Kategorie: technology

ThKeeper uses Watson to help reduce risk and enable identity verification across borders

We live in an increasingly globalized world, where it is becoming common for people to live in multiple countries. People coming from abroad bring new skills and experiences, enriching workplaces.
However, lives spent across borders can pose a challenge when it comes to identity verification, including credit history and criminal records checks. Even in today’s hyperconnected world, identity checks remain surprisingly unsophisticated. They tend to focus on a person’s records within one country rather than their international history. They can also fail to calculate someone’s statistical risk.
This can be dangerous for companies and unfair to people with limited records in a new country.
Let’s take an example from banking. What if a customer has a good credit history in one country, but they previously filed for bankruptcy or left large debts unpaid in another? Do they still look like a good customer? Alternatively, how many trustworthy customers are rejected because they do not have enough of a credit history where they live now?
Verifying identity in a globalized world
To help organizations make better-informed decisions about customers, London-based ThKeeper set out to build a solution that verifies a person’s identity across borders.
When a company wants to evaluate a person’s identity, it sends their passport, driver’s license or national identity card to ThKeeper’s mobile app, Jasoon. Our proprietary identity verification program cross-checks the person’s identity against 200 third-party databases in 192 countries, covering a total of 4.3 billion people.
Jasoon can provide valuable insights such as checking identities against watch lists such as Interpol, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and Politically Exposed Persons (PEP). Our services help users comply with regulatory requirements such as Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Customer Identification Program (CIP) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
Calculating risk
We saw an opportunity to take our solution one step further by providing a better understanding of customer risk profiles, based on rules set by the user. To do this, we deployed the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of IBM Watson Discovery. We built a state-of-the-art AI identity management service, based on IBM Watson and running on IBM Cloud virtual servers.
Using IBM Watson, we created a cognitive search and content analytics engine that extracts actionable insights from the data to power better decision-making. Our service assigns key risk indicators, providing an assessment of the risk a customer poses to the user’s business.
For example, the solution might tell a bank branch manager that an individual is 75 percent likely to be a good customer because they pay off their credit card in full every month. ThKeeper can also run specific checks relevant to certain industries, such as whether a person has ever been convicted of money laundering.
Our service is encrypted end-to-end, and personal data is automatically deleted after checks are run. If a client wants to hang onto data, they must commit to doing so within the IBM Cloud and in compliance with EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations.
Identifying new business
Our solution, based on IBM Watson technologies, also helps build our bespoke, customer-first brand more easily. We used to spend weeks or months creating tailored interfaces for each client or industry. Now we can detect each customer’s areas of interest and dynamically adapts the interface to match.
Our solution automatically customizes reports to each user’s taste, delivering information in spreadsheets or PDFs, depending on their preferences. It can also identify business opportunities by suggesting further areas to explore.
Running on the IBM Cloud has helped us speed up development. When you want to integrate a new service into your platform, about 75 percent of the coding effort has been done for you already. Last time, it took seven months to build a production-ready app. We built our current prototype with IBM Watson in just three months.
With the help of IBM Watson and IBM Cloud solutions, ThKeeper can offer a first-of-its kind AI identity management service. We enable companies to assess individual risk in an intelligent way, adding immense value to our offering and increasing our appeal to new customers.
Read the case study for more details.
The post ThKeeper uses Watson to help reduce risk and enable identity verification across borders appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

Why a modern integration strategy is essential for digital transformation

With customer expectations quickly evolving, enterprises are rushing to digitally transform and adopt cloud and AI capabilities. Companies are looking for ways to innovate faster, create personalized customer experiences, and deliver actionable business insights faster. The key is unlocking the hidden power of data and services.
Unlock data and services to power your digital transformation
From smartphones to Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as smart speakers and appliances, there are more services and more data being generated by companies and consumers than ever before. But before you can turn these into a competitive advantage, you first need to be able to access and connect to all, no matter where they may live across multiple clouds and on-premises environments.
Traditional integration architectures that are more centralized may not be as scalable. They simply can’t keep up with the speed and volume of integrations required to digitally transform. Modern integration requires speed, flexibility, security and scale, but ripping and replacing simply isn’t an option for large organizations.
What’s needed is an approach that balances traditional and modern integration, allowing businesses to use their existing investments, integrate hybrid environments and drive speed and efficiency, all while lowering costs.
Consider an agile integration strategy
By using a decentralized, container-based, microservices-aligned approach to integration, businesses can empower their teams to build and support the volume of integrations required to keep up in today’s digital world. We call this an agile integration strategy.
If you’re interested in learning more about agile integration strategy, please read the IBM Agile Integration Handbook or watch our on-demand webinar.
Adopting an agile integration approach requires a variety of integration capabilities, including API management, messaging, event streams and of course data and application integration.
In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2022, “at least 65 percent of large organizations will have implemented an HIP to power their digital transformation.”
Introducing the IBM Cloud Integration Platform
I’m pleased to announce IBM Cloud Integration Platform, the industry’s most complete hybrid integration platform, designed to support the scale, security and economics required for your integration and digital transformation initiatives.
IBM Cloud Integration Platform helps organizations easily connect applications, services and data across multiple clouds by bringing together into a single user experience.
IBM Cloud Integration Platform Capabilities include:

API lifecycle management
Data and application integration
Enterprise messaging
Event streams (Apache Kafka)
High-speed data transfer

The platform is container based and can be deployed across on-premises or cloud environment that support Kubernetes. This allows businesses to set up the appropriate organizational models and governance practices they need to support a decentralized and self-service approach to integration. The platform’s common asset repository allows teams to find, share and reuse integration resources, helping to improve efficiency.
The new IBM Cloud Integration Platform makes use of existing investments while getting the much-needed flexibility and speed that an agile integration strategy provides in a secured environment. These can accelerate your organization’s ability to deliver the personalized experiences your customers demand, take advantage of cutting-edge AI applications and deliver game-changing business insights to help you make more informed decisions faster.
The bottom line is that this can help companies cut the time and cost of integration by one third.
Interested in learning more about how IBM can help you turn your data and services into a competitive advantage? Visit our IBM Cloud Integration Platform page today.
The post Why a modern integration strategy is essential for digital transformation appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud

New IBM services help companies manage the new multicloud world

Enterprises are going through a huge transformation in how they operate.
Today, according to a recent study, 85 percent of enterprises operate in a multicloud environment. The IBM Institute for Business Value estimates that by 2021, 98 percent of organizations studied plan to adopt multicloud architectures.
Navigating multicloud complexity
There are no two ways about it. It’s a multicloud world. With most businesses already running and trying to manage five or more cloud environments, often from multiple vendors, companies are struggling with how to keep up. The IBV paper study also states that just 38 percent of those same enterprises studied will have the procedures and tools they need to operate this environment.
This is compounded by the fact that managing these multiple clouds is largely customized and can be complex, with potentially major security implications and a lack of consistent management and integration tools. What’s required are services that provide an integrated approach to provide companies with a single management and operations system that address three critical layers:

Business management. Applications that provide digital service ordering, modern service management, and cost governance.
Orchestration. An automation layer that enables services of different types, from different vendors to be delivered in an optimized manner and available to consumers.
Operations. A layer that enables infrastructure and operations admins to monitor and maintain systems, including legacy infrastructure, private cloud, public cloud and container environments.

Simplifying multicloud management
To help navigate this complexity, IBM is embracing the multicloud reality and vision for our clients. Our next step in achieving this is building off of a recent partnership expansion with ServiceNow to offer new services that are designed to help enterprises simplify the management of their IT resources across multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments. Not only can the IBM Services for Multicloud Management help you address those three areas, it will also include a unified, self-service experience to enable companies to:

integrate with the ServiceNow Portal to configure and buy cloud services/solutions from multiple cloud providers
offer a global DevOps pipeline and performance management services
offer data center performance cloud health, container management and AI ops management
provide workload planning, cloud sourcing, procurement and cost and asset management

Introducing new IBM Services for Cloud Strategy and Design
To succeed on any cloud platform and deliver real business value, it’s essential for companies to build the right strategy following a broad assessment. At IBM, we’re working with clients across industries to help them determine which processes, methods and applications need to be moved or modernized for cloud.
With our new IBM Services for Cloud Strategy and Design, IBM is providing a comprehensive set of consulting services to advise clients on their journey to hybrid cloud. Services include design, migration, integration, road mapping and architectural services with support for multiple vendor platforms. Our enhanced cloud capabilities combined with our Cloud Innovate tools, IBM Cloud approach and automated decision accelerators, help companies architect the best, holistic approach to cloud.
Dedicated teams of certified IBM consultants work with clients to help design, build and manage their cloud architecture with open, secure multicloud strategies. With the right multicloud support, we’re supporting companies with application development, migration, modernization and management for faster deployment.
There’s no question cloud is here to stay. The question is, is your company ready for a multicloud world?
Learn more about these new IBM Cloud Services and get started today.
The post New IBM services help companies manage the new multicloud world appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud