Montenegro’s unemployment rate rose to 20.5% at the end of December, up by 0.2 of a percentage point compared to the previous month, data by the country's employment agency showed.
The number of unemployed persons in Montenegro increased by 1.0% on the month to 47,509 at the end of December 2020, the statistical office said in a statement.
At the end of December 2019, the unemployment rate in Montenegro stood at 16.2%.

US-based global technology company ThoughtWorks said that it has agreed to acquire Romanian software development and consulting services firm Gemini Solutions for an undisclosed sum.
This acquisition is expected to significantly improve ThoughtWorks' ability to support and service clients, especially in Europe, the Chicago-based company said in a press release on Wednesday.
The transaction is expected to close later this month, subject to the satisfaction of closing conditions. 
The Gemini Solutions team will provide nearshore support for ThoughtWorks’ clients in the UK and Germany as well as continued support for existing clients in North America, France and Germany.
Serban Tir, previously the chief technology officer of Gemini Solutions, will serve as general manager of ThoughtWorks Romania.
"The team will form a key part of ThoughtWorks’ global as well as European expansion plans. We have been seeking a premium partner to help increase our nearshore delivery capability and capacity especially in Europe and Gemini Solutions is a strong fit," ThoughtWorks president and CEO Guo Xiao said.
Gemini Solutions was founded in 2005 in San Francisco by Romanian entrepreneurs Theo Nissim and Florin Parlea, a group of Silicon Valley Romanian technologists. The company's main activity is in Romania, where it has over 170 team members working in offices located in Bucharest, Cluj and lasi.
Founded in 1993, ThoughtWorks currently provides software design and delivery, and tools and consulting services through 43 offices in 14 countries. 

Global technology services company NTT Ltd has leased more than 2,300 sqm in Business Garden Bucharest for its new global shared services centre.
The London-headquartered company is owned by Japanese telecoms giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, which employs more than 40,000 people in 57 countries, and provides services in over 200 countries. The services include cloud-enabling, networking, hybrid cloud, data centres, digital transformation and cybersecurity.
Knight Frank assisted the company in identifying the location for its GSSC.
„With our new GSSC we are equipped to take the next step forward in our transformational journey in delivering a seamless experience to our clients and employees. To achieve this, we plan to grow our presence in Bucharest and are expecting to hire over 100 new employees in the coming months”, said Scott Carolan, the senior vice-president for business operations and optimisation in Europe at NTT Ltd.
With this transaction, Business Garden Bucharest is 80 pct leased. The 43,000 sqm, three-building complex is situated on Calea Plevnei in Belvedere district, just northwest of the city centre. It is LEED ‘Platinum’ certified. Vastint is the developer and owner of the complex.

SSCs in Hungary are increasingly voting in favor of large rural cities. The decline in the centrality of Budapest is more noticeable year by year; according to surveys, 82.83% of the workforce employed in the sector in 2013, and 84.76% in 2014, were in the capital.
By 2019, this figure was only 76.48%, indicating the development of a diversification strategy. Several provincial cities have consciously begun to attract these companies.  
The SSC sector within Hungary was able to really gain ground in Budapest. Seemingly ever more offices have been established since the 2000s, and today most of the more than 90 domestic SSCs are located here.
The very intensive demand for foreign language-speaking labor has reached such proportions that nowadays it is said that Budapest is “overheated”, which means that the demand significantly exceeds the supply. This started a spiral of wages and, in part to avoid this, a shift.
“In terms of having a center in Budapest or in a Tier 2 city, there is no significant difference in managing their operations, as BSCs are among the most digitized and digitalized workplaces in Hungary, and also worldwide,” Richárd Ránki, director of the Hungarian Service and Outsourcing Association (HOA) tells the Budapest Business Journal.
It has been a trend for more than five years that Hungarian SSCs and BSCs are targeting rural cities, says Katalin Fritzné Szénási, the ideas manager of the SSC Szeged Project. In this university city 175 km southeast of Budapest, they mapped out what the service centers needed, and what would make the city attractive.
The answer was high-quality office buildings with as many foreign-speaking young people as possible, mainly graduates, an investment-friendly city management and good infrastructural facilities. The big cities in the countryside can certainly compete with Budapest, Szénási believes.
The rural university cities have an absolute advantage over other provincial towns because there must be a continuous supply of labor in the catchment area to meet the sector’s requirements in the long run.
Thus, the SSC Szeged project was established with the cooperation of the Szeged city municipality, the Faculty of Economics and Humanities of the University of Szeged, and Szeged Pólus Nonprofit Fejlesztési Kft.

Source: https://bbj.hu/economy/statistics/analysis/the-budapest-vs-countryside-equation-in-ssc-location

KPMG in Romania announced that it has partnered with leading enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software company, UiPath, to jointly develop and deliver intelligent automation solutions to clients. Together, KPMG Romania and UiPath will enable organizations to achieve business-wide digital transformation, leveraging emerging technologies to transform operating models, to innovate to remain competitive, and to reimagine the customer experience.

The partnership represents the next stage in RPA collaboration between both firms, with a focus on implementing and managing large-scale, transformational digital programs. KPMG in Romania’s expertise in consulting and implementation will build on the capability, agility, and scalability advantages inherent in UiPath’s robust end-to-end automation platform.
Identifying the tasks best fitted to automate and delivering key expertise in change management, the KPMG Romania Lighthouse team delivers the strategy, design, development and implementation ability needed to transform the way our clients operate.
With this alliance, KPMG in Romania is included in the select list of UiPath Diamond partners, motivating us to create more innovative products to help optimize our clients’ productivity, enhance their effectiveness and cut costs”.
UiPath has a vision to deliver a Fully Automated Enterprise™, one where companies use automation to unlock their greatest potential. Only UiPath offers an end-to-end platform for automation, combining the leading RPA solution with a full suite of capabilities that enable every organization to scale digital business operations at unprecedented speed.
Through this alliance, KPMG in Romania gains capabilities to provide a faster response to the complex needs of existing and future customers looking to reshape their business processes through intelligent automation, and can provide clients with industry-leading tools and expertise required for large-scale RPA implementation.
“We’re pleased to work with KPMG in Romania, combining our efforts to help organizations easily decide what to automate and how to advance their digital transformation”, said Stina Gustavsson, Director Strategic Partnerships EMEA at UiPath. “Layering the KPMG services with our end-to-end automation platform allows us to enhance our offerings to joint customers. KPMG’s ability to provide services that support organizations throughout the entire RPA journey, from defining the strategy to continuous improvement and innovation, is key to delivering new automation capabilities.”

Yapily, a London-based fintech startup, has announced plans to set up in Vilnius, the company’s third European office. Yapily joins a growing number of UK fintechs including Revolut, Curve that chose Lithuania as the location for its European hub.
Yapily was established in 2017, shortly after the EU’s second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) granted third-party access to customer data of financial institutions. The legislation, which aims to stimulate competition in the financial services market, compelled providers of such services to innovate their API and open banking practices. Stefano Vaccino, Founder and CEO of Yapily, used his extensive experience in fintech and commercial banking to create Yapily, a platform that enables companies to take advantage of open banking.
Yapily connects businesses to banks and financial institutions using a single open API. Using the platform, companies can access their customers’ account information and gain a holistic financial view without having to build and maintain hundreds of APIs of their own. Powered by a secure and regulated service, Yapily manages and facilitates the connection to fetch information and initiate payments while ensuring PSD2 compliance.
“Yapily makes connecting to banks easy through sharing financial data and payments infrastructure,” explains Stefano Vaccino. “We connect you to thousands of banks using an open banking API, taking care of the complexity behind the scenes”.
Yapily’s vision of open banking has attracted significant investment. Since its inception, the company has raised $18.4 million in VC funding. Yapily’s investors include Holtzbrinck Ventures, LocalGlobe and Lakestar, an early investor in Skype, Spotify, Airbnb and Facebook as well as some of Europe’s biggest fintechs – Klarna and Revolut.
Yapily now allows companies to connect to more than 600 banks, providing 80% account coverage across 15 European countries. The company boasts customers ranging from innovative fintechs to Fortune 500 companies including American Express, IBM, Intuit Quickbooks, GoCardless and BUX. In the last 12 months, Yapily has tripled its headcount and currently employs 72 people in offices in the UK and Germany.
According to Stefano Vaccino, Yapily’s current focus is to penetrate the European market. “This involves building a scalable platform while accelerating testing capabilities for our European users”,” he says.

KPMG in Romania is pleased to announce that it has partnered with leading enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software company, UiPath, to jointly develop and deliver intelligent automation solutions to clients. Together, KPMG Romania and UiPath will enable organizations to achieve business-wide digital transformation, leveraging emerging technologies to transform operating models, to innovate to remain competitive, and to reimagine the customer experience.

The partnership represents the next stage in RPA collaboration between both firms, with a focus on implementing and managing large-scale, transformational digital programs. KPMG in Romania’s expertise in consulting and implementation will build on the capability, agility, and scalability advantages inherent in UiPath’s robust end-to-end automation platform.

As Richard Perrin, Partner and Head of Advisory at KPMG in Romania, comments: “KPMG in Romania has been developing its digital transformation services for clients for several years and our team includes some of the leading experts in the field. As competitive pressures continue to be strong, today’s companies cannot afford to neglect the opportunities which digital transformation can offer, both in terms of improved efficiency and also in terms of enhanced customer service. This new partnership with UiPath will further deepen the range of expertise we can offer our clients in the field of Robotic Process Automation.”

As Anemari Ionescu, Director, Digital Solutions at KPMG in Romania and of the Lighthouse Project, adds: “This alliance brings together two capabilities – excellence in advisory and deep industry expertise. KPMG Romania Lighthouse includes a dedicated team, which is UiPath certified. The expertise of this team is demonstrated by more than 100 cross- or industry-specific robots. These are used by our clients in areas such as financial services and banking, telecom, retail, oil&gas, health, and agriculture, in departments that include financial & accounting, human resources, sales, marketing, legal, and risk management.

With this alliance, KPMG in Romania is included in the select list of UiPath Diamond partners, motivating us to create more innovative products to help optimize our clients’ productivity, enhance their effectiveness and cut costs”.

Wipro will pay €40 million to acquire the IT assets of Metro in Germany, Romania and India, and take over 1,300 employees.

METRO AG executed an implementation of a multi-year digital and IT strategic partnership with Wipro Limited. Wipro Limited is a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company. Parts of the current internal IT unit Metro-Nom including more than 1,300 employees will be transferred to Wipro; the remaining units with around 1,000 employees will develop IT solutions for Metro AG’s operational business under the new brand Metro Digital.

Baker Mckenzie legal was advisor on the deal.

Full Story here.

U.S.-based global technology investment platform Recognize Partners is investing in Ciklum, one of the five largest IT outsourcing companies in Ukraine.
The company disclosed neither the sum of its investment nor the stake in Ciklum, citing business-sensitive information.
Ciklum will spend money on hiring new specialists. Now over 3,500 people work for the company. Its offices are located in Ukraine, Belarus, Spain, Poland and Pakistan.
“New investors see career opportunities for both current and new employees. We are currently increasing our teams locally and, in particular in Ukraine, we offer 100-150 jobs per month,” the press service of Ciklum wrote to the Kyiv Post.
“We plan to continue this growth aiming to double the number of employees in Ukraine during the next two-three years.”
In addition, Recognize’s partners – Frank D’Souza, Rajeev Mehta, Josh Miller – will join the board of directors at Ciklum.
“Ciklum is perfectly positioned to meet the demand for cutting-edge technological solutions with the exceptional quality of engineering talent it brings to clients. We look forward to supporting and accelerating the Company’s growth,” D’Souza said in its statement.
At the same time, AVentures Capital, a minority shareholder of Ciklum since 2019, sold its stake.
“It’s a happy ending after 5 years of joint history. In 2015, we attracted investments from the leading American investment fund to Ciklum. At that time, it was the largest investment in a Ukrainian IT company. After that, the Ukrainian IT sector received a wave of interest from international funds,” Andrey Kolodyuk, founder and managing partner of AVentures Capital, said, recalling the investment the company received from George Soros. Kolodyuk also has been a member of Ciklum’s board of directors since 2015.
Recognize is a newly established private equity fund. Its founders are Frank D’ Souza, co-founder and former CEO of Cognizant, Charles Phillips, former CEO of Infor and former President of Oracle, and financier David Wasserman, a long-time partner at Clayton, Dubilier & Rice.
Recognize manages $1 billion in investments.

Recognize isn’t the single investor in Ciklum. In February 2019 Ciklum sold its minority stakes to two Ukrainian investment companies — Dragon Capital and AVentures Capital.
Earlier, in 2015, the Ukrainian Redevelopment Fund headed by billionaire philanthropist George Soros bought a stake in Ciklum.
According to the estimates of AIN.ua, Ukrainian tech media outlet, Ciklum was worth about $150 million in 2019.