Payvision Partners With Wing Lung Bank in a Region Where Trust Is Key

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS--(Marketwire) - Payvision is proud to announce its Partnership with yet another well-established Chinese Bank in Hong Kong. Wholly owned subsidiary of the 6th largest commercial bank by total assets in China, China Merchants Bank (CMB), Wing Lung Bank (WLB) has built a solid reputation with 51 banking business outlets in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Macau and overseas since its inception in 1933.

"Payvision is excited to partner with Wing Lung Bank, one of the oldest local Chinese banks in Hong Kong." says Rudolf Booker, CEO of Payvision, "As an international payment solutions provider, we connect Wing Lung Bank to our Global Acquiring Network of financial institutions. Our secure payment platform opens new business opportunities by servicing domestic and cross-border transactions and settlement in multiple currencies. Through our partnership with WLB, Payvision further expands its presence in China"

Willy Kwa Kok Leng, VP Sales APAC for Payvision: "This Partnership further reinforces our presence in the North Asian Market. Building on the strength of the WLB brand name, this collaboration will help Payvision to win Chinese Merchant's trust, expanding our business network in the second largest internet market of the world"

"Wing Lung Bank has long been serving eCommerce merchants like universities and airline companies. With the increasing importance of eCommerce business in today's market, we are pleased to partner with Payvision, an international payment solution specialist, to expand our eCommerce business to other merchant categories and to provide better services to our existing merchants." says Peter Ke, Head of Wing Lung Bank Credit Card Centre.

 

About Payvision

Payvision, an independent payment solutions provider specialized in global card processing for the e-commerce market, offers Acquiring Banks, PSPs, ISOs and their Merchants a secure, PCI-DSS Compliant, PSD Licensed, international payment processing platform, enhanced with innovative technology. Payvision provides its customers 24/7 Support, 150+ transaction currencies and regional card settlement currencies, a high-end reporting interface and a solid risk management solution.

Founded in 2002, Payvision is headquartered in Amsterdam and has expanded its global services in over 40 countries with offices in New York, Utah, Madrid, , Paris, London, Berlin, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau. Please visitwww.payvision.com for more information.

 

About Wing Lung Bank

Wing Lung Bank, founded in 1933, is among the oldest local Chinese banks in Hong Kong. Following its motto of "Progress with prudence, service with sincerity", the Bank provides comprehensive banking services, including deposits, loans, wealth management, securities, credit cards, NET Banking, syndicated loans, corporate financing, bills, hire-purchase and leasing, foreign exchange, insurance agency, Mandatory Provident Fund, etc. Wing Lung Bank also provides futures broking, insurance broking and general insurance underwriting, property management and trustee as well as nominee services through its wholly-owned subsidiaries. At present the Bank has 51 banking business outlets in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Macau and overseas, and a staff force of more than 1,600 people. As at 30 June 2012, its consolidated total assets stood at HK$174 billion (US$22.4 billion). Wing Lung Bank became a member of China Merchants Bank Group in 2008 and subsequently a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Group in 2009. China Merchants Bank, the 6th largest commercial bank by total assets in China, is currently among the top 100 banks in the world.

 

For more information about Wing Lung Bank, please visit the Bank's website at www.winglungbank.com.

 

Media contact:
Payvision
press@payvision.com 
www.payvision.com  

Wing Lung Bank 
corpcomm@winglungbank.com 
www.winglungbank.com

© 2012 Marketwire, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Nutanix Unveils Next-Gen Products That Extend Its Leadership in Software-Defined Datacenters

Company Continues to Rapidly Innovate With VM-Centric Disaster Recovery, Adaptive Compression, and a Highly Configurable New Hardware Platform

LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwire - December 3, 2012) - Gartner Data Center Conference - Nutanix, the first company to offer a scale-out compute-and-storage appliance, today announced the latest version of its software, Nutanix OS 3.0, and a new hardware line, the NX-3000 series. These products extend its technology leadership in helping enterprises build next-generation software-defined datacenters. In addition to VM-level disaster recovery and adaptive post-process compression, Nutanix OS 3.0 also delivers dynamic cluster expansion, rolling software upgrades, and support for a second hypervisor, KVM. These software enhancements, coupled with the highly configurable NX-3000 series platform, enable unprecedented flexibility, performance, and scalability in enterprise datacenters.

"Nutanix continues to stay ahead of the innovation curve with this release. It is critical to have a solution that can adapt to such a fast paced industry while scaling at a level of granularity that best fits the growth of my business," says Rodney Perkins, IT Director of Farmers Insurance Group Federal Credit Union.

New Hardware Platform Allows For Independent and Customized Scaling. With the NX-3000 series, Nutanix has delivered a highly configurable platform in which compute-heavy and storage-heavy nodes can coexist in a single heterogeneous cluster. The platform will include hardware models that are variable in the capacity and number of PCIe-SSDs, SATA SSDs, and SATA HDDs per server node. Moreover, the nodes can have varying numbers of CPU cores per socket and variable memory capacities. This allows for independent scaling of compute and storage in a single system that is optimized for every use case and can scale to address evolving business requirements.

The NX-3000 is based on Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture and delivers unprecedented VM density in a 2U form factor.

Next-Generation Disaster Recovery. The Nutanix team, which was the first in the industry to deliver RAID, high availability, snapshots, and clones at VM-level, has implemented a highly differentiated VM-centric disaster recovery engine. The newly announced Nutanix OS 3.0 includes native storage-optimized disaster recovery that enables multi-way, master-master replication never seen before in traditional storage arrays. Administrators can configure disaster recovery policies that specify protection domains and consistency groups in primary sites, which can then be replicated to any combination of secondary sites to ensure maximum business resiliency and application performance. Furthermore, any Nutanix cluster can serve as both a primary and secondary site simultaneously for different protection domains, thereby providing even more flexibility and choice.

Nutanix OS 3.0 also delivers best-in-class runbook (failover and failback) automation that is hypervisor-agnostic, which means the native disaster recovery capabilities are available and consistent regardless of the underlying virtualization platform or management tools.

Adaptive Compression. One of the key pillars of the Nutanix solution is a highly efficient MapReduce-based framework that implements information lifecycle management in the cluster to achieve tiering, disk rebuilding, and cluster rebalancing. This massively-parallel "big data" architecture was the first of its kind in the storage industry. The same framework is being leveraged to deliver adaptive post-process compression of cold data as it migrates to the lower data tiers, thereby not impacting the normal IO path. By leveraging the information lifecycle management capabilities inherent in the Nutanix software, the system dynamically determines which data blocks to compress based on how frequently they are being accessed by the VMs. Post-process compression is ideal for random or batch workloads and delivers the highest possible overall performance. In addition, Nutanix OS 3.0 also supports basic in-line compression that works as the data is being written, which is better suited for archival and sequential workloads.

"While our existing storage solutions support compression in general, the granularity of Nutanix compression allows us to set policies at the VM level, ensuring maximum business value and storage utilization, without sacrificing performance," said Jon Lasley of Anthelio Healthcare Solutions.

Growing Hypervisor Support. With Nutanix OS 3.0, the company continues to deliver on its commitment to bring all of its enterprise features to the broadest range of platforms in the industry. The software, which was designed to be hypervisor agnostic, will now support KVM and VMware vSphere 5.1. Regardless of the underlying virtualization platform or management framework, enterprises benefit from all of the capabilities of the Nutanix software. The KVM hypervisor provides financial flexibility for enterprises and works well in workloads such as Hadoop.

Dynamic Cluster Expansion and Rolling Software Upgrades. Nutanix OS 3.0 uses a discovery-based protocol to auto-detect new nodes added to the same network as a cluster, enabling administrators to quickly and easily expand a cluster without incurring any downtime. In the background, the system will then rebalance the data across the entire storage pool, including the newly added nodes, to provide maximum IO performance.

The new software also uses software-defined networking tricks to achieve rolling software upgrades within the always-on cluster. Upgrades are delivered in a peer-to-peer framework to enable rapid software upgrades while retaining maximum cluster availability.

"The features and capabilities that we have delivered in Nutanix OS 3.0 and the NX-3000 series usher in a new era of business resiliency and datacenter optimization," said Howard Ting, VP of Marketing at Nutanix. "These enhancements, built on top of an already ground-breaking product foundation, underscore the company's continued commitment to innovation and customer success with high-end enterprise workloads."

The NX-3000 series and Nutanix OS 3.0 are available for ordering immediately. Contact your authorized Nutanix reseller or send inquiry to sales@nutanix.com. For existing customers considering an upgrade to Nutanix OS 3.0, contact Nutanix Support for assistance.

Learn more

 

About Nutanix

Nutanix (www.nutanix.com) is the first company to offer a radically simple compute and storage infrastructure for implementing enterprise-class virtualization without complex and expensive external network storage (SAN or NAS). Founded in September 2009 by a team that built scalable systems such as Google File System and enterprise-class systems such as Oracle Database and Exadata, Nutanix is based in San Jose, California, and is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Battery Ventures, and Blumberg Capital.

Nutanix and Nutanix Complete Cluster are trademarks of Nutanix Inc. Other marks mentioned herein are trademarks that are proprietary to other companies.

 

Nutanix Contact:
Sarah Reynolds
Media Relations
Nutanix
Phone: 408.569.2157
Email: pr@nutanix.com
Twitter: @nutanix

 © 2012 Marketwire, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Project Finance Partner Kelly Malone Joins King & Spalding in Singapore

SINGAPORE--(Marketwire - December 3, 2012) -  King & Spalding has recruited Kelly Malone, a specialist in cross-border development and financing of major energy projects, as a partner in its energy practice. Malone will be based in King & Spalding's Singapore office. He joins from the Singapore office of leading Norwegian firm Wikborg Rein, where he was a partner and head of that firm's global projects team. Malone is bringing with him a team of two senior lawyers and an associate.

"Kelly's power project and project finance business nicely complements our strong worldwide oil and gas practice," said Ken Culotta, leader of the King & Spalding's global transactions practice group. "His presence and expertise increase our capability in the power and project financing sectors, and allow us to offer the full range of energy services throughout the Asian market, and to expand our roster of clients."

Malone has built a practice that includes representing sponsors, lenders, governments and state utilities in over 50 major mostly power projects in 22 countries in Latin America, Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia. He is identified as one of the "world's leading energy and natural resource lawyers" by Euromoney Institutional Investor and as a regional expert on Asia and Latin America by Chambers Global.

"We're very pleased to welcome Kelly and his team to the firm," said John Savage, managing partner of King & Spalding's Singapore office. "Our Asian practice has historically focused on oil and gas and arbitration, and the logical next step in growing the business was to add a senior power projects partner with substantial financing and Asia experience. So we're very fortunate to have Kelly join us. We expect to build out our Asia team with more lateral partner hires and internal promotions in different practice areas in the short- to medium-term."

Malone said, "The opportunity to grow my practice from King & Spalding's global platform, and in the company of such talented energy lawyers, makes this an excellent move for me. I and my team look forward to being part of the firm's expansion in the energy sector and in Asia."

Malone joins a Singapore-based energy team which includes partners Dan Rogers and Merrick White. King & Spalding hired White, one of Asia's leading oil and gas lawyers, from Clifford Chance in October.

King & Spalding's Singapore office serves as a hub for the firm's work in energy projects and international arbitration throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

King & Spalding's energy practice is one of the world's largest, most experienced and most extensive. More than 250 lawyers across a range of practice areas make up the firm's integrated energy team. The group includes individuals who have been practicing in the field for several decades, including former in-house lawyers for leading global and national energy companies; leaders of energy industry trade groups; and former managers, engineers, scientists and government officials. The firm's energy lawyers offer experience that spans every sector of the industry, from oil and gas to power and renewables.

 

About King & Spalding

Celebrating more than 125 years of service, King & Spalding is an international law firm that represents a broad array of clients, including half of the Fortune Global 100, with 800 lawyers in 17 offices in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The firm has handled matters in over 160 countries on six continents and is consistently recognized for the results it obtains, uncompromising commitment to quality and dedication to understanding the business and culture of its clients. More information is available at www.kslaw.com.

 

Contact Information: 
King & Spalding
Matt Hyams
+1 212 827 4057
mhyams@kslaw.com

© 2012 Marketwire, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

General Exploration Partners Sells 53.2% Interest in Atrush Block

DENVER, CO--(Marketwire - December 3, 2012) - General Exploration Partners Inc. ("GEP" or the "Company") has signed a purchase and sale agreement to sell 53.2% of its participating interest in the Atrush Block to Abu Dhabi National Energy Company PJSC ("TAQA"). In conjunction with the sale, Aspect Energy International, LLC will divest itself of any interest in GEP, leaving ShaMaran Ventures B.V. as the sole interest holder of GEP's remaining participating interest. The agreement is subject to final approval by the Kurdistan Regional Government and obtaining necessary partner consents.

Following the closing of the transaction and subject to the Kurdistan Regional Government's 25% carried option, the Atrush Block will be held 53.2% by TAQA, 26.8% by GEP, and 20% by Marathon Oil KDV B.V., a wholly owned subsidiary of Marathon Oil Corporation (NYSE: MRO).

Alex Cranberg, Chairman of Aspect Holdings, LLC, commented, "With GEP's recent notification of Commercial Discovery, TAQA brings strengths and synergies which will assist with development and production. Most importantly however, the people of Kurdistan and all of Iraq continue to benefit from investment in and production of the natural resources in the region."

This press release contains statements about expected or anticipated future events and financial results that are forward-looking in nature and, as a result, are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, such as legal and political risk, civil unrest, general economic, market and business conditions, the regulatory process and actions, technical issues, new legislation, competitive and general economic factors and conditions, the uncertainties resulting from potential delays or changes in plans, the occurrence of unexpected events and management's capacity to execute and implement its future plans. Actual results may differ materially from those projected by management. Further, any forward-looking information is made only as of a certain date and neither the Company nor its partner's undertakes any obligation to update any forward-looking information or statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which such statement is made or reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as may be required by applicable securities laws. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for management of the Company to predict all of these factors and to assess in advance the impact of each such factor on the Company's nor its partner's business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking information.

 

Contact:

Rob Foster

303.225.5220

rfoster@aspectenergy.com

© 2012 Marketwire, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Inaugural Global Terrorism Index Launches

While more terrorist attacks are being recorded, the number of fatalities has declined by 25% from its peak in 2007

·         Since the start of the Iraq invasion the number of global terrorist incidents has increased fourfold;

·         Only 31of the 158countries ranked  have not experienceda terrorist attack since 2001;

·         North America is the least likely region to suffer from terrorism;

·         Western Europeans are nineteen times more likely to be killed in a terrorist attack than North Americans;

·         Since 2002, only 6% of all fatalities have been terrorists, highlighting the effectiveness of terrorism;

·         In 2011, Iraq was the country most impacted from terrorism, followed by Pakistan and Afghanistan.

LONDON, 4 December 2012 – The number of terrorist incidents has increased virtually every year since 9/11 according to the GlobalTerrorism Index (GTI), which launches today.However, terrorism fatalities have fallen by 25% since 2007, which coincides with the winddown of the Iraq war. Despite this Iraq was still the country most likely to suffer from terrorism in 2011.During the last decade, the Middle East and North Africa region has seen the highest number of fatalities due to terrorism, closely followed by Asia Pacific.

Produced by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)the GTI is the first index torank countries on the impact ofterrorism and analyses the associated economic and socialdimensions.The index is based on data from theGlobal Terrorism Database, which is collected and collated by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), headquartered at the University of Maryland.

Theindex scores 158 countries over the last 10 years by aggregating a series of indicators.  These include the number of terrorist incidents, fatalities, injuries and property damage.The GTIanalyses many otherfactors and has foundintergroup cohesion, human rights, group grievances, corruptionand governanceto be associated with terrorism.

Surprisingly, low-income countries are less affected by terrorism than lower middle-income countries, indicating that poverty is not necessarily a main cause of terrorism. Private citizens and property are the most common targets of terrorism while the military is targeted in only 4% of attacks. The U.S., Algeria and Colombia had the biggest improvements over the last ten years.

Most terrorist attacks occur in a wider conflict situation. The index shows that global terrorism only started to increase after the escalation of the Iraq war.  This was subsequently followed by further increasing waves of terrorism in Afghanistan and then in Pakistan eighteen months later.

“Terrorism is one of the most emotive subjects of our time.The impact of terrorism does seem to have plateaued over the last three years but is still unacceptably high.The aim of the GTI is to systematically analyse and quantify the phenomena”saidSteve Killelea, Executive Chairman of IEP.  “The GTI examines trends to help inform a positive and practical debate about the future of terrorism and appropriate policy responses.”

In the decade since 9/11, fatalities from terrorist attacks have increased by 195%, incidents by 460% and injuries by 224%.Interestingly, the seven countries that have suffered the most fatalities due to terrorism since 9/11 account for nearly three quarters of deaths in this period, with Iraqis suffering the most.

In 2011,the areas most impacted by terrorism were the MiddleEast, India, Pakistan and Russia.There were 7473 fatalities in 2011, which is 25%less than in 2007.

“I welcome the launch of the Global Terrorism Index,” said Khalid Mahmood MP, Chair of the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Tackling Terrorism.  “It promises to be a useful tool for policymakers in their efforts to track and tackle terrorism.”

Often perceived as a major target for terrorist attacks, North America is the least likely region to suffer from terrorism, with a fatality rate 19 times lower than Western Europe.The U.S. has had the largest improvement in GTI score from 2002–2011, dropping from 1^st to 41^st in the index,as the effects of 9/11 dissipated.

Killelea concluded: “The GTI highlights that many of the countries suffering the most from terrorism have also suffered from foreign military intervention. Although the ‘responsibility to protect’ is paramount, caution needs to be taken against unwanted consequences.  I urge policymakers to use the findings of this report to help redefine tackling terrorism strategies and help shift focus towards peace.”

ENDS

NOTES TO EDITORS

The full GTI report and interactive map available at:www.visionofhumanity.org

Follow: https://twitter.com/#!/GlobPeaceIndex

Visit:  www.facebook.com/globalpeaceindex

 

About the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP):

The Institute for Economics and Peace is an international non-profit research organization dedicated to shifting the world’s focus to peace as a positive, achievable, and tangible measure of human well-being and progress.www.economicsandpeace.org

Contacts:

Rima Sacre,      rsacre@hkstrategies.com        +44 20 79734427

Rob Foyle,        rfoyle@hkstrategies.com         +44 2074133512

For comment from Khalid Mahmood MP:  Elaina Cohen, cohene@parliament.uk, +44 20 72198141

© 2012 Marketwire, Incorporated. All rights reserved.