Technology

(Reuters) – The UK government said on Tuesday it has launched a new 270 million pound ($373.63 million) fund in its bid to gradually transition away from gas boilers over the next 15 years.

The Green Heat Network Fund (GHNF) will only support low-carbon technologies, such as heat pumps, solar and geothermal energy, which would enable more places in the country to use these from 2022, according to a statement https://bit.ly/3zLcyB3 from the government.

GHNF is expected to fund the delivery of enough total carbon savings by 2050 to equal taking 4.5 million cars in England off the road for a year, the statement added.

($1 = 0.7226 pounds)

(Reporting by Juby Babu in Bengaluru; Editing by David Gregorio)

By Tiffany Carpenter, UKI Head of Customer Intelligence Solutions at SAS

As delinquencies rise in the wake of COVID-19, lenders must harness technology to orchestrate omni-channel contact strategies

If you look at a chart of the UK’s GDP over the past 15 years, it’s pretty alarming. You can see when the last financial crisis hit—there’s a small but noticeable dip of about 6 percentage points between February 2008 and March 2009, followed by a slow and steady recovery.

By contrast, when you get to 2020, GDP falls off a cliff—dropping by more than 25 percentage points between February and April. You can’t expect the economy to weather that kind of shock without lasting consequences.

Even if the economy recovers quickly, banks and other lenders are going to be feeling the repercussions for years to come. The UK is a highly leveraged society, and with millions of people now facing job losses, business closures and reduced incomes, it’s inevitable that many will find it difficult to repay or even service their debts.

How can collections teams cope?

To handle this huge increase in delinquency, collections teams will need to find ways to work smarter by harnessing new technologies. This doesn’t necessarily mean ripping and replacing existing collections systems. Instead, you can take a more pragmatic approach by building on what you already have and augmenting it with new capabilities.

Improving segmentation with predictive analytics is a good place to start—it’s relatively easy to replace existing crude segmentation techniques with a more advanced approach, and it gives you the ability to treat your customers as individuals, which improves the customer relationship and increases yield.

But once you’ve brought your segmentation strategy up to standard, what should your next move be?

Orchestrating omnichannel collections journeys

From an operational perspective, there are four key questions that collections teams always need to answer:

• Which customers should we contact?
• How should we contact those customers?
• When should we contact those customers?
• What should we say to those customers?

Segmentation can be very helpful in deciding who to contact, choosing a contact strategy, and designing appropriate treatments for each customer—but it doesn’t actually help your teams put their plans into action. To run an effective collections operation, you also need tools to help orchestrate customer journeys across all channels, and dynamically adapt those journeys as new information becomes available.

For example, if you can monitor how each customer is engaging with you at each contact point, you can personalise each customer journey based on how well your different contact strategies and treatment approaches are working. Intelligent decisioning using predictive models can automatically move individual customers to more effective contact channels or gradually escalate to use more robust measures, while avoiding the use of heavy-handed or intrusive treatments until they are absolutely necessary.

What’s the solution?

The best approach is to optimise and automate collections operations to improve customer-centricity whilst collecting more payments faster. Advanced analytics and journey optimisation capabilities make it easy to plan sophisticated, personalised collections campaigns and execute them at scale through smart automation.

Today’s solutions orchestrate hyper-personalised contact strategies across digital and offline channels and optimise the sequence of activities at an individual customer level. By providing a seamless customer journey, optimised by customer channel preference and engagement across mobile push and pop-up messages, email, SMS, call centre interactions and direct mail, collections teams can ensure that each customer receives the right level of intervention for their individual case.

When calling customers is the smartest option, these solutions can optimise dialler campaigns by automatically generating call schedules that help collections teams initiate phone calls to customers at the right times, boosting right party contact (RPC) rates.

It can also derive optimal messaging for each individual customer, helping to build tailored communications to address different types of customer needs, and using analytics of historical cases to suggest appropriate settlement amounts for each customer.

Building a foundation for smarter collections

Smarter segmentation and automated omnichannel orchestration can make a significant difference to the effectiveness of collections operations—as well as providing a solid foundation for the use of AI techniques such as deep learning and reinforcement learning.

By Nick Carey

LONDON (Reuters) – In grim warnings this week, major carmakers including Toyota and Volkswagen offered fresh evidence that the auto industry remains firmly in the grip of an ongoing semiconductor chip shortage that shows no sign of abating.

After being forced to close plants last year as the pandemic took hold, carmakers are now facing stiff competition from the sprawling consumer electronics industry for chip deliveries amid global supply chain disruption.

The latest snarl up comes as COVID-19 cases surge in Asian countries home to auto factories and chip plants such as Japan, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia, leading to stricter curbs to prevent the spread of the virus.

Japan’s Toyota, thanks to a policy of stockpiling chips that dates back a decade to the 2011 earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster, had largely managed to avoid production cuts.

But the world’s largest automaker by sales volumes said on Thursday it will slash global production for September by 40% from its previous plan, affecting 14 plants in Japan and elsewhere, including most of its North American factories.

Automobiles have become increasingly dependent on chips for everything from computer management of engines for better fuel economy to driver-assistance features such as emergency braking.

Germany’s Volkswagen also said on Thursday that it couldn’t rule out further changes to production.

“We currently expect supply of chips in the third quarter to be very volatile and tight,” the No.2 volume carmaker behind Toyota told Reuters.

Ford Motor Co said this week it will temporarily shutter its Kansas City assembly plant where it builds its best-selling, profit-driving F-150 pickup truck, while China’s Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd warned the recent worsening of the chip shortage and resurgence of COVID-19 cases could pose a “significant threat” to its sales performance over the next few months.

Although Volkswagen said it expected the situation to improve by the end of the year, some carmakers have warned the chip crisis will drag on into 2022 with earlier industry hopes of a quick resolution long since dashed.

As numerous American auto production lines stand idle, at least part of the time, a trio of Democratic senators asked the Taiwanese government for more help to address the chip shortage, according to a letter reviewed by Reuters.

But even when one kink in the supply chain gets straightened out, others appear, making it difficult to ensure a consistent flow of chips and leaving damage-limitation focused automakers pushing available components to their more profitable models.

“The situation does remain fluid,” General Motors Co Chief Executive Mary Barra said on a conference call on August 4, noting the impact of events such as the current COVID-19 spike in Malaysia.

(Reporting By Nick Carey; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)

By Hyunjoo Jin

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – At Tesla’s “Autonomy Day” event in April 2019, Chief Executive Elon Musk said that by mid-2020 Tesla would have over a million self-driving vehicles where riders “could go to sleep” during a trip.

Tesla has not achieved that goal and on Thursday Musk is staging another event, called “AI Day,” to promote his electric car company as the place to work for the engineers he needs to make good on his promises for autonomous vehicles.

Musk has walked back some of his claims for Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) system in recent months, saying Tesla cars are “not fully-self driving yet.”

U.S. safety regulators earlier this week opened an investigation into Tesla’s driver assistant system because of accidents where Tesla cars crashed into stationary police cars and fire trucks. Two U.S. senators also called on the Fair Trade Commission to investigate Tesla’s claims of “Full Self-Driving” and “Autopilot.”

“Expectations have been significantly reduced from investors … Tesla has got some harder questions to answer, what’s going on with the safety probe? And how they market FSD?” asked Gene Munster, managing partner at venture capital firm Loup Ventures.

“I think the substance of the event is going to be lost with investors because it’s just a geek fest.”

Shares of the electric carmaker fell nearly 2% to $675.99 in morning trading on Thursday.

CONFLICTING VIEWS OF AI

In its invitation, Tesla said participants in the event at 5 p.m. Palo Alto, California, time will “get an inside-look at what’s next for AI at Tesla beyond our vehicle fleet.” Musk said the event will be livestreamed.

Goldman Sachs said it expected Tesla to discuss AI applications for solar/storage software and advanced manufacturing in its factories.

Musk has expressed complicated and contradictory views of artificial intelligence. He has touted Tesla’s AI as industry leading, but also said artificial intelligence could destroy humanity and pose bigger risks than nuclear-armed North Korea.

During 2017 and 2018, Tesla struggled to increase production of the Model 3 sedan in part because an ambitious factory automation project hit snags.

“Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” Musk tweeted in 2018. “To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.”

DOJO

Musk is expected to reveal more about Tesla’s “Dojo” computing system on Thursday, which he has said would process vast amounts of video data it obtain from Tesla vehicles on the road.

Musk said Dojo will have Tesla’s own chips and architecture.

“AI Day is really a recruiting day for Tesla. It’s not a marketing event for a vehicle,” said Ross Gerber, chief executive of investment fund Gerber Kawasaki which owns Tesla shares.

Tesla is competing with other technology companies, especially Google, for engineers skilled in artificial intelligence systems, Gerber said.

Musk has a history of promoting technology at showy events, then pushing back the launch dates.

Last September, Musk announced an ambitious plan to produce its own battery cells which would enable Tesla to offer a $25,000 car in three years. But Musk subsequently canceled the longest-range Model S Plaid+, which he had said would use the cells.

(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Additional reporting by David Shepardson; editing by Grant McCool)

By Makiko Yamazaki

TOKYO (Reuters) -Toshiba Corp said on Thursday it swung back to profit in the first quarter, as sales of automotive chips and hard disk drives recover from a pandemic-driven slump in demand.

The scandal-hit Japanese conglomerate also said it has been working on the selection of candidates for a permanent CEO and board chairman.

Satoshi Tsunakawa, a veteran Toshiba executive who has taken on both positions in an interim capacity, told reporters he hopes an extraordinary shareholders meeting to appoint a new board chairman will be held by the end of this year.

Toshiba posted an operating profit of 14.5 billion yen ($132 million) for April-June, in line with estimates and reversing a year-earlier loss of 12.6 billion yen. It was its fourth consecutive quarter of operating profit. Sales jumped 21%.

Its estimate of 170 billion yen in operating profit for the full year was unchanged.

An independent investigation in June concluded https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/independent-probe-says-toshiba-agm-last-year-was-not-fairly-managed-2021-06-10 Toshiba colluded with Japan’s powerful trade ministry to block investors from gaining influence at last year’s general meeting – an explosive finding that resulted in the ouster of its board chairman.

Toshiba’s previous CEO left in April over controversy about a $20 billion buyout bid from CVC Capital Partners that the conglomerate dismissed, angering some shareholders. That in turn has prompted Toshiba to promise a strategic review.

Tsunakawa said Toshiba was working on the review and reiterated it was open to take-private bids although it has not received any other offers.

Toshiba plans to announce a new midterm business plan in October as it is still struggling to build new profit drivers after the sale of the prized memory chip unit and the bankruptcy of the U.S. nuclear business – both of which occurred in the wake of accounting scandals.

($1 = 110.3900 yen)

(Reporting by Makiko Yamazaki; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

(Reuters) – Apple Inc is working with more Chinese suppliers to produce its latest iPhones, Japan’s Nikkei newspaper said on Wednesday, as a tech feud stemming from a trade war with the United States prompts Beijing to strengthen domestic firms.

The iPhone maker has warned of supply shortages as the U.S.-China trade tensions and the coronavirus pandemic have intensified pressure on global supply chains.

Beijing is also strengthening efforts to create world-leading local tech firms, with apparently government-supported Chinese firms working to manufacture products for global firms including Apple.

According to the Nikkei report, China’s Luxshare Precision Industry Co Ltd is set to build up to 3% of the iPhone 13 series, Lens Tech Co Ltd will supply metal casings and Sunny Optical Tech Group Co Ltd will supply rear camera lenses. BOE Tech Group Co Ltd will also supply components.

Apple boss Tim Cook in July said there were “some shortages” and that it was difficult to get the entire set of parts within the lead times.

“The company is pulling all the levers it can, from a global supply-chain standpoint (including China) to minimize the disruption to its sales,” said Tom Forte, an analyst at D.A. Davidson & Co.

“Tim Cook is part CEO and part diplomat… Cook has proven capable at enabling Apple to continue to leverage China from a supply-chain standpoint and generate a lot of revenue from selling products to Chinese consumers.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Taiwan-based Foxconn has set up a task force to fend off the growing clout of Chinese electronics manufacturer Luxshare to look into whether the company is supported by any Chinese government entity, Reuters reported last year.

Luxshare won orders over Foxconn and Pegatron Corp, and will start building the iPhone 13 Pro this month, the paper said.

(Reporting by Derek Francis and Nivedita Balu in Bengaluru; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

NEOMA Business School is now the first school in Europe to open a 100% digital campus, developed in partnership with Laval Virtual. The purpose of the digital campus is to create the interactions and atmosphere of a real campus, guaranteeing the most authentic and gratifying academic experience possible from a remote location.

A new 100% virtual campus closely mirroring a real campus

“Distance learning through Zoom and videoconferences cannot replace the invaluable contributions of in-class experience. This new virtual campus is midway between these two formats and combines the advantages of digital and physical pedagogic approaches by having them work off each other” says Delphine Manceau, dean of NEOMA Business School

Through the use of a personalised avatar, students can study and progress in this new space as if they were on a real campus. Once connected, they can access a virtual building to take their courses, meet with a work group, or even attend a conference. As well as this, the school’s services ecosystem, which includes the Talent & Career Centre, the Wellness Centre, the library, and the incubators, can also be accessed on the virtual campus.

An environment that preserves collaborative work and discussion

Accessible twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, this new digital campus will also host seminars and meetings. It can also be used as a collaborative workspace to facilitate discussion between members of the NEOMA community – students, professors and employees.

This new digital campus creates a sense of closeness, encourages natural reflexes in group situations and recreates the spontaneous atmosphere that is lacking from videoconference platforms.

“The avatar reworks the concept of telepresence by avoiding the tiring aspects of videoconferences. You can open a door, raise your hand, sit down, applaud or even play football on the football pitch. There are many different features that are based on daily, physical gestures and movements, which make the experience natural and enjoyable.” says Alain Goudey, director of NEOMA’s Digital Transformation. The new digital campus had initially been set up for international students who were unable to make it to one of NEOMA’s three physical campuses at the start of the academic year and it will soon be expanded for everyone’s use.

This campus stands as an innovation unprecedented in Europe for its scale and importance in the world of educational technologies, which ultimately shows NEOMA’s commitment to innovative pedagogy through the invention of a new learning environment that blends in-class and distance formats.

Ana Lucia Salazar, Senior Sales Manager, UK&I, EU

It was perhaps inevitable that as the world took a quantum leap forward in its digital transformation, cybercrime would be close behind. The rapidly expanding digital footprint of both individuals and organisations has given fraudsters greater opportunities to attack and profit from. One report suggests that 30 billion data records were stolen in 2020 – more than in the previous 15 years combined.

It’s not just records, either. Cyber-attacks looking to mimic individuals to gain access to personal information (predominantly financial) has risen – the IDnow Identity Fraud 2021 trend report found that between March and June 2020, there was a 231% increase in similarity fraud, a 180% increase in fake ID usage, and a 75% surge in social engineering.

Security in a contactless world

This is only going to increase. Even when businesses reopen again, there are numerous indicators that life is going to be a more remote, contactless experience – from more online transactions to the greater deployment of hybrid working, and even the preference for digital payments over cash. All of this requires more technology to function effectively, particularly collaboration tools.

Yet at the same time, this new environment requires a source of trust, one of them being making sure people are who they say they are. Whether starting a new job or applying for financial products, more transactions that once had to have in-person interactions are now fully virtual. Now more than ever, it is crucial for businesses to know that they are dealing with a real person.

At the same time, organisations are expected to keep delivering an outstanding customer experience. So, they have to ensure that their processes have the right balance that fulfills the evolving compliance and security requirements such as KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti-money laundering) checks, whilst still ensuring simple, easy to navigate transactions.

Online verification for instantaneous experiences

Due to the challenges cited above, companies have had to deploy innovative technologies which deliver complete protection without hampering that intuitive experience. A critical part of doing this is via online identity verification.

Consumers expect digital onboarding to be performed in real time, while still being safe, secure and easy to use. However,  because businesses are dealing with sensitive personal information, they have to deploy technology that guarantees the right level of security, that the systems are robust to prevent fraudsters  entering their systems and that they are quick and efficient, in a manner that can scale and supports, rather than undermines, the overall customer experience.

The KYC process aims to ensure that customers are genuine. It also assesses and monitors risks which are an integral part of preventing and identifying money laundering, terrorist financing and other criminal activities such as identity fraud. The digitisation of KYC procedures has revolutionised the way in which institutions verify and validate a customer’s ID and how they now leverage the use of biometric data to perform these checks within minutes, versus hours or days.

New technologies are meeting the requirements of both regulators and market players in the digital era. Yet this does not mean regulators do not need to keep pace with the rate of change themselves. A study found that “92% of organisations think they will feel a negative impact if regulators fail to evolve within three years,” highlighting fears that increased regulation equals diminishing opportunities for innovation.

It’s not hard to see why. Staying compliant with regulation is resource intensive – in finance alone, $270 billion per year is spent on compliance and regulation, about 10% of operating cost.

Facilitating innovation with better regulation

How can regulators help ensure the protection of consumers’ personal data? One area that needs improvement is standardisation of data collection. Toward this end, if the status quo is applied for information gathering- and compliance processes were automated, recorded and streamlined – it would eliminate duplicating effort across a variety of industries. If the same biometric data is deemed necessary to apply for a passport, open a bank account and verify an individual’s right to work in a specific country, the same information could be saved and shared in a secure and compliant manner as required. This type of change to the regulation process would reduce effort, as the example above demonstrated, and it would bring various digital verification tools into the mainstream.

In addition to biometrics, liveness checks should be utilised more widely. These checks could employ the use of biological identifiers, such as fingerprints and selfies and, when used in conjunction with a liveness detection programme, would ensure that the person is in fact a real human being, and stop any types of spoofing attacks – such as faux human body parts – to beat the system.  The identity verification processes should still have a human overview to complement the use of technology to ensure that it is both accurate and fair. In some instances, this is a regulatory requirement – the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, for instance, notes that a decision to fail a person cannot be determined by a machine alone, but has to be supported by humans as well.

There’s also an opportunity for regulators to automate how they gather, analyse and approve company submissions, which significantly accelerates an onerous process. In an increasingly automated digital world, regulators must be up ahead of the proverbial curve, and the new regulations have to compliment the latest innovations in the market. Automated solutions and a certain “freedom of choice” when it comes to identity methods are the future as users demand increased flexibility and efficiency.

Regulators are already taking steps to support the innovation required. While the stereotypical regulatory body might be one that looks for opportunities to say no, the likes of the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority have recognised the need to innovate, both for themselves and the wider industry. In this instance, regulators are no longer the guardians of compliance; they are very much the facilitators of innovation, supporting businesses to offer a better experience to customers without risking security.

Beating sophisticated attackers with innovation

As the world goes ever more digital, the opportunities for bad actors are only going to increase. They will keep winning if businesses and individuals deploy analogue tactics to fight them. By incorporating sophisticated technology of online identity verification, companies can protect customers without compromising the user experience. Regulators recognise their role in helping businesses strike the right balance. In doing so, they are helping facilitate innovation without compromising data.

The second series of The Internationalist, a podcast by the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU), has been launched, looking at the issues of the digital revolution and its impact on universities.

The series, inspired by the events that have taken place over the last year, will examine how universities have responded to the pandemic and if digital technology will play a larger role in higher education in the future.

Hosted by Natasha Lokhun, Head of Marketing and Communications at the ACU, the podcast features academics, students, practitioners and experts from across the Commonwealth.

Across the six episodes of the series, the podcast explores topics such as whether blended learning will be the new normal in universities, how to equip academics and students with the skills they need to navigate a digital future, and how technology can close the inequality gap in higher education and beyond.

It features renowned guests including Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Johannesburg in South Africa; Professor Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University in the UK; Professor Sue Bennett, Head of the School of Education at the University of Wollongong in Australia; Dr Luz Longsworth, Principal of the University of West Indies Open Campus; Professor Rocky Tuan, Vice-Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong; and Professor Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Oxford.

“The Internationalist is essential listening for anyone within higher education grappling with the implications of the COVID-19 crisis. It provides a global perspective on how digital technology is transforming universities while also putting these changes into historical perspective,” says Mark Carrigan, Digital Sociologist at the University of Cambridge and director of the Post-Pandemic University project who have collaborated with the ACU for t
he podcast.

The series is now available here: https://www.acu.ac.uk/the-internationalist/ and on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.