to help providers enhance productivity and increase revenue.

Both companies were recognized by their clients for their commitment to excellence in 2021, with the Best in KLAS ranking for outstanding efforts to help healthcare organizations deliver better patient care. Cloudmed is ranked #1 in the Revenue Integrity/Underpayment Services Provider segment. Databound earned the top honors in the new Robotic Process Animation (RPA) segment.

Both Cloudmed and Databound share a passion for excellence, innovation, and most importantly, service." states Paul Martin, President and CEO of Databound. "Databound's proven revenue cycle focused RPA technology that lives up to its promises is a perfect fit with the Cloudmed Revenue Intelligence platform. Together, well help our customers unleash the value of RPA and realize the revenue they deserve."

About Cloudmed

Cloudmed is a healthcare technology company focused on Revenue Intelligence and data-driven insights. Our market-leading platform utilizes intelligent automation and human expertise to help providers enhance productivity and increase revenue. Cloudmed partners with over 3,100 healthcare providers in the United States and recovers over $1.5 billion of underpaid or unidentified revenue for its clients annually. Cloudmed was awarded 2021 Best In KLAS: Revenue Integrity/Underpayment Services. Its solution suites have HFMA Peer Review status and are HITRUST certified. http://www.cloudmed.com

About Databound

Databound provides specialized automation software and services designed for the healthcare revenue cycle. By providing high ROI solutions that work, they help organizations increase productivity, save time, and capture missed revenue. Databound continues to set the standard for RPA excellence and has won 2021 Best in KLAS: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with unmatched customer satisfaction reviews. http://www.databound.com.

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Cloudmed Acquires Databound, Enhancing Its Revenue Intelligence Platform with Robotic Process Automation - Business Wire

ANNAPOLIS, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc. (X9) is creating a new standard -- X9.147, Audit Confirmation and Account Verification Exchange -- that will enable the automated transport of financial audit confirmation and account verification requests. Use of this standard will streamline data exchange between financial institutions and others, saving time and effort and improving accuracy and efficiency. Interested parties are invited to participate in its development.

In today's environment, audit confirmations (customer-authorized requests for account data for use in independent audits), deposit verifications and account verifications are largely manual. Most requests are for specific account balances on specific days, verifications of deposits within a specific date range, or address verifications. This data is used by independent auditors to verify client records, and it is also used for other purposes, such as benefits eligibility inspections or supplemental verifications for lease qualifications.

The information requests are often quite easy to fulfill, but are very time consuming, especially during peak season (January through April each year), when request volumes can increase many times over. Requests are delivered in multiple formats through many different channels, ranging from customers themselves to third-party vendors, making a simple process manual and prone to error. Developing a data exchange that could map directly to a financial institution's deposit system has the potential to automate this activity almost completely.

The resulting efficiency could dramatically decrease the impact of these requests to the financial institution, especially during peak audit season, as well as providing faster and more accurate results to requesters. Beneficiaries of the new standard will include financial institutions, their deposit customers, independent auditors, leasing agents, and state and local governments issuing and verifying benefit eligibility.

In furtherance of this goal, X9.147 will establish the file sequences, record types and field formats to be used for the electronic exchange of these requests. Work will be carried out within the X9B5 Confirmations and Verifications Workgroup, which seeks input from individuals with technical backgrounds and/or experience in audit confirmations and deposit and account verifications.

"The X9.147 project seeks to enable far more efficient presentment and consumption of audit confirmation and account and deposit verification requests into a financial institution, as well as the financial institution's response to those requests," said X9 Executive Director Steve Stevens. "All stakeholders will benefit, and we urge all who have an interest in this area to join us and contribute their expertise."

About the Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc.The Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc. is a non-profit organization accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop and maintain national and through ISO -- international standards for the financial services industry. The subjects of X9's standards include: retail, mobile and business payments; corporate treasury functions; block chain technology; processing of electronic legal orders issued to financial institutions; tracking of financial transactions and instruments; financial transaction messaging (ISO 8583 and 20022); quantum computing; PKI; checks; cloud; data breach notification and more.

X9 acts as the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for ISO TC68 (Financial), TC321 (E-Commerce) and TC322 (Sustainable Finance) and performs the secretariat functions for ISO TC68. Please visit our website (www.x9.org) for more information.

Follow ASC X9 on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter

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ASC X9 Preparing New Standard To Enable Automation of Financial Audit and Verification Confirmations - Business Wire

ARMONK, N.Y., March 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --Automated Marking Incorporated (AMI), a leading manufacturer anddistributor of marking and coding equipment is pleased to announce thatindustry veteran Wilfred (Bill) Allen has joined their leadership team, to playasignificant role in accelerating the company's aggressive growth plans.

AMI, headquartered inWestchester County, NY, has been a leader in the marking and coding industry, perhapsmost well-known as being the exclusive North American distributor of a line of uniquehandheld coding devices. The company's roots are in manufacturing dating back to 1903 as a rubber stamp and engraving company. In its current form AMI hasbeen serving clients large and smallwith both handheld and inline marking, coding equipment, specializedaftermarket inks and related products for over 41 years.

"Bringing Bill aboard is astrong signal of more developments to come for AMI," shared Jeff Mear, CFO ofthe family-owned and managed business. "Bill brings with him decades ofexperience, and a deep background in all levels and aspectsof the marking andcoding industry. We are very pleased to have him on the team."

Over a career that spans morethan thirty-years, Mr. Allen has been a leader in the Coding, Packaging, and CommercialPrinting space, with experience in the areas of service, technical support and training,as well as significant experience insales leadership.

"Bill will be tasked withbuilding-out our field service and support teams, and enlarging our salescapabilities, as we continue to expand our proprietary offerings. Bill has alreadyproven to be a key acquisition, and we look forward to his rolebeing atransformative one for Automated Marking," expanded Julian Mear, AutomatedMarking's CEO.

"I couldn't be more excitedabout the potential that I've walked into here at AMI," shared Mr. Allen. "Thereis a deeply experienced leadership team in place, with a vision for improvingcustomer experiences, improving service and overall -improving plantproductivity for our customers," Allen says of his new environment. "AMIalready has some killer-app technology in place, and we're on the verge oflaunching some innovative new offerings, that will catapult our capabilitiestothe very top of the industry."

"We've built this businessover many years, by being relentlessly focused on exceeding our customers'expectations. We believe in selling the highest quality products, leveraging andunderstanding our clients' workflows and environments, anddelivering top qualityservice throughout the customer lifecycle," says Stephanie Mear, AMI's Chief Operating Officer.

"Bill's background intraining and service in addition to sales means he understands our customers pain-points,and is always solution and value oriented," continued Stephanie Mear, speakingabout Mr. Allen's appointment. "This is a veryimportant position in our organization,and I am confident that Bill is exactly the right person to fill this pivotalrole."

ABOUT AMI:Automated Marking Incorporatedhas beenan international leader since 1903, in the development, sales, service andsupport of high-quality product identification, systems automation equipment,hardware,software and consumables for marking, coding, and commercial printingapplications. AMI's core capabilities including full-lifecycle support for ThermalInkjet Printers (TIJ), Continuous Inkjet printers (CIJ), Laser MarkingSystems,Thermal Transfer Overprinters (TTO), Piezo Hi -Rez, Case Coding, Form Fill andSeal, Print and Apply Labeling (LPA), Commercial Graphics and Addressing, andCode Assurance.

For Interviews, Photos or other Media or Public Relations Needs, contact: John Van Dekker 914-800-9222 | [emailprotected] | enormouscreative.com

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Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Axel Kicillof relished the role he played in the Argentine government years ago: the brash left-wing economy minister who clashed at every opportunity with foreign investors. They hated him and he loved it.Today, Kicillof is once again locked in a bruising battle with financiers in New York and London. This time its as governor of Buenos Aires, which, along with nearly a dozen other provinces, called for debt restructuring talks last year as the federal government began negotiations of its own with creditors. But unlike the others, Buenos Aires has yet to emerge from default. In fact, 10 months after Kicillof halted payments on $7.1 billion worth of bonds, barely any progress has been made in talks.With the bonds now languishing at just 35 cents on the dollar in secondary markets and not a penny of interest income flowing their way, creditors are growing tired of the stalling and the disinterest displayed by Kicillofs aides. Last week, funds from the Buenos Aires Ad Hoc Bondholder Group sued the province in U.S. court for unpaid principal and interest.This gambit, analysts say, may help jump-start the process by forcing the province to take a more active role in negotiations. But, they warn, theres another dynamic at play that threatens to only embolden Kicillof to further radicalize his hard-line approach. The federal government -- under the growing influence of Vice President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, a mentor to Kicillof -- is aggressively pushing for concessions to refinance a $45 billion failed program with the International Monetary Fund.The governments newly restructured sovereign bonds, like the defaulted Buenos Aires bonds, now trade below 40 cents on the dollar, a reflection of how badly the countrys economy and finances have been battered by the pandemic and lack of credibility.For Kicillof, this is political, said Diego Ferro, founder of M2M Capital in New York, a veteran debt investor who doesnt hold bonds of the province. Which means that unless he gets a deal consistent with what Argentina got, it will reflect poorly on him.And as August primaries and October mid-term elections get closer, politics will play an ever larger role in shaping all aspects of policy. Cutting a deal with the IMF or provincial bondholders isnt a priority, especially during a pandemic.Buenos Aires has extended the deadline on its debt proposal no fewer than 13 times. But last week, the province published details of a new one shown to New York-based hedge fund GoldenTree Asset Management, one of its largest creditors. It was swiftly rejected -- as was the counteroffer.The next day, the creditor group, including GoldenTree, submitted two legal claims against the province in the U.S District Court of New York seeking $366 million in unpaid interest and principal.Theres definitely more pressure with the litigation now ongoing, said Carlos de Sousa, an emerging market portfolio manager at Vontobel Asset Management in Zurich. Kicillof is quite ideologically driven and close to Cristina. And thus his lack of cooperation with creditors until recently.The provinces bonds due 2027 fell 0.3 cent to 37.7 cents on the dollar at 4:50 p.m. in Buenos Aires.Those who observed Kicillof as Economy Minister between 2013-2015 under then president Fernandez de Kirchner know that he doesnt quickly surrender in high profile conflicts with creditors. Back then he battled Paul Singers Elliott Management and other holdouts, insisting that Argentina couldnt comply with a ruling in their favor and eventually opted to default again with the presidents blessing.And while hes delegated negotiations this time around as governor to his provincial Economy Minister Pablo Lopez, hes very much involved.Read More: Buenos Aires Province Weighs Next Steps After Creditor LawsuitThe legal claims are only a strategy to pressure the government and the province will still have 60 days to respond, Lopez said in an interview last week. While Kicillof, 49, doesnt directly participate in conversations with bondholders, Lopez frequently discusses the debt restructuring process with him, he said.He is focused and interested, Lopez said. The debt negotiation is determined by the provincial government.The province is bigger than many countries and represents half of the debt from regional governments. Home to almost 18 million people and accounting for two-fifths of Argentinas GDP, its a critical political battleground in any election.Last week at an event, Fernandez de Kirchner, who hand-picked Alberto Fernandez as the presidential candidate in 2019, railed against the IMF and the terms being sought to renegotiate the largest credit agreement ever struck with the Washington-based lender. Bond prices fell.We cant pay because we dont have the money, she said, with Kicillof nodding in the background. While they spoke, Economy Minister Martin Guzman was wrapping up a trip to Washington after meeting IMF officials.After Fernandez took power in December 2019, Buenos Aires Province was the first to default on its debt payments in May. Days later, the federal government followed suit, along with several other provinces over the course of the next months.Since then, the government and eight provinces have settled with creditors. Deals ranged from about 55 cents on the dollar for the government while many regional authorities agreed to much smaller discounts, between 83.4 and 96.3 cents considering a 10% exit yield. While a few small provinces also remain in talks, Buenos Aires, which offered to pay about 65 cents, is the last major holdout.As economy minister, Kicillof negotiated a settlement with Spains Repsol SA after the government seized its stake in oil producer YPF SA in 2012, agreeing to compensate the company with bonds. He also struck a deal with the Paris Club of creditors.Those events give some investors hope that hell eventually come around to an agreement. Still, his rhetoric remains combative. Speaking at an event on Friday, Kicillof called investors unsupportive and intransigent.Court claims arent going to lead to solutions to the root problems, he said. We remain open to dialogue to reach an agreement thats convenient to creditors and that the province can pay.Even after the lawsuit was filed, Kicillof has little financial incentive to reach a settlement soon or offer concessions to creditors. The province realistically has no chance of tapping international markets for fresh funding, so it has little to lose in dragging out talks. And if a court ruling were to go against it, the provinces lawyers could appeal the case several times, and that could stretch the saga into the next gubernatorial elections in 2023.I dont see a situation where Kicillof agrees to a deal thats better than what the sovereign agreed to, Ferro said.(Updates with bond move in 11th paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.2021 Bloomberg L.P.

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Worldwide Nordic Building Automation and Control Industry to 2027 - by Type, Offering, Industrial Vertical and Country - ResearchAndMarkets.com -...

Venture by Tijana Kojovic and Dragoljub Cibulic builds on Serbian firm's own tech offering

Two senior partners at top Serbian firm BDK have launched a legal technology document automation startup to help in-house teams streamline the creation of standardised legal documents.

The startup, Draftomat, was conceptualised and financed by managing partner and co-founder Tijana Kojovic and co-senior partner Dragoljub Cibulic. Its launch comes a year after the firm unveiled its first document automation offering, Blinkdraft. Unlike Blinkdraft, Draftomat exists as an independent venture spearheaded by Kojovic and Cibulic.

Draftomat builds on the existing foundation laid by Blinkdraft and updates it for a more wide-ranging target client-base that includes law firms, HR departments, banks, notaries and insurance companies.

Vojislav Bajic, business development manager at BDK, said: The uniqueness of Draftomat is in its multifunctionality and integrability with various databases, and in that it is a front-end tool for secure digital service offerings to the licensees clients.

The software began as a two-pronged product in the form of an internal document automation service that could be used for drafting processes and a client space to offer a template-as-service solution, dubbed Draftomat Drafts and Draftomat Galaxy respectively.

Working alongside a team of software developers, Kojovic and Cibulic built out the platforms capabilities to include Draftomat Knows, which provides access to institutional memory through a tag and store feature allowing users to more easily retrieve legal knowledge.

Draftomat also includes a suite of additional features, including mass document production and the ability to connect user data repositories and external business registries to document templates.

As partners in a law firm, we have always been focused on finding ways to do things more efficiently without it compromising on quality standards, Kojovic and Cibulic wrote on Draftomats website. It seems that us lawyers have a unique perspective on how the software should actually serve us and our clients, based on our everyday experience.

The product will initially be available to the South Eastern European market with plans to expand its reach to the wider European and global markets, according to the firm.

Launched in 2004, BDK has offices in Belgrade, Podgorica in Montenegro and Banja Luka in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Last month, Linklaters unveiled a new contract automation platform, CreateiQ, developed in conjunction with its flagship tech group Nakhoda to improve upon existing laborious contracting mechanisms with data-driven solutions.

Independent law firms developing their own legal tech or consultancy services include Spains ECIJA, which this month acquired Valencia-based consultancy Revamp Law to expand its legaltech, cybersecurity and technology services, and Italys BonelliErede, which spun out its legal services provider business beLab as a standalone company last October.

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Senior BDK partners team up to found document automation startup - The Global Legal Post