Fiverr's 8th Business Trends Index revealed that even traditionally offline businesses like shipping and construction are investing in their web strategy. 

Fiverr International Ltd., the company that is changing how the world works together, today released its Fall 2023 Business Trends Index, a collection of trending searches for freelance digital services on Fiverr's platform. Among the millions of inquiries on the marketplace, these services saw the largest percentage increase over the last six months. The data revealed that businesses, from highly tech-driven startups to those in industries like construction and retail, are recruiting freelance experts to help them explore new avenues for growth.

Taking advantage of opportunity is the theme at the center of Fiverr’s 8th Business Trends Index. The main trends to surface in this index include:

(1) businesses exploring new and more specific projects with AI
(2) retail companies preparing to capture modern consumers during shopping season
(3) service businesses stepping up their digital presence

“Businesses are taking advantage of the new tools at their fingertips and the growth potential for their bottom line,” said Hila Klein, COO of Fiverr. “Data from our platform reveals that a variety of businesses — from retail stores to tech companies and shipping services — are pursuing new growth channels. They’re leveraging freelance experts to help make their unique business vision a reality. With the wider adoption of AI tools and signs of a leveling economy, the last six months have brought a new sense of momentum, and freelance talent has played a pivotal role in helping businesses evolve to keep pace and find innovative ways to improve.”

These are the trending global searches over the past six months:

Growing comfort with AI tech and exploration of new possibilities

At the start of this year, business leaders eagerly sought ways to understand and adopt AI tools. The tech still remains top of mind. Search trends show that they've refined their focus, seeking out AI experts to help them create tools and assets aligned with their specific business needs. Still in its infancy, AI technology has spiked demand for experts with specific AI skills, even spawning new AI jobs on the platform. Freelancers with a range of skills — from prompt engineers to AI app developers and AI video editors — are meeting the evolving needs of leaders looking to create next-generation businesses with AI.

• AI content editing +10,490%
• Prompt engineering +7,345%
• AI video +3,746%

Retail revs up ahead of shopping season

In the wake of global economic shifts, retail businesses are navigating a quickly-evolving consumer landscape. The months leading up to key shopping moments, including back-to-school and the holiday season, are a critical time for retailers who are adapting their online sales strategies to more effectively meet modern consumers. Fiverr searches reveal retailers are seeking freelance experts to help them with everything from updating their product descriptions to improving their e-commerce site and creating mock ups of new products.

• E-commerce website developer +3,333%
• Amazon A+ content +12,256%
• Clothing store +525%

Service industries are stepping up their online strategy

Service businesses, like shipping logistics, construction, and repairs are in consistent demand and faced with the challenge of meeting customer needs faster and more efficiently. In an increasingly tech-centric world, these businesses are seeking the support of freelancers who can help them improve their web presence. Many are recruiting developers to build custom websites that will allow them to grow and make customer interaction more seamless.

• Trucking website +3,442%
• Handyman website +1,398%
• Property management website +1,397%

Overloaded with subscriptions and unsure of costs, consumers ditch streaming services in favor of piracy

Faced with a cost-of-living crunch, half of Asian consumers (59%) say they can no longer afford all of their subscription services. As a result, 44% now access content via illegal piracy sites. That's according to a new Bango study, exploring subscription trends and the rise of Super Bundling in Asia.

Bango's study incorporates data from over 6,000 consumers currently paying for subscription services across India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.

It found that almost a third (29%) of Asian consumers have 5 or more subscriptions. In regions such as Thailand, however, 63% of consumers say they can no longer afford the subscriptions they want, a figure that rises as high as 79% in Malaysia.

Subscription squeeze

To better keep track of costs, Asian subscribers are looking to manage all of their current subscriptions (streaming, gaming, fitness and more) in one single platform, app, or monthly bill. In fact, the vast majority (91%) believe that having this single platform would help them to better manage their monthly household expenses.

While many subscribers are struggling to afford all the content they want, Bango's research also highlights a growing frustration managing several different subscription services. 59% are "annoyed" that they can't manage all of their subscriptions in one place, while a quarter struggle to renew contracts across their various accounts. This is further driving demand for a single 'Super Bundling' content hub.

Commenting on this trend, Anil Malhotra, Co-founder at Bango said, "With escalating household expenses and a surge of new entrants in the streaming market, content providers need to ensure they offer subscribers value for money. If they don't, our data indicates that many consumers will resort to piracy instead.

"Telcos in the region have a major role to play, by helping subscribers make sense of their subscription commitments. By offering these services through a Super Bundling subscriptions hub, delivered through existing telco billing relationships, telcos and their content partners can take the wind out of the sails of this growing trend towards piracy."

The demand for Super Bundling

A centralized hub for subscription services would enable simpler, more flexible management which ultimately works to disincentivise piracy. The demand for this type of consolidation is clear across Southeast Asia and India — 93% of consumers want one place to manage subscriptions.

If Super Bundling were available, the data suggests it would increase customer retention and loyalty for telcos, with 89% spending more time using subscriptions, and 81% signing up for more subscriptions. 95% of respondents also say they would feel more loyal to brands offering bundled content hubs, while 66% would even switch telco providers to gain access, underscoring the potential competitive advantage.

"This is where Bango comes in," Malhotra says. "The Bango Digital Vending Machine makes it simple for telcos to aggregate and bundle subscriptions into a single user-friendly experience. Super Bundling subscriptions all in one place boosts customer satisfaction, making it simple for content providers and telcos to tap into this opportunity."

Optimize the compliance lifecycle with automated evidence collection and "test once, comply many" across more than 33 frameworks

TrustWeek 2023 - OneTrust, the market-defining leader for trust intelligence, introduces OneTrust Compliance Automation to optimize the compliance lifecycle. Built on the same cutting-edge guidance, content, and proprietary shared evidence framework that allows OneTrust Certification Automation customers to reduce certification costs and accelerate the compliance process, OneTrust Compliance Automation now extends these capabilities throughout the entire Trust Intelligence Platform. As information security (InfoSec) teams are challenged with managing multiple compliance frameworks, laws, and regulations, OneTrust Compliance Automation enables organizations to deduplicate redundant activities across team members, eliminate manual work, streamline risk management, and reinforce program consistency.

"OneTrust Compliance Automation provides visibility into regulatory requirements, automates upwards of 60% of evidence collection requirements, and offers a roadmap of portfolio coverage and progress," said Cliff Huntington, General Manger, OneTrust GRC and Security Assurance Cloud. "With out-of-the-box compliance framework content and guidance for more than 33 industry frameworks, Compliance Automation isn't just a remedy for audit fatigue, it also allows InfoSec teams to go beyond compliance and focus on trust."

OneTrust Compliance Automation provides the blueprint for organizations to go beyond compliance management:

• Test once, comply many: OneTrust's proprietary shared evidence framework driven by expert-vetted content seamlessly removes duplication and complexity across 33+ published frameworks and the company's common controls.
• Stay continuously compliant with automated evidence collection: InfoSec teams can bypass manual stopgaps with ready-to-activate integrations which automate insights across the tech stack. Capture auditable data on-time and in-scope for defined control requirements with pre-architected, end-to-end collectors.
• Streamline the compliance process: Complete OneTrust's scoping survey to automatically generate risk, controls, and evidence tasks based on identified frameworks and business operations. Centrally manage initiatives based on the company's compliance requirements to track, collect, and monitor evidence of implemented controls across the organization.

OneTrust's GRC and Security Assurance Cloud helps companies protect operations, remain resilient, and make risk-informed decisions. Governance and policy management, IT risk and security assurance, third-party risk, and audit and compliance management enable organizations to holistically and effectively manage operations in the face of continuous threats.

The AI-powered addition to the Skai platform serves as a single location for analyzing and optimizing creative strategy

Skai, a leading omnichannel marketing platform, today announced the launch of Creative Center, a hub within the platform designed to address the pains of managing and optimizing creative assets at scale across multitudes of channels and publishers. Within the Creative Center, marketers can both monitor and compare performance insights in one view, giving them big-picture insight while also increasing the efficiency, effectiveness, and performance of active campaigns. By eliminating the need for manual unification of creative performance data, marketers can make more strategic creative decisions in minutes instead of hours.

As audience segmentation and identification become less of a perfect science in an era of consumer data privacy, priorities are shifting towards omnichannel creative personalization and strategies founded in customer intelligence. In order to upskill in these areas, marketers need ongoing visibility into what works well on which channels and how to repurpose assets to maximize their creative investment.

Centralizing performance trends provides valuable, holistic insights that were previously siloed within different teams and difficult to access, making it possible to evaluate creative at a more granular level and understand root causes. Artificial intelligence automates reporting and powers analysis that can be converted into complete creative briefs. This automation saves critical time and effort, eliminating days of campaign managers' time on the resource-intensive creative brief production process.

"Skai's Creative Center is a critical tool in the world of omnichannel advertising," comments Chris Fecci, Sr. Manager Amazon Media, L'Oréal.  "It offers a convenient one-stop solution for understanding what creative content resonates best with our consumers across channels. We are looking forward to Skai's continued innovation and the exciting possibilities this feature brings."

"Skai customers have been increasingly asking for us to develop creative capabilities that complement our sophisticated audience targeting tools," said Guy Cohen, Chief Product Officer at Skai. "Creative Center is just the beginning. Ad creative is essential to performance and we will continue to expand the ways in which our customers can streamline their creative process while gaining holistic insights that drive growth and competitive market share."

Tata Communications, a global digital ecosystem enabler, today announces completion of the acquisition of Kaleyra, Inc.

On 28th June 2023, Tata Communications had entered into a definitive agreement with Kaleyra, Inc. to acquire it through Tata Communications Limited. The transaction has now been completed upon receipt of the approval by Kaleyra's stockholders, necessary regulatory approvals, and fulfilment of other customary closing conditions. Under the terms of the agreement, Tata Communications Limited has paid an aggregate consideration of approximately $100 million in cash and assumed all of Kaleyra's outstanding debt. With this, Kaleyra, Inc. and its subsidiaries have now become wholly owned subsidiaries of Tata Communications Limited.

The combination of Tata Communications customer engagement solutions and Kaleyra's stronghold in technology, engineering and research & development will drive growth of global enterprises powered by hyper-personalised and intelligent customer interactions.

"In today's hyperconnected world, customer success and loyalty are pivotal to enterprise growth across industries and geographies," said A.S. Lakshminarayanan, MD and CEO, Tata Communications. "We at Tata Communications are committed to revolutionise how businesses engage with customers, leveraging a digital fabric to harness data insights for delivering seamless, secure, smart and impactful customer interactions. We're thrilled to welcome Kaleyra in this journey, as together we pave the way for the future of customer experience!"

Mysore Madhusudhan, Executive Vice President, Collaboration and Connected Solutions, Tata Communications added, "In this digital age, businesses require multi-channel customer engagement solutions built for intuitive, intelligent and automated interactions. Together, Tata Communications and Kaleyra form a powerful combination, poised to shape the customer engagement platforms of tomorrow."

Mauro Carobene, Head of Customer Interaction Suite, Tata Communications, commented, "Together Kaleyra and Tata Communications stand on the brink of a new era, powered by the world-class communications capabilities of Kaleyra.io platform and a determination to drive the future of communications via our intelligent suite of customer interaction solutions. Our joint aspirations are massive, not only in terms of growth, but also in expanding our portfolio that drives value for our customers."

Dr. Avi Katz, Founding Managing Partner of GigCapital Global said: "As the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Kaleyra since inception in November 2019 by way of combination with GigCapital, Inc., I am delighted to see this outcome for the Kaleyra team and its stakeholders. This acquisition reflects a global recognition of the leadership of Kaleyra in the CPaaS industry, fruits of hard work of the entire Kaleyra team for the last four years and excellent relationship with Tata Communications."

UserWay upgrades the standards used by its digital accessibility and compliance solutions, to the newest technical recommendation adopted today by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 

UserWay, a full-service provider of digital accessibility software, announced the release of a standards upgrade across its offerings. Today, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the internet's international standards-setting organization, has adopted WCAG 2.2 as the latest standard for accessibility online.

Meanwhile, global regulatory pressure around accessibility is ratcheting up. The U.S. Department of Justice, on August 4, 2023, published proposed rules increasing digital accessibility demands of state and local public entities. Member states of the European Union have begun enforcing the new E.U. accessibility laws across the private sector, including in eCommerce, goods, and services.

"As advocates for digital inclusion throughout the development lifecycle, UserWay is committed to helping our customers meet evolving accessibility standards so they can provide a more accessible experience to their end users," said Allon Mason, UserWay CEO.

WCAG 2.2 has been seen as more of a complementary update to the previous WCAG 2.1 standards rather than a significant leap towards WCAG 3.0, which may eventually be a major overhaul that will introduce significant changes to the WCAG framework.

UserWay CCOO, Dr. Lionel Wolberger added, "As we work to close the digital disability divide, the world needs the insights of a WCAG 3.x series. It will help us recognize progress in the pursuit of full accessibility. As we evolve beyond binary pass/fail assessments in WCAG 2.x series, we will foster greater inclusivity, with the ability to pass parts of a site, parts of a page, and identify compliance issues of various levels."

The update adds nine new success criteria that companies must meet in order to conform. Companies who are today compliant using WCAG 2.1 AA standards may no longer be under WCAG 2.2. Audits and certified testing may be required to identify accessibility violations under the new standards.

WCAG 2.2 will address emerging challenges, incorporate industry best practices, and improve support areas for people with cognitive and learning disabilities. WCAG 2.2 focuses on keyboard navigation, consistency of user interface elements and form validation. These are critical to people with visual impairments, cognitive impairments, motor impairments, and memory loss, to better interact with online services.

UserWay's recent upgrades mean customers can now identify and remediate accessibility violations under WCAG 2.2, seamlessly. Organizations can become more accessible using UserWay's AI-Powered Accessibility Solution, Scanner, and Audit solutions.

Solution Provides Foundational AI Infrastructure for Marketers to Personalize Messaging at Scale

Aampe, the AI-native user engagement platform, today announced a $7.5 million Pre-Series A funding round led by Matrix Partners India and Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India & SEA). The new capital will support product development and fuel growth as the company continues its rapid global expansion.

Over the last several years, the marketing industry has grappled with the opportunities presented by personalization and the challenges associated with properly implementing it. Today, managing customer relationships suffers from the inefficiencies created by traditional, manual processes. Within CRM systems, marketers must manually segment user populations, build user journeys with minimal guidance, and perform labor-intensive A/B tests.

By redesigning what was traditionally a one-way communication to users, Aampe turns an app's marketing messaging into a personalized experience through agentic AI that tracks and adapts to each user's individual responses, clicks, and subsequent actions in response to each message they receive. Marketers can then collect the insights gained about users within a simple dashboard to understand individual user preferences, behaviors, and motivations.

Aampe automates content creation, experimental design, and conversion tracking, among other uses. Improving those marketing processes significantly boosts user engagement and conversion rates while reducing the time and effort required to manage traditional rules-based systems.

“AI dramatically alters how we build software, making the older 'rules engine' generation of software increasingly obsolete,” said Paul Meinshausen, co-founder and CEO of Aampe. “Marketers have been forced to define rigid paths for their users that ignore their individuality and diversity. Generic segmentation leads to frustration, reduced engagement, and slower growth. Aampe has created a way for CRM AI agents to iteratively learn user preferences and then adapt and respond to those preferences optimally, unlocking the benefits that better customer experience provides.”

With its latest funding, Aampe has now raised a total of $9.3 million since its founding in 2020. Aampe currently serves over 50 million users each month, delivering impactful results for a diverse range of customers, such as HAAT, IntelyCare, PayU, Swiggy, and ZALORA, among others, and is growing its customer base across Asia, Europe, and North America.

From gaming to eCommerce and subscription apps to FinTechs, Aampe's customers have garnered strong results by using Aampe's AI-driven approach to customer lifecycle management. Customers have reported a 30% increase in new user conversions, a 4x increase in customer retention, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings on SMS spending through more efficient messaging, with no reduction in messaging performance. In the first eight months of 2023, Aampe's MRR grew at a compound monthly growth rate of 32%.

“Customer engagement and marketing technology has been an early beneficiary of advances in AI and machine learning, and Aampe is a clear front runner in enabling organizations to adopt personalized and result-oriented communication to drive growth,” said Aakash Kumar, Managing Director of Matrix Partners India. “We’re delighted to lead this round to support a team that is best placed to build the next generation of an AI-native customer engagement stack for businesses and keenly look forward to collaborating with them as they scale up.”

“As the world switches from growth at all costs to profitable growth with a solid unit economics profile, the way users are engaged and retained inside an application world has become more important than ever,” said Anandamoy Roychowdhary, Partner - Surge, Peak XV Partners. “Aampe builds a fantastic product that has seen their customers significantly improve retention numbers. The users of these apps have much better outcomes as well. I’m excited for Aampe to take this great product to a lot more customers.”

Survey finds data accuracy, global coverage and compliance requirements top the list of business verification challenges

Trulioo, a leading global identity verification platform, today announced new research revealing that 79% of responding organizations have experienced business identity theft, which involves defrauding, extorting or stealing money from a company.

The findings stem from the Trulioo September 2023 “Global Know Your Business (KYB) Survey,” which includes responses from 705 banking, trading, payments, online marketplace, health care and government professionals. More than 50% of respondents report annual sales revenue exceeding $500 million, and a majority (65%) verify more than 100 businesses per month.

A third (34%) of respondents report dissatisfaction with their current business verification vendor. Participating firms cite data accuracy, global coverage and compliance requirements as the top 3 challenges they face in conducting business verification. The dynamic business landscape also ranked high as a challenge for large global companies.

The business fraud threat is driving urgency in the verification market, with more than 75% of respondents indicating they will likely invest in such solutions within the next year.

KYB solutions help organizations address business verification challenges while weeding out false positives and negatives. Trulioo helps organizations increase digital trust by enabling fast, secure and accurate merchant and supplier onboarding, submitter verification and watchlist screening.

“Our global KYB survey shows that 79% of companies have been affected by business identity theft,” said Michael Ramsbacker, Trulioo chief product officer. “Fraudsters all too often find an open door by using stolen business identities. To address this increasing attack vector, the Trulioo platform allows our customers to deploy onboarding workflows that verify the user submitting the business information is affiliated with the business. Trulioo provides multilayered business verification and global data sources, all through one platform, to help organizations thwart those fraud threats and achieve compliance in countries around the world.”

The Trulioo platform distills complex, multisource business data into precise, actionable results with risk and fraud signals that enable nuanced decision-making. The platform enables organizations to quickly and confidently verify business customers to fuel secure expansion into new markets.