The Record - Issue 20: Spring 2021

23 Decisions enables virtual council democracy in Ålesund Meeting technology provider Decisions is facilitating the democratic process during virtual council meetings in Ålesund, Norway. The city council had already deployed Office 365 and Microsoft Teams when it started using Decisions during the Covid-19 pandemic to allow elected officials to join and actively participate in organised remote meetings. Having previously counted votes manually, creating a risk of human error, the council now uses Decisions’ Vote Now feature for secure and accurate voting. Ålesund Municipality also uses the Speak Now function to build on Teams’ hand raise feature and create an ordered speaker list. “The combination of Decisions and Microsoft Teams empowers a more democratic process by ensuring the voices of each elected official are heard and counted,” said Dagrun Lorgen Jensen, city clerk at Ålesund Municipality. Through its loan origination solution – VeriLoan – VeriPark is enabling banks to comply with new European Banking Authority guidelines on loan origination and monitoring, which will take effect in June 2021. A recent third-party assessment found that VeriLoan offers banks a sound basis for establishing compliance with the new guidelines. It supports banks in meeting the highest compliance standards in terms of the formal specification of loan origination processes, responsibilities and data requirements; the collection of relevant customer data (bank-internal or external); the detailed documentation of each step of the loan origination process and the provision of regular monitoring capabilities. VeriPark ensures new loan origination compliance Adyen launches Network Token Optimization Payments platform provider Adyen is expanding its collaboration with Microsoft to launch Adyen Network Token Optimization. Adyen is one of the first payment platforms to enable tokenised payments across multiple schemes and to offer automated optimisation of the use of tokens to increase authorisation rates. By adopting Network Token Optimization, merchants like Microsoft are able to increase revenue due to increased authorisation rates. Adyen currently processes payments for Microsoft globally and supports various local payment methods, including US-based debit networks.