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Global companies remain unprepared for cyberattacks: PwC
 Massive cybersecurity breaches have become almost commonplace, regularly grabbing headlines that alarm consumers and leaders. But for all of the attention such incidents have attracted in recent years, many organisations worldwide still struggle to comprehend and manage emerging cyber risks in an increasingly complex digital society.

PwC launched its 2018 Global State of Information Security® Survey (GSISS), based on responses of more than 9,500 senior business and technology executives from 122 countries.

Executives worldwide acknowledge the increasingly high stakes of cyber insecurity. Forty percent of survey respondents cite the disruption of operations as the biggest consequence of a cyberattack, 39% cite the compromise of sensitive data, 32% cite harm to product quality, and 22% cite harm to human life.

Yet despite this awareness, many companies at risk of cyberattacks remain unprepared to deal with them. Forty-four percent say they do not have an overall information security strategy. Forty-eight percent say they do not have an employee security awareness training programme, and 54% say they do not have an incident-response process.

How cyber interdependence drives global risk

Case studies of non-cyber disasters have shown that cascading events often begin with the loss of power—and many systems are impacted instantaneously or within one day, meaning there is generally precious little time to address the initial problem before it cascades. Interdependencies between critical and non-critical networks often go unnoticed until trouble strikes. Many people worldwide—particularly in Japan, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and South Korea—are concerned about cyberattacks from other countries. Tools for conducting cyberattacks are proliferating worldwide. Smaller nations are aiming to develop capabilities like those used by larger countries. And the leaking of US National Security Agency (NSA) hacking tools has made highly sophisticated capabilities available to malicious hackers.

When cyberattacks occur, most victimized companies say they cannot clearly identify the culprits. Only 39% of survey respondents say they are very confident in their attribution capabilities.

The soaring production of insecure internet-of-things (IoT) devices is creating widespread cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Rising threats to data integrity could undermine trusted systems and cause physical harm by damaging critical infrastructure.

Meanwhile, there is a wide disparity in cybersecurity preparedness among countries around the world. In our 2018 GSISS, the frequency of organisations possessing an overall cybersecurity strategy is particularly high in Japan (72%), where cyberattacks are seen as the leading national security threat, and Malaysia (74%).

In May 2017, G-7 leaders pledged to work together and with other partners to tackle cyberattacks and mitigate their impact on critical infrastructure and society. Two months later, G-20 leaders reiterated the need for cybersecurity and trust in digital technologies. The task ahead is huge.

"Often in the Middle East, organisations try to address their cybersecurity issues by buying the latest technology or implementing the best standards, but unfortunately that doesn't work on its own,” said Wael Fattouh, PwC Middle East Partner, Cyber and Technology Risk. “Effective security must be achieved by smart and effective investments in People, Processes, and Technology together, that is the only way to ensure a proper and resilient level of protection.”

Next steps for business leaders

So what can business leaders do to prepare effectively for cyberattacks? PwC recommends three key areas of focus:

C-suites must lead the charge and boards must be engaged: Senior leaders driving the business must take ownership of building cyber resilience. Setting a top-down strategy to manage cyber and privacy risks across the enterprise is essential.

Pursue resilience as a path to rewards—not merely to avoid risk: Achieving greater risk resilience is a pathway to stronger, long-term economic performance.

Purposefully collaborate and leverage lessons learned: Industry and government leaders must work across organisational, sectoral and national borders to identify, map, and test cyber-dependency and interconnectivity risks as well as surge resilience and risk-management.

Output: Global companies are still unprepared for cyberattacks, with 44% lacking an overall information security strategy, while 48% have no employee-awareness training. The figures come from PwC's Global State of Information Security Survey (GSISS), which collated responses from more than 9,500 senior executives across 122 countries. It revealed 54% had no incident response process, and only 39% said they were confident of identifying cyberattack culprits. The GSISS urged senior board members to lead the fight against cyber crime, called for greater risk resilience and for increased collaboration between governments and organisations.


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Brexit could reduce UK's supply of fruit and vegetables: RSA
 The RSA Commission on Food, Farming and Countryside, which will be run by the RSA and is launched today, will also look at measures to improve the public’s health, the countryside and rural communities.

The Commission’s launch prospectus outlines some of the changes in the UK’s food, farms and countryside since the UK joined the then EEC in 1973.

UK rural areas have lost population equivalent to Cardiff, Manchester and Edinburgh combined; from 12.7m to 11.3m.

The amount we spend on food has decreased, as a proportion of our weekly household budget, from 31% to 17% of household budgets.

The UK has lost 51% of farmland birds, several species have become extinct, and over 1,000 species today are threatened with extinction.

Poor diets have become more common as a cause of poor health. The latest estimates put the cost of obesity at £16 billion a year, obesity has risen from 5% of the adult population to 27% today and Type II Diabetes rates have doubled since 2000.

Over the past 40 years, the UK has come to depend on rules and money from Brussels including laws that protect our wildlife and water. Of the £3.6 billion net income made by UK farms in 2016, £3.1bn from EU farm payments, and less than half of our fruit and veg is homegrown, and 90% of that by EU-born workers [see Notes for source].

Sir Ian Cheshire, Chair of the new Commission, said:

“We rely on the countryside even when we don’t see it; not only for food but so much we take for granted, like clean water. It’s part of who we are. We have come to depend on EU laws and money but they haven’t been working well enough, and they are set for the biggest shake-up in a generation. “Farmers groups, conservation charities and others are already putting huge thought into this. But they don’t have all the answers and might not agree. The role of this Commission is to learn what people want, as well as the established experts, what’s working in communities around the country, to come up with some creative answers and find a way through.”

The Commission is funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and will be launched at RSA House on Wednesday, with speakers including:

Sir Ian Cheshire, Chair of the Commission, also Chair of Barclays UK

Helen Browning OBE, Chief Executive of the Soil Association

Lord Curry of Kirkharle, Farmer and Businessman

Caroline Mason, Chief Executive, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation

Sue Pritchard, Director of the RSA Food, Farming & Countryside Commission

Sue Pritchard, RSA’s Director of the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission said:

“Every single person in the UK has a stake in our food, farming and countryside. “The UK has great strengths but real challenges too. We are a global leader in food manufacturing, but we rely heavily on imported fruit and veg. And while some people have more food choices than ever, inequality in the UK means for too many the reality is little choice and food poverty. “What’s on our plates affects all of us, and what is on our neighbours’ plates affects us too: the effect of food inequality is a public health time bomb. “So we need both optimism and realism in spades. The Commission will take this once-in-a-generation opportunity to renew our food, farming and countryside for the next forty years and beyond, helping to turn our shared ambitions into actions.”

Caroline Mason, Chief Executive, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, said:

“We have funded this Commission because we believe there are ways to produce higher quality food that are better for people and the environment. Our support for 170 sustainable food initiatives over the past 10 years - from community allotments to healthier fast food - has shown us that the food system is disjointed, but that many people want the chance to make it better. The Commission represents a perfectly-timed, once in a generation opportunity for people and communities to influence the role of food in their lives.”

Contact:

Ash Singleton, [email protected], 07799 737 970.

Notes:

Source on EU migrants working in agriculture: Written evidence submission to House of Lords EU Committee inquiry, made by the British Growers Association.

Output: If the UK fails to agree a Brexit deal there could be serious implications for public health, according to a report by the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). The study is designed to coincide with the launch of a new RSA commission that will explore the impact of leaving the European Union on UK food and farming. The report stated that of 35 portions of fruit and vegetables, equivalent to a week of the recommended five-a-day intake, just one is grown in the UK and harvested by UK or non-European Union workers.


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Brexit could reduce UK's supply of fruit and vegetables: RSA
 The UK faces serious health implications if the government fails to agree a Brexit deal, finds a report that says of 35 portions of fruit and vegetables, a figure relating to the five-a-day recommendation for individuals, just one “portion” is grown in the UK and picked by British or non-EU workers.

The report, to mark the launch of a new RSA commission examining the impact of Brexit on food and farming, found that the five-a-day health target – which adds up to the 35 portions of fruit and vegetables a week – was overwhelmingly met by food grown in the EU or harvested by EU workers in the UK.

Sue Pritchard, director of the RSA Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, said Brexit offered a great opportunity to reshape farming and food, but warned that no deal over the exit from the union would have a dramatic and immediate effect.

“What would be available on the shelves would change dramatically. There will be delays at ports and all along the food supply system – the impact will be felt very, very quickly,” she said.

The study found that of the average 28 portions consumed by Britons of the recommended weekly intake of 35 portions of fruit and vegetables, the equivalent of 11 portions came from the EU, seven from the rest of the world and nine arose from the UK and were harvested by workers from other EU countries. The equivalent of just one portion was grown in the UK and harvested by British or non-EU workers.

Of 35 ‘portions’ of fruit and vegetables just one has been harvested from the UK and picked by UK or non-EU workers. Photograph: Edd Westmacott/Alamy

Pritchard added: “If there is no deal the system is very fragile and the impact in the UK food supply is likely to be dramatic.”

The majority of farmers backed Brexit, but the National Farmers’ Union has since suggested that crops will “rot in the fields” and that Britain will be unable to produce the food if the government cannot secure a deal that allows tens of thousands of EU workers to continue to work on UK farms.

The government has been criticised for failing to make any meaningful progress in the Brexit negotiations and key figures, including the prime minister, have argued that a no deal would be better than a bad deal.

The commission, which will be officially launched on Wednesday, aims to explore what will happen to food and farming after Brexit and how the UK might then improve public health, sustainability and the rural environment.

It says that since the UK joined the European Economic Community, in 1973, the amount people have spent on food has decreased as a proportion of their weekly household budget, from 31% to 17%.

Poor diets have also become more common as a cause of ill health, with the latest estimates putting the cost of obesity at £16bn a year.

Sir Ian Cheshire, chair of the RSA commission, said: “The role of this commission is to learn what other people want, as well as the established experts, what’s working in the communities around the country, to come up with some creative answers and find a way through.”

Pritchard said that although less than a fifth of people in the UK lived in rural areas, everyone relied on the countryside for “food, clean water and more”. She added: “The countryside and rural scenery is the top feature that people say makes them proud of their country.”

She said that though Brexit would pose a serious challenge to the UK’s food and farming, it also presented a once-in-a-generation opportunity. “It is forcing us to address many systemic failings that we have ignored for too long and if we can get this right we can create a better, more sustainable, healthier future.”

Output: If the UK fails to agree a Brexit deal there could be serious implications for public health, according to a report by the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). The study is designed to coincide with the launch of a new RSA commission that will explore the impact of leaving the European Union on UK food and farming. The report stated that of 35 portions of fruit and vegetables, equivalent to a week of the recommended five-a-day intake, just one is grown in the UK and harvested by UK or non-European Union workers.


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Waymo looks to improve autonomous vehicle user experience
 Waymo, Google's self-driving car spinoff, showed off its technology to reporters on Monday at its California testing facility.

Waymo officials declined to say when they expect to offer the technology commercially or where it will first show up.

The technology seems mature, but questions and challenges remain.

MERCED COUNTY, California — California's Central Valley is known for its miles and miles of farm orchards, fights over water rights, and, these days, high unemployment.

High-tech? Not so much.

But I was here on Monday to see in action a cutting-edge technology that has the potential to greatly reshape our economy and society — the self-driving car. Waymo, Google's autonomous vehicle spinoff, has its testing facility at a decommissioned Air Force base. The company invited several dozen reporters to see its cars in action, get a ride in one, and hear its case that its technology is all-but ready for the real world.

"We're pretty excited about where we are right now," in terms of developing fully autonomous cars, John Krafcik, Waymo's CEO, told the assembled journalists. He continued: "We're getting to the point where we're really close."

Just how close, though, is anyone's guess — anyone outside Waymo, that is. When asked when we might see Waymo roll out its technology commercially in a product the public at large can see or interact with, Krafcik declined to offer a forecast.

Unanswered questions

It's also unclear exactly where Waymo's technology will first start showing up. Krafcik said the company is pursuing several opportunities at the same time: in trucking, ride-hailing, and ride-sharing, in making "last-mile" connections between consumers homes and the closest public transit stops, and in personal vehicles. But he declined to say which opportunity the company thinks is closest.

Waymo's Chrysler Pacifica minivan navigates the company's obstacle course sans a driver. Waymo

Krafcik did say that the company plans to work with partners such as Fiat Chrysler, Lyft, and the rental-car company Avis to deploy the technology, rather than going it alone. Waymo has spent the last 12 to 18 months building out such partnerships, he said.

"We see our role not as disruptors but as enablers," Krafcik said.

Waymo has been focusing on so-called Level 4 autonomy. At that level of sophistication, a car can drive itself without any driver input, but can only do so in a relatively confined area or in a relatively circumscribed set of conditions. The company is already offering fully autonomous rides in certain areas of Chandler, Arizona, outside Phoenix, as part of a test of its systems.

The company is hoping to gradually progress up to Level 5 autonomy, where self-driving cars can basically go just about anywhere a human-driven car could go.

Riding in a car with no driver

We reporters got to see first-hand how just far along Waymo's Level 4 technology is. Part of the outing involved an approximately 10-minute, two-mile drive around the company's testing facility with nothing but Waymo's technology behind the wheel.

Some of the obstacles the Waymo vehicles had to navigate on Monday. Waymo

Waymo's testing site is at Castle Air Force Base, a decommissioned military facility where pilots trained for World War II and in the Cold War, was the home of a wing of the nation's Strategic Air Command. On its 91-acre section of the old base, the company has set up a network of streets, traffic circles, driveways, crosswalks, and even a railroad crossing to create a wide range of scenarios for its cars to contend with.

Accompanied by a Waymo engineer who was sitting with us in the back of one of the company's specially equipped Chrysler Pacifica minivans, another reporter and I could do little but watch and hope for the best as our vehicle made its way around the facility. To show what the minivan could do and how it might handle real-world situations, Waymo had some of its employees drive around in other cars, cross streets or bicycle beside the vehicle.

At least in this fairly staged environment, the vehicle handled everything with aplomb. I was never concerned about my safety or those around us. And while it was a bit strange to not have anyone in the driver's seat at first, I quickly grew accustomed to it.

Reassuring riders

Waymo has put a lot of thought into how its cars will reassure and communicate with riders, using visual and verbal cues. On the back of the front-row seats there are a pair of screens that show an image of the vehicle you're riding in along with some of the things in the environment that it senses, such as other cars, pedestrians, traffic cones, stoplights.

Waymo uses its displays to reassure and communicate with riders. Waymo.

The display is designed to show riders that the car is aware of what's happening around it, and view changes noticeably depending on what the car is doing. If the car is attempting to turn right, for example, the angle of view will shift to show more of the road to the left of the car and any oncoming traffic from that direction.

But the screens also show messages to provide more information. They might show the speed limit in the area or flash a quick message to explain that the car is "yielding to pedestrians." And when you've arrived at your destination, the screen will tell you, "We're here."

The information on the screens is designed to build trust, so "people will feel Waymo is a safe and reliable and trusted chauffeur," said Ryan Powell, Waymo's head of user experience design.

The challenges ahead

However, as well Waymo's car performed, it's clear that the company still has plenty of challenges ahead of it, both technical and otherwise.

Much of Waymo's autonomous vehicle testing has been done in relatively mild climates, including the San Francisco Bay Area. The cars don't have a lot of experience driving in winter weather conditions. The company is trying to address that. It announced last week that it will begin testing its cars in Michigan specifically to see how they handle ice, sleet, and snow.

Another key question for self-driving cars is how they will handle unusual situations that may occur in the real world. Waymo's been trying to address that multiple ways, not only by having its cars drive on real streets, but also by running through potential scenarios at its facility here, and then using data from those scenarios to run computer simulations back at its Mountain View headquarters.

Waymo is hoping consumers will soon be pressing "Start Ride." Waymo

There are also numerous non-technical questions with which the company has to contend, not only about how it will market its technology but also about how it will convince government regulators that it is ready for the road. And there are the societal questions about how the rollout of autonomous cars will impact jobs. What will happen to taxi and Uber drivers, truck drivers, and the like?

And then there's the public. It's an open question about whether the public is ready to adopt robotic cars. Even if they're open to the idea — and Waymo's data suggests about half of them are — they're likely to have plenty of questions about how they will use such cars, how they will work, and how they will handle particular driving scenarios.

In that area alone, Waymo seems to have a lot of work to do. When asked by reporters how its cars would handle particular situations like obstacles in the road that might block traffic, representatives gave conflicting answers. One even suggested that the cars might not move until an obstruction — a moving van that was double parked, say — were cleared out of the way.

I'm guessing Waymo's engineers have a better answer than that. But they may find navigating the non-technical obstacles to our self-driving car future are as difficult as the technical ones.

Output: Alphabet's self-driving company Waymo has been working on improving the user experience in its autonomous vehicles, with around half of participants in its Early Rider programme in Phoenix comfortable with being a self-driving car. To help build up the trust of the other 50%, the company is developing a system of visual and verbal cues using seat-mounted screens to inform passengers about what the car is doing and its intentions. Waymo is also examining ways to identify picking up riders who approach the car from a prearranged pick-up location.


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Fossil fuel companies accused of thwarting Paris climate talks
 In November 2017, during one of the most unprecedented periods of climate-related extreme weather events and humanitarian crises, governments will once again gather in Bonn, Germany, for the 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). High on government’s list will be to discuss the procedures that will guide the implementation of the Paris Agreement. If the world is to avoid the worst of the climate crisis and keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and well below 2 degrees, Parties must agree to real, just, and sustainable solutions, and reject the false solutions peddled by the world’s dirtiest polluters and their proxies (including obstructionist governments and industry trade groups).

Read the executive summary.

Output: International negotiations on the implementation of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords are being undermined by corporate interests, according to a report co-authored by campaign group Corporate Accountability. The report, released ahead of a meeting of parties to the Accord next week, gives examples of fossil fuel firms that it claims have manipulated the negotiations and questions the role of leading polluters that sponsor meetings in return for high-level access. Firms and organisations named in the report include EDF, Monsanto, Shell, Syngenta and the International Emissions Trading Association.


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Fossil fuel companies accused of thwarting Paris climate talks
 Global negotiations seeking to implement the Paris agreement have been captured by corporate interests and are being undermined by powerful forces that benefit from exacerbating climate change, according to a report released ahead of the second meeting of parties to the Paris agreement – COP23 – next week.

The report, co-authored by Corporate Accountability, uncovers a litany of ways in which fossil fuel companies have gained high-level access to negotiations and manipulated outcomes.

It highlights a string of examples, including that of a negotiator for Panama who is also on the board of a corporate peak body that represents carbon traders such as banks, polluters and brokers.

It also questions the role of the world’s biggest polluters in sponsoring the meetings in return for access to high-level events.

The report argues that as a result of the corporate influence, outcomes of negotiations so far have been skewed to favour the interests of the world’s biggest corporate polluters over those of the majority of the world’s population that live in the developing world. It finds that influence has skewed outcomes on finance, agriculture and technology.

We have the wrong people at the table and we’re looking to the wrong people for advice Corporate Accountability's Jesse Bragg

It comes as the 2018 deadline approaches for member countries to finalise the rule book that guides the implementation of the Paris Agreement. That rule book will determine things such as how compliance will be monitored and enforced and how the developing world will receive finance and support.

“We’ve been at many crossroads on climate change but this is perhaps one of the last of those that we have left,” said Jesse Bragg from Corporate Accountability. “If parties don’t arrive at a set of guidelines that actually facilitates the transition we’ve been talking about and keeps us under 1.5C, we may never have another shot at this.”

“We’re doing this wrong right now. We have the wrong people at the table and we’re looking to the wrong people for advice. If we don’t course-correct at COP 23 and the next inter-sessional in Bonn, we’re in real trouble. And you can look at what’s happened so far to see the evidence of that.”

Examples of the infiltration of polluters into the official negotiations include:

The UNFCCC’s Climate Technology Network, which advises on how to develop and transfer green technology to the developing world, includes a member of the World Coal Association, and its board has included managers at Shell and EDF – one of the world’s biggest electricity producers.

A negotiator for Panama is currently a board member of the International Emissions Trading Association (Ieta), and was previously its president for several years. Ieta was set up by the fossil fuel companies including BP and Rio Tinto in order to make sure climate action caused “minimal economic harm”. Today its members include Chevron, BHP, Dow, Duke Energy, Repsol, Xcel Energy, Veolia and Statoil.

Sponsorship of the COP21 meeting in Paris gave fossil fuel companies access to the “communications and networking area” inside the rooms where the negotiations were taking place.

Big agricultural corporations such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Yara have been lobbying heavily at UNFCCC meetings, with Monsanto even co-charing the World Business Council on Sustainable Development’s Climate-Smart Agriculture working group.

The report argues this access has influenced outcomes at the UNFCCC, undermining the Paris agreement in the following ways:

Market-based solutions to climate change have become dogma at UNFCCC meetings, despite many developing world countries urging alternative mechanisms such as direct regulation, and despite studies suggesting they can allow big polluters to continue polluting, according to Corporate Accountability.

The US and Canada have adopted agricultural corporations’ approach to “climate-smart agriculture”, and argued against regulation of non-CO2 emissions from agriculture.

Most of the funds from the Green Climate Fund have so far been allocated to private sector projects.

The report argues that if the UNFCCC process results in a rulebook being developed in line with what the world’s biggest polluters want, then the Paris agreement is doomed to failure.

“If those rules are written in a way to give weight to the provisions that industry is in favour of, and ignores those things that the industry is against, then you’re almost renegotiating the Paris agreement,” Bragg said. “What you’re doing is cherry-picking out of the Paris agreement the things that they want, and leaving behind the things that the global south [developing] countries need.

“It’s where you lose any nod to incorporate non-market mechanisms into article 6. It’s where ‘climate smart agriculture’ becomes the only focus of agricultural negotiations, and so big ag is dominating negotiations there and petrochemicals are the solution. And the fossil fuel industry dominates the conversation around technology so we’re just hoping for a successful large-scale carbon capture and storage to get us out of this mess. It’s those things that are at risk in the rulebook negotiations.”

Momentum has been building over the past couple of years to have an official conflict-of-interest policy agreed on at the UNFCCC.

In Marrakech in 2016 moves instigated by a group representing the majority of the world’s population – the Like Minded Group of Developing Countries – were thwarted by the US, EU and Australia.

Australia’s delegation has argued that “there is no clear understanding of what a conflict of interest is and it means different things to different people” and that fossil fuel companies were “the providers of the biggest and best solutions”.

But in May this year in Bonn, the group succeeded in getting the UNFCCC to agree to improve “transparency”, and discussions will continue in May 2018.

The World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control successfully implemented a conflict of interest policy that has widely been acknowledged as a key ingredient in its success.

Corporate Accountability says a similar policy is needed for the UNFCCC.

Output: International negotiations on the implementation of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords are being undermined by corporate interests, according to a report co-authored by campaign group Corporate Accountability. The report, released ahead of a meeting of parties to the Accord next week, gives examples of fossil fuel firms that it claims have manipulated the negotiations and questions the role of leading polluters that sponsor meetings in return for high-level access. Firms and organisations named in the report include EDF, Monsanto, Shell, Syngenta and the International Emissions Trading Association.


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Researchers use sunlight to produce biodegradable plastic
 In Michigan, Michigan State University scientists are proposing a new way to economically produce biodegradable plastics with sunlight and help from an ancient microorganism. Researchers at the Ducat MSU-Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratory took cyanobacteria, that use sunlight to naturally produce sugar, and genetically tweaked them to constantly leak that sugar into a surrounding saltwater medium. They paired them with natural bioplastic-producing bacteria that fed on the leaked sugar. The pairing was prolific.

Processed biomass contained a near constant 30 percent bioplastic content, four times more than similar experimental systems, and production rates were over 20 times faster.

Output: Scientists at Michigan State University have developed a low-cost method of producing biodegradable plastics. The team paired genetically altered cyanobacteria, which use sunlight to produce sugar, to feed natural bioplastic-producing bacteria in a saltwater medium, whose voracious appetite encouraged the cyanobacteria to generate more sugar. The virtuous circle combination produced biomass at 20 times the rate of other systems, and contained a steady 30% bioplastic material, four times more that previously produced.


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Researchers use sunlight to produce biodegradable plastic
 Michigan State University scientists are proposing a new way to economically produce biodegradable plastics with sunlight and help from an ancient microorganism.

The team, led by Taylor Weiss, a postdoctoral researcher in the Ducat MSU-Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratorylabat the MSU-Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratory, took cyanobacteria, that use sunlight to naturally produce sugar, and genetically tweaked them to constantly leak that sugar into a surrounding saltwater medium.

They paired them with natural bioplastic-producing bacteria that fed on the leaked sugar. The pairing was prolific.

Processed biomass contained a near constant 30 percent bioplastic content, four times more than similar experimental systems, and production rates were over 20 times faster.

The approach avoids fossil fuels for production and aims to reduce plastic’s impact on the environment.

“A major problem is that most synthetic plastic today is not completely biodegradable, so it lasts for hundreds of years after being discarded, in landfills and in water ecosystems,” Weiss said.

Although researchers have developed 100 percent biodegradable plastics made with special bacteria, it is very expensive.

These methods also tend to rely on feeding plastic-producing bacteria with loads of sugar derived from agricultural crops, like corn or beets, that also feed people and animals. There is a risk of competing for limited agricultural resources and driving food prices up in the long term.

Scientists are looking to genetically alter cyanobacteria, tiny photosynthetic workhorses, also known as blue-green algae, to funnel their outputs into useful products.

Weiss said that scientists create gradually more efficient bio-production systems all the time, but a major twist is that his improves over time, without human meddling.

“The cyanobacteria constantly make sugar through photosynthesis, and the bacteria constantly beef up on it, which encourages the cyanobacteria to keep producing,” Weiss said. “So, the system continuously evolves in a virtuous cycle.”

Looking forward, Weiss wants to partner cyanobacteria with other specialist bacteria to create cheap, environmentally friendly bioproducts, like biofuels to power jets and cars, fragrances, edible dyes and medicines.

“Ultimately, we aren’t just creating alternatives to synthetic products,” Weiss said. “We’re trying to ask nature to do what it does best: figure out the problem for us.”

SOURCE: MSU Today

Output: Scientists at Michigan State University have developed a low-cost method of producing biodegradable plastics. The team paired genetically altered cyanobacteria, which use sunlight to produce sugar, to feed natural bioplastic-producing bacteria in a saltwater medium, whose voracious appetite encouraged the cyanobacteria to generate more sugar. The virtuous circle combination produced biomass at 20 times the rate of other systems, and contained a steady 30% bioplastic material, four times more that previously produced.


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Facebook introduces creative A/B testing and Test and Learn
 Facebook Tuesday introduced two new ways for brands to optimize their future campaigns: creative split testing and Test and Learn.

Creative split testing enables advertisers to A/B test different ad formats, visuals, headlines and calls to action in order to determine which versions of their ads drive the best results. Users will only see one version of ads during split tests.

Facebook said in a Facebook Business blog post introducing the new features, “When setting up a split test, you can choose to isolate a specific creative variable or test multiple creative variables.

Output: Facebook is launching two tools: creative split testing and Test and Learn, aimed at enabling marketers to get the best out of their campaigns, according to a blog post. Creative split testing, available from this month through Ads Manager, allows A/B testing of various ad formats. Test and Learn, currently in pilot testing and set to be rolled out early next year, gives advertisers the chance to ask questions about campaigns and get information about which tests would be most useful.


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Paris's Brighteye Ventures raises $58m for edtech investment
 Brighteye Ventures, a Paris, France-based education technology (edtech) venture capital firm, closed its first fund, at €50m.

The fund will lead or participate in seed and series A and B rounds for innovative companies using technology to enhance learning and creativity. It will consider companies working across a full range of educational levels, from K-12 to university and beyond.

Brighteye Ventures is looking to invest between €500k and €3m per round in 20 companies over the next three years. It has a global remit, looking to lead investments in Europe and Israel and co-invest alongside smart partners in the US.

The fund has already invested in two companies participating in the $8m series C of Epic!, a digital content platform for under 12s, and in the $5m seed round of Lightneer, a learning games studio from Helsinki set up by ex-Rovio executives.

Brighteye Venture Advisers, based in Paris, is the sole advisory to the fund. Its two partners, Alex Spiro, managing partner, and Benoit Wirz, investment partner, have previously built and invested in some of the most dynamic companies in the edtech space and both have significant experience and relationships in technology, media and venture capital.

Managing partner Alex Spiro has a proven track record in children’s media, and is co-founder of children’s publisher Flying Eye Books, and Minilab Studios, an educational app development studio. Investment partner Benoit Wirz brings nearly 20 years’ experience of developing and investing in edtech, media, enterprise software and other tech companies, most recently at the Knight Foundation.

FinSMEs

01/11/2017

Output: French venture capital firm Brighteye Ventures is set to make significant investments in the edtech sector after closing a €50m ($58.2m) fund. Paris-based Brighteye, founded by Alex Spiro and Benoit Wirz, will participate in or lead seed series A and B rounds for 20 companies around the world that are using technology to improve education, investing between €500,000 and €3m per round over the next three years. The fund has already taken part in the $8m series C of content platform Epic! and a $5m seed round for Helsinki firm Lightneer.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Russia has change of heart in favour of cryptocurrencies
 In 2016, the Russian government was convinced bitcoin was a danger to its economy and a threat to its national security, so much so that politicians introduced legislation that, if passed, would spell jail time for anyone found using the technology. The offense carried a 7-year jail sentence.

One year later, Russia has established itself as a preeminent hub for bitcoin and other emerging cryptocurrencies, launching an audacious plan to grab almost one-third of the world’s bitcoin mining network from China. Everyone from the government to private businesses are embracing blockchain, the technology which powers bitcoin, and they’re doing so at an unprecedented rate.

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Moscow’s change of heart has left experts guessing at what the Kremlin has up its sleeve. Theories range from Russia making a strategic decision to reduce its economy’s reliance on oil and gas through bullish cryptocurrency investment to Russian oligarchs looking for clever ways to avoid western sanctions — blockchain technology allows for anonymous exchanges, making it popular among criminal entities looking to avoid government oversight.

One thing is clear, however: change came from the top. Analysts say Russia’s sudden embrace began on June 3, 2017, when Russian President Vladimir Putin took part in the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg. There, Putin had an unexpected meeting in the corridors of the Lenexpo Exhibition Complex with Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-Canadian programmer who created bitcoin-rival ethereum.

“After the meeting, it seemed to me that the light flicked on for him” Tom Luongo, an expert on the Russian economy, told VICE News. ”This was a way to rapidly push forward Russian financial and banking services, they are now moving rapidly to effectively digitize their entire economy.”

The appeal is obvious. Not only is every major financial institution around the world pouring huge amounts of money into research in cryptocurrencies, but according to one expert, in the right conditions — and Russia has the right conditions — mining bitcoin could be “10 times more lucrative than pumping oil.”

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Luongo says that Putin soon realized cryptocurrencies were not entirely dangerous, and instead offered the potential to diversify the country’s economy away from oil and gas. Russia has thus far focused primarily on Buterin’s creation: ethereum.

While having less than a third the market capitalization of bitcoin ($29 billion versus $93 billion) many experts see ethereum having a bigger future, as it has widespread applications in the financial world, allowing banks and other institutions to run smart contracts.

“Right after the meeting, the government pivoted towards cryptocurrencies, and said we need to start looking into it because it might be a ground-breaking technology,” Andrei Barysevich, a researcher at threat intelligence company Recorded Future, told VICE News.

Russia’s pivot occurred seemingly overnight. The state development bank VEB is developing an ethereum-based project; Russia’s billionaire businessman Boris Titov launched a blockchain project promising secure voting; the Central Bank of Russia is developing its own digital currency called masterchain; and Burger King Russia is embracing the currency to promote its restaurants. One Russian entrepreneur reportedly applied to patent his plans to distribute “vodka that trades on the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ethereum Classic brand names.”

Last Wednesday, Putin asked his government to create legislation to regulate cryptocurrency mining and establish legal definitions for various digital assets — a move which will give the Kremlin greater control over how this industry develops.

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But it’s not all about innovation and development. Barysevich believes there are other reasons behind Russia’s turn toward cryptocurrencies — and in particular bitcoin.

“It is not because of the convenience of the technology, it is purely because they want to be controlling the technology and making huge profits out of it,” Barysevich told VICE News.

Key to to Russia’s bitcoin takeover is an audacious enterprise launched in August to grab almost one-third of the world’s bitcoin mining network from China. Russian Miner Coin (RMC), a company co-owned by Putin’s internet ombudsman Dmitry Marinichev, is in the process of raising $100 million to fund the building of vast warehouses full of specialized computers that will work day and night with the sole purpose of mining bitcoins.

This gambit isn’t new to Russia. China has been dominant here for the last two years, currently mining around 60 percent of the world’s bitcoins. The Middle Kingdom’s efforts have been richly rewarded: the price of one bitcoin has soared from $1,000 at the beginning of 2017 to a record high of over $6,300 as of this writing.

Russia wants to get into the game and has a competitive advantage over almost every other country in the world: Electricity in Russia is cheap and abundant — especially in regions like Siberia — making it an ideal location to run the vast computing warehouses 24/7 at little cost.

Barysevich said that with the current government-controlled electricity prices, Russia could make a lot of money from bitcoin. “If you have an electricity at the cost of 2 cents per kilowatt, it’s 10 times more profitable than pumping oil.”

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But bitcoin comes with some notable drawbacks, including its proliferation and popularity among criminals, who’ve embraced the currency because it’s difficult to trace.

The currency’s shady origins hasn’t been lost on Putin, who has publicly said that he wants restrictions put in place on who can use bitcoin.

Not everyone is buying Putin’s posture however, with some experts suggesting that Russia’s sudden interest in cryptocurrencies coincides with the latest round of U.S. economic sanctions, which even friendly economists say will deal a blow to Russia’s recovering economy.

Specifically, Russia’s emboldened interest in cryptocurrencies hasn’t evaded the U.S. government. The U.S. Treasury told VICE News that it is “aware of the reports” regarding Russia and its increased adoption of cryptocurrencies, and they are continuing to monitor “evolving trends and new potential avenues for sanctions evasion,” a spokesman for the department said.

Russia’s enthusiasm for largely anonymous currencies like Bitcoin and ethereum comes at a time when Russian financial affairs have never been more closely scrutinized. But Marc Johnson, a security consultant and former CIA operations officer, told VICE News, early indication suggests it’s mostly “sincere.”

Output: Russia could use digital currency mining as a way to diversify away from fossil fuels, take on China as a bitcoin mining leader and work around US-imposed economic sanctions, according to analysts. The U-turn apparently followed an unplanned meeting between Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin in June. Putin recently called for legislation to be created to govern the sector, and Central Bank of Russia and VEB have both begun work on crypto projects, including a digital currency. Some have also suggested the abundance of cheap electricity in chilly Siberia makes it ideal for huge mining warehouses.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
MetaX testf blockchain with undisclosed advertiser
 Blockchain — which originated in financial services and is essentially an open ledger (a massive spreadsheet) of transaction data — is a new ad tech solution in town. Its promise is to provide advertisers more transparency and solve problems related to ad fraud and brand safety.

The underlying technology of blockchain is sophisticated, but how it works is straightforward. In its simplest form, blockchain works as a community. For instance, if a brand buys inventory from 10 publishers programmatically, the 10 publishers, the supply-side platforms that those publishers work with, the advertiser’s media agencies, demand-side platforms and the brand itself could form a group where members have different levels of access to a ledger. Pavel Cherkashin, co-founder and CEO for Blockchain Programmatic Corporation, explained that the multiple access levels allow only authorized parties in the transaction to access the data for audit purposes, while the remaining members have access to aggregate data for analysis and modeling purposes, etc. Transactional data is encrypted to ensure its protection.

“Each member of the network is a ‘node’ storing a certain amount of data on their servers and earning rewards, or tokens, for processing this data,” said Cherkashin. “They also conduct the audit and crowdsourcing of the data to ensure its accuracy and compliance.”

Blockchain is still in its early days, but some industry initiatives use it. For instance, Nasdaq said in March that it is providing blockchain technology to power a startup called the New York Interactive Advertising Exchange that trades guaranteed advertising contracts, while the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech Lab formed a blockchain working group in September led by GroupM’s mPlatform and NYIAX. (It is hosting its first full working group meeting on Nov. 1.)

Despite these applications, lots of use cases for blockchain are still theoretical. Here’s what you need to know.

The key numbers

The global blockchain market is expected to grow from $339.5 million this year to $2.3 billion in 2021, according to data firm Statista.

EMarketer predicts U.S. programmatic display ad spend will reach around $32.6 billion this year.

There are at least 11 publicly traded blockchain companies. The number of blockchain firms — private and public — that specialize in advertising is not clear.

The blockchain company view

Ken Brook, CEO for blockchain ad platform MetaX, said that in an unreleased beta test of blockchain with an undisclosed advertiser, his team discovered that between bot traffic, invalid banner video and unauthorized inventory sellers, more than 30 percent of the advertiser’s online ad spend wasn’t what it paid for.

“There is an immense problem around disparate data sets, especially when these numbers are used to justify ad spend and return,” said Brook. “There is also a lot of obscurity on how inventory is sold and resold.”

Cherkashin added that neither SSPs nor DSPs can provide the required level of trust and ability to process data as crowdsourcing in blockchain does. After all, with blockchain, the intermediary is a robot, not a human, so people can trust it with their data.

Cherkashin’s team patented the concept of multilayer blockchain, where 100,000 independent blockchains can work concurrently, which allows the system to process more than 1 million transactions per second, according to Cherkashin. “The compromise we need to accept is that there is no real-time consensus between all of the blockchains, but for advertising audit and data analysis, this is not required,” he added.

BPC will launch with more than 100 publishers this December, and Cherkashin expects at least 10,000 advertisers will get on board through token purchase by the end of this year.

The industry view

It is widely reported that one big problem with blockchain’s application in programmatic buying is the technology is not capable of handling millions of bid requests per second. “I don’t think blockchain is the solution. From what I’ve read, blockchain can only handle around 2,000 transactions per second, while in programmatic, we are doing millions of transactions per second,” said Nick Jordan, founder of data trading company Narrative I/O. “Ad tech likes to add layers of solutions on top of other solutions.”

Jordan said that even if blockchain can process 100 billion ad impressions per day, only three or four organizations like Google and Amazon have the computing power to manage the large databases required by that volume, which goes against the promise of blockchain: a distributed ledger. “Basically, the industry goes back to the hands of walled gardens,” he said.

Drew Bradstock, svp of product for Index Exchange, echoed Jordan’s sentiment. Bradstock said SSPs, DSPs and publishers can work together to provide advertisers more transparency. If advertisers and publishers rely on blockchain, there will probably be an ad tax on using the solution.

“You don’t need blockchain to audit the ledger,” said Bradstock. “For advertisers, it’s always cheaper and easier to hold their partners accountable than pay extra tech tax.”

Output: Blockchain advertising platform MetaX has completed a beta test with an undisclosed advertiser. CEO Ken Brook said that over 30% of the advertiser's ad expenditure was misused, an issue that could be alleviated through the blockchain. The online ad spend was wasted on bot traffic, unauthorised inventory vendors, and invalid banner videos. Brook said that the issue of "disparate" data sets and obfuscation on inventory sales and resales causes problems for advertisers. Pavel Cherkashin, co-founder and CEO of the Blockchain Programmatic Corporation, added that DSPs and SSPs cannot offer the necessary amount of transparency and data processing as blockchain.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Unassuming Dutch cycle bridge is a 3D-printed first
 Dutch officials have toasted the opening of what is being called the world’s first 3D-printed concrete bridge, which is primarily meant to be used by cyclists.

There was applause as officials wearing hard hats rode over the bridge on their bikes at the inauguration in the southeastern town of Gemert on Tuesday.

“The bridge is not very big, but it was rolled out by a printer, which makes it unique,” Theo Salet, from the Eindhoven University of Technology, told Dutch broadcaster NOS.

Work on printing the bridge, which has some 800 layers, took about three months after starting in June and it is made of reinforced, pre-stressed concrete, according to the university.

“One of the advantages of printing a bridge is that much less concrete is needed than in the conventional technique in which a mould is filled,” it said on its website. “A printer deposits the concrete only where it is needed.”

The eight-metre (26-ft) bridge spans a water-filled ditch to connect two roads, and in conjunction with the BAM Infra construction company was tested for safety to bear loads of up to two tonnes.

“We are looking to the future,” said the head of BAM, Marinus Schimmel, adding in a statement that his company was constantly “searching for a newer, smarter approach to addressing infrastructure issues and making a significant contribution to improving the mobility and sustainability of our society”.

3D printing meant “fewer scarce resources were needed and there was significantly less waste”, he added.

The Netherlands is among countries, with the United States and China, taking a lead in the cutting-edge technology of 3D printing, using computers and robotics to construct objects and structures from scratch.

Last year a Dutch architect unveiled a unique 3D printer with which he hopes to construct an “endless loop” building.

And a Dutch start-up called MX3D has begun printing a stainless steel bridge, of which a third is already completed. The aim is to finish printing by March and lay the bridge over an Amsterdam canal in June.

Output: The first 3D-printed concrete bridge has been opened in Gemert in the Netherlands. The cycle bridge, which is only eight metres long, consists of about 800 layers of 3D-printed, pre-stressed and reinforced concrete, and took about three months to build since work began last June. The project was carried out by the Eindhoven University of Technology and the BAM Infra construction company, and the structure was successfully tested for a maximum load of two tonnes. The 3D-printing technique enabled the use of less concrete than would have been required by traditional mould methods.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Alibaba launches 11.11 Global Shopping Festival in Shanghai
 Alibaba has officially launched its 11.11 (Singles Day) Global Shopping Festival, kicking off the three-week event with a fashion show in Shanghai.

The “See Now, Buy Now” fashion show, which showcased the fashion and apparel that is available to buy during the 11.11 festival, was one a number of promotions and entertainment features unveiled by the e-commerce giant to promote the annual event.

The event highlights a key strategic focus for Alibaba, which aims to blend e-commerce with entertainment through live-streaming, short content videos and personalised features.

Alibaba's chief marketing officer Chris Tung told Alizila, "We are elevating the shopping experience from a shelf-based, item-based presentation to a content-based experience for the visitors to our app.

"The [Tmall] platform is not just a shopping mall for customers exposed to the top brands in the world, but also a very informative medium for shoppers," said Tung.

Alibaba’s 11.11 (Singles Day) shopping extravaganza has become one of the largest and most anticipated e-commerce events globally, with last year’s event taking a record-breaking RMB 120.7 bn ($17.4 bn).

The event has evolved from a 24-hour online sale into a 24-day festival season, with consumers around the world offered 15 million product listings from more than 140,000 brands.

This year’s festival will also showcase Alibaba’s ‘New Retail’ strategy, which aims to integrate online and offline shopping, with the e-commerce giant launching pop-up stores and smart-stores where consumers can experience products and use facial recognition payment and scan-and-deliver O2O shopping.

This year’s event will also enable more than 60,000 international brands including Adidas, Bose, La Mer, L'Oréal, Mac, Mattel, Mondelez, Nike, P&G, Shiseido, Siemens, Unilever, Uniqlo, Wyeth and Zara to target Chinese consumers, with Chinese brands also able to sell goods globally via its Tmall World initiative.

The festival will also incorporate AR games to drive traffic and gift prizes and coupons to consumers, as well as sharing red envelopes with more than RMB 250 million and the annual 11.11 Countdown Gala Celebration will again be broadcast live on Chinese TV.

Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang said: “The 11.11 Global Shopping Festival is a large-scale business collaboration bringing together consumers, retailers, logistics companies, financial institutions, online as well as offline stores and shopping centers around the world. It is a grand stage for showcasing the New Retail initiative pioneered by Alibaba.”

Output: China's e-commerce giant Alibaba has launched this year's 11.11 (Singles Day) Global Shopping Festival with the See Now, Buy Now fashion show in Shanghai. The 24-day shopping extravaganza forms part of Alibaba's "new retail" initiative, bringing together the online and offline shopping experiences and blending them with entertainment, including live streaming events and augmented reality games. In 2016, Singles Day took CNY120.7bn ($17.4bn). This year's event will see more than 60,000 international brands exposed to the Chinese market, as well as Chinese goods offered to international shoppers.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Ads.txt now used by 44% of most popular digital ad domains
 The Digiday Programmatic Media Summit is taking place in New Orleans November 13-15. For information on how to attend or sponsor the summit, click here.

After a slow start out of the gate, adoption of ads.txt is taking off with some help from Google.

Only 13 percent of the 10,000 most popular domains that sell digital ads adopted ads.txt in the 100 days following its release by the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab in May. But between mid-September and the end of October, that number jumped to 44 percent, according to data from Ad Ops Insider publisher Ben Kneen. The time frame of the uptick in adoption overlaps with Google’s recent announcements that several of its most popular ad products will begin filtering for ads.txt. It also underscores just how much sway Google holds over publishers.

The IAB Tech Lab launched ads.txt as a tool to help ad buyers avoid illegitimate sellers that arbitrage inventory and spoof domains. The way that ads.txt works is that publishers drop a text file on their web servers that lists all the companies authorized to sell their inventory, which allows buyers to check the validity of the inventory they purchase. If a publisher uses ads.txt, then anyone with an internet connection can verify the publisher’s authorized sellers.

Domain spoofing remains a serious threat to the growth of programmatic advertising, so aside from shady resellers, pretty much everyone who works with automated advertising has incentive to back ads.txt. But despite the fanfare that followed ads.txt’s announcement, publishers dragged their feet in adopting ads.txt early on. The text files take just a few hours to create, according to multiple publishing sources, but publishers were slow to adopt because they had finite tech resources overcommitted to other projects, a lack of understanding about how ads.txt could benefit them and a lack of clarity about the impact. (Some publishers also weren’t crazy about exposing all the ways buyers could get onto their site outside of direct sales.)

“Even one or two months ago, it was slow going,” said Dennis Buchheim, svp and gm of the IAB Tech Lab, noting that ads.txt has since become one of the Tech Lab’s fastest-growing initiatives. “People were saying good things, but not necessarily acting on it.”

Google isn’t alone in pushing for ads.txt, so it can be difficult to separate correlation from causation when trying to determine what prompted so many publishers to create ads.txt files recently. Some ad buyers have said they won’t buy from publishers without ads.txt by the end of year, ad industry lobbyists support ads.txt and ad tech firms like AppNexus and MediaMath have created tools around the initiative. A few publisher execs have also clamored for more adoption of ads.txt to protect media brands from fraudsters, and ads.txt has become a buzzword at industry events.

All of these factors likely helped goose adoption rates, but none of these other organizations have Google’s power. Before Google announced it would use ads.txt files to filter unauthorized inventory, just 20 percent of the publishers that work with ad tech firm Advelvet had ads.txt files, said Murat Deligoz, CEO of Advelvet, which helps publishers set price floors in Google’s ad exchange. Now, all the publishers that work directly with Deligoz’s company have ads.txt files.

“Google is definitely the force to get ads.txt up and running,” he said.

In the past six weeks, Google announced that its DoubleClick Ad Exchange, AdSense network and demand-side platform DoubleClick Bid Manager will begin using ads.txt files to filter unauthorized inventory. For now, publishers without an ads.txt file can still sell their inventory through these channels. But if a publisher does have an ads.txt file, Google will block unauthorized vendors not listed in the file from selling the publisher’s inventory, said Pooja Kapoor, Google’s head of programmatic global strategy.

“I believe that Google should get most of the credit [for the increase in ads.txt adoption] because until the DoubleClick Bid Manager mandate went out a few weeks ago, many publishers, though not all, were just playing a waiting game,” said Michael Stoeckel, vp of global tech strategy at Prohaska Consulting.

Aside from the public announcements, Google has worked in the background to push ads.txt. In mid-October, Google sent emails to publishers using its DoubleClick exchange that said publishers should update their ads.txt files “in order to prevent impact to your earnings.” In the past month, Google’s ad server added an ads.txt management tab to its dashboard that shows publishers which sellers are listing their domains without authorization, according to a publishing source requesting anonymity.

Last week, Google launched a tool that scans publishers’ ad calls and spits out ads.txt files for them based on who it thinks is authorized to sell their inventory, Kapoor said. Publishers are encouraged to fact-check and tweak these files. The idea isn’t to set a publisher’s ads.txt file in stone but instead to remove friction to help it start one.

Google’s recent moves regarding ads.txt can be seen as the first steps that ultimately culminate with Google requiring ads.txt files from publishers before they can sell inventory through Google platforms. Google has discussed requiring ads.txt files from publishers, but no timeline exists for making such a move since ad buyers and sellers are just beginning to account for ads.txt in their transactions, Kapoor said.

“There’s no reason why we as an industry should monetize counterfeit inventory,” Kapoor said.

Google’s ability to help push ads.txt adoption is just one recent example that shows the search giant’s influence in the media industry. When Google ended its first-click free policy that required subscription-based publishers to let readers see at least three free articles in order to have the publishers’ content surfaced in search, publishers breathed a sigh of relief. Meanwhile, Google’s plan to turn off the sound on autoplay videos and unleash an ad-blocking version of its Chrome browser in 2018 has concerned publishers.

Since Google owns the most popular ad exchange, DSP and ad server in the ad industry, it wants to prevent further erosion in the trust in programmatic. Google’s ad exchange is listed on nearly 14,000 ads.txt files, which is 50 percent more files than the second-most popular exchange AppNexus has, according to ad measurement company Pixalate. Propping up trust through initiatives like ads.txt is one way for the search giant to encourage ad buyers to keep sending dollars through programmatic platforms, which is an area Google dominates.

Although publishers and advertisers alike have wearied of the power that platforms like Google and Facebook possess, the industry is welcoming Google’s push for ads.txt adoption. Liane Nadeau, director of programmatic at ad agency DigitasLBi, called Google’s backing of ads.txt “a great step.”

Slate adopted ads.txt in September a few weeks before Google announced its DSP would start using ads.txt files to filter unauthorized sellers, said Dan Check, vice chairman of The Slate Group. While Google wasn’t the main catalyst to nudge Slate to use ads.txt, Check recognized and supported Google’s use of its influence to push for industrywide ads.txt adoption.

“It can be good to have a stick, waved judiciously, in cases like this,” he said.

Output: Adoption of the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab's ads.txt tool by digital ad sales domains grew to 44% between mid-September and October, according to Ad Ops Insider, largely thanks to Google. The search giant has thrown its weight behind the tool to help maintain trust in programmatic advertising. In addition, the recent announcement that its DoubleClick Ad Exchange and AdSense network will use ads.txt files could lead to Google allowing only publishers that have ads.txt to sell on its platforms. The ads.txt tool helps ad buyers verify inventory by checking it against a list of authorised sellers.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
AISUS launches SIRIUS-X inspection technology
 Aberdeen-based AISUS has invested a six-figure sum in upgrading and developing cutting edge inspection technology as it looks to further broaden its range of services and increase its geographical reach to provide its customers with the most efficient, cost-effective technological solutions.

AISUS has launched an improved internal gravity deployed ultrasonic scanning tool, SIRIUS-X, for completing ultrasonic corrosion mapping within offshore caissons, risers and conductors.

Following successful field trials, it recently completed its first caisson inspection programme for a major UK oil and gas operator. The projects were completed in 14 days and included internal inspection of the largest diameter caisson AISUS has delivered to date.

The SIRIUS-X is controlled from the topside, allowing inspection data to be captured above, within and below a variety of obstacles and diameter variations commonly encountered within caissons, without removing the tool.

It has been developed to maximise data accuracy and minimise the duration of inspections to meet the increasing demands of the offshore industry. Featuring a high torque rotary drive and a scanning speed of up to five metres per hour, its small cross-sectional footprint with minimal hydro-dynamic drag also allows it to perform during elevated sea states.

The SIRIUS-X’s simplified and lightweight design means it can be easily configured and adapted in-field where required, further limiting the duration of offshore inspections and reducing costs. It can be deployed to depths of up to 200 m and adjusted for a range of caisson sizes, from 14 in. to 60 in., at the touch of a button.

Stuart Lawson, managing director of AISUS, commented: “This investment demonstrates our ongoing commitment to the global oil and gas market by offering the latest, most efficient technologies to support even the most complex inspection projects worldwide.

“SIRIUS-X, and other inspection application tools which we are currently developing, will bring real benefits to operators with a range of challenging requirements. Our technology is capable of transmitting data in real-time and can be deployed and recovered easily by smaller, highly-skilled teams, offering increased efficiency over traditional inspection approaches. This allows us to provide our clients with the data they need, when they need it.”

Establishing itself as leaders in the inspection of caissons, conductors, J-Tubes and risers, the firm has made significant progress in solidifying its reputation in its initial markets and is now growing its international footprint by exporting its custom engineered technology and expertise to exploit global opportunities. The firm’s long-term commitment to research and development activities will see AISUS launch new technology offerings to the market every year in a bid to address both the current and future challenges facing the energy sector.

“We have listened to our customers and adapted our approach to ensure everything we do is in line with exactly what they need to achieve their operational goals. Innovation and continuous improvement is what sets us apart in this increasingly challenging market. The process of providing innovative inspections solutions for gathering accurate and reliable inspection data from challenging and difficult to access areas is what AISUS is becoming world renowned for,” added Mr Lawson.

“This investment will enable us to harness and expand our expertise to broaden our product range and geographical reach as we look to fulfil our ambition of becoming a world leader in advanced inspection solutions.”

Established in 2013, AISUS is an innovative, technology driven company delivering remotely deployed visual and ultrasonic inspection solutions to the global oil and gas industry.

Output: AISUS has launched an ultrasonic scanning tool called SIRIUS-X. The tool is a flexible, remotely operated system for corrosion mapping of offshore risers, conductors and caissons. It can be deployed to depths of up to 200m, and can be adjusted to fit caissons with diameters of between 14 and 60 inches. SIRIUS-X is one of a suite of tools AISUS plans to roll out to address an increasingly challenging market.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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San Leon San Leon and Avobone agree revised payment schedule
 Further to the announcement on 5 June 2017, San Leon Energy, the AIM listed company focused on oil and gas development and appraisal in Africa and Europe, has announced that San Leon and Avobone have agreed a revised payment schedule in respect of sums owed to Avobone. The remaining payments of €8,000,000 (previously due during October 2017) and €6,694,840 (previously due during November 2017) will now be paid using Nigerian funds to be received by San Leon, to be paid to Avobone as soon as received by San Leon and no later than by 15 January 2018. The Company is scheduled to be repaid approx. US$19 million per quarter on its loan notes from Q4 2017, with the next payment due to be received by the Company on or before 1 January 2018.

Original article link

Source: San Leon Energy

Output: Republic of Ireland-based oil and gas exploration firm San Leon Energy has agreed a revised payment schedule for debts to Avobone. The companies have decided that payments of €8m ($9m) and €6.7m, previously due in October and November 2017 respectively, will now be paid using Nigerian funds, as soon as San Leon receives them, with a deadline of 15 January 2018.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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HydraWell develops rig-less plug & abandon solution
 Several years ago, HydraWell introduced a technology more or less revolutionised the market for plugging and abandoning offshore wells. The company’s PWC® technology (perforate, wash and cement) promised to plug offshore wells in 2 - 3 days instead of the 10 - 14 days it took with traditional plugging methods such as section milling.

Since then, 15 operators – including supermajors, big, national and independent oil companies – have accepted and utilised HydraWell’s PWC® technology to plug more than 200 wells worldwide.

"This has resulted in approximately 1500 fewer rig days for the oil companies in question, plus significantly smaller environmental footprint as they don’t have to bring the well’s swarf cuttings topside. This typically amounts to 4 t per well, says Morten Myhre, chief technology officer at HydraWell.

Today, oil companies often have to upgrade the derrick on their platforms, or hire a jack-up that is connected to the production platform, in order to execute P&A operations. With rig rates at a couple of hundred thousand dollars per day, this is a costly operation.

The new proposed solution HydraWell has developed, enables plugging of wells from the production platform, without a conventional drilling rig, but by use of well intervention equipment such as coil tubing, wireline or e-line. Performing this type of P&A work, without a drilling rig, will significantly reduce costs and environmental footprint for both oil companies and society as a whole.

Another advantage with HydraWell’s third generation solution is that the well can be plugged without having to pull thousands of metres of production piping out of the well. This will save costs and the environment further as you eliminate the need for heavy lift vessels, transport of material onshore, demolition and recycling of the materials from the well.

“The solution is ready. We will now enter into dialogue with oil companies to further develop it and start testing it offshore. Our experience is that oil companies are very open minded when it comes to cost efficient plugging methods, and we strongly believe that they are interested in exploring this solution too from HydraWell,” says Mark Sørheim, CEO of HydraWell.

HydraWell’s headquarter is based in Stavanger, Norway. The company also has offices in Aberdeen, UK, and in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

HydraWell is owned by the company’s management and employees together with private equity-fund Norvestor VII, L.P., which is advised by private equity-company Norvestor Equity AS.

Output: Norwegian firm HydraWell has developed a plug and abandon (P&A) solution that uses well intervention gear than a traditional rig. The P&A system significantly reduces costs and environmental impact, the company says. "Our experience is that oil companies are very open minded when it comes to cost efficient plugging methods, and we strongly believe that they are interested in exploring this solution too”, said HydraWell CEO Mark Sørheim.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Robo-adviser Moola gives investors £100 if they get quiz right
 Digital wealth management platform Moola is offering successful participants of an online quiz £100 for signing up to one of its risk-targeted portfolios.

Investors are invited to take part in the quiz that has four not 'easy' questions and provided you get at least three right, the first 200 new customers will receive £100 into their investment account.

The catch is you have to set up your Moola account with a minimum investment of £50 and a minimum monthly contribution of £50 a month for a period of 6 months or contributions totalling £300 in the first year.

Moola will deposit £100 prize into investors account within 1 month of the account being opened and first deposit made with the £100 prize invested into the portfolio.

All things being equal – which they rarely are – this locks in a 33 per cent return before fees.

Accounts, however, must remain open for at least 12 months before withdrawing the £100 prize or it and any associated profits will not be able to be withdrawn and will be recalled by Moola.

Gemma Godfrey is the founder and CEO of Moola. The platform is backed by Octopus Ventures as well as Run Capital, Odysseus Investments and some private investors.

Output: Robo-adviser Moola is offering users £100 ($130) in investments if they complete a quiz correctly while signing up to one of the firm's portfolios. Potential "winners" have to already have an investment of £50 in their Moola accounts in addition to a recurring contribution of £50 set for the next six months or make a one-off investment of £300. The first 200 customers to complete the quiz successfully will be awarded the £100 into their investment accounts. The reward will be unable to be redeemed from the account for at least 12 months.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
One fifth of bonds trade electronically
 The use of electronic trading for corporate bonds has surged significantly over the past few years, with MarketAxess being the preferred e-trading platform according to new research.

A study from Greenwich Associates revealed 84% of investors now trade corporate bonds electronically as of this year, compared to just 69% in 2013.

Similarly, the overall corporate bond trading volume on a notional basis traded electronically has surged from just 8% in 2013 to almost 20% this year.

“The increase in usage from just 69% in 2013 shows how quickly investors are adopting electronic trading and how rapidly electronic tools and venues are maturing,” the report explained.

High-yield bond trading has seen an even greater surge in electronic trading activity, with almost three quarters of investment firms stating they use an electronic platform this year, up from just 44% in 2013.

It also found 95% of investors that trade electronically - including hedge funds, banks, funds and advisors - have MarketAxess on their desk, which is used to execute 85% of their electronic trading on a volume-weighted basis.

The research explained the surge is partly due to bond trading providers launching new and enhanced data and analytics products, which are acting as a draw for investors.

“In coming years, we will see bond trading venues morph into data and analytics providers, with their liquidity pools as the mere foundation of the business,” said Kevin McPartland, head of Greenwich Associates market structure and technology research, and author of the report.

“The additional insights available to the buy side will help not only traders, but also compliance teams become increasingly comfortable with all-to-all trading, and even, eventually, the idea of buy-side price making.”

Output: The percentage of investors trading corporate bonds electronically this year has risen to 84%, according to a study from Greenwich Associates. The figure is up from 69% in 2013. In terms of overall trading volume of corporate bonds, electronic trading accounts for 20% of the market, compared with 8% in 2013. The growth has been significantly bigger for high-yield bond trading, with roughly three-quarters of firms saying they use electronic platforms in that field, compared to 44% in 2013.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Insurtech Jetty introduces 'one-step' quotes
 Renters’ insurance startup Jetty has rolled out a new one-step quoting tool, enabling customers to receive online quotes simply by inputting their home address.

The new platform, Quick Quote, has been in production since the insurtech launched in April, according to CEO & co-founder Michael Rudoy. By entering a place of residence, Jetty can answer basic underwriting questions such as neighborhood crime rate, building age and estimate salaries to determine how much coverage to give perspective policyholders.

“Customers are sick of the old model of talking to agents or virtually transcribing information about the places they live just to get a quote,” said Rudoy. “We wanted to take as much friction away from the quoting process as possible.”

Prior to the deployment of Quick Quote, Jetty asked would-be consumers seven to 10 questions to issue a quote. The purpose being to tailor products to customers’ preferences from the get go. On its new platform, clients instead receive their quote and then add coverages for personal valuables, electronics or Airbnb home sharing to customize their policy. Jetty calls these additions “power ups.”

“In listening to our customers, they just wanted to see a number quickly,” Rudoy said, adding they now also have the choice of adding landlords to their policy. “Part of what is happening in the industry is landlord’s mandating people to buy renters’ insurance before signing a lease. So we changed our quote page to put [the option] at the top.”

Jetty also works hand in hand with landlords and property managers across the U.S, Rudoy says. The insurtech, based in New York’s Flatiron District, recently launched a product suite for property owners to help distribute their policies.

The startup has also been busy adding talent of late. Jetty recently announced the hires of Kristopher Agermark and Stephen Hazeltine as directors of product design and customer experience. Its current staff of 17 consists primarily of data engineers and two product designers supporting the MGA’s business development, insurance and customer experience teams.

On the expansion front, Jetty’s policies are now available in 29 states, including Texas and New York as of this week. The company, which began selling its products in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Georgia this spring, plans to grow its market footprint nationwide by year’s end.

Output: Jetty, an insurtech focused on providing renters with insurance, has rolled out a tool allowing users to get a quote simply by providing their address. The platform, known as Quick Quote, can determine a number of underwriting factors from the address, including crime rates and estimated salaries. Customers can add additional coverage to their quote for specific items. Jetty is also working with property owners and landlords to help distribute their product.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Autonomous vehicles, smart homes top of mind for Liberty Mutual
 The sharing economy, connected home and autonomous vehicles are top of mind for Liberty Mutual Insurance at its Boston-based innovation center, Solaria Labs.

Opened in 2015. the lab’s purpose is twofold: to identify and tackle disruptive industry trends while changing Liberty Mutual’s mindset around digital transformation. Mounting pressure from customers looking for user experiences resembling that of Amazon and Google also forced the carrier to think differently about core products put into market.

“People’s expectations are so high,” said Adam L’Italien, VP of global consumer markets innovation at Liberty Mutual, when Digital Insurance visited the lab this month. “You’re not compared to your direct competition in many industries now. You’re compared to all competition and all industries.”

Solaria Labs is treated as a part of a larger ecosystem that also includes the insurer’s core business and partner network—startups and original-equipment manufacturers (OEMs)—with co-creation as the main objective. At any time, the Solaria Labs can partner with any member of the ecosystem, L’Italien says. As an example, the lab tapped into core resources to launch its own startup, All Set, in 2015. All Set connects customers with home cleaning professionals online, similar to how Uber pairs drivers with commuters. The service is currently available in Massachusetts and California.

“We have very deep partnerships with existing organizations that span away from emerging companies,” said L’Italien. “We work with them to test and learn with a goal of co-creating as well.”

Product owners, operating as mini CEOs, are responsible for running all projects at Solaria Labs, according to Chris Moss, the lab’s manager, reporting directly to L’Italien. They’re responsible for testing new products in market and understanding what features need to be built on. Solaria’s applied science team is tasked with developing algorithms needed for the projects. Software developers and designers then build out the functionality for apps and online solutions.

“They’ll come into work thinking about those different work streams and then, of course, have various meetings to understand as a team how to coordinate different projects and figure out how to get them to market as soon as possible,” Moss says.

Liberty Mutual rotates staff from across its global business to work at its Solaria Labs WeWork space in order to spread its new fail fast model—one where it frequently tests hypothesizes in market instead of making too many assumptions, L’Italien says.

In keeping with the approach, Solaria’s data science team, part of its applied science division, looks for new ways to use emerging technologies such as machine learning or blockchain. The accelerator also has a dedicated team scanning for emerging trends, similar to those the insurer identified two years ago.

Earlier this month, Solaria Labs launched its Total Home Score initiative after internally customizing a Shine API using open city data. The platform, available only in Boston, helps illuminate neighborhoods through 3-D maps, rating road safety and noise levels around a home.

Using the same publicly available data, Solaria Labs is also looking to expand the use of its Shine API to drivers by adding a “safe route” to customers’ preferred GPS navigation app. Most only provide the quickest route or an option avoiding tolls. Data points such as time of day and location will be factored into suggestions route suggestions.

“I can imagine the future world where I’m taking my child, putting them in the back seat for the first time,” said L’Italien “I’m going to trade time for a lower probability of risk based on historic data.”

Solaria Labs is also scheduled to roll out a new platform focused on the sharing economy in November, with an eye toward capturing more customer data for insight on how to protect evolving forms of risk. Liberty Mutual already offers discounts to customers who install smart home devices and adopt connected-car technologies from Volvo and Subaru in exchange for information.

“As people maybe own things less and start sharing personal assets in new ways, new risks evolve and new things that people are going to want to protect against will emerge,” L’Italien notes.

Like many insurance companies, Solaria Labs relies heavily on machine learning to build out its applications, as it can be used to process images, text and voice through natural language processing and computer vision. The technology will also be a focal point of Solaria Labs’ new Singapore location established this summer. One of its senior employees is currently in Asia standing it up, L’Italien says.

In March, Liberty Mutual moved its Boston Solaria Labs location near the city’s South Station transit hub closer to its main campus. The lab, encompassing 160 work stations, is now directly adjacent to the insurer’s home offices, a move intended to improve operational workflows and collaboration efforts through proximity.

“You’ll find people that have 10, 15-plus years in the insurance industry working with us,” said L’Italien. “But you also have people that have come from consumer goods or technology organizations, like Chris, chipping away at really hard problems.”

Having an established Solaria Labs Boston location also allows the insurer to grab talent from highly-credited universities, L’Italien adds.

“This guy [Chris] is an MIT guy,” he concluded. “So he definitely was drawn from the talent pool.”

Output: Autonomous vehicles, smart homes and the shared economy are the focus of Liberty Mutual Insurance's Solaria Labs innovation centre in Boston. The lab is chiefly concerned with exploiting digital transformation and staying on top of disruptive trends. It is also looking at companies such as Google and Facebook for ideas about how to serve its customers differently. “People’s expectations are so high,” said Adam L’Italien, Liberty Mutual's head of global consumer markets innovation, adding: “You’re not compared to your direct competition now. You’re compared to all competition and all industries.”


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Airbus admits inaccuracies in US defence export filings
 European plane maker Airbus notified U.S. regulators about shortfalls reporting certain defense-related deals, adding to its global compliance woes, The Wall Street Journal reports. The company said it would miss delivery targets for one of its most popular plane models, the latest in a series of production setbacks as it struggles to make all the new planes it has sold.

The company said it had reported itself to U.S. authorities about errors made on equipment exports, adding that it was cooperating with U.S. authorities and couldn’t determine if there would be a financial penalties, The Journal adds.

According to Airbus Chief Financial Officer Harald Wilhelm, the transgression related to a failure to properly notify U.S. authorities about the use of outside sales agents, who help broker deals of defense equipment and services.

Wilhelm stressed that Airbus first notified U.S. authorities about a potential problem late last year, which triggered a more in-depth review and, in July, led the company to formally inform U.S. authorities rules were broken.

The wrongdoing concerns compliance with the Part 130 section of U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations rules into political contributions, fees and commission involved in export of military equipment, The Journal adds.

Airbus wouldn’t speculate on its potential financial or criminal exposure, as the company is in talks with both the State Department, which would lead any civil probe, and the Justice Department, which could lead a criminal probe, The Journal informs.

Output: Airbus has revealed it has breached US export regulations governing defence-related sales through inaccuracies in its disclosures regarding payments to middlemen. The company is already under investigation in France, the UK, Germany and Austria and this latest revelation adds to the rising controversy over Airbus's compliance with global export regulations. The European flagship aerospace and defence group has also acknowledged that it is going to miss delivery targets for one of its most popular models. Airbus is currently in talks with the Department of State and the Department of Justice in the US.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Baker Hughes introduces FASTrak Prism fluid analysis system
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FASTrak Prism service provides a clearer picture of the reservoir in real time to improve efficiency and enable better asset development decisions (illustration: BHGE)

Baker Hughes, a GE company has announced the introduction of its FASTrak™ Prism fluid analysis and sampling while drilling service. The service uses advanced sensors and proven technology to collect and deliver reliable, industry-leading volumes of high-quality fluid samples and comprehensive, real-time reservoir characterization. These samples provide valuable insight into the reservoir to help operators improve efficiencies and make more informed decisions around their overall well completion and production strategy.

“We developed the FASTrak Prism service to address the industry’s need for a better, more accurate understanding of the subsurface while drilling in complex environments,” says Herman Nieuwoudt, Logging While Drilling Product Line Director. “The growing need for cost-efficient reservoir fluid characterization solutions for challenging, highly-deviated and extended-reach wells underscores the need to collect accurate, real-time information so operators can evaluate their reserves and make better asset development decisions, as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

Unlike conventional services that can require additional post-drilling runs to collect samples, the FastTrak Prism service’s industry-leading capacity – 16 discrete single-phase samples per run, and up to 13.4 litres of total fluid volume – provides operators with the representative fluids required for their strategic development and appraisal decisions in one drilling run, resulting in significant rig time and cost savings. Further, the FASTrak platform of sampling services has an extensive track record with hundreds of samples collected worldwide.

Continual measurement and analysis of pumped fluid during sampling operations makes it possible to easily and accurately monitor contamination and fluid properties before capturing the fluid sample. The FASTrak Prism service’s fluid chambers feature proprietary sample capture technology enabling it to achieve an enviable record of acquiring high volumes of high-quality samples with minimal contamination.

Multichannel spectrometry extends the accuracy and reliability of the service, allowing customers to clearly distinguish between fluid types and improve their understanding of fluid properties, especially in complex flow conditions.

On a recent offshore project in Australia, the FASTrak Prism service captured a total of 26 samples – 12 in the first well and 14 in the second – with a total sample volume of over 20 litres in the two runs – setting a global record for fluid sampling while drilling. Additionally, in a recent offshore project in Africa, the FASTrak Prism service met the operator’s fluid evaluation objectives, saved two days of rig time, and contributed to an efficient well completion, resulting in production that exceeded the target by more than 30%.

Output: General Electric-owned oil field service company Baker Hughes has launched its record-breaking FASTrak Prism fluid analysis system. It uses proprietary capture technology to obtain plentiful high-quality samples with minimal contamination. In previous deployments, the system has resulted in "significant rig time and cost savings". Utilising advanced sensors, the technology is capable of analysing and collecting real-time information on reservoir characterisation.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Apex Clearing gains new robo client after losing Wealthfront
 Apex Clearing has added a new, fast-growing robo advisor service for RIAs in a partnership the turnkey asset management program says will bulk up its offerings.

RobustWealth struck the agreement with Apex to allow for trading with no additional fee on top of its platform charges, along with other capabilities, the firm announced earlier this month. The Lambertville, New Jersey-based TAMP already has $750 million on its platform, according to founder Mike Kerins.

The partnership comes six months after Apex lost Wealthfront, one of its major clients and an independent leader in the robo space with about 160,000 clients and $8.3 billion in assets under management. The clearing firm still has retained competitors like Betterment, Stash and Robinhood as clients rush to the robo space.

RobustWealth, like some other asset managers and several custodians, is tapping the business-to-business possibilities by giving advisors a white-labeled product. Its platform opened in January, and advisor Bob Dunn says RobustWealth’s deal with Apex will help him grow his practice.

“With Apex, transaction costs go away,” says Dunn, the president of Princeton, New Jersey-based RIA Private Wealth Management Group. “When you’re dealing with smaller accounts, it’s a no-brainer.”

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‘LOTS OF LOVE’

Advisors who don’t think they need a robo partner just don’t know yet that they need one, according to Dunn. He has 15 clients on RobustWealth’s investing programs, but he says he had been waiting to place more clients on the platform until the firm joined a partnership with Apex.

Advisors can trade ETFs, mutual funds and U.S. stocks on the platform because of the deal, which also enables fast client onboarding, account linking and bank transfers.

RobustWealth has 98 RIAs on its platform, which has grown each month by a range of $50 million and $100 million, according to Kerins. RobustWealth will keep TD Ameritrade as its other custodian and advisors may now choose between TD Ameritrade Institutional and Apex for their clients, he says.

The clearing announcement follows a new TAMP launched in August by RobustWealth and the XY Planning Network for its more than 450 advisors. Seeking to provide a one-stop tech shop, Kerins sees easy account opening and automated portfolio rebalancing as two main boons it can offer advisors up front.

“We want to understand what pain points they have. We have a broad client range and we give everyone lots of love,” says Kerins, the former head of a team managing a $40 billion global portfolio at Franklin Templeton Investments.

Dallas-based Apex is opening just under 300,000 new accounts each month, with more than $30 billion in combined AUM among its client firms, according to CEO Bill Capuzzi. While some other firms will follow Wealthfront by bringing their infrastructure in-house, Apex provides technology that robos can leverage for scale, he says.

“Apex is the proverbial man behind the curtain,” Capuzzi wrote in an email. “Our job is to automate all the processes that lie beneath most all of the advisory interactions with their clients."

On the other hand, RobustWealth is “a late entrant for an idea that has been built already,” says Lex Sokolin, the global director of fintech strategy at London-based consulting firm Autonomous Research. He names Betterment, AdvisorEngine, Trizic and Schwab Intelligent Portfolios as providing similar services.

However, robos’ as-yet untapped future market penetration does present RobustWealth with an opening, according to Sokolin.

“The goal-based approach and trading capabilities are hard to get right, especially in combination with outsourced account management,” he wrote in an email. “In the end, the advisory market is large and signing up new firms is a process of sales blocking and tackling, so we should see additional traction in all the players.”

Output: Apex Clearing, a provider of clearing and execution services to asset management platforms, has entered into an agreement with robo-adviser RobustWealth. The firm previously lost the business of well-known robo-adviser Wealthfront, which has about $8bn AUM, though Apex still works with a number of other prominent robo-adviser platforms. RobustWealth provides white-labeled robo-platforms to registered investment advisers and has approximately $750m managed via its platform.