Fintech PR
FACTORY DEMAND WEAKENS ACROSS MAJOR ECONOMIES IN OCTOBER: GEP GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN VOLATILITY INDEX
- U.S. factories cut back purchases sharply, signaling heightened risks of manufacturing weakness spilling over into the broader economy in 2025
- In contrast, Chinese factories report growth following three months of shrinking input purchasing
- Europe’s industrial recession shows no sign of abating, with German, French and Austrian producers at the heart of the downturn
CLARK, N.J., Nov. 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The GEP Global Supply Chain Volatility Index — a leading indicator tracking demand conditions, shortages, transportation costs, inventories and backlogs based on a monthly survey of 27,000 businesses — posted -0.39, which was little change from -0.43 in September. Therefore, the index remained in territory that indicated one of the highest levels of spare capacity at global suppliers in over a year during October, with no imminent turnaround in Western manufacturing in sight.
Suppliers feeding the world’s largest markets reported contractions in October. Most notable was another steep rise in slack across North American supply chains due to declining factory activity in the U.S. In fact, purchasing managers at U.S. manufacturers made their strongest cutbacks to buying volumes in nearly a year and a half, indicating that factories in the world’s largest economy are preparing for lower production volumes.
Suppliers feeding Asia also reported spare capacity in October, albeit to a lesser degree than we’re seeing in Western markets. This is due to the sustained strong expansion of certain manufacturing industries, such as India’s. Notably, in October, China’s factory production growth rebounded, and procurement activity rose after three months of contraction, although Japanese and South Korean producers made fewer purchases — an adverse leading indicator for manufacturing in these economies.
Europe’s industrial plight remained a key feature of the data in October. Vendor capacity was significantly underutilized, reflecting a continuation of subdued demand in key manufacturing hubs across the continent. Germany’s retrenching automotive manufacturing sector is a major headwind to factory output in Europe.
Additionally, October is the 14th consecutive month that the items in short supply indicator has been negative. This shows an excess supply of commodities and intermediate goods relative to current manufacturing demand globally.
“We’re in a buyers’ market. October is the fourth straight month that suppliers worldwide reported spare capacity, with notable contractions in factory demand across North America and Europe, underscoring the challenging outlook for Western manufacturers,” explained Todd Bremer, vice president, GEP. “President-elect Trump inherits U.S. manufacturers with plenty of spare capacity while in contrast, China’s modest rebound and strong expansion in India demonstrate greater resilience in Asia.”
OCTOBER 2024 KEY FINDINGS
- DEMAND: Procurement activity remains weak across the globe. Demand for commodities, components and raw materials continues to contract, and at one of the steepest rates seen in 2024 so far. By region, North America saw the weakest purchasing activity in October, followed by Europe. Input demand was more resilient in Asia, but still subdued overall.
- INVENTORIES: Inventory drawdowns intensified across factories worldwide in October. Reports of safety stockpiling remained low by historical standards as companies look to make their warehouses leaner to preserve cash flow and tightly manage stocks in line with the weak order situation.
- MATERIAL SHORTAGES: The items in short supply indicator, an aggregate measure which tracks the availability of critical components and raw materials, remains low, pointing to robust supply levels.
- LABOR SHORTAGES: Reports of manufacturers’ backlogs rising due to labor shortages ticked higher in October and were above the long-term average. However, factory employment levels have fallen in recent months, suggesting throughput has decreased as a result of lower workforce capacity and companies aren’t clearing backlogs as quickly.
- TRANSPORTATION: Global transportation costs were in line with their long-run average during October.
REGIONAL SUPPLY CHAIN VOLATILITY
- NORTH AMERICA: Index at -0.72, versus -0.78 previously. The latest figure is consistent with a substantial level of spare capacity at North America’s suppliers.
- EUROPE: Index at -0.52, from -0.74. Albeit an improvement from September, the latest data indicate a continuation of Europe’s industrial recession.
- U.K.: Index fell notably to -0.40, from -0.12, its lowest level in six months, signaling a deterioration in the U.K. manufacturing sector.
- ASIA: Index at -0.20, from -0.36. While indicative of spare capacity, the level of slack is much lower than seen in Western markets. India continues to have a strongly positive influence on the region.
For more information, visit www.gep.com/volatility.
Note: Full historical data dating back to January 2005 is available for subscription. Please contact [email protected].
The next release of the GEP Global Supply Chain Volatility Index will be 8 a.m. ET, Dec. 11, 2024.
About the GEP Global Supply Chain Volatility Index
The GEP Global Supply Chain Volatility Index is produced by S&P Global and GEP. It is derived from S&P Global’s PMI® surveys, sent to companies in over 40 countries, totaling around 27,000 companies. The headline figure is a weighted sum of six sub-indices derived from PMI data, PMI Comments Trackers and PMI Commodity Price & Supply Indicators compiled by S&P Global.
- A value above 0 indicates that supply chain capacity is being stretched and supply chain volatility is increasing. The further above 0, the greater the extent to which capacity is being stretched.
- A value below 0 indicates that supply chain capacity is being underutilized, reducing supply chain volatility. The further below 0, the greater the extent to which capacity is being underutilized.
A Supply Chain Volatility Index is also published at a regional level for Europe, Asia, North America and the U.K. For more information about the methodology, click here.
About GEP
GEP® delivers AI-powered procurement and supply chain solutions that help global enterprises become more agile and resilient, operate more efficiently and effectively, gain competitive advantage, boost profitability and increase shareholder value. Fresh thinking, innovative products, unrivaled domain expertise, smart, passionate people — this is how GEP SOFTWARE™, GEP STRATEGY™ and GEP MANAGED SERVICES™ together deliver procurement and supply chain solutions of unprecedented scale, power and effectiveness. Our customers are the world’s best companies, including more than 1,000 Fortune 500 and Global 2000 industry leaders who rely on GEP to meet ambitious strategic, financial and operational goals. A leader in multiple Gartner Magic Quadrants, GEP’s cloud-native software and digital business platforms consistently win awards and recognition from industry analysts, research firms and media outlets, including Gartner, Forrester, IDC, ISG, and Spend Matters. GEP is also regularly ranked a top procurement and supply chain consulting and strategy firm, and a leading managed services provider by ALM, Everest Group, NelsonHall, IDC, ISG and HFS, among others. Headquartered in Clark, New Jersey, GEP has offices and operations centers across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. To learn more, visit www.gep.com.
About S&P Global
S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI) S&P Global provides essential intelligence. We enable governments, businesses and individuals with the right data, expertise and connected technology so that they can make decisions with conviction. From helping our customers assess new investments to guiding them through ESG and energy transition across supply chains, we unlock new opportunities, solve challenges and accelerate progress for the world. We are widely sought after by many of the world’s leading organizations to provide credit ratings, benchmarks, analytics and workflow solutions in the global capital, commodity and automotive markets. With every one of our offerings, we help the world’s leading organizations plan for tomorrow, today.
Media Contacts
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Email: [email protected] |
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Fintech PR
Blockchain for Good Alliance Hosts Web3 Oscar, Celebrating Innovators Advancing UN’s Sustainable Development Goals
DUBAI, UAE, Nov. 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The highly anticipated Web3 Oscar, a prestigious event hosted by the Blockchain for Good Alliance (BGA), celebrating blockchain projects driving real-world impact aligned with the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Industry leaders gathered in Bangkok to honour innovators shaping a sustainable future.
The event was part of BGA’s November lineup, featuring two major initiatives for global change through blockchain: the Sustainable Innovation Summit and the Web3 Oscar Awards.
Sustainable Innovation Summit: A Hackathon for Social Impact
Held from September 9 to November 11, 2024, the Sustainable Innovation Summit hosted a hackathon with a $100,000 prize pool, inviting participants worldwide to create blockchain solutions addressing key issues such as poverty, clean water access, and gender equality. The summit concluded with a Demo Day at the Grand Hyatt Erawan in Bangkok, where finalists showcased their projects to blockchain pioneers, investors, and industry leaders, with opportunities for incubation support and equity-free funding.
Rising Stars
In a cinematic presentation style, 10 shortlisted projects from across the globe, participating in the Sustainable Innovation Summit’s 17 SDGs Challenge, took the stage. Each team presented their blockchain solutions to address sustainability challenges, telling the story of a “hero” confronting a global crisis (one of the 17 SDGs), with blockchain as the “tool” they wield for change.
Winners for the 17 SDGs Challenge:
- 1st Place: Grand Social Impact Award 🥇 EthicHub
- 2nd Place: Outstanding Social Innovation Award 🥈 Plastic Odyssey
- 3rd Place: Emerging Impact Award 🥉 ResearchHub
Rising Star Awards (top 10 projects, in no specific order):
- Wavy Health
- LAKE (LAK3)
- KulaDAO
- erable°
- arkreen
- UCO Network
- Edu3Labs
Web3 Oscar Awards: Honouring Leaders in Blockchain for Social Good
Coinciding with the hackathon’s Demo Day on November 11, the BGA Web3 Oscar Award recognizes individual contributions to blockchain for social good across three categories, with up to 7 total winners.
Each category highlights individual efforts aligning with BGA’s mission.
The Collaboration Bridge Award honours individuals who have played a vital role in guiding the strategic direction of the Blockchain for Good Alliance (BGA). This year’s recipients are:
- Harn, CEO of Trigger Asset Management
- Mariana de la Roche Wills from INATBA (International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications) and de la Roche W. Consulting
The Public Welfare Contribution Award celebrates individuals who have harnessed #BlockchainForGood. This award was presented to:
- BreeAnne Yek, Consultant at The Verdant Room
- Milica Dimitrijevic from Positiveblockchain.io
These individuals have demonstrated remarkable dedication, guidance, and pioneering work, significantly advancing the mission of the Blockchain for Good Alliance (BGA) in promoting sustainable development through blockchain technology.
In her closing remarks, Helen Liu, Co-founder and COO of Bybit and founder of BGA, explained how blockchain can bring people together to make a real difference worldwide. Her vision for leveraging blockchain to create worldwide impact was both inspiring and forward-thinking.
About Blockchain for Good Alliance (BGA)
The Blockchain for Good Alliance (BGA) is a long term collaborative non-profit initiative with key partners with the main aim to contribute to societal good by using blockchain technology to solve real world problems. By convening leaders, innovators, and organisations from across the blockchain community, BGA seeks to drive innovation, collaboration, and action towards a more sustainable and equitable world.
For more information
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.blockchainforgood.xyz
Twitter: www.twitter.com/chainforgood
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Fintech PR
Volante Technologies launches real-time payments intelligence solution for financial institutions
Volante Payments Intelligence gives all stakeholders a deep, accurate assessment of business performance, driving increased operational efficiency, time-to-market, internal innovation, and business growth
NEW YORK, Nov. 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Volante Technologies, the global leader in Payments as a Service (PaaS), today announced the launch of Volante Payments Intelligence, a powerful new solution that offers financial institutions unparalleled visibility and operational control over their payments business. A modular component of the Volante Payments Platform, the solution enables banks to better understand their payments operations, simplifying decision-making while improving business performance.
Volante Payments Intelligence addresses the increasing volume and complexity of the payments landscape, driven by the proliferation of real-time payments, the adoption of ISO 20022, and the digitization of payment flows. The new offering harnesses historical and real-time payments data, delivering actionable intelligence that helps banks strategically plan, optimize operational efficiency, and accurately track performance.
As noted in the 2024 Corporate Banking IT Pressures & Priorities report from Celent, 60% of banks plan to increase migration of business-critical applications to the cloud by the end of 2025. Payments modernization now ranks as a top priority for corporate banks globally, signifying the need for solutions that provide intelligence across stakeholder viewpoints, streamline modernization efforts, and simplify operations.
“In a world where the volume and complexity of payments is increasing, operational resilience and efficiency are more important than ever. Managing through this requires banks to have instant insight into payment flows, operational performance, and the ability to quickly address issues,” said Gareth Lodge, Principal Analyst at Celent.
Volante Payments Intelligence reduces the time banks spend on manual reporting and allows them to prioritize operational efforts more effectively, staying ahead of regulatory demands. With enhanced observability, users can achieve more precise performance tracking, improving their ability to mitigate risks and adapt to market changes.
As financial institutions navigate an increasingly regulated environment, Volante Payments Intelligence offers critical tools to support resilience and compliance. The solution’s integration into existing systems and ease of deployment in private or hybrid cloud environments or as part of Volante’s PaaS offering ensures that institutions can start seeing results immediately.
“We developed Volante Payments Intelligence as a transformative solution, crafted in close collaboration with a diverse range of our customers to address a critical gap no other platform could fill: Delivering actionable, measurable, and personalized business intelligence in real-time,” said Deepak Gupta, EVP, Product, Engineering & Services, Volante Technologies.
“Payments Intelligence doesn’t just bridge the shortcomings of existing intelligence solutions; it redefines what business intelligence can achieve, empowering Volante customers, from small enterprises to global institutions, to unlock new heights in their operational efficiency and strategic growth. This continues Volante’s track record of, and our valued commitment to, driving time-to-market speed, innovation, and business growth for our customers,” concluded Gupta.
Volante plans to continue its innovation drive within Payments Intelligence through the addition of advanced dashboards to provide operators, managers, and executives with a more complete view of their payments business. By adding exception management, payment controls, and new AI-driven capabilities, financial institutions will be able to monitor and identify market dynamics more effectively.
For a deeper dive or to schedule a demo, visit volantetech.com/payments-intelligence.
On behalf of Volante Technologies:
Americas
Julian Byrne
anthonyBarnum
Public Relations
Tel. +1 (512) 665-9258
[email protected]
EMEA
Assyria Graves
Hard Numbers
Tel: +447507870214
[email protected]
[email protected]
About Volante Technologies
Volante Technologies is the trusted cloud payments modernization partner to financial businesses worldwide, giving them the freedom to evolve and innovate at record speed. Real-time native, API enabled, and ISO 20022 fluent, Volante’s Payments as a Service and underlying low-code platform process millions of mission-critical transactions and trillions in value daily. Volante’s customers include four of the top five global corporate banks, seven of the top ten U.S. banks, and two of the world’s largest card networks. Learn more at www.volantetech.com and linkedin.com/company/volante-technologies.
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IBM’s Autonomous Security for Cloud solution to help organizations transition to cloud-based environments using Amazon Bedrock’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline and automate security and compliance tasks
ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced Autonomous Security for Cloud (ASC), an AI-powered solution from IBM Consulting designed to automate cloud security management and decision-making to help mitigate risk for organizations accelerating their cloud journey on Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments.
Highlighted in IBM’s 2024 Cloud Threat Landscape report, misconfigurations and compliance failures were identified as the top threats organizations face as they increasingly rely on cloud computing environments. Yet, in a technology landscape where security is non-negotiable, maintaining compliance and security can be complex, especially in highly regulated industries such as financial services, manufacturing and the public sector where legacy, labor-intensive compliance processes can be slow to evolve to rapidly changing cloud infrastructures and the strict regulatory standards required to protect data.
For organizations focused on cloud-based architectures, security management requires robust and specific policies and configurations to mitigate potential risks. To address those needs, IBM’s ASC solution will leverage Amazon Bedrock generative AI technology to automate, evolve and enforce client-chosen security controls quickly.
“Insights from theCUBE Research shows that 96% of organizations continue to embrace cloud transformation, which intensifies the challenge of managing and securing data,” said Dave Vellante, Chief Analyst and co-founder of theCUBE Research. “Generative AI-driven automation has the potential to be a game-changer, empowering companies to swiftly adapt, enforce, and control data policies.”
Using generative AI, automation to alleviate cloud security management challenges
Using generative AI for autonomous decisions, ASC aims to help ease operational burdens, accelerate deployment and management and mitigate risks by offering continuous monitoring, immediate adjustments and proactive threat mitigation, all designed to minimize manual work. Augmenting traditional Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solutions, ASC will provide a tailored approach to cloud security management by harnessing AI-powered intelligence to consider the client-chosen control framework, along with future updates. In addition, the ASC solution is designed to automate and enforce hygiene maintenance, resolve misconfigurations, and reduce and address long-term policy drift.
“IBM recognized the opportunity for our clients to better manage and enforce security policies in their cloud environments,” said Dimple Ahluwalia, Global Business Information Security Officer and Senior Partner for Cybersecurity Services at IBM. “With ASC, we’re utilizing AI and automation tools to help organizations better manage their data, tackle cloud migration challenges and positively impact their compliance posture, to deliver value to stakeholders across the C-suite.”
As a scalable cloud solution, ASC is designed to help clients:
- Harness the power of generative AI to understand clients’ security policies and standards using large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generative (RAG) applications;
- Infer AWS native technical controls that apply to an organization’s workloads based on the client-chosen regulatory obligations;
- Autonomously monitor and deploy cloud security controls to mitigate misconfigurations; and,
- Address their non-compliance discrepancies using cloud-native automation.
And, for client security teams that spend months mapping security policies, aligning them with regulations and transforming them into scripts, ASC also seeks to accelerate the time spent on policy deployment using a combination of generative AI and cloud-native automation.
Accelerating Cloud Transformation with IBM and AWS
The introduction of ASC underscores IBM’s commitment to helping mutual clients harness the power of AWS. By combining IBM’s expertise in cloud transformation with AWS, ASC will allow clients to accelerate their cloud adoption and unlock new opportunities for business transformation and growth.
Beginning with deployment and onboarding, IBM consultants with cloud certifications and AWS expertise can assist clients utilizing ASC with tailored assessments, continuous monitoring and optimization, and proactive risk and compliance management. In addition, IBM Consulting can support ASC integration on AWS to address client’s evolving cloud infrastructure needs with the goal of improving accuracy and effectiveness over time.
IBM’s ASC solution will be generally available globally beginning in December 2024 and showcased during an AWS re:Invent 2024 session titled, “Harnessing AI for Autonomous Cloud Security: IBM & AWS Game-Changing Solution.” For more information on IBM’s Autonomous Security for Cloud solution, visit: https://www.ibm.com/services/autonomous-security-cloud.
Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.
About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. More than 4,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.
Visit www.ibm.com/ for more information.
IBM Contacts:
Joel Rushing
[email protected]
Alex Prevor
[email protected]
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