As leaders in digital transformation initiatives around the world, Exela is entrusted with maintaining the integrity, privacy, and security of information belonging to our customers and their customers and end users. “The information entrusted to us is the lifeblood of our customers’ businesses,” notes Mario Carneiro, Exela’s Data and Technical Security Manager. So to say there’s a lot at stake would be an understatement.

In fact, maintaining the privacy and security of the information entrusted to us by our customers is a primary business objective of ours. Our robust approach includes:

• Compliance with the GDPR and related Privacy Shield Framework
• Compliance with the GLBA
• Compliance with SSAE (Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements), including SSAE 16 (applicable specifically to service organizations) and SSAE 18 (applicable to all attestation engagements, and requiring, among other things, annual SOC1 audit of data and system security controls and protocols)
• Compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX, which protects shareholders and the general public from accounting errors and fraudulent enterprise practices)
• Compliance with the National Archives and Record Administration’s standards for guidance on maintenance and storage of electronic records.
• Biennial internal auditing and monthly self-assessment auditing of all Exela facilities to ensure compliance
• Implementing physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure all information we process, including preventing unauthorized access and/or disclosure and maintaining data accuracy

Fully compliant operations

In every country, in each locality, and in every industry in which Exela delivers services, Exela is charged with being and remaining compliant with the applicable laws, rules, regulations regarding data security and privacy. That means, among other things:

• System Certification and Accreditation under NIST (the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, as discussed in What Rules Apply to Data Security), which requires compliance with the applicable guidelines and standards contained in:
  • FISMA
  • HITRUST CSF
  • PCI DSS
  • HIPAA
  • ISO/IEC 27000-series
  • FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards, with regard to nonmilitary government agencies and government contractors)
  • DIACAP (Department of Defense Assurance Certification and Accreditation Process with regard to information systems risk management)

System security

To protect the integrity of our systems and ensure secure, uninterrupted service for all our customers, we maintain a complex and rigorous set of security and control features, including:

• Access controls:
  • Our facilities uphold the highest standards for security and access control, including continuous monitoring by personnel and by CCTV, identification display protocols, and periodic system integrity checks. Physical access (to both buildings and computer equipment) is restricted to individuals requiring access to perform their job responsibilities.
  • Contractors and subcontractors are required to implement and maintain safeguards consistent with ours.
  • User access privileges are reviewed regularly.
  • Unauthorized attempts to access information as well as authorized access to sensitive data is logged and reported; the logs and reports are regularly reviewed, and appropriate action taken.
• Change controls – Before any modification is made to the system or any element thereof, all affected parties are notified, and timing is to ensure minimum adverse impact.
• Application controls – All databases are configured so that modifications can be made to data only through programs, and individuals are restricted from directly accessing underlying production databases. Segregation of duties is enforced, and source code control is in place. A Software Development Life Cycle includes industry standard secure coding training, practices and requirements.
• Antivirus controls – The gold standard of antivirus software is deployed in all contexts and is properly maintained, including real time upgrades.
• Disaster recovery controls – Exela’s formal disaster recovery policies, including contingency plans and securing alternative processing methods, have been established, tested, and refined over decades to ensure operating requirements are met, quality is maintained, and expectations are exceeded wherever possible. They continue to be reviewed and improved as needed at least annually.
• Data backup & recovery controls – Our backup and recovery controls ensure all systems are backed up and all critical systems media is available for use in an emergency.
• Risk management – Exela develops, disseminates, and periodically reviews its security policies, including risk management, security awareness, security training, and incident response.

Data security

Exela maintains the integrity, privacy, and confidentiality of the data entrusted to it through its compliance program, its system security stance, as well as a complex set of best practices that include:

• Secure configuration, access controls & passwords – Exela’s formal policies, which are reviewed on a regular basis, ensure access to data is controlled in a secure manner that allows business operations, and such controls are regularly monitored to ensure compliance and appropriate incident response.
• Boundary firewall – To protect data integrity and security of our enterprise network, we have implemented multiple controls and practices to maintain the highest level of security including protecting all boundaries/the external perimeter with firewalls. All external connections must terminate in a DMZ network.
• System security – In addition to the system security controls discussed above, Exela has also engaged a Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) to help provide threat intelligence at our boundary.

System monitoring

Exela has deployed the Tenable Security Center solution, which includes the Passive Vulnerability Scanner (PVS) to provide continuous network monitoring in real-time. Security alerts are continuously monitored and logged, and logs are maintained securely.

Thus concludes our thought-leadership series on Leveraging Cybersecurity to Master Your Domain. If you missed the earlier posts, you can catch up here:

• Why security is the transformation you should be talking about
• What we’re really talking about when we’re talking about security
• 21 Staggering Security Statistics Every Business Should Consider
• How the Bad Guys Get In: Cyber Attack Vectors
• How to Keep The Bad Guys Out: Cyber Security Best Practices
• 8 Worst Cyber Attacks of All Time

Psst....you can download the entire series as a flipping-book here, and you can also find all of these posts on our blog, which we update at least twice weekly.

A Leap Into The Breach: Leveraging
Cybersecurity to Master Your Domain

In the future, be sure to subscribe to Exela’s quarterly thought leadership publication, PluggedIN for up-to-the-minute news and views on topics that matter to you.

In 2016, Experian Data Quality put out their Global Data Management Benchmark report, which laid out several insights on how enterprises are collecting, managing, and leveraging big data. Logically, some businesses have proven more adept at the task than others – using their data to improve decision making, customer experience, and internal processes. Others are struggling in the face of the digitally-driven proliferation of data.

In the report, Thomas Schutz, SVP, General Manager of Experian Data Quality elaborated, “a shift has taken place where businesses are using data for nearly every aspect of their organization" and that "the majority of sales decisions are expected to be driven by customer data by 2020." He further noted that “businesses get in their own way by refusing to create a culture around data and not prioritizing the proper funding and staffing for data management."

Not having enough data to accurately paint a picture of historical customer behavior, data patterns, or significant relationships between events, groups, or individuals is no longer a concern – but drowning in data may be.

The question then becomes, what is the best way to approach big data collection and analysis so that you’re effectively leveraging the data that you have? Simply letting it pile up, and never gaining the unique insights big data can provide a business is no longer a viable answer.

Complicating Factors

Even a team with best-class analysts can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data that enterprises collect today. The days of relying on Excel files to manipulate pivot tables to find patterns or correlations in your data have passed. Traditional approaches to data analysis may no longer be enough. Finding the meaningful signals within a mountain of data should be the aim of every enterprise, but a new approach may be necessary to do so. Nearly every business interaction creates actionable ata. It is up to each enterprise to decide what they do with that information – let it compile and accumulate, or efficiently mine it for everything it has to offer.

A Better Way Forward

By effectively analyzing and gaining the intelligence that big data holds businesses can make more informed decisions to achieve better results. Information without analysis is not intelligence – but with effective processes in place, deep operational insights can be gained that otherwise would be lost in the noise.

To tap into the real value of their collected data enterprises need a data mining platform that finds, monitors, analyzes and summarizes the information needed to make informed decisions in real-time. These platforms act as a force multiplier of analyst man-hours, automate data extraction, and then aid in the identification of emerging trends and abnormal behavior.

How it Works

Big data mining platforms work by linking data sources from an organization’s own databases, visible and invisible web feeds, customer feedback, and proprietary data silos to make critical information more actionable in terms of decision-making and the insight it can provide. Using the latest machine learning techniques, these platforms can recognize trends and patterns in data, identify correlating factors, analyze sentiment, and find meaningful relationships, events, groups and individuals within amounts of data too large to be manually analyzed.

An ideal data mining platform then has the ability to turn its analytics into action with customized outreach strategies. It can escalate internal alerts, send targeted messages to customers, or deploy two-way communication to gather new data. For example, a platform that aggregates recipient’s preferred method and time of delivery, can help an enterprise more effectively reach a target customer with a custom message when the recipient is most receptive.

From there, big data mining platforms help internal teams to analyze numerical data for correlations, language for sentiment, and interactions for network relationships. Through an intuitive workflow, an optimal big data platform’s artificial intelligence engines can learn to filter data noise and mine media channels for the most relevant results. The platform tracks who’s talking, what they’re talking about, and how they feel, along with where and when reactions are generated. This use of internal data in combination with external sources can help enterprises better understand individual behavior and expected values and take action before problems reach a tipping point.

From businesses gaining insight on customer loss prevention, to governments targeting fraud, waste and abuse, automated big data analytics provide organizations the tools they need for real-time decision making. Effective platforms can enable users to discover, monitor, extract, analyze and visualize large structured and unstructured data sets in a multitude of formats and languages.

To conclude, it’s become increasingly important that businesses do not just collect data – but that they put in place the necessary platforms, processes, and people to actively manage, and effectively mine that data – turning it into real business outcomes. 

Contact us today to discover how we can help unlock the potential of your data!

If you’ve been reading the Exela Blog lately, you probably already recognize how fundamental information management is to solving healthcare’s costly inefficiencies. As we discuss in the 7 Layers of Digital Transformation, properly leveraging information management is akin to properly pouring the foundation when building a skyscraper. But just as identifying, sourcing, and accumulating all your building materials is a necessary first step before you can pour your foundation, data aggregation is a prerequisite for data management.

Data aggregation often involves some level of data digitization.

Depending on where you’re at along your digital transformation journey, data aggregation may rely heavily on the digitization of paper documentation. One of the most reliable methods is via scanner. It’s for that reason Exela offers scanning solutions, tailored to the precise needs of our customers, wherever they are on the digital transformation journey. In some cases, our customers go so far as to engage us to take over their scanning workflow altogether for a completely streamlined end-to-end solution. That’s precisely what we did for a global pharmaceutical company, with the end result being not only better control, more efficient document management, and more streamlined adherence to applicable privacy rules and regulations, but also a vast reduction in how much the company relied on paper documentation.

The mailroom is a logical place to start, or accelerate, data aggregation.

Scanning is an important part of our Digital Mailroom solutions. As with scanning, we’re sometimes engaged to take over entire front-end mail operations in order to enable our customers to shift or maintain their focus on their core, revenue-generating work. Such was the case with a leading insurance payer, which came to Exela when its outdated mail facilities and processes were beginning to have a measurable negative impact on revenues. Exela’s solution was to relocate, reorganize, and re-equip the company’s mail operations, and the results were dramatic, resulting in vastly improved service levels alongside a 30% cost reduction per year. In some cases, we provide digital mailroom services in conjunction with other mailroom management services.

For healthcare payers, claims ingestion is another logical entry-point

Similarly, omni-channel claims ingestion offers a logical point of entry for data into the payer workflow. A common and significant payer pain-point involves the volume and variety of forms in which provider and patient claims enter their workflow. Our claims processing and adjudication solutions unify data from all incoming communication channels and perform pre-submission checks to create clean claims and intelligently route claims for optimal processing. For example, for a large healthcare claims processing center, our OpenBox platform streamlined the claims-intake process by automating the sorting and routing of inbound claims based on artificial intelligence technologies that were trained to identify, sort, and route claims according to form as well as content.

Medical coding doesn’t have to be a burden

HIPAA established the coding scenario that has proven a burden to many industry players, but the intention was streamlining operations. Streamlining operations is the goal of Exela’s coding services. Offered through LexiCode, an Exela brand devoted to providing innovative health information management solutions that drive reimbursement, such services are designed to improve coding quality and minimize compliance risk, can be performed for you or alongside you in a variety of settings, for both payers and providers. Such services can be provided remotely, as they were for one of our large medical center customers. can also train your staff to code accurately and in compliance with HIPAA and other applicable regulations.

What comes next?

With health information management underway, there is a perfect opportunity to turn information contained in EHRs into strategic planning, billing and collections, marketing, and communications assets. Our data analytics solutions include, among others:

• Predictive Analytics
• Data Visualization Tools
• Liquidity Management
• Security and Compliance Monitoring
• Omni-Channel Communications
• Hyper-Targeted Marketing

In our next post, we’ll be exploring how we take health information management to the next level via automation. Can’t wait? Check out the full story in our Q4 Edition of PluggedIN: Tell Us Where It Hurts: How Tech Can Heal Healthcare.

Get PluggedIN Now

When it comes to delivering desired outcomes to end-users in the context of digital transformation, the first rule of thumb is understanding who your end-users are. Of course, that’s no simple task, as we explain here. Luckily, one of Exela’s strengths is that we recruit and cultivate leaders who possess exceptional analytical prowess. One such leader is Tatiana Koleva, Exela’s Senior Vice President of Service Delivery. Tatiana is responsible for the services Exela delivers on-site for customers in the financial services- and legal-industries. In other words, Tatiana is on-site with our financial services and legal industry customers, ensuring end-user satisfaction at every level, even as the end-user landscape is in a constant state of evolution.

“I interact with people all day long and it is what I love most,” Tatiana tells us. In addition, she feels “privileged” to be leading her teams of “dedicated, customer-focused professionals who strive to deliver excellence in service every day.”

How Tatiana came to be doing what she’s doing

Tatiana attributes her success and her current position to “good fortune,” but it’s clear she’s worked hard for everything she’s achieved. “Six months after arriving in the U.S. from my home country of Bulgaria, I got an entry level job with the outsourcing division of Pitney Bowes and started learning about business and leadership and taking every opportunity to learn and grow.”

Tatiana’s favorite Exela offering

“I am really excited about Smart Office,” Tatiana tells us. “So many of our customers are focused on improving the experience of the millennials they're hiring, while also keeping real estate costs down. Our technology solves both. Our solutions provide visibility as to how services are used. As such, they can be provided where needed to enhance the user experience, while reducing the expense of providing them. It is a win-win.”

What Tatiana’s working on—right this very minute

“We are working on expanding services globally for many customers. It presents new challenges to solve for, which excites me, as well as the team.”

Tatiana on “innovation”

If you ask a handful of people how they define “innovation,” you’ll get a handful of different answers. What we’ve noticed is that the way one defines “innovation” has a lot to do with that person’s particular relationship to innovation. For example, this one comes from a tech-marketing perspective. For Tatiana, “innovation is a cultural trait, it is how we think about what we do, how we listen and respond to client needs, how we define the future of how our customers operate and how we deliver services. Sometimes it is progressive and sometimes it is disruptive. It’s change as a way of life.”

We asked Tatiana to give us her #FiveWordsAboutYou.

Here’s what she came up with:

• #determined
• #fearless
• #extrovert
• #disciplined
• #open-minded

What you probably don’t know about Tatiana

• Would you have guessed that Tatiana wrote poetry when she was younger?
• She also loves dancing and grew up dancing with her family.
• While growing up in a communist country, she really had little exposure to “business” as we know it in a capitalist society. So, her idea of success back then was to be a diplomat, and that was her dream job as a child.
• Favorite author since childhood: Oscar Wilde
• Favorite film: The Intouchables (a French buddy comedy-drama film from 2011 that her daughter, who was studying French, wanted her to watch). “It left quite an impression on me.”

Here’s more about the industry-specific solutions we’re delivering to our financial services industry customers, and to our legal industry customers.

Note:

Not all of Exela’s business process optimization solutions are industry-specific, however, and many of our clients, including our financial services and legal industry customers are also benefitting from our broad variety of solutions designed to optimize the business processes of enterprises in virtually any industry.

These include the entire array of Smart Office suite of solutions referenced by Tatiana above. You can learn all about how a major institution deployed one such solution, Intelligent Lockers, to great advantage.

Thanksgiving in Los Angeles happens to “fall” during the local rainy season, but that didn’t stop #TeamExela from turning up bright and early--and in unprecedented numbers--Thanksgiving 2019 to participate in the 7th Annual Funding Palisades Turkey Trot. Exela was a corporate sponsor this year and was represented by more than 50 participants (we had to stop counting at 50, and we can’t even begin to estimate how many were watching and cheering from the sidelines)--including Exela personnel, family, and friends. Race officials told us we had the highest group representation at the races that day. And you couldn’t miss us in our orange team t-shirts. Check out photos of the event here and here, and you’ll get an idea of what we’re talking about.

It’s been several weeks and several holidays since the Turkey Trot, but we’re still “kvelling” over the dedication our team demonstrates toward our #ExelaGivesBack program, of which the Turkey Trot was a highlight in 2019. As always, as part of the #ExelaGivesBack program, Exela agreed to match all donations from #TeamExela, dollar for dollar, and we’re also proud to report that in connection with this Turkey Trot, Exela raised over $10,000 for the Child Life Program at the UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital. The Program helps hospitalized kids of all ages cope with their hospital stays through age-appropriate therapeutic activities expertly designed to meet their needs. You can read more about the work the Program does here in this blog on Helping Hospitalized Children and Their Families.

To see what else #TeamExela accomplished in 2018 for the #ExelaGivesBack program, take a look at our Annual Corporate Philanthropy Review here. And stay tuned for some really exciting news about our plans for #ExelaGivesBack in 2020.

Like innovation and marketing, tech development and sales are inextricably intertwined. In fact, the success of any tech business depends upon a successful working relationship between these two teams. Despite their synergies and shared goals, however, their interests and priorities will sometimes diverge. Over the years, Exela’s CEO, Ron Cogburn has seen this firsthand and shares his insights with the Forbes Technology Council in the July 8, 2019 Forbes article, 10 Issues Sales and Tech Teams Commonly Clash Over (And How To Solve Them).

For example, sometimes a tech team is developing a solution to perform tasks “A” and “B,” but the sales team is out there selling it as doing tasks “D” and “E” as well. There’s an apparent disconnect there, and the result can be dissatisfied customers and frazzled sales and tech staff. How to prevent the disconnect? Ron has had great success with fostering “open communication and alignment between groups.” You can see the full text of Ron’s observations and advice as well as those of 9 other members of the Forbes Technology Council #d39eda7c7e00" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">here.

Ron is Exela’s Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Forbes Technology Council, offering many valuable insights. You’ll find many other thought-provocative articles from elite members of the C-Suites of Top Tech Companies like Exela here. For more up-to-the-minute Exela news, stay tuned to the Exela Blog.

To learn more about Exela’s rapidly deployable business process automation solutions, check out our Solutions page,  which has been approved by both tech and sales staff as a matter of course. And to learn more about the people behind our technology, don’t miss this interview with Tydus Mathis, Exela’s Enterprise Operations Director.

Cyber attacks increasingly threaten businesses, and the attack vectors continue to proliferate even as we speak. Here are 22 (and counting) you’ll want to consider right now:

Malware

Malware is any malicious code introduced into a computer system for the purpose of compromising the system’s integrity. Malware can steal or delete system data outright, modify system functionality, hijack systems for the purpose of extracting financial ransom, and even track the activities of system users. Malware attacks, which account for at least 28% of all data breaches¹, can be introduced into a system via:

• The installation of software and system patches by a system user or administrator
• Malicious websites accessed by system users
• Emails containing malicious attachments intended to be downloaded by a system user
• Other forms of hacking

Social engineering

Social engineering is the manipulation of a system user into performing an action that reveals sensitive data stored on the system or otherwise compromises the integrity of the system. Social engineering attacks account for at least 33% of all data breaches. Social engineering attack vectors can include:

• Emails with malicious attachments
• Emails containing links to malicious websites
• Phishing scams (emails requesting, cajoling, or even demanding the user provide sensitive information to the sender, including system login credentials)

Physical theft and loss of enterprise devices

Whether we’re talking about desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, hard drives or other devices that contain system data, the rule of thumb is that if it isn’t padlocked, it’s safe to assume it can be lost or stolen. Once stolen (or lost), even if a device is password protected, it’s not necessarily impenetrable. An unlocked device that connects to an enterprise system is no different from an unlocked door to a house.

Abuse of privilege

At least 30% of all data breaches are caused by individuals working from inside an organization. About half are accidental; the other half are intentional abuses of privilege. As Forbes puts it², “If you thought hackers were your biggest security risk, think again. Internal attacks are among the top threats, partially because it’s incredibly easy for people who already have access to sensitive data to abuse it.” Internal attackers can include:

• Disgruntled employees
• Employees who have already been terminated but have not yet relinquished their system credentials
• Employees and other insiders looking for ill-gotten gain (this includes insiders planted by outsiders)

Insider negligence

The other half of data breaches caused by insiders to an organization are inadvertent, including executives and even members of the C-suite. We’re talking human error here, including:

• Weak passwords
• The “coffee-shop problem” (using public networks to run enterprise programs containing sensitive data)
• Sending sensitive information to the wrong recipient
• Sharing system credentials
• Inadvertently downloading malware
• Falling for social engineering attacks
• Failure of an individual or a system administrator to apply software patches and coding/configuration errors (such that information intended to be confidential becomes internet-facing and/or searchable on the web)
• Misconfiguration of devices /badly implemented changes

Use and misuse of personal devices

Many workplaces (including Exela’s own MegaCenters) ban the use of personal data-storing devices. The goal is not to keep employees from spending their work hours checking Facebook, but rather to eliminate an easily controllable security vulnerability. A personal device on which enterprise data is stored might as well be an enterprise device—except that it’s far less secure because the enterprise has far less control over it. And like an enterprise device, when unlocked, it becomes an open door into the enterprise’s systems and data.

Cloud vulnerabilities

If it weren’t for the cloud, using multiple devices, both professional and personal, wouldn’t be nearly as seamless. The cloud allows you to access enterprise data wherever you go on any device that’s capable of accessing the cloud. In fact, many of Exela’s solutions are cloud-enabled for just that reason. But we provide our cloud-enabled solutions with confidence because ours are built “and function in accordance with”the high standards of security noted here. Not all cloud storage comes with that level of encryption or authentication, and so, like the personal devices on which the cloud is accessed, the cloud has the potential to become an open door through which the “bad guys” can enter.

Third party providers

The more third party service providers your enterprise uses, the more opportunities that exist for security gaps and glitches. Whatever systems you connect to theirs become subject to their system vulnerabilities—not just technological but human.This is one reason why a single-provider model is advantageous in digital transformation initiatives.

For each attack vector, there are best practices to avoid breaches. We’ll be discussing those best practices in the weeks ahead, as well as how keeping those bad guys out is a business priority at Exela and other of-the-moment security topics. If you missed the earlier posts in this series on cyber security, you can catch up here on:

• Why security is the transformation you should be talking about
• What we’re really talking about when we’re talking about security
• 21 Staggering Security Statistics Every Business Should Consider

Gotta read it all now? You can download the entire series as a flipping-book here.

A Leap Into The Breach: Leveraging Cybersecurity to Master Your Domain

In the future, be sure to subscribe to Exela’s quarterly thought leadership publication, PluggedIN for up-to-the-minute news and views on topics that matter to you

1. https://enterprise.verizon.com/resources/reports/2019-data-breach-investigations-report.pdf
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericbasu/2015/11/05/the-top-5-data-breach-vulnerabilities/#798ca8064d04

From September 23 to 25, the best, brightest, and most innovative fin-tech professionals descended upon New York City for FinovateFall 2019, a major cutting-edge conference showcasing the most promising financial and banking technologies. Finovate conferences consistently attract the largest, most high-impact financial and banking executives, so Exela was thrilled to be a part of this latest one.

Check out the Press Release with all the details here.

Debut of Exela’s Real Time Payments Platform

For FinovateFall 2019, Exela was honored to present its new Real Time Payments Platform, a full-service, fully-integrated real time payments (RTP) platform. Exela’s innovative and highly intuitive take on RTP is designed to integrate billing and payment processes on one easy-to-use platform, securely streamlining go-to-market strategy. Salar Salahshoor, Director of Product Marketing, and Hishaam Siddiqi, Product Marketing Specialist, presented a riveting demonstration that began with the provocative question:

How effective is a payment system without interoperability?

Instantaneous and secure payment transactions, now with interoperability

“In 2017, this industry promised “real time payments” as the future, offering instantaneous and secure transactions,” Salahshoor stated. “However, because of the high cost and complexity of integration, many banks have been slow and unsuccessful bringing RTP to market. And what happens every time we do come out with a new payment system? It’s bolted on as a standalone solution without thinking about interoperability.”

Watch the demo here.

“We’re here today to tell you about a Real Time Payments system that goes beyond the transaction.”

Salahshoor and Siddiqi proceeded to demonstrate how the Real Time Payments Platform is designed with the much-anticipated interoperability built- into the design. “It’s an integrated RTP platform that includes everything from bill rendering to receivables management,” Salahshoor explained, “integrating with everything from bill rendering and presentation to receivables management, providing you with more control over your entire payment ecosystem.”

How’d we do that?

“Exela is able to successfully deliver this because we are one of the largest global providers of transaction processing solutions,” Salahshoor and Siddiqi pointed out during the demo. “Our financial technology is deployed in over a thousand banks, including the top 10 US banks, processing more than 60 million transactions every day.”

Just one week after FinovateFall 2019, Exela proudly announced its partnership with Vocalink, a Mastercard company, to deliver a “Request to Pay” platform enabling consumers to receive payment requests, view bills, communicate with vendors regarding payment requests, and make real-time bill payments. Leveraging structured data to foster increased transparency and simpler reconciliation, Request to Pay is set to launch in the first quarter of 2020 and stands to serve as a core component in PAY.UK’s “new payment architecture” (the U.K.’s new conceptual model for the future development of the shared retail payment infrastructure).

SEE THE DEMO

Fascinated? Then check out Exela’s full line of Payment Technologies and Services, previously known as our Banking and Financial Services (BFFS).

For more on Finovate, please check out this blog from the spring of 2019, where we discuss FinovateSpring 2019, at which Exela debuted our BFSS solutions. The BFSS solutions use a uniquely designed presentation layer and strong technology workflow to improve liquidity, working capital and compliance for domestic banks, global banks, and large domestic and international companies.

To set up a meeting to examine how our innovative business process solutions can optimize your business, please contact us.

And please stay tuned for an upcoming video demonstration of how Exela’s Real Time Payments platform can streamline your go-to-market strategy.

So many of us, as workers, are often stressed about the idea of making a mistake in the workplace – mistakes that could affect everything from regulatory compliance to revenue to customer retention. In the previous Exela blog, the first of four tips on how to drive better customer experience is “use AI and bots to help with smaller issues” – but how do you do that? Using AI will not only give your customers a better experience, but will help your workforce avoid the potential for those small (or big!) errors that are simply part of being human.

AI is transforming every industry, from the uber-traditional financial, health insurance, and automotive industries to the newer worlds of smartphone app development and e-commerce. Machine learning (ML) is a subset of AI in which a computerized system either learns from a set of existing labeled data or learns to identify similarities within data without being told what the outcomes could be. Examples of ML include Netflix predicting what you’d like to watch next, Facebook algorithms noticing what products you shopped for and showing you ads, or Amazon suggesting new products you’d like to buy based on past purchases. Given the frequency we receive these suggestions in our online lives, the ubiquity of ML (and the overarching presence of AI) demonstrates how necessary it is to implement digital solutions within your company.

With a smartphone in nearly everyone’s pocket, customers have come to expect mobile and web options that make their lives easier. On the other side of that relationship is the workforce behind the banks, health insurance providers, hospitals, apps, and retail stores that must implement these AI-based solutions. Each industry has ever-changing guidelines to be met, leaving a wide margin for error when constantly trying to hit a moving target. Digital solutions help manage these issues, taking efficiency to the next level.

Malcolm Gladwell’s well-known text, The Tipping Point, gave us a term for when something reaches critical mass and is known and adopted across all parts of life, from our business lives to our personal lives. When Gladwell wrote it in 2000, he may not have thought of it being used to describe technology adoption in every vertical. All parts of a business need to work together to achieve an AI tipping point, what TechCrunch refers to as “collaborative automation” as employees are trained in new digital processes that will alter the landscape of their day-to-day work. Exela’s solutions provide just that – a layer of business process automation that changes how a business runs for the better, making it faster, more efficient, easier to use and implement, and providing an optimized customer experience. Machine learning principles allow users to either “auto-select” the correct answer to a problem or provide recommendations to the worker to reduce stress-related mistakes, therefore speeding up the time required to reach a successful outcome, especially in relation to customer experience.

Industry leaders are already implementing technology solutions in new and innovative ways, revolutionizing how business is conducted. For example, self-driving cars, apps that can identify different plant and animal species through crowdsourced photos, robots that interact with banking customers and direct them to the right employee for quick and effective service – all of these innovations require AI platforms similar to the offerings Exela applies to so many industries, from fintech and healthcare to print/mail services and staffing needs.

As tech leaders look to the future, AI is poised to become more intuitive, learning from repeated, assigned tasks and eventually will be able to move beyond single-step prediction. This is great in industries like healthcare and insurance, where events often move in a sometimes lengthy but predictable sequence. Industrial workers, healthcare professionals, and insurance representatives will benefit from AI knowing which task comes next and helping them complete it with accuracy, narrowing the margin for error and boosting productivity on all sides of project workflow.

Customers expect their experience with companies in all verticals to come with a layer of digital innovation, and if your company doesn’t “have an app for that” then you are perceived as lagging behind the pace of technology. Improving customer experience means adding AI to your existing systems, but you can’t do so without first knowing your specific automation needs. Choose a company that doesn’t just deliver AI and walk away, but helps transform each customer’s individual digital journey for the best experience for both customer and workforce. Contact us today!

Here on the Exela Blog, we’ve been talking quite a bit lately about sustainability and how we, as a company, can do our part in preserving the planet for future generations. But what does that really mean? Whether or not you subscribe to the idea that human activity has caused changes in our climate, scientists are generally in agreement that humans can slow the process by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.[1]

But what actually are greenhouse gas emissions? Most of us have it in our minds that greenhouse gases are “bad,” and greenhouse gas emissions should be curbed. Many of us also find ourselves swapping out “carbon” in place of “greenhouse.” None of that is exactly accurate, however. Since we expect we’ll be talking about sustainability--and Exela’s efforts in supporting it---for some time to come, we’re going to take a moment now to clarify the relationship between carbon and greenhouse gas emissions and sustainability.

Greenhouse gas emissions

Greenhouse gas emissions refer to the release of certain types of gases into the air as a result of either natural processes (like respiration) or unnatural processes (like manufacturing). The types of gases that are referred to as “greenhouse” are those that allow sunlight to heat our planet but don’t have the ability to escape the Earth’s atmosphere. Greenhouse gases, therefore, act as a “greenhouse” for our planet, generating warmth and also preventing heat from escaping. Greenhouse gases also protect our skin from the damaging rays of the sun. So they’re not all bad. But reducing the amount of greenhouse gases we produce is a goal that scientists agree can help sustain our planet for generations to come.

Carbon: two sides to the story

Stronger than steel and more flexible than rubber, Carbon is the key ingredient for almost all life on earth and was first known to humans and their predecessors as a form of coal--which remains a major source of fuel today, accounting for about 30% of energy worldwide. It’s also an important component in manufacturing, both in the form of graphite (a lubricant) and as a key component in the production of steel.[2] Carbon is the key component in diamonds. Carbon is taken in by plants as part of respiration, and animals (such as humans) benefit by eating plants and plant-eating animals.

Carbon comes in many forms, but not all forms are good for sustaining life, particularly when two parts of it combine with one-part oxygen to form the gas, carbon dioxide, which it does when it is burned (for fuel). Theoretically, the burning of carbon-based fuel can be regarded as “progress.” On the other hand, one thing that makes it so effective as a precursor of fuel is that it is really proficient at retaining heat. Accordingly, the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has the effect of trapping heat close to the earth.

Carbon also becomes problematic when it combines with hydrogen to form methane gas, which is emitted in the course of decomposition of organic material. Methane is a combination of one-part carbon and four parts hydrogen, methane is a natural byproduct of organic decomposition (think garbage in landfills, livestock manure, and also livestock flatulence). It’s also is released by rice fields, mud volcanoes, and termites. While far less abundant than carbon dioxide, it possesses 80% more power to trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.

With their power to trap heat, these two types of carbon byproducts (carbon dioxide and methane gas) are considered “greenhouse gases.” But they’re far from the only ones. Other greenhouse gases include:

• Water vapor

An even more prevalent greenhouse gas than either carbon dioxide or methane is...nothing more than water in gas form, i.e., water vapor. Water vapor helps cool the Earth through precipitation, but it also acts as a form of insulation that doesn’t allow heat to escape the atmosphere.

• Ozone

Ozone is oxygen that’s been exposed to ultraviolet light from the sun. It also forms when fuel is burned and as a byproduct of manufacturing. While the ozone layer, way up high, shields the Earth from the sun’s radiation, it also traps heat when it is in abundance at or about ground level.

• Nitrous oxide

Nitrous oxide forms naturally from soil and the ocean, as well as from energy production and manufacturing. Natural yes, but it also damages the ozone layer that protects the earth from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation.

• Chlorofluorocarbons:

Like nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons damage the ozone layer, but unlike nitrous oxide, are derived solely from human activity such as energy production and consumption.

Greenhouse gases and sustainability

Whether or not the emission of greenhouse gases into the air can hasten climate change, controlling those emissions can slow that change. Here at Exela, where our mission is to accelerate the business transformation of our customers using innovative strategies that create the most value using the least resources, our solutions are part of the solution. One of our goals this year is to reach even more businesses, not just those who are motivated by the promise of digital transformation, but also those corporate citizens looking to make this world a more sustainable place.

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/

[2]https://www.livescience.com/28698-facts-about-carbon.html