Tag: MENA

• New research highlights a chronic lack of finance that will leave billions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia without electricity or clean cooking by 2030
• Urgent action to accelerate investment in clean energy for developing countries is needed from global leaders assembling at COP26 to ensure a just energy transition

VIENNA, Austria, Oct. 14, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — This year’s Energizing Finance research series – developed by Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) in partnership with Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) and Dalberg Advisors – shows the world is falling perilously short of the investment required to achieve energy access for all by 2030 for the seventh consecutive year.

In fact, tracked finance for electricity in the 20 countries that make up 80 percent of the world’s population without electricity – the high-impact countries – declined by 27 percent in 2019, the year before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The economic strain caused by Covid-19 is expected to have caused even further reductions in energy access investment in 2020 and 2021.

Energizing Finance: Understanding the Landscape 2021, one of two reports released under the series, finds committed finance for residential electricity access fell to USD 12.9 billion in 2019 (from USD 16.1 billion in 2018) in the 20 countries. This is less than one-third of the USD 41 billion estimated annual investment needed globally to attain universal electricity access from 2019 to 2030.

Meanwhile, there is an abysmal amount of finance for clean cooking. Despite polluting cooking fuels causing millions of premature deaths each year and being the second largest contributor to climate change after carbon dioxide, only USD 133.5 million in finance for clean cooking solutions was tracked in 2019. This is nowhere near the estimated USD 4.5 billion in annual investment required to achieve universal access to clean cooking (accounting only for clean cookstove costs).

These findings have been released just ahead of COP26 in Glasgow, where global leaders will focus on how to spark meaningful progress on fighting climate change. As part of this, they will need to consider how to reduce global emissions from the energy sector while also increasing energy access in developing countries to support their economic development.

“We are at a critical moment in the energy-climate conversation,” said Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All and Co-Chair of UN-Energy. “What is clear is that the path to net zero can only happen with a just and equitable energy transition that provides access to clean and affordable energy to the 759 million people who have no electricity access and 2.6 billion people who lack access to clean cooking solutions. This requires resources to mitigate climate change and create new opportunities to drive economic development and enable people everywhere to thrive. Energizing Finance provides an evidence base of current energy finance commitments and the finance countries require to meet SDG7 energy targets.”

In 2018, 50 percent of total electricity finance flowed to grid-connected fossil fuels in the high-impact countries compared to 25 percent in 2019. While this is a positive trend for the climate, tracked investment in off-grid and mini-grid technology also declined and represented only 0.9 percent of finance tracked to electricity.

Dr. Barbara Buchner, Global Managing Director at CPI, who partnered with SEforALL on Energizing Finance: Understanding the Landscape 2021, said: “Achieving both the Paris Agreement and universal energy access requires far greater investment in grid-connected renewables and off-grid and mini-grid solutions than what has been tracked in Energizing Finance. These solutions are essential to helping high-impact countries develop their economies without a reliance on fossil fuels.”

To better illuminate the challenges high-impact countries face, the second publication in the series, Energizing Finance: Taking the Pulse 2021, offers a detailed look at the estimated volume and type of finance needed by enterprises and customers to achieve universal energy access for both electricity and clean cooking by 2030 in Mozambique, Ghana and Vietnam. Importantly, it illustrates the energy affordability challenges people face in these countries and the need for financial support for consumers, such as subsidies.

The report finds that providing access to clean fuels and technologies, i.e. modern energy cooking solutions, in Ghana, Mozambique and Vietnam will cost a total of USD 37-48 billion by 2030; 70 percent of which will be for fuels (e.g., LPG, ethanol and electricity). A more achievable scenario would be for all three countries to deliver universal access to improved cookstoves at a total cost of USD 1.05 billion by 2030.

“Ghana, Mozambique and Vietnam each have unique challenges to achieving universal access to electricity and clean cooking,” said Aly-Khan Jamal, Partner at Dalberg Advisors, who partnered with SEforALL on Energizing Finance: Taking the Pulse 2021. “This research digs deep into these national contexts to identify solutions that can make Sustainable Development Goal 7 a reality.”

Providing results-based financing for energy project developers and exploring policies that facilitate demand-side subsidy support and reduce taxes on solar home systems are among several policy recommendations presented for Ghana, Mozambique and Vietnam.

Energizing Finance also advocates for increased innovation in financial instruments to reach the scale of finance needed for universal clean cooking access; for integration of electricity access, cooking access and climate change strategies; and for national governments, bilateral donors, philanthropies, and DFIs to all increase their efforts to mobilize commercial capital to Sub-Saharan African countries.

More of the reports’ key findings and recommendations are available here.

Notes to editors

Contact
For further details on the reports or any interview requests, please contact: Sherry Kennedy, Sustainable Energy for All: Sherry.Kennedy@SEforALL.org / media@seforall.org or +43 676 846 727 237

About Sustainable Energy for All

Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) is an international organization that works in partnership with the United Nations and leaders in government, the private sector, financial institutions, civil society and philanthropies to drive faster action towards the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) – access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all by 2030 – in line with the Paris Agreement on climate. SEforALL works to ensure a clean energy transition that leaves no one behind and brings new opportunities for everyone to fulfill their potential.

SEforALL is led by Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All and Co-Chair of UN-Energy. Follow her on Twitter @DamilolaSDG7. For more information, follow @SEforALLorg.

Open source collaboration platform delivers alternatives to tools like Slack, Trello, and Notion to help R&D teams improve productivity and accelerate digital operations

Palo Alto, Calif., Oct. 13, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Mattermost, Inc. today announced several new additions to its open source project at KubeCon® + CloudNativeCon North America 2021, launching and integrating modern project and workflow management solutions into its popular developer collaboration platform. Built for technical teams, Mattermost now provides flexible alternatives to tools like Slack®, Trello®, and Notion® through a unified platform for increased collaboration and productivity across a wide range of software development processes — from sprint planning and release management to incident resolution and retrospectives.

With heightened awareness around the urgency for remote collaboration and modernization of enterprise processes, developers have been increasingly asked to circumvent fragile processes, talent shortages, and security risks to deliver performance, innovation, and digital operations at scale. The newest update to the core Mattermost® platform emphasizes the complexities of these staggering objectives and the need for dynamic solutions that empower R&D teams with autonomy, flexibility, and security.

The launch of Mattermost’s modern project and workflow management solutions also reflects the company’s evolution beyond secure messaging to enable team alignment and operational agility across sophisticated R&D use cases. Unlike general collaboration products, the Mattermost platform now allows developers to contribute directly to its solutions and customize their workspaces to adapt to their preferred team processes. Mattermost also provides teams with the option to deploy on-premise or in a secure cloud instance. This gives companies more control over their data and assists them in meeting stringent security and privacy compliance standards such as those found in HIPAA, FINRA, GDPR, country-specific data sovereignty, and other regulatory requirements.

“As organizations navigate the shift to always-on digital operations, teams that effectively align their people, tools, and processes across each stage of the development lifecycle are increasing their velocity, improving delivery and gaining a strategic advantage,” said Ian Tien, co-founder and CEO of Mattermost. “With developers reporting that nearly 40% of their workweek is wasted due to tool fragmentation, manual tasks, fragile workflows, and service-impacting incidents and outages, we see a huge opportunity to help every R&D team in the world improve their operations and productivity with collaboration solutions built specifically for the way they work.”

Founded in 2016, Mattermost has powered over 800,000 developer workspaces worldwide and has a community of over 4,000 open source contributors who have updated the platform over 30,000 times since its initial release. Mattermost’s commercial offerings are used by over 800 organizations, including European Parliament, NASA, Nasdaq, Samsung, SAP, the United States Air Force, and Wealthfront.

“Mattermost has been unimaginably effective for our company and continues to exceed expectations with every new release,” said Daniel Gover, IT system administrator for Crossover Health. “The platform helps us ensure that we’re staying HIPAA-compliant while letting our clinicians collaborate efficiently and seamlessly.”

“Developer velocity is increasingly essential to driving digital operations and modernization across the enterprise,” said Paul Nashawaty, senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. “Mattermost is helping to meet this requirement with a collaboration platform that reduces context switching and delivers visibility and control across the developer workflow and toolchain.”

This update to the Mattermost platform is now available to all users and features enhanced navigation and multiple tightly integrated collaboration tools, including:

Channels: The foundation of the Mattermost platform, Channels bring all of your team’s communication into one place, so you have complete visibility and control. Channels come with team messaging, conferencing, and file sharing features beyond general-purpose collaboration, including slash commands, code syntax highlighting, rich Markdown formatting, code snippets, and bot integrations.

Playbooks: Playbooks are prescribed workflows that streamline complex, recurring processes. Playbooks run side-by-side with Channels and make any structured process repeatable and predictable using checklists, triggers, automation, and tool integrations. Continuous improvement is built into each playbook with learnings and retrospectives.

Boards: Boards are Kanban-style task and project management solutions with clearly defined tasks, owners, checklists, and deadlines. Boards help teams increase transparency and keep all resources readily available, including documents, images, and links, and are used to help teams achieve project milestones and manage projects and tasks of any size.

Connections: Connections are integrations and extensions with leading developer tools, including GitHub®, Jenkins®, Circle CI®, GitLab®, Jira®, PagerDuty®, and ServiceNow®. Connections allow developers to turn any Channel into a CLI through built-in or custom commands to execute actions directly, such as posting to Channels, listening for new messages with incoming and outgoing webhooks. Developers can build Connections through custom apps, open APIs, plugins, and webhooks. The Mattermost App Framework allows developers to define custom interactive add-ons that support web, mobile, and desktop clients without changes. Apps can be written in any language, deployed on any HTTP server, or hosted as an AWS Lambda function.

Controls: Controls provide extensive data protection, information governance, eDiscovery, enterprise information archiving support, and identity/access management. Controls give administrators the ability to set granular permissions to control access to sensitive data and can be customized to meet your specific compliance requirements with fine-grained data retention, audit logs, the ability to programmatically archive and export records, and integration with Global Relay and Smarsh/Actiance for compliance, archiving, and analytics. Deployment options are available in on-prem or secure cloud environments to meet the strict requirements of GDPR, AICPA, CCPA, FINRA, HIPAA, and more.

To learn more about Mattermost’s developer collaboration platform, attendees can find the team at booth #S12 at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021, or please visit the Mattermost Blog.

About Mattermost:

Mattermost is an open source platform for secure collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle. Hundreds of thousands of developers around the globe trust Mattermost to increase their productivity by bringing together team communication, task and project management, and workflow orchestration into a unified platform for agile software development.

Founded in 2016, Mattermost’s open source platform powers over 800,000 workspaces worldwide with the support of over 4,000 contributors from across the developer community. The company serves over 800 customers, including European Parliament, NASA, Nasdaq, Samsung, SAP, United States Air Force and Wealthfront, and is backed by world-class investors including Battery Ventures, Redpoint, S28 Capital, YC Continuity. To learn more, visit www.mattermost.com.

Mattermost and the Mattermost logo are registered trademarks of Mattermost, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Jeff Benanto
Mattermost
5083619001
jeff.benanto@mattermost.com

Certified Investment Management Analyst® -CIMA® certification recognized as global standard for fund allocators

Denver, Co, Oct. 12, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Two associations for investment practitioners who are committed to competent and ethical practice of investment management analysis and fund allocation have formed a multi-year strategic alliance to raise the bar of professionalism, and promote standards of quality for investment professionals around the world.

The strategic alliance aims to support and advance each organization’s respective objectives.

• The Association of Professional Fund Investors (APFI) will work collaboratively with the Institute to promote global awareness and adoption of the CIMA certification as the most relevant global standard for manager research and fund investing, thereby enhancing the competency and professionalism of services delivered to investors.
• Investments & Wealth Institute® has entered into a service agreement with APFI to support their aims to empower professional fund investors to learn, share ideas, network with their peers, and have a collective voice to national and global standards bodies and regulatory authorities.

The APFI has previously released a International Accreditations for Fund Selectors evaluating international accreditations available to industry professionals. While the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation is by far the most widely-held and most well-known accreditation in the financial services industry, the APFI believes that the Certified Investment Management Analyst® (CIMA) accreditation is a better fit for professional fund selectors and recommended the CIMA certification as the most relevant and practical for fund allocators.

Adam Choppin, Executive Chairman of the Board for the APFI said, “All of the credentials we reviewed have excellent curricula and provide professionals with the necessary educational core to act as professional fund and manager selectors. But what sets them apart when you look at them side by side is how relevant, practical and useful each one is to a real working professional and what you have to do to maintain it. When we looked at those things objectively, the CIMA certification rose to the top.”

“We really started from a point that said, what set of tools and skills should a fund allocator have, based on our individual experience from across the globe,” said APFI Director, Gandy Gandidzanwa .

The CIMA accreditation is one of only six global accreditations approved by the APFI and of those only two require ongoing education to maintain the designation. “I was actually shocked when we did this review and found how few of these accreditations required ongoing education,” Choppin said. “That you would say you never have to do anything ever again to be equally qualified doesn’t make sense to me. I would never hire a fund manager who never made an effort to improve themselves.”  Formed in 1988 as a credential for investment management consultants, CIMA certification is one of only a handful of professional certifications in financial services that meets the rigorous accreditation requirements of ISO 17024, a global standard for personnel certifications. Earlier this year, CIMA certification was accredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board under this standard. Today, the certification requires three years of professional experience, several background checks detailing a clean disciplinary and legal history, completion of a comprehensive executive education program at one of four registered programs – The Wharton School, Chicago Booth School, Yale School of Management, or the Investment Management Research program in Australia. Following 300 hours of self-study, candidates must then pass a 140 question, five-hour examination, with a first time pass rate of 56%. All certified professionals must recertify every two years by maintaining ongoing ethics and continuing education requirements (40 hours every two years).

Operated and managed entirely by member volunteers, and independent of commercial interests, the APFI is a hub for professional allocators and manager research professionals from across the globe. Originally founded in Switzerland and now headquartered in the UK, with a leadership team spread from Cape Town to Kerala and Seattle to Sweden, the APFI’s membership reflects the global diversity of the fund investing profession. The APFI has turned to the Investments & Wealth Institute as a technical partner to enable its global membership access to the modern tools of networking and collaboration for an increasingly digital age. Working with the Institute to globalize the reach of the APFI’s most highly recommended accreditation (the CIMA), also furthers the APFI’s goals of promoting the industry’s highest levels of professional standards and integrity in fund investing.

“This partnership will unlock opportunities for members of the Association of Professional Fund Investors and bring substantial benefits to both organizations,” said Sean Walters, Chief Executive Officer of the Investments & Wealth Institute. “Members and practitioners around the world can benefit from rich content sharing, moderated discussions, and a networked community of the world’s best and brightest global investment professionals, hosted on our new community platform, and facilitated by APFI members, who work on nearly every continent around the globe.”

About the Investments & Wealth Institute

Founded in 1985, the Investments & Wealth Institute is the premier professional association, education provider, and standards body for financial advisors. Through its award-winning events, publications, courses, and acclaimed certifications—Certified Investment Management Analyst® (CIMA®), Certified Private Wealth Advisor® (CPWA®), and Retirement Management Advisor® (RMA®)—the Institute delivers Ivy league-quality, highly-practical education to more than 30,000 practitioners annually in over 40 countries.  Members of the Institute include the industry’s most successful investment consultants, advanced financial planners, and private wealth managers who embrace excellence and ethics in applying a broad set of knowledge and skills in their daily work with clients. www.investmentsandwealth.org

About the Association of Professional Fund Investors

Formed in 2011, the Association of Professional Fund Investors advances the interests of investors by promoting professional standards and integrity in fund investing. APFI members are all professional fund investors – professionals whose principal occupation is the identification and evaluation of investment managers, funds, vehicles, etc. that are external to their own organization. APFI promotes best practices in fund investing by setting global standards of professionalism and accreditation, while empowering professional fund investors to learn, share ideas, network with their peers, and have a collective voice to national and global standards bodies and regulatory authorities. www.profundinvestors.org

Cindy Chaifetz
Investments & Wealth Institute
303.850.3079
cchaifetz@i-w.org

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Oct. 12, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — FreedomPay, a global leader in Next Level Commerce™ has selected Hill+Knowlton Strategies (H+K) as its communications partner, following a competitive agency review. H+K will work with FreedomPay’s in-house marketing team to execute the global fintech leader’s national communications strategy as it continues its global expansion across 130+ countries, more than one hundred currencies and thousands of commerce partners.

FreedomPay is the only, fully independent, ‘open’ and agnostic Commerce Platform supporting the most innovative partners across banking, acquiring, processing and software vendors around the world. A pioneer in Commerce Technologies, FreedomPay’s cutting edge technology is unrivaled in speed, security, and capacity. With its award-winning, world-class Platform now serving 3 Billion+ transactions across the globe and accelerating into advanced cloud infrastructure, the company is growing rapidly to meet the needs of merchants with over 600+ integrations and the ‘new norm’ consumer demanding more experiences across in-store, online and on mobile commerce.

“FreedomPay’s singular focus on the evolving needs of both merchants and consumers distinguishes our solution set and is driving exponential growth,” said Chris Kronenthal, President & CTO at FreedomPay. “As technology continues to unite markets across all continents, our international partners are turning to our globally available and scalable Platform to support increasingly complex requirements to satisfy merchant and consumer requirements. With a focus on continued innovation for the fintech industry, as well as an extensive US and global presence that delivers an understanding of the markets and stakeholders that we are expanding to reach – we look forward to collaborating with Hill+Knowlton as our communications partner and sharing our entrepreneurial drive and culture of innovation.”

FreedomPay’s global footprint delivers full Omni-channel capabilities to merchants in 130+ countries and territories. FreedomPay’s Next Level Commerce™ platform is now fully compliant with PSD2 strong customer authentication, on-line PIN and foreign language support now meeting the needs of hundreds of thousands of merchants around the world.

About FreedomPay

FreedomPay’s Next Level Commerce™ platform transforms existing payment systems and processes from legacy to leading edge. As the premier choice for many of the largest companies across the globe in retail, hospitality, lodging, gaming, sports and entertainment, food service, education, healthcare and financial services, FreedomPay’s technology has been purposely built to deliver rock solid performance in the highly complex environment of global commerce. The company maintains a world-class security environment and was first to earn the coveted validation by the PCI Security Standards Council against the Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE/EMV) standard in North America. FreedomPay’s robust solutions across payments, security, identity, and data analytics are available in-store, online and on-mobile and are supported by rapid API adoption. The award winning FreedomPay Commerce Platform operates on a single, unified technology stack across multiple continents allowing enterprises to deliver an innovative Next Level experience on a global scale. www.freedompay.com

 

About Hill+Knowlton Strategies   

Hill+Knowlton Strategies, Inc. is an international communications consultancy, providing services to local, multinational, and global clients. H+K operates 77 offices in 43 countries worldwide, as well as an extensive associate network, delivering award-winning campaigns to clients across all sectors and disciplines and with a focus on continued innovation for the industry. Headquartered in New York, the firm is part of WPP, one of the world’s largest communications services groups.

Media Contact

Amy Dalkoff

Hill+Knowlton for FreedomPay

Amy.dalkoff@hkstrategies.com

312-255-3078 

Taylor Durovsik
FreedomPay
taylor.durovsik@freedompay.com