Rokt, the leading ecommerce technology company using machine learning and AI to make transactions more relevant to each shopper, today announced its partnership with Afterpay, one of the global leaders in "Buy Now, Pay Later" payment. The partnership enables Afterpay to offer its ecommerce shoppers highly relevant offers at checkout, which creates a more relevant and engaging shopping experience while driving new revenue and deepening customer lifetime value.

"Afterpay is committed to delivering the most meaningful and relevant shopping experience for its customers, and we are thrilled to build on this mission by leveraging Rokt's ecommerce technology," said Saket Mehta, Global Head of Advertising Partnerships and Strategy at Afterpay. "This partnership allows us to further enhance our in-app offering and give shoppers more choice at checkout."

Leveraging Rokt’s ecommerce solution, Afterpay and its thousands of retail partners, are empowered to deliver targeted, relevant and seamless advertising experiences to customers during the checkout flow.

"We are thrilled that Afterpay has chosen Rokt to provide their customers the most relevant shopping experiences possible," said Elizabeth Buchanan, Chief Commercial Officer of Rokt.  Both Afterpay and Rokt were originally founded in Australia, and so it is especially exciting to now be partners on the global stage."

Collaboration with MessageGears addresses cost, resource, and data accessibility limitations to make aspirational engagement KPIs a reality

Through a strategic collaboration with MessageGears, Vericast's NXTDRIVE clients will have access to an integrated customer messaging solution that delivers scalability, speed, and efficiency.

Launching early next year, NXTDRIVE is a customer data marketing platform (CDMP) that cleans, enhances, and uncovers opportunities from first-party data. It elevates communications by giving brands the capability to deliver timely, personalized, and engaging messaging through email, short message service (SMS), and push notifications.

Vericast's collaboration with MessageGears is foundational to building a messaging solution that allows users to directly access data from various sources all within the NXTDRIVE platform. This creates a closed-loop single platform for learning and informing media strategy. With NXTDRIVE, exporting customer data into separate and disparate tools is eliminated, saving time and costs.

"Delivering personalized email and mobile experiences is a critical component of how our clients reach their customers," said Marc Mathies, senior vice president, NXTDRIVE at Vericast. "With NXTDRIVE, we're helping our clients put their customers in the driver's seat to deliver faster, quality messaging campaigns across multiple channels to build brand loyalty and increase customer lifetime value."

NXTDRIVE leverages predictive insights to inform media strategy and performance. When combined with MessageGears for multichannel activation, marketers benefit from a significant upgrade in capabilities including a built-in content evaluation process, which provides deeper insight on the viability of each message template, content, and deliverability.

"It shouldn't be hard to send messages that make every customer feel unique," said Natalia Dykyj, chief marketing officer at MessageGears. "We're excited to be partnering with Vericast to help more brands communicate based on known behaviors and preferences. The combination of NXTDRIVE's capabilities and MessageGears' best-of-breed cross-channel messaging capabilities will help brands unlock deep, data-driven personalization."

Recent data reveals that 62% of both B2B and B2C marketers have increased their marketing budgets over the last year, with 48% increasing their SMS/MMS budgets in the same period. As brands continue to focus on the engagement metrics that matter most, email and mobile messages need to continuously adapt to garner clicks, form fills and more.

Sprout Social, Inc. (“Sprout Social”, the “Company”), an industry-leading provider of cloud-based social media management software, today announced the appointment of Scott Morris to chief marketing officer (CMO), effective December 4, 2023. As CMO, Morris will oversee Sprout’s global marketing organization and be a key contributor to Sprout’s continued growth.

Morris brings more than 25 years of experience leading key strategic marketing initiatives at both B2B and B2C tech companies. Prior to Sprout, Morris held executive leadership positions at Zendesk including SVP Global Marketing and Acting CMO, during which time he led the company’s 400-person global marketing and communications team, and was responsible for building the Zendesk brand and partnering with Sales to deliver world-class demand. For more than 10 years, Morris also held various leadership roles at Adobe where he ran product marketing for Creative Cloud, and then campaign marketing for both Creative Cloud and Document Cloud.

"As a marketer, I recognize that social media has fundamentally transformed the way consumers connect with brands, and continues to have a massive impact on the entire customer experience," said Morris. "Sprout helps businesses streamline the complexity of social channels, empowering them to leverage social as a strategic asset. With Sprout's disruptive and efficient inbound model, a world-class product backed by a passionate customer community, a winning culture, and vast potential in enterprise and international markets, I'm thrilled to get the opportunity to help Sprout accelerate this next phase of growth.

“We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Scott to Sprout. His track record of scaling global B2B and B2C tech companies will be key as we work to build a $1 billion brand by 2028,” said Ryan Barretto, President of Sprout Social. “Not only is Scott an accomplished marketer, he is a stand-out leader who is dedicated to empowering teams to think creatively and find innovative solutions. Scott and the marketing team will play a central role in building our brand, deepening relationships with our customers and increasing demand to support Sprout’s next stage of growth.”

Dropbox Plans to Leverage NVIDIA’s AI Foundry to Build Custom Models and Improve AI-Powered Knowledge Work with Dropbox Dash Universal Search Tool and Dropbox AI

Dropbox, Inc. and NVIDIA announced a collaboration to supercharge knowledge work and improve productivity for millions of Dropbox customers through the power of AI.

The companies’ collaboration will expand Dropbox’s extensive AI functionality with new uses for personalized generative AI to improve search accuracy, provide better organization, and simplify workflows for its customers across their cloud content.

Dropbox plans to leverage NVIDIA’s AI foundry consisting of NVIDIA AI Foundation Models, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and NVIDIA accelerated computing to enhance its latest AI-powered product experiences. These include Dropbox Dash, universal search that connects apps, tools, and content in a single search bar to help customers find what they need; Dropbox AI, a tool that allows customers to ask questions and get summaries on large files across their entire Dropbox; among other AI capabilities in Dropbox.

“Recent advancements in generative AI are opening up a world of possibilities to improve knowledge work and address many of the pain points we all experience around organization, prioritization, and focus,” said Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox. “AI has the potential to offload routine tasks, unlock our creativity, and help us do more meaningful work. We’re excited to partner with NVIDIA and leverage their technology in new ways to deliver more personalized, AI-powered experiences to our customers.”

“The arc of AI is expanding from cloud services into enterprise generative AI assistants that will drive the most significant transition in the computing industry to date,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together, NVIDIA and Dropbox will pave the way for millions of Dropbox customers to accelerate their work with customized generative AI applications.”

AI to Transform Knowledge Work

Dropbox has long believed in the potential for AI to transform knowledge work. The company has been incorporating AI and machine learning into its core product experience for many years to help its customers do their most important work, save time, and be more efficient.

NVIDIA has built flexible tools that will allow Dropbox to deliver new AI-powered capabilities and bring more intelligence to its customers’ content and workflows. Using NVIDIA AI Foundation Models and the NVIDIA NeMo™ framework — an end-to-end platform for building, customizing, and deploying large language models — Dropbox can customize and fine-tune LLMs to provide more personalized and relevant information with all the security controls, privacy, and transparency millions of Dropbox customers have come to rely on.

Dropbox can also increase inference performance for production AI with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, including NVIDIA Triton Inference Server™ and NVIDIA TensorRT™ -LLM.

Fibocom unveils a high-performance, multi-mode LTE smart module SC228 to drive digital transformation across AIoT industries. Empowered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon® SM6225 chip, the module delivers superior CPU processing performance and excellent power efficiency backed by the features of an Octa-core (4*A73 2.4G + 4*A53 1.9G) processor and high-level graphics processor.

Fibocom (Stock code: 300638), a global leading provider of IoT (Internet of Things) wireless solutions and wireless communication modules, announces the release of a new LTE smart module SC228 for the acceleration of digital transformation in smart retailing, smart wearable camera, Industrial IoT, In-vehicle infotainment market. Integrated with a 6nm processor, the module utilizes the powerful CPU and GPU to deliver superior multimedia performance while conserving power. Compatible with frequency bands worldwide, the module also supports Bluetooth and dual-band Wi-Fi for short-distance wireless communication.

The integration of AI and IoT is reshaping the way that decision-makers from various industries operate and respond to real-time information. The highly integrated smart module SC228 is capable of offering a comprehensive solution for industry customers to improve product performance and facilitate the decision-making process. Equipped with a powerful CPU, SC228 can support the smooth running of AI algorithms, which ensures the terminals realize a bunch of functionalities such as facial recognition, HMI (Human-machine Interaction), etc. In terms of multimedia processing, the SC228 is integrated with a low-power island DSP (Digital Signal Processors) for sensors and audio, furthermore, it also supports multi-camera input and output with up to three of them working simultaneously. To cater to diverse IoT application scenarios, the SC228 is designed with rich interfaces including MIPI/ USB/ UART/ SPI/ I2C to help customers develop the terminals flexibly. In software design, the SC228 is preset with an upgradable Android 14 operating system in cope with the ever-evolving software innovations, which can help our customers quickly meet the requirements for GMS (Google Mobile Service) certification and continuous development for long lifecycle terminals. Notably, the premium smart module is also built-in with GNSS for fast and accurate positioning for mobile scenarios.

"AI-driven productivity is inevitably evolving as an essential to extend the capabilities of IoT devices, significantly improve the operational efficiency by enriching the IoT device with edge computing," said Eden Chen, General Manager of MC BU at Fibocom. "We are pleased to be at the forefront of the AIoT market to provide a comprehensive, highly integrated SC228 smart module solution for various industries, looking forward, we are optimistic to unleash the interconnected intelligence with our powerful smart module portfolio."

Guidewire and Akur8 announced that Akur8’s new Ready for Guidewire validated accelerator is now available to PolicyCenter users in the Guidewire Marketplace.

Designed exclusively for the P&C insurance industry, Akur8 leverages machine learning and predictive analytics to empower insurers to make faster, more informed decisions. Akur8 automates the generation of production-ready Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) and Generalized Linear Models (GLMs), allowing pricing teams to easily build highly predictive models with speed and accuracy. Integrated with Guidewire, Akur8’s app automates the export of these Akur8-built risk models into PolicyCenter’s Rating Engine, removing the traditional IT bottleneck in rate deployment.

Akur8’s Accelerator for AI-Powered Pricing enables insurers to:

• Accelerate time-to-market for new rates and products;
• Maintain transparency and control over the pricing models created; and
• Increase accuracy, security, and efficiency.

Akur8’s comprehensive technology supports pricing teams throughout the whole pricing process, from modeling to deployment. Cloud-based and collaborative, Akur8 has been designed for business users, ensuring the technology is easy to adopt.

“Pricing risk correctly is a critical discipline for insurance companies,” said Samuel Falmagne, CEO of Akur8. “The combination of our innovative, automated solution and Guidewire’s industry-leading P&C platform creates a leading-edge insurance pricing solution that quickly leaves behind older, conventional methods.”

“Congratulations to Akur8 on the release of its new PolicyCenter app,” said Will Murphy, Vice President, Global Technology Alliances, Guidewire. “Traditional rate deployment can be a very tedious task, burdened with manual labor that slows the entire pricing process. With Akur8 integrated with Guidewire, this labor is eliminated, increasing efficiency, agility, and speed-to-market for insurers.”

Akur8 is a Bronze level sponsor of Guidewire Connections 2023.

Global Surface Leader with 148 Business Units Leverages Sprinklr's Unified AI to Create Consistent, Engaging Customer Experiences Across Channels

Sprinklr, the unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform for modern businesses, today announces that Cosentino , the world's leading producer and distributor of sustainable surfaces for the world of architecture and design, has chosen Sprinklr to optimize its social media and marketing strategies.

Cosentino is a global brand with 148 business units and 6,000 employees from 129 different countries. Delivering consistent, on-brand experiences across channels at this scale is an immense challenge. Cosentino will use Sprinklr Social , Sprinklr Insights and Sprinklr Marketing to streamline content creation, distribution and audience engagement across all digital channels.

Damián Granados-Lorca Soto, global vice president of marketing at Cosentino, states: "The challenge for our brand is to go from being leaders in kitchen countertops to being leaders in the surfaces market in a broader way and with greater diversification of applications. "Sprinklr's unified platform offers the tools we need to achieve this transformation. We are confident that this partnership will allow us to effectively communicate the versatility and quality of our brand, while building strong relationships with industry professionals."

"As a valued new customer, Cosentino demonstrates its commitment to adapt to changing market needs by investing in Sprinklr's unified platform to manage and optimize social media and digital marketing," said Michael Maas, Senior Vice President of European Sales at Sprinklr . . "We are eager to help Cosentino streamline its marketing processes and ensure consistency of brand messaging. Deep insights into audience behavior and the ability to effectively measure and adapt its strategies enable it to achieve the ultimate goal of reinforce its position as a leading provider of sustainable surfaces for architecture and design."

As a leading company in creating unique environments and designs for residential and commercial spaces, Cosentino hopes to inspire people's lives with meaningful design brands such as Silestone® or Dekton®. As a corporate entity, it is also a pioneer in promoting environmental and social responsibility, which supports its competitive advantage in the global surface market.

With Sprinklr, Cosentino seeks to achieve its goal of reaching, engaging and listening to the architecture and design community with the following capabilities:

1. Advanced Social Media Listening and Engagement: Sprinklr Social will help Cosentino monitor and understand conversations within the architectural and designer community, allowing it to eliminate manual work and refine its messaging and product offerings based on real-time insights.
2. AI-powered performance analysis: Sprinklr Insights will reduce reporting time, measure the impact of Cosentino's brand messages, and make it easier for the company to quickly make data-driven adjustments to its strategy.
3. Unified Content Management with Global Governance: Sprinklr Marketing will help Cosentino create and distribute engaging content with built-in auditing capabilities and AI-powered intelligent compliance , ensuring global governance.

We are excited to partner with Sprinklr and leverage their AI-powered Unified-CXM platform. It will help us effectively communicate the versatility and quality of our brand to architects, designers and consumers," adds Jaime Valverde Cohén, global director of content, social media and retail marketing at Cosentino . "With Sprinklr, we can streamline content creation, obtain valuable information from the audience and measure the impact of our brand messages in real time. This partnership is an important step in achieving our mission of inspiring and transforming spaces around the world."

Feedzai will leverage Mastercard’s Ciphertrace crypto intelligence solutions to reduce the risk of account-to-account fraud flowing into crypto exchanges

Feedzai, a financial crime and risk management solution, and Mastercard – a global technology company in the payments industry - are combining technologies to increase crypto fraud protection for hundreds of millions of consumers.

Today, an estimated 40% of scam transactions exit directly from a bank account to a crypto exchange. According to Feedzai’s recent report, The State of Global Anti Money Laundering (AML) Compliance Report 2023, the monitoring of cryptocurrency effectively is still one of the biggest challenges for financial institutions.

Addressing the need to implement effective AML solutions, Feedzai and Mastercard will collaborate to integrate Mastercard’s world-leading crypto intelligence solution, Ciphertrace Armada, into Feedzai’s unique RiskOps platform. RiskOps analyzes transaction data totaling over $1.7 trillion annually¹ and offers a comprehensive suite of AI-based solutions designed to stop fraud and financial crime at the source – allowing banks to be alerted in nanoseconds when a transaction appears fraudulent.

Ciphertrace Armada allows banks, crypto exchanges, wallets, crypto ATMS and other Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) to better assess the fraud risk in digital asset transactions. In pairing these technologies together, Feedzai’s customers, who collectively protect over 900 million consumers² globally, will now be able to identify and prevent transactions involving fraudulent crypto exchanges before they occur.

The partnership comes just months after Mastercard announced its new solution that helps banks identify scams in account-to-account payments. Using AI, Mastercard Consumer Fraud Risk enables banks to intervene in real time and to stop a payment before funds leave a victim’s account.

The combined intelligence means that financial institutions can stop transactions involving high risk and potentially fraudulent crypto exchanges in real time, alerting the customer to the risk before money leaves their account.

Nuno Sebastião, CEO of Feedzai said, “Mastercard’s commitment to protecting its global customer base from fraud aligns perfectly with Feedzai’s mission. Criminals use crypto as part of their scam strategies, with the scam proceeds often ending up being funneled to an unauthorized or otherwise risky crypto exchange. It also continues to remain a challenge for AML professionals as criminals become ever more sophisticated and money laundering techniques advance. This global partnership will further empower banks to protect their customers’ against the risks associated with crypto and instill further trust in the ecosystem.”

Ajay Bhalla, president of Cyber and Intelligence at Mastercard said: “This is an exciting step in our journey to secure the digital ecosystem. We’re providing financial institutions with the insights they need to be able to prevent transactions involving fraudulent crypto exchanges. We are delighted that, through this new partnership, we are able to go further, by helping to stop fraud and payments to scams before they take place, giving customers more choice, security and, most importantly, reinforcing trust.”