Acxiom, the global leader in customer intelligence, welcomes a new Chief Operating Officer, John Watkins. This strategic addition to Acxiom's executive leadership team underscores its commitment to elevating its global operational capabilities for more robust scaling, innovative breakthroughs, and transformative growth. Watkins will report to CEO Chad Engelgau.

Watkins will focus on operationalizing alignment and adaptability through the following initiatives:

• Collaborating with Acxiom's executive leaders to create and implement the company's operational vision, strategy, and goals while ensuring these objectives remain aligned with the organizational mission.

• Launching a new business unit focused on standardizing, automating, and globalizing operations throughout the enterprise.

• Spearheading key projects and integrating methodologies to pinpoint operational opportunities, overcome challenges, and enhance profitability.

• Overseeing Acxiom's day-to-day operations to ensure efficient and effective performance and core objectives are consistently achieved.

"Welcoming John signals a bold reimagining of how Acxiom operates," says Engelgau. "His vision, team spirit, and unmatched operational leadership are precisely what Acxiom needs to take us to the next level. With John on board, we're not just looking to the horizon, but aiming to redefine it."

A veteran in technology and data, Watkins’ career spans over twenty years of experience leading complex operations strategies and guiding multifaceted teams. Prior to joining Acxiom, he spent 15 years at Merkle serving in pivotal executive roles, including COO and Global Chief Transformation Officer.

Reflecting on his new role, Watkins says, “I'm thrilled to be part of Acxiom, a trailblazer in data-driven marketing that sets the standard for client impact. I'm eager to work side-by-side with this amazing team, leveraging our combined strengths and ensuring we not just meet but surpass the expectations of our clients, partners, and associates."

New add-on to Telesign’s Identity product family enables customers to know if and when a phone number—and any associated data—has been compromised

Telesign, the leading provider of customer identity and engagement solutions, today announced the launch of Breached Data, the newest addition to the company’s Identity products. Breached Data gives customers the ability to identify when a phone number and its associated data attributes have been compromised in a data breach, helping proactively prevent account takeovers, fake users, and synthetic identity fraud.

In today’s digitally connected world, in which the average person spends nearly seven hours online daily, safeguarding sensitive information is a top priority. From sign-ups and sign-ins to likes and comments, every digital interaction creates a dataset, contributing to the trillions of gigabytes of data on the internet. In the wrong hands, this data can wreak havoc, leading to unauthorized account takeovers, identity theft, fraudulent transactions, and more. Businesses that fail to protect themselves and their customers from data breaches can experience severe financial, operational, and reputational loss.

Breached Data protects against the ramifications of compromised data. Across the customer journey, the new solution conducts a rapid analysis of submitted phone number data against a comprehensive global dataset. This provides near real-time confirmation of breach status and any associated compromised attributes. If a submitted phone number is found in a recent data breach, it delivers a timestamp for when the phone number and associated attributes were compromised.

“In an era of escalating data breaches, which inflict reputational and financial damage to organizations everywhere, Telesign innovates to protect both businesses and consumers,” said Telesign Product & Portfolio Vice President Chris Thompson. “Breached Data is our most recent effort to protect against the consequences of data theft by bad actors.”

“Breached Data is a game-changer in today’s digital landscape, helping to keep businesses and their customers safe while also expanding Telesign’s global presence,” said Steven Dickens, Vice President and Practice Leader, The Futurum Group. “With data breaches on the rise, this new solution gives businesses the power to mitigate fraud and create safer digital experiences. This is crucial because the onus is now squarely on companies to elevate digital privacy measures, not just as a fiduciary duty but as a cornerstone of customer trust.”

Key features of Breached Data

Global Comprehensive Coverage: The solution meticulously compares the submitted data against more than 166 billion breached data records across emails, passwords, IP addresses, usernames, PII, geographic locations, phone numbers, financial details, and more. The extensive scope of Breached Data ensures that global data breaches are vigilantly accounted for and shielded against.

Continuous Protection: In 2022, over 422 million people had their data exposed on the dark web, up 128 million from the previous year. Breached Data is updated daily to ensure every data breach is accounted for in order to avert potential harm.

New Use Cases for Breached Data

• Account Takeover: Businesses can be notified when user data has been compromised to enable the prevention of unauthorized access, protecting their end-users and ecosystem.
• Synthetic Identity Fraud: Businesses can help stop synthetic identity fraud by balancing the right amount of authentication without alienating legitimate users. Breached Data notifies businesses during sign-up when a user is registering with a recently breached PII.

European data teams can now build and automate data pipelines with the ease of a managed SaaS offering while meeting stringent data sovereignty requirements.

Ascend.io, the leader in data pipeline automation, today announced the availability of its cloud-based data engineering platform in the European region. Now, data engineers, data architects and analytics engineers can build intelligent data pipelines for Snowflake, Databricks, and Google BigQuery through Ascend's fully managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform.  Data will never be exported or processed outside of the EU, allowing enterprises to meet strict data sovereignty requirements without having to host their own deployment of the software. Ascend's EU-based cloud offering is generally available to all customers today.

Ascend is bringing this cloud offering to Europe in response to rapidly growing demand driven by large digital transformations and new digital native business models. Ascend already supports customers in the region including News Corp and Maytronics, and regularly fields requests from digital natives for more accelerated deployment options. As Ascend's partners Snowflake and Databricks continue to expand in the region, the demand for scalable data pipeline solutions has skyrocketed. Snowflake reports growing FY23 revenue in the region by 72% YoY, and Databricks has grown its team size 75% in the region over a similar period.

Ascend's native cloud offering provides a lower barrier to its intelligent data pipeline controller that reduces up to 91% of repetitive data engineering tasks, reduces data software costs by 68% and can lower ETL cloud consumption bills by up to 30%. Now, even the leanest data engineering teams can meet data privacy, security and sovereignty requirements in their local regions.

"Ensuring data remains within a country's geographic borders while providing a self-managing SaaS experience for data pipelines is no small feat. This expansion ensures that European data professionals can focus on building intelligent data pipelines 10x faster without worrying about compliance or technical backends," said Sean Knapp, CEO of Ascend.io.

Data teams in Europe can now enjoy:

Instant Access & Setup: Just enter credentials and immediately tap into the world of intelligent data pipeline automation.

Complete Data Sovereignty: Uncompromising compliance with European data sovereignty regulations, ensuring data remains strictly within national boundaries.

Stellar Savings & Efficiency: As endorsed by industry giants like News Corp, and Maytronics, Ascend's users report up to 91% less effort in data prep and transformation, a 68% cost reduction in their data stack, and up to 30% less cloud resource consumption.

Seize the Future of Data Pipeline Automation: Embrace the future of data pipelines with Ascend's free trial of the new SaaS offering, perfectly complementing the trusted, fully dedicated tenant deployment that's been at the forefront of progressive data engineering teams for years.

• The refreshed logo signifies a renewed and strong focus on consumer privacy and enhanced safety in communication

• The overall design maintains the signature ‘True blue’ colour with an icon that establishes a distinct identity, thereby protecting our users from copycat and imposter apps

Truecaller today announced a corporate rebranding and launch of a brand new app icon that will be instantly recognisable on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The timing of the new brand identity aligns with a significant transformation taking place in the digital space. At the heart of this rebranding is Truecaller’s renewed sense of purpose, energy, and enthusiasm.

Commenting on the announcement, Alan Mamedi, Co-founder and CEO, Truecaller said, “We are excited to unveil our new brand identity and logo. It signifies our continued commitment to our users and our focus to constantly evolve and improve, every day.”

“Our mission, to protect communication for all, is what guides us to develop new anti-fraud solutions like Search Context and engineer improvements to improve user privacy,” he added.

As part of this refreshed identity, Truecaller users also get powerful new anti-fraud feature called Search Context, as a part of the Truecaller AI Identity engine. While looking at the search results for any number, Truecaller users will be instantly notified if the name for the number has been recently changed or is being changed frequently. The app also classifies this contextual message into three colour categories: blue, for a neutral change, yellow, which could be potentially suspicious if the name has changed more than 3 times in the past 7 days and finally red, indicating multiple and frequent name changes which are highly indicative of fraudulent and scammer activity. This message will be shown to all Truecaller users on all search results across Android, iPhone and Truecaller web.

The new branding identity is orchestrated by leading global brand consultancy, Interbrand and it will be rolled out across the globe over the coming weeks. To see the new app icon and changes, users need to update to app version 13.34 or newer on Android and version 12.58 or newer on iOS. Read more on our blog here and download press assets here.