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Curated Conscious Beauty Solutions Online Platform, Aardae, Launches In Singapore

SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 8 September 2021 – Aardae, a thoughtfully curated online platform celebrating sustainable, non-toxic and cruelty-free products launches in Singapore to introduce an extensive selection of the finest beauty products sourced from international indie brands to Southeast Asia. Promising a diverse selection of high-performance products with large following internationally, Aardae showcases an exciting range of products that are suitable for all skin types.

 

Having analyzed the skincare market in Singapore and understanding various transitions in the importance of sustainable non-toxic products within Asia, Aardae promises to bring fellow enthusiasts’ various options through their pioneer platform. Co-founded by two passionate entrepreneurs, Shweta Gupta and Darshana Balagopal, Aardae’s philosophy is sharing knowledge about products that are not merely heavily embedded in conscious beauty but also promise high efficacy.

 

Aardae has carefully curated 1,000 products from 40 unique brands including international favourites such as Dot & Key, Juicy Chemistry, OCEGLOW, Purearth, Earth Rhythm and Omorfee. Committed to quality, Aardae performs in-house consumer testing on each product prior to its inclusion into the catalogue.

 

Co-founder Shweta Gupta said, “At Aardae, we believe in exclusively curating products that are high in quality. Patrons can rest assured that every aspect of each brand and product has been considered and put through objective and stringent testing before being offered. As skincare afficionados, we wanted to close the existing gap and come up with a platform that is essentially the first-of-its-kind. While we are thrilled to introduce these fabulous brands to Singapore, we are equally eager for consumers to be introduced to a dedicated clean beauty platform such as Aardae as a one stop solution for all their hair and skin needs.”

 

Consumers can explore ethically-sourced and thoughtfully manufactured skincare and haircare products that are incredibly versatile and suitable to modern lifestyles. Driven by the desire for consumers to be more conscientious and knowledgeable about their purchases, Aardae aims to provide options that are commited to reducing carbon footprints and minimal environmental impact. Co-founder Darshana Balagopal said, “We are heavily rooted in conscious beauty and it is important that our platform echoes these beliefs. With so many complex options available globally, the challenge was to shortlist products that were safe for consumers and the planet. We hope to encourage smart buying decisions and induce higher levels of mindfulness to the environment using fewer highly efficient products.”

 

More information: www.aardae.com

BCEL Asks Customers to Provide Proof of Covid-19 Vaccination

BCEL to require customer vaccinations

Banque Pour Le Commerce Exterieur Lao Public (BCEL) has issued an internal notice stating that it will require customers to provide proof of vaccination against Covid-19 prior to using the bank’s services.

Laos Confirms 211 New Cases of Covid-19

Covid-19 update Khammouane

Community spread continues in Laos as the nation confirms 211 new cases of Covid-19.

Four Lao Nationals Caught Smuggling Frozen Food From Thailand into Laos

Thai police officers sieze smuggled goods
Thai police officers seize smuggled goods

Four Lao nationals were arrested by marine police in Thailand while attempting to smuggle frozen food across the Mekong River.

Chen Zhi Scholarship Jointly Launched by Prince Group and Ministry of Education Youth and Sport to Prepare Cambodian University Students For Post-Pandemic Future

Full tuition fees and stipends for 400 university students to advance sustainable development, financial inclusion and world-class hospitality; Awardees to get internship and employment opportunities at Prince Group

PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA – Media OutReach – 8 September 2021 – Prince Holding Group (“Prince Group”), one of the largest conglomerates in Cambodia, has finalized a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Ministry of Education Youth and Sport (MoEYS) to launch a scholarship program for Cambodian university students. Prince Group will provide full tuition fees and stipends for 400 selected students to pursue their Bachelor of Science degrees at top Cambodian universities including Royal University of Phnom Penh, National University of Management, and Institute of Technology of Cambodia. In total, Prince Group will provide over US$2 million across seven years.

Chen Zhi Scholarship MOU Signing

Chen Zhi Scholarship MOU Signing

Prince Group Chairman Neak Oknha Chen Zhi in conversation with the MoEYS team

As public-private partnerships are essential, Prince Group will work with the government to achieve the goals outlined in the Education Strategic Plan (2019-2023).  Prince Group will work with MoEYS to ensure students get financial support, training, mentoring and work opportunities to bolster learning in three areas: sustainable development of the real estate sector; advancing financial inclusion and the digital economy in the banking and finance industries, and the promotion of world class hospitality standards, meeting the future human capital needs of the local economy.

Through internships, students will learn from top professionals in Cambodia – Prince Group, which oversees more than 80 businesses, possesses a diverse workforce with 20% of employees hailing from places like Singapore, Malaysia and Greater China.

His Excellency Hang Chuon Naron, Cambodia’s Minister of Education Youth and Sport, commented: “We welcome the cooperation of employers that take their role as educators seriously. Cambodia’s road to recovery will require bright young minds from all parts of the country and MoEYS, along with its partners, will remove obstacles, offer targeted guidance, ensure equitable access to education and work opportunities to ensure talented students focus on learning and acquiring skills that will be important for Cambodia’s future.”

“We are pleased to launch one of Cambodia’s largest scholarship programs sponsored by a private enterprise,” said Gabriel Tan, Chief Communications Officer of Prince Holding Group. “Prince Group’s various units are excited to welcome Cambodian students into our family as we will create strong internship and management trainee programs to train, nurture and educate the leaders of tomorrow. The Chen Zhi Scholarship seeks to provide both academic and practical experience for the students, by providing both a first-rate education and exposure to an international working experience.”

The scholarship will be spearheaded by Neak Oknha Chen Zhi, Chairman of Prince Group, who was recently recognized as the Entrepreneur of the Year among leaders of conglomerates at the 2021 International Business Awards, due to his business and corporate social responsibility leadership over the course of the pandemic. Under Chen Zhi, Prince Group follows a holistic environment, social and governance framework (ESG) that aims to make a long-term impact in Cambodia. Prince Group has opened the Prince Horology Vocational Training Center, Cambodia’s first independent watch school. The training center gives Cambodian youths the opportunity to learn a new artisanal skill – watchmaking – and gain the necessary experience to help them in job markets in Cambodia and abroad. In August this year, Prince Group had also sponsored the Career Preparation Program run by Caring for Cambodia, a leading charity, to help high school students. Prince Group will continue to actively seek out ways to contribute to better educational outcomes for Cambodians from all walks of life.

About Prince Holding Group:

Prince Holding Group is one of the largest conglomerates in Cambodia, with its various units focusing on three core areas: real estate development, financial services and consumer services.

Prince Holding Group’s key business units in Cambodia include Prince Real Estate Group, Prince Huan Yu Real Estate Group, Prince Bank, Cambodia Airways, Belt Road Capital Management, as well as Awesome Global Investment Group. Via its subsidiaries, Prince Holding Group has over 80 businesses in Cambodia operating in real estate development, banking, finance, aviation, tourism, logistics, technology, food and beverages, and lifestyle sectors etc.

Rising foreign direct investment, free trade agreements with leading countries and future participation in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership are expected to act as key drivers for the Cambodian economy, supported by pro-industry policy initiatives by the government.

Leveraging a network of industrial, business and financial professionals across Asia, Prince Holding Group has laid the foundation to be a vital conduit for local and international capital. The Group is firmly committed to the long-term development of Cambodia. For example, Prince Holding Group is developing Ream City, an upcoming tourism and residential project that will be one of Cambodia’s first sustainable real estate projects, aiming to secure $16 billion in total investment for the region. Located conveniently within a 10-minute drive from the Sihanoukville International Airport, the project aims to contribute to economic recovery in Sihanoukville.

Moving forward, Prince Holding Group will continue to seek out opportunities to play an important role in Cambodia, through partnerships or direct investments into key industries for the betterment of Cambodians and the local economy.

#PrinceHoldingGroup

Cognian and Avnet Enter Strategic Engagement

Avnet, a global technology distributor and solutions provider and Cognian, an Australian-headquartered global Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity provider of smart building management solutions, today announced that they will collaborate to accelerate and scale IoT deployments worldwide, and provide customers with seamless industry leading connectivity solutions being built on Avnet’s IoTConnect Platform.

 

PHOENIX AZ, U.S.A & SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – Media OutReach – 8 September 2021 – Avnet (Nasdaq: AVT ) and Cognian have entered a strategic relationship which will significantly increase the reach and scale for global customers, by providing immediate access to Cognian’s IoT connectivity platform enabled by their cutting edge mesh network technology, Syncromesh Smart Canopy and Avnet’s IoT Connect cloud platform.

 

Avnet’s proven expertise and strong position in IoT PaaS enablement and expansive customer base and strategic focus on IoT is the perfect match to accelerate IoT deployments and enable Cognian to seamlessly connect a wide range of third-party BLE-based devices, addressing the connectivity and hardware needs of connected IoT solutions.

 

Cognian’s Syncromesh Smart Canopy wirelessly turns every building into a human-centric smart building with management of cost, carbon emissions, safety, and well-being at its core. The unified data connectivity platform enables remote and autonomous control over smart building capabilities such as access, occupant capacity, heating/cooling, air quality and lighting control.


Cognian offers proven wireless solutions to build and securely connect global Building Management Systems quickly, securely and in a cost-effective manner. In addition, by using Avnet’s Microsoft Azure-powered IoTConnect platform, Cognian can seamlessly connect multiple devices to the cloud and address the software and hardware needs of those IoT solutions. Cognian continues to win landmark commercial building projects across Australia in addition to establishing its footprint in Asia and the USA, through strategic relationships with tier one partners such as Avnet.

 

Avnet’s Partner Program enables system integrators (SIs) and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to build new solutions and service models for their practice on Avnet’s IoTConnect platform.  Solution developers and OEMs can create cloud-based applications that communicate with the Avnet IoTConnect API with ease, avoiding the complexity of sensor interfaces, protocols, security and device management. Connected suppliers can expand their market presence with preconnected devices that accelerate customer adoption and reach.

 

Lou Lutostanski, IoT vice president, Avnet said, “Avnet is excited to partner with Cognian in order to bring world class building connectivity at the IoT edge to our growing family of IoTConnect partners and customers.  With the IoTConnect platform and Cognian’s unique Syncromesh wireless technology, our partners are able to bring open, secure, integrated, and scalable end-to-end solutions to their end customers.”

 

Mark Blum, CEO of Cognian, said, “Our philosophy is all around openness: open standards and open partnerships with companies who are driving smart building innovation across industries from commercial real estate to retail, convenience stores, logistics and everything in-between. With the commercial IoT space going from strength-to-strength globally, our partnership with Avnet amplifies our global reach. This in turn means we can help our partners and customers access an even broader range of third party devices that can be enabled and easily connected by Syncromesh through the Avnet IoTConnect Platform.”

About Cognian

Cognian Technologies is a fast-growing Australian company whose mission it is to make existing buildings smart buildings, and smart buildings smarter. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, the company was founded in July 2016. Its flagship product Syncromesh is a wireless Internet of Things (IoT) data connectivity platform – the ‘Central Nervous System’ for the building that empowers building owners and operators to simply add a range of building management solutions to lower a building’s carbon footprint, reduce energy costs, and increase tenant satisfaction, regardless of the buildings size, location or age. In November 2020 Cognian’s Syncromesh was named PropTech of the Year at the Urban Developer Awards. Learn more about Cognian at www.Cognian.com

About Avnet

As a leading global technology distributor and solutions provider, Avnet has served customers’ evolving needs for an entire century. We support customers at each stage of a product’s lifecycle, from idea to design and from prototype to production. Our unique position at the center of the technology value chain enables us to accelerate the design and supply stages of product development so customers can realize revenue faster. Decade after decade, Avnet helps its customers and suppliers around the world realize the transformative possibilities of technology. Learn more about Avnet at www.avnet.com. More information on the Avnet Partner Program can be found here.

#Avnet

GBG Partners SEON to Enhance Online Fraud Prevention for Fintechs and Digital Banks in APAC

SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 8 September 2021 – GBG (AIM:GBG), the global expert in digital identity, helping businesses prevent fraud and meet complex compliance requirements, has announced a partnership with SEON. With this partnership, GBG strengthens online fraud prevention for banks, fintechs, and digital banks by using email, IP, phone and social media as alternative data for fraud detection, while meeting compliance and data privacy needs. SEON’s technology is fully integrated into the GBG Intelligence Center.

 

Digitilisation is accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, where digital banks in Asia Pacific reported a threefold increase in their customer bases in 2020 as compared to traditional banks. Mature economies like Singapore and Hong Kong have established high fintech adoption rates, and developing countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines are gearing to achieve financial inclusion with 70% of Filipino adults by 2023 to provide financial access to low-income households, gig economy, small businesses, and new-to-bank GenZ.

 

As Financial Crime 4.0 continues to exacerbate, the partnership with SEON enables GBG to increase effectiveness in combatting modern day fraud by validating the most active and present-day e-lifestyle based consumer touchpoints such as email addresses, IP location, social media, phone and SIM data to detect fraudulent anomalies in account application and loan origination, as well as to onboard new-to-bank population. Financial institutions (FIs) can look to reducing fake and malicious email address usage to as low as 0% and increase detection of suspicious IP-related applications and transactions by up to 80%.

 

Remote Fraud Management with Accuracy and Automation

 

FIs utilising the GBG Intelligence Center, a key module in GBG’s flagship end-to-end financial crime management solution – Digital Risk Management and Intelligence platform, benefit from enriched data intelligence to augment fraud detection and prevention accuracy by reducing manual work for FIs, false positive and false negative rates.

 

SEON adds to the performance of the Intelligence Center with its track record of zero false positives for email, phone and IP. Especially as fraud costs increasingly outweigh fraud management spend, this partnership helps risk management teams to increase efficiency by reducing time spent on manual tasks (eg checking of email, phone and IP data) by up to 50%. Furthermore, as remote working arrangements continue, the ability to automate fraud detection and prevention with a high degree of accuracy remains crucial. This partnership will further strengthen GBG’s capabilities to support enterprises with agility and flexibility.

 

Dev Dhiman, Managing Director of GBG, APAC, says, “To effectively address the rise in digital financial crime simply means that fraud detection and prevention measures need to be constantly modernised. This partnership with SEON continues to expand GBG’s datasets to better combat against identity crime, in particular synthetic ID, impersonation, identity theft, account takeover, money muling, and SIM swap fraud typologies.”

 

“Close to half of GBG’s customers are in financial services, it’s a top priority for us to build a watertight environment to avert any data point from being used by bad actors to commit fraud. By constantly enhancing how our platform performs, we can better protect our customers and build digital trust between financial institutions and their consumers. As the digital economy continues to evolve, the GBG Intelligence Center will continue to grow its strong network of partners to equip all FIs with the best-of-breed data and technology to fight fraud,” continues Dhiman.

Double Down on Fraud with AI & Machine Learning

 

Complementing GBG’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven approach to detect fraud, SEON uses open data and whitebox machine learning, giving businesses complete visibility and total control of how the AI decisions are made.

 

With SEON’s expertise and access to data, the integration with GBG Intelligence Center will provide enterprises with an even more thorough and unified fraud detection process:

  • Achieve up to 60% reduction in fraud volume in enterprises
  • Wide data coverage in APAC
  • 100% GDPR and ISO 27001 compliant to meet data and privacy standards
  • Leverages only on proprietary email, IP and phone data going back a decade
  • Connected to over 30 social media platforms to uniquely see a comprehensive view of a person’s social network footprint with their digital footprint

SEON’s APAC customers include Grab, Danabijak, ATM Online, HomeCredit, 10Bet, and Robocash.

Jimmy Fong, Chief Commercial Officer at SEON, added, “The ability to identify fraudulent behavioral patterns also means businesses can discover hidden revenue opportunities. SEON’s AI adapts to any business model, learning how it operates to create fully transparent and visible rules. This creates a scalable fraud prevention solution for all online business types, whether as a payment service provider, payment gateway, neobank, Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), gaming, anti-money laundering and more. The combination of GBG and SEON is a modernised solution for a fast-moving digital age, set to create greater agility to mitigate growing risks of fraud brought on by the pandemic, while smoothening and automating financial crime management processes without compromising user experience.”

This partnership forms part of GBG’s commitment to protect and provide FIs with end-to-end digital fraud and compliance solutions. The GBG Intelligence Center, with SEON incorporated, will be available to FIs across APAC, including Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand.

 

About GBG:

GBG offers a range of solutions that help organisations quickly validate and verify the identity and location of their customers. Our market-leading technology, data and expertise help our customers improve digital access, deliver a seamless experience and establish trust so that they can transact quickly, safely and securely with their customers online.

Headquartered in the UK and with over 1,000 team members across 16 countries, we work with 20,000 customers in over 70 countries. Some of the world’s best-known businesses rely on GBG to provide digital services and keep the economy moving, from US e-commerce giants to Asia’s biggest banks and European household brands.

To find out more about how we help our clients establish trust with their customers, visit www.gbgplc.com/apac, follow us on Twitter @gbgplc or LinkedIn.

#GBG

About SEON:

SEON is founded in 2017 by Tamas Kadar and Bence Jendruszak, with head offices in Budapest and London. Backed by financial leaders such as founders of Tide, Revolut, SumUp, N26 and investors in Spotify and Klarna, SEON is on a winning mission to fight fraud on a global scale. SEON is partnered with Patreon, Air France, Grab, Afterpay, and albo Bank, to add new capabilities to their fraud prevention solution. SEON also has offices in Austin and Jakarta to support international clients.

To find out more about SEON, visit www.seon.io or follow us on LinkedIn.

Vang Vieng To Receive New Roads, Infrastructure Upgrade

Vang Vieng

Vang Vieng is to receive a USD 8 million upgrade to improve its infrastructure, according to the Vientiane Times.