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Smart Communications Expands AI-Powered Migration to Help Enterprises Cut Legacy Costs and Move to AI Faster

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AI-assisted migration, expert services, and flexible commercial models make it faster, lower-risk, and more affordable to consolidate legacy communications systems

SYDNEY, Oct. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Smart Communications, a leading customer engagement technology provider for regulated industries, today announced expanded AI-enhanced migration capabilities to help enterprises lower technical cost, reduce dependency on legacy communications systems, and build the foundation they need to responsibly adopt AI.

Regulated enterprises across insurance, financial services, healthcare, and government operate multiple communications systems often accumulated through decades of growth and acquisitions. Consolidating onto a modern platform can reduce cost and complexity; however, the expense and disruption of such a migration often delay those plans.

Meanwhile, communications volumes continue to grow. According to IDC, 57% of organisations still rely on legacy technology to create, manage, and deliver customer communications, while 64% are producing at least 20% more communications than a year ago.[1]

“Most enterprises know where they need to go. The difficult part is the journey,” said Heidi Johnson, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Smart Communications. “Legacy complexity makes it harder to consolidate, modernise and put AI to work at scale. By using AI to collapse the cost and time of migration, while maintaining human oversight and the audit trail regulated organisations require, we can help turn modernisation from a ‘next year’ ambition into an achievable initiative today.”

Less Manual Work, a Clearer Plan

Smart Communications’ offering covers migration from start to finish. AI first analyses an organisation’s existing communications, finding duplication and consolidation opportunities across thousands of documents. The results become a Migration Blueprint: a clear, prioritised plan for modernisation.

An AI conversion engine then turns legacy documents into modern, reusable templates. The benefit is it removes much of the slow, manual rework that has traditionally made migration so expensive. Customers stay in control from start to finish, working alongside Smart’s migration experts to review and validate every conversion, deciding what is migrated and approved for deployment.

A foundation for AI

Consolidation does more than cut costs. It gives enterprises a single, governed source of trusted communications, allowing them to use AI safely and at scale for more personalised, automated customer experiences.

“Migration is now an opportunity, rather than solely a cost consideration, when changing vendors,” said Amy Machado, Research Director, IDC. “AI-assisted template reconstruction is cutting migration timelines, which means switching costs — long the biggest moat in this market — are eroding. That’s good news for buyers and a wake-up call for incumbents.”[1]

Proven results

Smart Communications has helped hundreds of large enterprises in insurance, financial services, and healthcare modernise complex communications environments.

“We had an ambitious timeline for a complex implementation, and the Smart Communications team helped us deliver it in just a few months,” said Anna Hewer, Business Improvement Manager at Aptia, a leading provider of pension administration, consultancy and actuarial services. “It was a true partnership that helped us achieve our goals.”

[1]Source: IDC, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Intelligent Customer Communication Management 2026 Vendor Assessment, #US54131626

About Smart Communications

Smart Communications is a leading customer engagement technology provider for regulated industries. The company helps organisations simplify the complex interactions that shape people’s lives by enabling more connected, personalised, and trusted customer engagement. Its Customer Engagement Platform brings together data collection, customer communications, journey orchestration, trusted AI, and information management to help organisations create seamless experiences across the customer lifecycle. By connecting the systems, processes, and interactions that drive critical business outcomes, Smart Communications enables organisations to improve customer experience, increase operational efficiency, strengthen compliance, and build trust at every touchpoint. More than 700 enterprises worldwide, including Zurich Insurance, Priority Health, The Pacific Financial Group, and The Bancorp, rely on Smart Communications to power engagement in regulated environments. With more than 30 pre-built integrations to leading enterprise platforms, including Salesforce, AWS, Guidewire, Duck Creek, OneSpan, and Pega, Smart Communications powers more than 60 billion mission-critical customer interactions each year.

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SOURCE Smart Communications

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Neudata appoints Richard Barnett as Chief Product Officer

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LONDON, Oct. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Neudata, a global leader in alternative and market data intelligence, today announced the appointment of Richard Barnett as Chief Product Officer. The appointment comes as Neudata increases its focus on product innovation and accelerates the development of new solutions in response to evolving client and market needs. Based in London, Richard joins Neudata’s leadership team and will lead the company’s product strategy, portfolio and roadmap.

Rado Lipuš, CEO and founder of Neudata, said: “Our ambition is to make Neudata one of the most innovative companies in the data intelligence market. Our deep understanding of both the data landscape and the needs of institutional investors gives us a unique perspective on how the market is evolving, particularly as AI creates new ways to use and derive value from data. Through initiatives such as the Neudata Innovation Lab, we want to move quickly to turn those insights into new products and solutions. Richard brings the experience, creativity and product leadership we need to accelerate that ambition.”

With over 20 years of product leadership experience across financial information and B2B software, Richard has held senior product and digital leadership roles at Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, building and leading global product and UX teams across some of the industry’s most widely used platforms. More recently, he has advised established and scaling businesses on product strategy and transformation, and served as fractional CPO at Instinct Digital, where he led product strategy and the development of AI-enabled capabilities for asset managers.

At Neudata, Richard will lead the product management team and oversee the company’s product portfolio, translating client needs and market insights into a clear roadmap for development and growth. He will work closely with the Neudata Innovation Lab to assess new opportunities and bring validated ideas into the roadmap. His initial priorities will include advancing Neudata Ranger, the company’s market data intelligence product, helping clients evaluate market data providers and make more informed sourcing decisions.

Neudata’s Innovation Lab brings together insights from across the company, its clients, partners and the wider data market to identify unmet needs, test ideas and validate opportunities for new products and features.

Richard Barnett said: “Neudata combines deep knowledge of the data market with a close understanding of what clients need. That’s a strong foundation to build on. I’m looking forward to working with the team to develop products that help clients make better decisions about data, build on Ranger’s capabilities and address new opportunities as the market evolves.”

About Neudata

Neudata is an independent alternative and market data intelligence platform connecting institutional data buyers with data providers. Founded over 10 years ago, Neudata today connects more than 1,000 data buyers with over 4,400 data providers and 11,000+ datasets, providing unbiased research and analysis that helps clients discover, evaluate and manage external datasets with confidence. A team of 100 people across London, New York and Shanghai runs Neudata’s Scout and Ranger platforms, its global events programme and its 1-to-1 networking programme, AltDating. Neudata also helps organisations monetise their existing data assets through its consulting services. For more information, visit www.neudata.co.

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Avalara Helps Global Businesses Move Faster as Tax and Compliance Complexity Accelerates

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Fortnum & Mason and ASOS share how automation helps them grow across markets

LONDON, Oct. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Avalara, Inc., the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance, today opened its CRUSH Europe customer conference by showing how businesses can use automation and agentic AI to manage growing tax and compliance complexity while moving faster across markets. Fortnum & Mason and ASOS joined Avalara at the conference to share how their organizations are using compliance automation to support global growth as regulatory requirements become increasingly digital, interconnected, and real-time.

Selling at speed and global scale

Fortnum & Mason, a 315-year-old British institution, ships to customers in nearly 90 countries. Automating sales tax, import tax, and duties calculations, including the complex classification of food and non-food goods, allows the team to focus on serving customers and delivering exceptional products and services. The company shared its story at Avalara’s conference.

“When delivering across multiple countries and some unique destinations, accurate tax and duties calculations are essential,” said Nataliya Schipka, Director of Finance at Fortnum & Mason. “Automating cross-border compliance allows us to focus on serving customers wherever they are, rather than being constrained by the complexity of compliance.”

Fortnum & Mason was joined at CRUSH Europe by ASOS, one of the world’s leading online fashion retailers. Operating at the pace of global fashion means launching products, entering markets, and adapting to regulatory change quickly, while delivering a seamless checkout experience for customers around the world. ASOS uses compliance automation to support that speed and scale without relying on added headcount simply to keep pace with growing complexity.

Their experiences reflect a broader challenge facing businesses across Europe. Tax and compliance requirements are becoming more interconnected, more digital, and increasingly real-time, while businesses are under pressure to move faster. For years, software has automated individual compliance tasks, but much of the work between those tasks and systems has remained manual. Avalara believes meeting that challenge requires rethinking how the work gets done.

New purpose-built agentic AI solutions for tax and compliance

At CRUSH Europe, Avalara showed how agentic AI can help close those gaps by orchestrating work across tax and compliance processes and systems.

Avalara Aviator, which is generally available today, is the company’s new agent hub for tax and compliance. It’s designed to turn days of manual work into minutes of oversight, with an audit-defensible record for every action. Intelligent agents can understand context, coordinate work, monitor variance, and take action, while bringing people in when judgment or approval is required.

Among other compliance operations, Avalara Aviator can map products to tax codes, validate exemption certificates, auto-generate tax matrices, configure custom rules, and analyze results across applications. It is grounded in trusted tax content, deep compliance expertise, proprietary data, deterministic technology, and governance Avalara has built over more than 22 years, informed by more than £2.1 trillion in transactions Avalara handles annually.

Versori by Avalara, Avalara’s agentic integration fabric, addresses another critical part of that challenge: bringing tax and compliance intelligence into the systems and data where businesses already work. In an agentic world, compliance work won’t always begin inside compliance software. It may start in an ERP, an e-commerce platform, a finance system, or an AI agent. Versori uses specialized AI agents to research, build, test, and deploy production-grade connectors in days rather than months at a fraction of the cost of traditional integration tools. 

“AI is changing how work gets done across every industry,” said Hugo Sarrazin, Chief Executive Officer at Avalara, in his CRUSH keynote. “But agentic AI is different. It can execute multi-step work, continuously monitor what is changing, and bring people in when judgment or approval is required. The opportunity is automation and control, not one at the expense of the other. In tax, the calculation still has to be right. The filing still has to be defensible. And the person accountable is still a person.”

Built for Europe’s mandate wave

Governments across Europe are moving compliance closer to the transaction, and mandatory e-invoicing will extend digital reporting to cross-border B2B transactions across the EU from 2030. Avalara lets businesses integrate once through a single global API, then activate individual country mandates through configuration rather than repeated reimplementation. Avalara has been an approved platform in France since September 2026 and expects to be ready for Germany in January 2027 and Spain in October 2027. Avalara was recently named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide E-Invoicing Compliance Solutions 2026 Vendor Assessment (doc #EUR154882626, September 2026).

About Avalara
Avalara is the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance. For more than two decades, Avalara’s trusted tax content, deep compliance expertise, proprietary data, and technology have helped customers succeed on a global scale. Avalara now pairs that foundation with agentic AI to help businesses execute complex compliance work while keeping people in control. Avalara processes more than 54 billion AvaTax API calls annually and supports millions of businesses worldwide. For more information, visit Avalara.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding Avalara’s product plans, technology capabilities, and expected availability dates. These statements describe Avalara’s intentions as of the date of release and are subject to change without notice.

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SOURCE Avalara, Inc.

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Reliance Digital’s Festival of Electronics Sale Is Live: Best Deals on iPhone 17 Pro, TVs, ACs, Laptops & Top Electronics

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The Festival of Electronics Sale features the best deals across mobiles, laptops and top electronics, with the iPhone 17 Pro 256GB at ₹56,990*, Toshiba 55-inch Mini LED TV at ₹49,990* and Samsung 1.5T Inverter AC at ₹33,890*. Customers can also shop deals on smartphones, laptops, TVs, air conditioners and other consumer electronics, with an assured exchange bonus of up to ₹20,000* and bank offers of up to ₹30,000*.

MUMBAI, India, Oct. 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — This festive season, Reliance Digital brings back its much-awaited Festival of Electronics, inviting consumers to upgrade, gift and bring home the technology they have been waiting to #CelebrateWithNoExcuses.

This year’s campaign celebrates the idea that the festive season is the perfect time to stop postponing those upgrades and make celebrations bigger, smarter and more memorable. With great deals across leading electronics categories, consumers can find something for every festive need, from entertainment and smartphones to home appliances.

Deals on Phones, TVs and Home Appliances

Among the featured offers, the iPhone 17 Pro 256GB is priced at ₹56,990*. Entertainment and home appliance deals include:

Dell 13 XPS Intel Core 5 at ₹64,999*LG Mini LED at ₹37,990*Samsung 1.5T Inverter AC at ₹29,990*

The list also covers LG 10 Kg Front Load Washing machine at Rs.39,990* and Marshall Emberton II Bluetooth Speaker at ₹10,999*.

Exchange, Second-Product and Bank Offers

Beyond individual product prices, the sale includes three broader offers:

An assured exchange bonus of up to ₹20,000*Flat 50% off on the second product*Discounts of up to ₹30,000 on leading bank cards and consumer loans*

A Campaign Built Around ‘No Excuses’

This year’s campaign centers on the idea that the festive season is the right moment to make celebrations bigger, smarter and more memorable. Under the #CelebrateWithNoExcuses banner, Reliance Digital is positioning the sale as a reason to stop waiting for ‘later’ or ‘next year’.

The Festival of Electronics covers entertainment, smartphones and home appliances, aiming to offer something for every festive need, whether shoppers are upgrading, gifting or buying for the home.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Festival of Electronics?
It is Reliance Digital’s festive-season electronics sale, returning in 2026 with offers across smartphones, TVs, home appliances, laptops and audio products.

Which products are featured in the sale?
Featured products include the iPhone 17 Pro, Dell 13 XPS Intel Core 5 Laptop, LG Mini LED TV, Samsung 1.5T Inverter AC , Samsung Front Load Washing Machine and Marshall Emberton II Bluetooth Speaker.

How much does the iPhone 17 Pro 256GB cost in the sale?
It is priced at ₹56,990*, subject to terms and conditions.

What is the maximum exchange bonus?
Up to ₹20,000* as an assured exchange bonus.

What is the second-product offer?
Shop for 15000 or above and get 50% off on select accessories. Offer applicable till stock lasts. Offer Valid till 15th Nov’26.

What bank card and loan offers are available?
Up to ₹30,000 discount on leading bank cards and consumer loans*.

When does the sale end?
The end date has not been announced.

What is the campaign hashtag?
#CelebrateWithNoExcuses

*Terms and conditions apply

About Reliance Digital:

Reliance Digital is India’s largest electronics retailer, present in over 800 cities with more than 700+ large-format Reliance Digital stores and 900+ My Jio stores, serving customers in every corner of the country and making the latest technology accessible to all. With over 300 international and national brands and more than 5,000 products at the best prices, Reliance Digital offers the largest selection of models to help customers find the right technology for their lifestyle. The trained and well-informed staff at every store are always ready to guide customers through every detail of each product. Importantly, Reliance Digital provides after-sales service for all its products through Reliance resQ, the service arm of the retailer and India’s only ISO 9001-certified electronics service brand. Reliance resQ is available all week and is fully equipped to provide end-to-end solutions.

For ease of purchase, customers can visit any Reliance Digital store, shop online at www.reliancedigital.in 

 

 

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