Toronto-based Pungle Inc., enables its customers to deliver real-time electronic, business payments. This applied research collaboration with Seneca will develop a cash-flow optimization service for Pungle users. This new service, which will be seamlessly integrated into the Pungle platform, will utilize user-specific transactional data to predict the optimal discounts required to ensure timely invoice payments. By integrating this value-added feature, Pungle will increase customer retention and provide a competitive advantage over other real-time payment businesses. Pungle will engage with Professor Ramy Taraboulsi, supported by two Research Assistants from Seneca's School of School of Accounting and Financial Services and two from our School of Information and Communications Technology. The developed software will enhance Pungle's ability to capture the Canadian marketplace, helping SMEs to improve their businesses and better control cash flows. The resulting growth of the company will lead to dozens of new software development and financial services jobs in the next three to five years.

Funder: The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)

The Canadian Employee Relocation Council (CERC) is Canada’s leading authority on employee relocation. Established in 1982, CERC is a membership organization whose goal is to provide leadership, services and assistance to members enabling them to effectively serve relocated families by addressing issues that impact workforce mobility both domestically and internationally.

CERC is collaborating with Seneca researchers to develop global mobility, risk-control frameworks. The result will be a series of recommendations, best-practices, and information resources which CERC can provide to its members, enabling its member companies to develop internal, risk-control frameworks for moving employees between countries. Seneca will draw on the expertise of student Research Assistants in Seneca’s School of Leadership and Human Resources under the guidance of Professor Cal Barber to understand existing global mobility and risk-control frameworks. This information will then be used to develop resources around the wide variety of regulatory hurdles associated with global mobility, such as tax, immigration, data privacy, and country-specific employment regulations, and identify upcoming trends in these regulatory areas.

CERC will utilize the results to assist its members in developing compliance-oriented, risk-control frameworks to reduce the complexity of employee relocation and avoid unnecessary penalties associated with non-compliance.

Funder: The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and OCE in a combined Engage/ VIP1 grant.

VigilantCS is a provider of intelligent, cloud-based, staff-conduct risk platforms for the financial securities industry. Their software solutions lower compliance-related costs by providing best practices, tracking current issues, and mitigating future challenges. Their product, the VCSOpen Staff Compliance Platform provides the industry with comprehensive functionality to manage the compliance needs of registered securities staff through a single, staff-facing portal. VigilantCS has identified the life insurance industry as their next target market, as compliance oversight provides significant opportunity to improve operational efficiency, lower costs, and reduce risk. VigilantCS is collaborating with Rohan Singh, Professor in the School of Accounting and Financial Services and student Research Assistants to research the life insurance industry regulatory environment, assess current and future needs and concern, create validated use-cases for a variety of users, and map regulatory information and risks to each case. The outputs from the project are the best practices and future outlook for regulations and compliance in the life insurance industry and will enable VigilantCS to access new markets for their VCSOpen product.

Funder: The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)