Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: commercetools appoints its first Chief Marketing Officer, Jen Jones. FCA and PRA authorised GB Bank procures TruNarrative technology to deliver its onboarding and transactional risk strategies. Contentstack is now available on Microsoft Azure. This makes Contentstack the first multi-cloud SaaS CMS on the market, offering customers the cloud provider of their choice. ShipBob data report highlights global brand expansion, new sales channels and fulfilment trends to watch
commercetools appoints its first Chief Marketing Officer
commercetools has announced the appointment of Jen Jones as the company’s first chief marketing officer (CMO).
The addition of Jones and further investment in marketing comes on the heels of commercetools achieving unicorn status in 2021 as a privately held company worth over $1 billion. With over two decades of B2B technology marketing experience, Jones will remain in the U.S. reporting directly to Dirk Hoerig, co-founder and CEO at commercetools. She will focus on building the company’s brand while continuing to scale the growth commercetools has experienced.
Jones brings decades of experience in building global marketing teams. That includes serving as the CMO of Dataminr where she built an extraordinary marketing team and supported the company’s rapid growth. Prior to Dataminr, she served as SVP of corporate marketing at Cision, and director of industry product marketing at Oracle Marketing Cloud.
As commercetools rapidly expands its presence in the global B2B and B2C eCommerce markets having recently signed major brands including The Very Group, L.L. Bean, Lululemon, and Kaiser Permanente among others, commercetools is well positioned for accelerated advancement. Jones joins commercetools following its most recent $140M Series C funding round and acquisition of the leading frontend platform, Frontastic, supporting its mission to become the global market leader in commerce experience technologies.
GB Bank chooses TruNarrative for customer onboarding, transactional risk and financial crime prevention
GB Bank iusa new bank focussed on getting Britain building again. It has announced it has chosen Leeds-based regtech innovator TruNarrative to provide its full suite of customer onboarding and transactional risk compliance capabilities.
GB Bank aims to support under-served SME property developers and is the first UK tech-driven lender to exclusively provide SMEs, construction companies and property developers access to finance up to £5 million.
The start-up bank will also provide competitive fixed-rate FSCS protected savings accounts that allow savers to complete account opening within minutes and manage their accounts online. GB Bank focuses on supporting regional projects and businesses and is set to lend £3 billion across the next five years. It aims to build a £1 billion-plus balance sheet by funding the construction of 20,000 homes and several million square feet of commercial space.
Selecting TruNarrative
TruNarrative is a trusted supplier to numerous financial institutions, being a vital part of their financial crime prevention and compliance strategies. The TruNarrative platform enables banking, lending, ecommerce and payments firms to safely onboard customers, detect fraud and identify risk via a single API.
With a requirement to make rapid, high-value lending decisions central to its overall proposition, GB Bank went to market for a solution to facilitate low-friction customer journeys, robust compliance, and risk mitigation across its customer base.
TruNarrative will deliver a full suite of compliance technology, automating onboarding processes including: AML, KYC, document validation, PEPs, sanctions and adverse media checks, bank account authentication, and full transactional risk monitoring.
Using TruNarrative, GB Bank will be able to build a complete risk profile for each customer using transactional monitoring with risk visibility over applications, deposits, withdrawals, and repayments.
GB Bank now has access to over 50 third-party data providers within the TruNarrative App Store. GB Bank can now build bespoke and compliant customer journeys for its multiple products. It will allow the team to make lending decisions with the full customer picture in view.
Contentstack to run on Microsoft Azure
Contentstack has announced it is now available on Microsoft Azure. This makes Contentstack the first multi-cloud SaaS CMS on the market, offering customers the freedom to run Contentstack on the cloud provider of their choice. Whether running on Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS), customers receive the same functionality, pricing and packaging structure.
Microsoft Azure is the second largest provider of cloud infrastructure. 85% of the Fortune 100 and 63% of enterprises overall are running applications on Azure. For companies who have competitive concerns with Amazon, Azure is the preferred choice. Yet no agile CMS offered Azure as an option for its customers. That has them from enjoying all the benefits of a MACH architecture. Now Contentstack enables companies to use a MACH approach and choose the cloud provider that best suits their business needs.
Contentstack enables companies to use a MACH approach and choose the cloud provider that best suits their needs. While Contentstack is a SaaS offering, the ability to run in a cloud-agnostic fashion is proof that Contentstack’s internal architecture is highly sophisticated and modern. Since Contentstack is cloud-agnostic, customers are inoculated against vendor lock-in. Contentstack’s Azure offering falls under ISO27001 certification and the company is working to achieve SOC2 Type II certification by mid-2022.
Contentstack enables enterprise developers and business users to build and deploy content across every channel and touchpoint in the consumer journey. With a focus on accelerating idea-to-deployment, Contentstack’s built-in collaboration tools enable businesses to keep content and customer experience fresh. A founding member of the MACH Alliance, Contentstack’s platform is built on API-first principles that are developer-friendly and support a variety of content and delivery models.
ShipBob Releases 2022 State of Ecommerce Fulfillment Report
ShipBob has released its 2022 State of Ecommerce Fulfilment Report. The research highlights how eCommerce brands are approaching expansion and adapting their fulfilment strategies this year.
ShipBob’s 2022 State of Ecommerce Fulfilment Report comes at a time when there have never been more eCommerce IPOs and online/offline sales and marketing channels for direct-to-consumer brands to navigate. Alongside the ecommerce industry’s impressive growth in 2022, the number of new brands launching globally has also skyrocketed. It has made competition for consumers even more fierce and unpredictable. Vendors face supply chain issues, labour shortages and port congestion delays.
One section of the report looks at various global shopping and shipping trends. It looks at the importance of free shipping and how brands are approaching global expansion to reach a wider audience. ShipBob also documents the surge in online shopping during the pandemic. The report details how brands plan to grow globally, specifically calling out key 2022 global expansion trends, such as:
Approximately 56% of brands plan to either ship or fulfil orders from new countries in 2022. 32% of brands will start physically fulfilling orders in new countries in 2022.
The report also underscores the fundamental changes from 2020 to 2021 affecting the ecommerce, supply chain and fulfilment industries. It touches on the most important ecommerce brand priorities for the year and in the years to come.
