Here is the Ultimate Fin Tech Glossary got a fwd email (source internet).

Blockchain technology has created waves around the World, bringing transparency and massively reducing costs in sectors like Banking, Finance, Logistics and Manufacturing, among others. And this is only the beginning…

What is blockchain? And what are the potential implications for finance?

Great primer

• What is blockchain? A primer for finance professionals

BYOE aka Bring your own encryption is a security model that gives cloud customers complete control over the encryption of their data by allowing them to deploy a visualized instance of their own encryption software in tandem with the application they are hosting in the cloud.

BYOE can help an organization that wishes to take advantage of cloud services to address both regulatory compliance and data privacy concerns in a third-party multi-tenant environment. This approach allows a customer to use the encryption technology that best suits the customer’s needs, regardless of the cloud provider’s underlying IT infrastructure.

Bring-Your-Own-Encryption (BYOE) Allows Full Confidence and Control Over Sensitive Data and Security

In June 2014, Oracle unveiled Oracle Mobile Application Framework.

Oracle Mobile Application Framework is a hybrid mobile framework that enables developers to rapidly develop single-source applications and deploy to both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms.

Features include support for multiple integrated development environments, including Oracle JDeveloper and Eclipse (through Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse); support for multiple development languages, support for Apache Cordova plug-ins; and support for applications developed under Oracle ADF Mobile.

Oracle recommends that new mobile application development be done with the new Oracle Mobile Application Framework. Some Key Highlights Includes:

• Build Once, Run on Multiple-Platforms
• Simpler UI development
• Java, JavaScript, and HTML5-based application development
• Choice of development tools
• Offline-capable: SQLite with Encryption
• Full Access to Native Device Features
• Modular, Reusable Components

Oracle MAF – Business Benefits

• Increase mobile development speed
• Eliminate mobile skills shortage – use existing skill sets
• Complete solu)on out of the box
• Extensible

Here is Oracle Mobile Application Framework Architecture [ Adopted from www.Oracle.com ]

Here is YouTube lesson, for More insights.

Additionl Note

• New Mobile Application Framework (MAF) DataSheet
• Oracle Mobile Application Framework
• Oracle Mobile Security.

Oracle Hyperion Tax Provision is a comprehensive, easy-to-use global tax provision solution that is purpose built for the automation of the accounting for income tax process. The Software is designed by tax users for tax users, and leverages the existing finance data and processes without impacting finance’s current financial close procedures.

The solution addresses both IFRS and US GAAP requirements, and includes tax maintenance wizards that are designed to be easily maintained by the tax department. Since Oracle Hyperion Tax Provision is architected on top of the Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) platform, both finance and tax can realize significant efficiencies in training both the casual and power users involved in the tax reporting process (e.g. regional controllers around the world and power users in the tax department).

Tax Provision calculates your company’s global tax provision, effective tax rate, and deferred tax for tax provisioning purposes. The application is designed to comply with the standards for accounting for income taxes under US GAAP ASC740 and IFRS IAS12.

Those who are not accounting background , can understand

A Tax Provision is…

• a quarterly and annual disclosure (10Q & 10K)
• a key part of the Financial Close
• required for US GAAP & IFRS

Donot get confused with As Tax Provision is NOT…

• a tax return
• a requirement for the IRS (US), HMR&C (UK),
• or other revenue agencies…

To summarize, The new Module encompasses all stages of the corporate tax provision process:

• A tax provision calculation engine that addresses US GAAP, IFRS, and statutory tax reporting
• A web-based tax package and integrated workflow for global data collection
• Integrated with Oracle Hyperion Financial Managment, the solution that is based on the same technology trusted by thousands of corporate finance organizations.
• An easy-to-use wizard for automation of tax differences
• A comprehensive suite of tax reports for the consolidated tax provision – including the tax disclosure
• Reconciliation of the tax accounts to the accounting data, and generation of the tax journal entry
• A return-to-accrual process that integrates and enhances the tax compliance process
• Configurable supplemental schedules to address unique data collection and calculation requirements

Why this software care about Tax?

1. The Tax Provision is very material number
2. It is a key part of the Financial Close (e.g. same value proposition)
3. Replacing Excel
4. The tax department is a new audience
5. The Hyperion solution can have a material impact

Hyperion Tax Provision provides the tax department with the same strong data collection and management tools that the finance department is accustomed to. By providing the tax department with the same platform as is used by the finance department, the coordination between the two departments improves the financial close process, since the financial close cannot be complete without the tax close.You can get further details at Oracle site .

Installing Hyperion Tax Provision
The Hyperion Tax Provision requires, at minimum, Hyperion Financial Management Release 11.1.2.2 with Patch Set Update: 11.1.2.2.303.

REIT is a company that mainly owns, and in most cases, operates income-producing real estate such as apartments, shopping centers,offices, hotels and warehouses. Some REITs also engage in financing real estate. The shares of many REITs are traded on major stock exchanges.

With changes in the tax rates, a number of other operating businesses are evaluating the benefits of conversion to a REIT status.

As a real estate investment trust, a company is allowed to distribute 90% of its taxable income to its shareholders and is subject to lower taxes. This Post will help you to gove more insights on REIT.

REITs can be bought and sold like listed securities and generates revenue through rental payments from the properties under it.

This revenue is distributed to the unit holders either on a semi-annual or annual basis. REITs are known to some as “pass-through entities” since they pass significant amount of their profits to investors.[ref:http://sqft.asia]

A REIT is an entity that:

• Owns, leases and operates income-producing real estate
• Holds at least 75% of total assets in real estate
• Derives at least 75% of gross income from real property rents, including storage revenues, or other real property sources
• Generates service and non-property related income within Taxable REIT Subsidiaries
• Distributes annually at least 90% of qualifying taxable income in the form of dividends

REIT structure provides significant benefits to stockholders

• Substantial tax savings
• Disciplined capital allocation strategy
• New opportunities for value creation

Are REITs located only in the US?

REITs are now global: Nearly 30 countries have adopted variations of the U.S. REIT model. Today, anyone in the world can invest in REITs around the world

What are some examples of REITs?

REITs own many of the shopping malls, apartment buildings, student housing complexes, homes, medical facilities, office buildings, hotels, cell towers and timberlands that we use every day.

These sort of companies currently exploring REIT status represent new REIT property types

Tower Companies
Tower companies build permanent structures on land and rent space on them to telecom companies.

Data Centers
Data center REITs lease server space to their tenants, and they have been in the index since 2004.

Storage
Storage REITs have been around for decades.

Prisons
Prison REITs first entered the index in the 1990s.

Lodging/ Resorts
There have been dedicated hotel REITs since 1970.

Infrastructure
There currently is an Infrastructure sector in the FTSE NAREIT All REITs Index.

Billboards and Gaming
There haven’t been billboard or gaming REITs in the index in the past, but their basic business models, like those of other REITs, involve providing land and the improvements on it for lease to tenants.

Are all REITs the same?

The REIT industry has a diverse profile, which offers many benefits.

Types of REITs

REITs often are classified in one of two major categories: equity REITs or mortgage REITs.

• Equity REITs derive most of their revenue from rent.
• Mortgage REITs derive most of their revenue from interest earned on their investments in mortgages or mortgage backed securities.

A third type is Hybrid REITs – A combination of the two aforementioned REITs

REITs can be publicly registered with the SEC and have their shares listed and traded on major stock exchanges, publicly registered with the SEC but not have their shares listed or traded on major stock exchanges, or private (not registered with the SEC and not having their shares listed or traded).

Source from Internet , Ninety percent of listed REITs are Equity REITs; the remaining 10 percent are Mortgage REITs.

Qualification as REIT for U.S. Tax Purposes

In order for a company to qualify as a REIT, it must comply with certain provisions within the Internal Revenue Code.

As required by the Tax Code, a REIT must:

• Be an entity that is taxable as a corporation
• Be managed by a board of directors or trustees
• Have shares that are fully transferable
• Have a minimum of 100 shareholders
• Have no more than 50 percent of its shares held by five or fewer individuals during the last half of the taxable year
• Invest at least 75 percent of its total assets in real estate assets
• Derive at least 75 percent of its gross income from rents from real property or interest on mortgages financing real property
• Have no more than 25 percent of its assets consist of stock in taxable REIT subsidiaries
• Pay annually at least 90 percent of its taxable income in the form of shareholder dividends

Why should someone invest in REITs? What advantages can REITs potentially offer investors? [ Source Internet]

• Diversification: Equity REITs invest in many different property types in all 50 states, bringing investment diversification by property and geography to investor portfolios. Over the long term, equity REIT returns have followed a path that has been different than the path of returns for other stocks, an important source of portfolio diversification.
• Dividends: REITs must pay out at least 90 percent of their taxable income as dividends to shareholders who in turn pay income taxes on those dividends at ordinary rates.
• Liquidity: REIT is a liquid investment when it is listed as a shares or units of a listed REIT and traded like any others stock on the stock exchange. REIT able provides greater investment flexibility, with ability to react more quickly to change in market conditions, in comparison to investing in physical property.
• Performance: Over the 30 years ended March 28, 2013, publicly traded equity REITs outperformed the leading stock market indexes, including the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrials and NASDAQ Composite.
• Transparency: REITs are governed by the respective exchange regulations and are mandated by law to submit disclosures every quarter or year. This makes REITs highly transparent investment instruments.
• Growth: Over long holding periods, equity REIT returns have tended to outpace the rate of inflation, helping investors hedge the purchasing power of their portfolios.

Who manages a REIT?

• Like other publicly traded companies, a REIT’s executive management team operates the company, deciding what properties it will own and manage.
• Management’s decisions are overseen by a board of directors that is responsible to the shareholders.

REIT Provides Significant Stockholder Benefits

Three Key Value Drivers

• Higher dividends over time supported by
• U.S. federal & state income tax savings
• Higher distributable pre-tax income
• Both U.S. & international rental (QRS) income

Facts About REIT Conversions

A number of companies have announced recently that they are exploring converting to a REIT. Why?

There are two primary reasons a company would consider converting to a REIT:

1) Business model and core competencies – REIT status is available to companies that are primarily real estate companies, the majority of whose revenues and assets come from real estate. They’re choosing to focus on their core real estate business and operate as REITs.

2) Macro-economic trends – Today’s slow-growth economic environment and the Federal Reserve’s commitment to keep interest rates low for an extended period have produced a global search for yield and strong valuations for income stocks. The requirement that REITs pay out at least 90 percent of their taxable income as dividends makes them especially desirable now as excellent income stocks.

Globalization of Real Estate Securities

Many countries have adopted a REIT-type structure:

• LPT – Listed Property Trusts (Australia)
• Dutch FBI – Fiscal Beleggings Instelling (Netherlands)
• S-REIT – Singapore Real Estate Investment Trust
• J-REIT – Japanese Real Estate Investment Trust
• SIIC – Sociétés d’investissements Immobiliers Cotées (France)
• Canadian REITs – Legislated in 1993, growing universe
• Belgium REITs – Growing universe
• Hong Kong REITs – Largest REIT IPO Completed in November 2005
• Bulgarian REITs – Newest country with REIT legislation
• Malaysian REITs – Growing universe

Oracle with Endeca plans to create a comprehensive technology platform to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together enabling businesses to make stronger and more profitable decisions.

Therefore, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (Formerly Endeca Latitude) is an enterprise data discovery platform for rapid, intuitive exploration and analysis of data from any combination of structured and unstructured sources.

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery enables organizations to extend their existing business analytics investments to unstructured sources – including social media, websites, content systems, email, and
database text – providing unprecedented visibility into data and business processes, saving time and cost, and leading to better business decisions.

With Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, users can:

• Easily combine structured and unstructured data and metadata to understand key metrics in their relevant context and evaluate new business situations.
• Ask unanticipated questions of any data through intuitive, flexible, and highly interactive online discovery applications.
• Mash up and recombine data and visualizations to compose discovery applications.
• Leverage all of the rich metadata of existing Business Intelligence data models and semantic layers as a basis upon which to build discovery applications.
• Unburden IT from the constant chasing of new requirements and non-traditional data sources for incorporation into the data warehouse, enabling them to deliver fast access to relevant data and selfservice to business users while maintaining security, governance, and quality.

The Architecture for Oracle Endeca Information Discovery

Let’s start by briefly reviewing the Endeca Information Discovery architecture. The architecture consists of 3 main components:

• Oracle Endeca Server. This hybrid, search/analytical database provides unprecedented flexibility in combining diverse and changing data as well as extreme performance in analyzing that data. Oracle Endeca Server has the performance characteristics of in-memory architecture however is not memory bound. Oracle Endeca Server is also used extensively as an interactive search engine on many major e-commerce and media websites.
• Studio is a Discovery application composition environment for the Oracle Endeca Server. Studio provides drag and drop authoring to create highly interactive, visually-rich, enterprise- class information discovery applications.
• Integration Suite. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery includes a set of tools used for loading and optionally enriching diverse information—including structured and unstructured content—into Oracle Endeca Server.

This can be best understood as fig 1 below:

Apart from this there are Extensible Value-Added Modules are

• Oracle Endeca Content Management System Connectors- This add-on module allows for integration of content stored in various enterprise content management systems.This is currently supported systems include: EMC Documentum, EMC Documentum eRoom, FileNet P8, FileNet Document & Image Services, Interwoven TeamSite, Lotus Notes/Domino, Microsoft SharePoint, and OpenText LiveLink.
• Oracle Endeca Text Enrichment. This add-on module includes text analysis capabilities for extraction of people, places, organizations, quotes, and themes as well as core summarization capabilities for automatic creation of abstracts or topical summaries.
• Oracle Endeca Text Enrichment with Sentiment Analysis. This add-on module includes all of the Text Enrichment capabilities as well as advanced text analysis for extraction of aggregate sentiment related to each extracted concept. Sentiment is extracted with a score indicating the positive and negative nature of a document or an entity in the document. These scores can be used within the faceted search experience by varying ranges of
  positivity and negativity.

What type of analysis is Oracle Endeca Information Discovery designed for?

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is in supporting a users’ need to better understand the data. In expanding analysis inputs beyond structured content to unstructured sources, users can better understand the color and qualitative insights which support quantitative results.

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery enables this type of analysis through Oracle Endeca Server, a hybrid search/analytical database that is specifically optimized for discovery, not reporting or online transaction processing.

Highly scalable, column-oriented, and in-memory – without being memory bound – Oracle Endeca Server supports navigation, search, and analysis of any kind of information including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured content.

This also provide a broad suite of packaged analytic applications to extend corporate business processes to include unstructured data

• Integrate unstructured data into ERP, Supply Chain, Human Capital, CRM and EPM applications
• Integrate unstructured data into specialized edge applications – PLM, MDM, Web Commerce, Analytic applications
• Extend industry specific business processes and vertical applications to include unstructured data

Search capabilities of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery provide

Oracle Endeca Information Discovery provides two different, and complementary, types of search:

1. Value – or dimension – search provides type-ahead autocompletion that enables users to find attribute values and help disambiguate queries by identifying which attributes contain the search terms.
2. Record search provides advanced full text search across any single or combination of fields, leveraging a variety of configurable term matching and relevancy ranking algorithms to retrieve results for display and analysis.

Know the facts and dependecy with other Prducts

1. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery part of Not of Oracle BI Foundation Suite, this is a separate licensed product.
2. If you don’t run Oracle BI. You can still benefit from Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, beacuse the diversity of supported data sources is a strength of this product.
3. Oracle Endeca Server exposes web services for querying existing BI tools.
4. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery enhances existing business intelligence applications by extending analysis to unstructured sources and supporting exploratory data analysis.
5. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is certified on Exalytics.
6. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery’s primary benefit with respect to Big Data (Read the previous post on Big data) is in solving the problem of Big Variety – relevant data sources for business analysis have never been more diverse, and an increasing share of this information is unstructured.
7. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery and Hadoop are highly complementary technologies

Resources for Oracle Endeca Information Discovery (OEID)

• Product Documentation
• Oracle EID Youtube channel
• Oracle Endeca Information Discovery Wiki

Oracle MDM Suite – These are the set of applications (MDM Hubs) designed to consolidate, cleanse, enrich, and synchronize these key business data objects across the enterprise and across time.

It includes pre-defined comprehensive data models with powerful applications to load, cleanse, govern and share the master data with all business processes, operational applications and business intelligence systems.

This includes following components –

• Oracle Customer Hub (Siebel UCM) – Enables an enterprise to manage customer data over the full customer lifecycle.
• Oracle Product Hub – Provids customers to centralize all product information from heterogeneous systems, creating a single product repository that can be leveraged across all functional departments. Details can be obtained at previous post
• Oracle Site Hub – Delivers a competitive advantage in site-driven business decisions
• Oracle Supplier Hub – Provides all the tools needed to onboard, evaluate, and manage suppliers across your trading lifecycle
• Oracle Data Relationship Management – A powerful financial reference data master, with best in class hierarchy management capabilities, and a business user friendly enterprise dimension mastering tool with deep integration into Enterprise Performance Management (Hyperion)

Oracle Exadata Database Machine

Oracle Exadata is the only database machine that provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and OLTP applications, making it the ideal platform for consolidating on private clouds.

It is a complete package of servers, storage, networking, and software that is massively scalable, secure, and redundant.

Simple and fast to implement, it is ready to tackle your largest and most important database applications – and often them 10 times faster, or more.

Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine

The industry’s first in-memory BI machine that delivers the fastest performance for business intelligence and planning applications

Best-in-class enterprise BI platform, in-memory analytics software, and hardware optimized to work together

Advanced data visualization and exploration to quickly provide actionable insight from large amounts of data

Fastest solution for business intelligence, modeling, forecasting, and planning applications

Access to all Oracle and non-Oracle enterprise data sources

No limits on your users, your data, or your applications

Oracle Advanced Analytics

Oracle Advanced Analytics extends the Oracle database into a comprehensive advanced analytics platform through two major components: Oracle R Enterprise and Oracle Data Mining.

With Oracle Advanced Analytics, customers have a comprehensive platform for real-time analytics that delivers insight into key business subjects such as churn prediction, product recommendations, and fraud alerting.

Oracle NoSql Database

The Oracle NoSQL Database is a distributed key-value database. It is designed to provide highly reliable, scalable and available data storage across a configurable set of systems that function as storage nodes.

Key Features are

• Simple Data Model
• Scalability
• Predictable Behavior
• High Availability
• Easy Administration

Oracle Big Data Appliance

An engineered system optimized for acquiring, organizing, and loading unstructured data into Oracle Database 11g. It combines optimized hardware components with new software solutions to deliver the most complete big data solution.

Pre-integrated full rack configuration with 18 of Oracle’s Sun servers that include InfiniBand and Ethernet connectivity to simplify implementation and management

• Cloudera distribution including Apache Hadoop to acquire and organize data
• Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition to acquire data
• Additional system software including Oracle Linux, Oracle Java Hotspot VM, and an open source distribution of R

Oracle Big Data Connectors

Suite of software designed to connect big data software with data in Oracle Database 11g.

• Oracle Loader for Hadoop
• Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop
• Oracle R Connector for Hadoop
• Oracle Direct Connector for HDFS

Oracle offers a broad portfolio of products to help enterprises acquire, manage, and integrate big data with existing information, with the goal of achieving a complete view of business in the fastest, most reliable, and cost effective way .

Oracle’s Big Data Appliance, and Oracle Big Data Connectors is one such solution and portfolio of products bundled together to provide an integrated solution. The good about Oracle Big Data Appliance comes with fact that the process of Acquire, Organize and Analyze work quite closely with their proven Oracle RDBMS technology and thus gives Enterprises flexibility to cover SQL and NoSQL (Key-Value store databases for unstructured, semi-structured data) within the horizon of their analytical needs.

The Oracle Big Data Appliance is an engineered system of hardware and software designed to help enterprises derive maximum value from their big data strategies. It combines optimized hardware with a comprehensive software stack featuring specialized solutions developed by Oracle to deliver a complete, easy-to-deploy offering for acquiring, organizing and analyzing big data, with enterprise-class performance, availability, supportability, and security.

The Oracle Big Data Appliance integrated software includes :

• Full distribution of Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH)
• Cloudera Manager to administer all aspects of Cloudera CDH
• Open source distribution of the statistical package R for analysis of unfiltered data on Oracle Big Data Appliance
• Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition3
• And Oracle Enterprise Linux operating system and Oracle Java VM

The Oracle Big Data Appliance offers the following benefits:

• Rapid provisioning of a highly-available and scalable system for managing massive amounts of data
• A high-performance platform for acquiring, organizing, and analyzing big data in Hadoop and using R on raw-data sources
• Control of IT costs by pre-integrating all hardware and software components into a single big data solution that complements enterprise data warehouses

Oracle Big Data Connectors is an optimized software suite to help enterprises integrate data stored in Hadoop or Oracle NoSQL Databases with Oracle Database 11g. It enables very fast data movements between these two environments using Oracle Loader for Hadoop and Oracle Direct Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), while Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop and Oracle R Connector for Hadoop provide non-Hadoop experts with easier access to HDFS data and MapReduce functionality.

Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine is purpose-built to deliver the fastest performance for business intelligence (BI) and planning applications. It is designed to provide real-time, speed-of-thought visual analysis, and enable new types of analytic applications so organizations can make decisions faster in the context of rapidly shifting business conditions, while broadening user adoption of BI though introduction of interactive visualization capabilities. Organizations can extend BI initiatives beyond reporting and dashboards to modeling, planning, forecasting, and predictive analytics.

These offerings, along with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Database 11g, create a complete set of technologies for leveraging and integrating big data, and help enterprises quickly and efficiently turn information into insight.

More Information

Data sheets, white papers and other interesting information can be found here:

• Big Data OverView
• BigData Connector OverView
• Big Data Appliance OTN page
• Big Data Connectors OTN page