Data analysts and engineers can use Jupyter Notebook in Athena to perform data processing and interact programmatically with Spark applications.

Over time, different industries, such as financial services, healthcare, and retail, need to conduct more sophisticated analytics on different data formats and sizes. To facilitate complex data analytics, organizations have adopted Apache Spark. Apache Spark is a popular open source distributed processing system designed to run fast analytic workloads for data of all sizes.

However, building an infrastructure to run Apache Spark for interactive applications is not easy. Customers must provision, configure, and maintain the infrastructure on top of the applications. Not to mention performing optimal resource tuning to avoid applications starting slowly and suffering idle costs.

How it works
Since Amazon Athena for Apache Spark runs serverless, it’s beneficial for customers when performing interactive data exploration to gain insights without the need to provision and maintain resources to run Apache Spark. With this feature, customers can now create applications for Apache Spark using notebook operation, either directly from the Athena console or programmatically using the API.

Amazon Athena integrates with the AWS Glue Data Catalog, helping customers work with any data source in the AWS Glue Data Catalog, including data in Amazon S3. This opens up opportunities for customers to build applications for data analysis and visualization, for data exploration, for preparing datasets for machine learning pipelines.

API programmatic access
In addition to using the Athena console, I can also use programmatic access to interact with the Spark application in Athena. For example, I can create a workgroup with the create-work-group command, start a notebook with create-notebook, and start a notebook session with start-session.

Using programmatic access is useful when I need to execute commands, such as creating reports or calculating data, without having to open the Jupyter notebook.

“We are pleased to deliver strong third-quarter results, generating record revenue and continuing to expand our partnerships. We remain focused on growing our presence across the unsecured consumer, auto, credit card, point-of-sale, and real estate sectors, and have plans to expand by offering credit solutions for mortgages, insurance, and other data-rich markets. In the immediate future, Pagaya is hyper-focused on integrating its network with banks and Fintech companies across the United States, delivering a comprehensive technology and capital solution that enables them to grow their customer ecosystem in a capital efficient manner.”

Third Quarter 2021 Financial Highlights include:

• $137 million in revenue for the third quarter ending September 30, 2021
• $320 million year-to-date revenue through Q3, over 220% higher than full-year 2020 revenue
• Strong momentum continuing into Q4 2021

In the past year, Mindspace launched new branches in London, Tel Aviv, Philadelphia and a new hub and spoke location outside Tel Aviv, at Yakum. Mindspace serves a wide variety of companies; about 41% are large enterprises and corporations and 38% are small and medium-sized companies. The leading industry types of its customer base are technology companies, financial companies and service providers. Past and present customers include Microsoft, Samsung, Playtika, Taboola, Yahoo!, Expedia, GoPro, and more.

While most of the commercial real estate industry took a hit as a result of COVID, the flex market continued to grow. All forecasts predict the accelerated growth of the flex industry to reach a market share of more than 30% by 2030; the current market share of flex as part of commercial real estate is 5%. According to a recent study by CBRE, in two years 43% of occupiers will have 10-50% of their portfolio dedicated to flex. In addition, 17% of occupiers will have more than 50% of their portfolio dedicated to flex. Zakai said:

“Mindspace is experiencing an impressive growth momentum and high demand in all its locations,” says Dan Zakai, CEO and Co-founder of Mindspace. “We successfully faced the many challenges of COVID. Today, our locations are almost at full occupancy and the current investment led by Harel Insurance and More Provident Funds is intended to fulfill the rising demand in the market and to launch new locations in partnership with landlords worldwide. Mindspace isn’t just another real estate company that rents out offices, but rather offers a strong, strategic partnership to its customers and to landlords. When choosing their office environment, we found that our customers put a great emphasis on their experience: central location, unique design and service of the highest standard. We expect a continued accelerated growth in 2022, while creating a great added value for our many customers.”

Mindspace provides well designed offices, fully equipped kitchens and meeting rooms. Mindspace allows for flexibility, shorter term commitments and lower financial risk, which is a suitable solution in times of economic slowdown.

Late in the evening of November 3, an unauthorized third party obtained access to a limited amount of personal information for a portion of Robinhood`s customers. The attack has been contained and no Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, or debit card numbers were exposed. The company believes that there has been no financial loss to any customers as a result of the incident. 

“As a Safety First company, we owe it to our customers to be transparent and act with integrity. Following a diligent review, putting the entire Robinhood community on notice of this incident now is the right thing to do.”, said Robinhood Chief Security Officer Caleb Sima.

Meanwhile Robinhood Markets Inc. is in the process of making appropriate disclosures to affected people.

After the company contained the intrusion, the unauthorized party demanded an extortion payment. Robinhood promptly informed law enforcement and they are continuing to investigate the incident with the help of Mandiant, a leading outside security firm.

According to Windows operating system manufacturers, Ally will join the Viva family as “part of the Employee Experience Platform (EXP) designed to help businesses embrace new digital work life.” This provides a more transparent way to communicate your company’s goals and objectives to your employees.

What is Viva? 

It is said to be an “employee experience platform” equipped with Microsoft 365. According to Microsoft, it brings together learning, insight, communication, and resources into one platform that includes topics, connections, learning, and four main categories. Insight. It aims to help companies onboard and engage their employees and help organizations foster a culture of people-to-people connections, growth, well-being and success.

Where are your allies coming from?

That technology will be at the core of the fifth Viva module next year, and Microsoft will improve Ally.io’s technology and team integration to integrate with Office, Power BI, and other Microsoft 365 apps and services. Kirk Koenigsbauer, COO and Corporate VP of Experience and Devices, in a blog. The director commented:

“Aligning employee work with the company’s strategic mission and core priorities is a top priority for all organizations. To do this, leaders communicate transparency about the betting of large corporations. We need to invest in tools that create ways to cascade goals and report results at all levels of the organization.”

The acquisition of Ally is a testament to Microsoft’s focus on productivity. The 3-year-old Ally enables organizational coordination, agility, concentration, and transparency operations needed to meet the fast-paced needs of the evolving market. The software integrates with other collaboration tools such as Slack, Jira, Smartsheet and Asana. It is used by more than 1,000 major high-tech, manufacturing, financial services, and healthcare companies in more than 80 countries.

Ally’s success shows the growth of the OKR sector. As the times change, more and more companies are focusing on productivity, and with the move to a hybrid workplace, the importance of keeping leaders, teams, and individuals on the same page, visibility and overall clarity of the work process. Microsoft has acquired collaboration software Ally to enhance its employee experience platform, Viva.

The Siemens subsidiary announced the new offerings at its annual Mendix World event last week, along with a range of products and services including new AI features for its low-code PaaS, an updated Data Hub designed to allow developers to more easily connect to a variety of off-the-shelf and custom data sources, and new Smart AppServices to digitalize and automate business workflows.

Low-code and no-code platforms are often used by companies to help developers rapidly develop applications and cut labour costs. According to Gartner, nearly 75% of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives by 2024. Gartner associate principal research analyst Akash Jain commented:

“It is a growing trend within many enterprises to empower business technologists and citizen developers with low-code tools that will allow these enterprises to rapidly develop required digital solutions.”

The COVID-19 crisis showed that companies that adopted a low-code approach to development adjusted more quickly and effectively to the crisis than businesses that relied solely on conventional development, proving that rapid app development and constant iteration of software have become table stakes for competitive enterprises, according to a recent Forrester Wave report.

Industry Clouds target key business sectors

To help facilitate rapid app development for key industries, the new Mendix Industry Clouds will feature reusable templates that focus on addressing challenges specific to the targeted business sectors. According to Mendix CTO Johan den Haan, Industry Clouds will help form an industry-focused, low-code community as it will incorporate APIs, Mendix AppServices, connectors to data sources, and offer ways for its community of 250,000 “makers” to share app development and industry knowledge.

Mendix for Manufacturing and Mendix for Financial Services are available now. The financial cloud offers templates for Credit Rating, Claims Management, and Portfolio Management, while the industry cloud includes templates for Smart Warehousing, Predictive Maintenance, and Smart Workforce Planning.

Mendix also announced an AppServices Framework, available now for ISVs and partners who want to sell their services on the Mendix marketplace. The framework includes provisioning, metering, and billing. A new Solutions Platform for ISVs includes IP protection on top of integrated metering and billing, as well as tools to extend and maintain low-code-developed applications.

Mendix offers new AI, Data Hub services

A new Mendix suite of Smart AppServices is designed for those building applications with digital business workflows and offers capabilities for document data capture and cognitive services such as language and sentiment analysis, including the ability to understand conversations that take place via messages. The suite can be used to enhance applications acquired through the Mendix Marketplace.

According to Gartner’s Jain, low-code capabilities are increasingly being utilized for automating business workflows owing to their AI capabilities such as optical character recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and sentiment analysis. The new Mendix capabilities should enhance the ability of the company’s platform to quickly offer value to developers, said Thomas Boogert, strategic planner and ICT product owner at Secrid, a Dutch wallet maker and Mendix customer.

“One of the biggest strengths of developing with Mendix lies in the startup phase of developing an app. Where a code solution would take weeks or months to set up the basics of an application and security, Mendix only takes a couple of days,” Boogert said. “The announcement of the AppServices Framework and Industry Solutions enable us to start building actual business value with Mendix even faster.”

Mendix enhances automation capabilities

Boogert said:

“Even though the expansion of Data Hub is not that relevant for us yet, as we only have two applications up and running, we already see that a lot of the budget is spent on integrating different apps. Expanding these capabilities is helping Mendix become the core of larger corporations IT landscapes.”

A new AI capability slated for availability later this year is Page Bot, part of Mendix’s AI-based service called Assist. In combination with the previously available Logic Bot and Performance Bot, it looks into instances of application development and ensures that apps follow architectural patterns. Page Bot will assist developers in UI and UX development, after learning from anonymized data sets.

The company also announced a separate machine learning kit for Mendix, available later this year, that will allow organizations to incorporate custom machine learning models into their applications.

Yeh comes to Technisys with more than 20 years of experience in banking and financial services, which she will leverage to support current and future compliance initiatives for Technisys’s current suite of digital banking solutions, as well as across the company’s North America operations.

Yeh served as Head of Compliance for Poppy Bank, and Chief Compliance Officer with Tri Counties Bank. She also held senior-level Consultant roles with a variety of banks and banking institutions, including Wells Fargo, Treliant LLC, Aurora Bank, and, notably, Infosys, where she was a part of the core team that supported the firm’s expansion into the U.S. market for the first time, ensuring compliance with all federal regulatory requirements. Yeh commented:

“Technisys is a world-class, cloud-native digital banking platform provider that is already a leader in regulatory compliance. I am thrilled to be joining the North American team to further expand the company’s compliant-ready offerings. Technisys has created a platform that can truly enable the next generation of banks and institutions to provide their customers with safe, convenient, digitally-powered solutions. As the regulatory landscape continues to evolve, I look forward to helping ensure these offerings are compliant ready.”

Miguel Santos, co-founder and CEO of Technisys also commented:

“We are thrilled to have Kathleen join our team and help continue reinforcing one of our core mandates of ‘regulatory readiness‘ of all our products, services and capabilities.

Santos also noted that her experience across all levels of the banking system and legal and compliance management, complemented by her distinct understanding of the current regulatory environment, make her the perfect addition to their product teams, and to Technisys as a whole.

Paysafe, a leading specialized payments platform, announced today that it has appointed international payments executive, Chirag Patel, as CEO of its global Digital Wallets business. Patel will report directly to Group CEO, Philip McHugh when he joins the company in early September this year.

Paysafe’s digital wallet solutions include Skrill and NETELLER and enable consumers to store, withdraw and make purchases in over 40 currencies from a virtual account as well as buy and sell interests in cryptocurrency and make international money transfers. They are used by 3.5 million consumers around the world.

Patel has over 20 years experience of working in payments for high profile, global organisations. He joins Paysafe from Santander Group where he was Global Head of Payments. During this time, he launched a global payments platform and significantly increased usage of the bank’s payments products and services. Before Santander, Patel was Amazon’s Head of Payments, Europe and International Expansion, where he was responsible for the company’s product roadmap for emerging payments technologies and international payment expansion. Before Amazon, Patel held senior executive roles in payments and financial services for other well-known financial institutions. Philip McHugh, Paysafe’s CEO, noted:

“Chirag has an awesome track record as a high-performing payments’ executive and has successfully launched and grown multiple consumer-facing and B2B payments products and services around the world. I’m thrilled to have someone of his calibre and energy-level to take our Digital Wallets business to the next level of growth.”

Chirag Patel commented:

“I am really looking forward to joining the Paysafe team next month and to be given the opportunity to lead its exciting Digital Wallets business. I believe there is enormous potential to extend the offering to more and more customers given Skrill and NETELLER’s worldwide presence, combined with Paysafe’s great technology and talented team.”

McHugh added:

“I’d like to add my sincere thanks to Lorenzo for the immense passion and drive he has shown over the past 15 years as he launched our digital wallet solutions around the world. We now offer two of the most popular and sophisticated digital wallet brands on the planet and have strong foundations to continue building on as we grow the business.”

Patel replaces former Digital Wallets CEO, Lorenzo Pellegrino, who is stepping into a strategic advisory role for Skrill Limited.

As we’ve noted before, C++ has historically been used for a particular set of functions in investment banks and financial services firms. By virtue of its low level memory access and therefore speed, it’s often the language of choice for high speed trading systems. This is why JPMorgan, for example, is currently hiring a C++ engineer for its JISU low-latency platform, why hedge fund Citadel wants a C++ engineer for its own market making systems, and why Goldman looks for C++ expertise for its systematic trading team.

As high speed electronic trading systems become an increasingly important differentiator and algorithmic trading takes hold beyond the equities markets, C++ expertise stands to become more sought-after in finance. Paul Bilokon, a former credit quant at Deutsche Bank and founder of AI company Thalesians, has long been an exponent. Bilokon points out that Bjarne Stroustrup, the Danish computer scientist who created C++, described it as a language for defining and using light-weight abstractions, and that this makes it peculiarly appropriate in banks and hedge funds.

“Finance is full of abstractions. And there is a lot of demand for their light-weight implementations – in derivatives pricing and, most pertinently, in high-frequency trading, where there are few alternatives to C++,” he says.

As C++ evolves, Bilokon says its use is spreading. Hedge fund Millennium specifies that its quantitative developers have, “substantial modern C++ programming experience,” a designation that it doesn’t define and that can mean different things to different people. He adds:

“Modern C++ used to mean C++11 and above, but nowadays may be taken to mean C++17 or even C++20 and above.” 

In finance and elsewhere, the more recent iterations of C++ have considerable advantages over their predecessors. There’s less use of the old C-style idioms and the language is both cleaner and more powerful, which can make users more productive. Bilokon says the upshot is C++ has caught up with Python by introducing range-based “for” loops and powerful lambda expressions. “C++20 is all about modules, coroutines, concepts, and the ranges library.”

While C++ isn’t exactly taking over from Python in finance (there are currently 2,150 Python roles advertised on eFinancialCareers versus just 785 for C++), this does mean that the language is becoming easier to use and is venturing beyond some of its historic niches. Goldman Sachs, for example, is migrating its SecDB risk and pricing system away from its proprietary language, Slang, and is looking for people who can code in both Java and C++ to help make the transition. C++ is also well-used in analytics systems, site reliability engineering and for strats roles relating to pricing, risk and P&L calculations.

Python has become a necessary language to learn if you want a job in finance. However, while students everywhere are becoming minor Python coders, the fact that C++ is harder to master can be a differentiator when it comes to getting a job. At the same time, more recent versions of C++ are easier to use than those that came before. C++ 20 has improved support for large-scale dependable software, says Bilokon

The price of the leading cryptocurrency appears to be in a consolidation phase (sideways phase) as the sellers and buyers are in equilibrium. However, the presence of a small head-and-weak shoulders signal that there is the likelihood of increasing interest in selling and that the current buyers’ dominance may soon lose interest.

This is affirmed by the presence of the death cross formed by Bitcoin as indicated by the 50-day moving average crossing below the 200-day moving average, which signals a bull trend switching to a bear trend, and thus shows that the original cryptocurrency is likely to move toward the $32,000 support level. This is further confirmed by the MACD lines that appear to converge at the 0-level and try to move downwards, thus showing a change in the trend structure, signalling a new downward trend is likely.

The return to backwardation is likely, signalling a bear market, which may see Bitcoin taking a rest at the $32,000 support level before retracing its way. Public criticisms of the flagship cryptocurrency’s energy needs by Billionaire Elon Musk and regulatory crackdown worldwide (not just in China) are among obstacles.

Last month, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority banned Binance affiliate, which operates in the country, from offering any traditional financial services that fall into the regulator’s remit. Last week, the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority stated that Binance was not authorised to operate a cryptocurrency exchange in the nation.

However, the thesis of a bear market trend may be invalidated if there is no selling interest and that the buyers can quickly drive the price up towards the $36,000 resistance level.