🎙️ Executive Interview with Microsoft- TSG sat down with Microsoft to talk about emerging issues that the payments community may not be aware of, their partnership with Chargebacks911, and what merchants can do to be proactive
Billionaire bitcoiners Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are laying off 10% of the workforce at Gemini, a first for the U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange and custodian. The twins announced in a blog post on Thursday morning that the industry is in a “contraction phase” known as “crypto winter,” which has been “further compounded by the current macroeconomic and geopolitical turmoil.” “We are not alone,” the memo continued. Fellow crypto exchange Coinbase recently reported that revenue had fallen 27% from a year ago, as had overall usage.
Payments players PayPal, Klarna and Bolt all recently moved to restructure their businesses in the face of new economic pressures, and another peer, Fast, shuttered altogether, highlighting the emerging macro-economic perils for fintechs. San Jose, California-based PayPal has pared jobs worldwide, with cuts in San Francisco, Chicago and Ireland while Stockholm-based Klarna said it plans to eliminate about 700 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, and California checkout upstart Bolt shaved about 185 workers, a third of its headcount, according to reports in recent weeks.
In a sign of buy now, pay later’s deepening penetration of digital payments, Affirm Inc. is partnering with payments-technology provider Stripe Inc. to make its Adaptive Checkout application available to Stripe clients in the United States. Launched in 2021, Adaptive Checkout uses Affirm’s decisioning engine to offer consumers personalized bi-weekly and monthly payment options, which are based on the size of the transaction, and then make real-time underwriting decisions.
Payments company Square suffered a two-hour outage Wednesday, prompting outrage from merchants about losing out on business during peak hours. Shares of its parent company, Block, fell 6% amid a broader market pullback. Multiple Square services were operating at “degraded performance,” including its payment processing services, according to its systems status page. Only its banking services appeared unaffected during the widespread outage.
The tech industry has grappled with a diversity problem for years, with little progress to show for it. For one tech CEO, the only way forward for the industry is clear. “Accountability needs to happen,” Suneera Madhani, the co-founder and chief executive of billion-dollar fintech start-up Stax, tells CNBC Make It. She says government incentives or even mandates for tech companies and investment firms might be necessary to force the issue — because despite several years of tech leaders trying, and failing, to address the industry’s diversity issues, women and people of color remain woefully underrepresented.
Growing demand for digital commerce methods in all regions of the world prompted a series of initiatives and legislative actions aimed at promoting financial inclusion. These measures will help all citizens obtain access, education and technology to transact on mobile and connected devices, payments industry leaders on both sides of the Atlantic noted. Scott Talbott, senior vice president, government relations at the U.S.-based Electronic Transactions Association, stated the payments industry has worked tirelessly to make payments inclusive to all consumers.
In this interview, we sat down with James Shepherd, Founder and CEO of CCSalesPro and ISO Amp to learn more about his journey through the payments industry providing training, education, and technology to the ISO/Agent community.
There are more than 1 billion shopping sessions on Google a day, but the company is thinking about IRL retail. In its own way, at least. “People are starting to behave more online like they did in the physical world where you were shopping for exploration, not just to get to a purchase,” Bill Ready, president of commerce at Google, said. About two-thirds of shoppers say they first start doing so online, he noted—no matter if they end up buying that Adidas bucket hat in store or off a website.
Square announced that it is working with Apple to enable Tap to Pay on iPhone, Apple’s contactless payment acceptance capability, within the Square Point of Sale app. The new offering enables sellers of all sizes to seamlessly and securely accept in-person contactless payments with only an iPhone and Square’s industry leading POS app. Ahead of publicly launching the service later this year, Square also announced an Early Access Program for Tap to Pay on iPhone, allowing select sellers to begin testing the new technology.
We’ve all been keeping up with the recent drama of Stripe vs. Plaid. Rather than rehash all that here, I’ll point you to some of our recent articles on the topic and just summarize: The two fintech startups have recently grown (much) more competitive. If things weren’t turbulent enough, another startup has very publicly emerged as a formidable competitor to Stripe: Finix. Now, Finix is not coming out of nowhere. The SaaS startup — which started out in early 2020 by selling its payments tech to other businesses — raised a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia.
Customers at Chipotle will now be able to pay for their burritos with cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, ether, and dogecoin, in a move that could help crypto become more mainstream, according to trade publication Restaurant Business. But there’s just one important caveat: Chipotle will accept the crypto through a payments system called Flexa, which is far from the decentralized technology that crypto supporters have promised for over a decade.
Walmart’s cavernous stores are known for aisles of low-priced groceries, paper towels and apparel. Now, those big boxes are hubs for its e-commerce business, serving as launch pads for delivery drones, automated warehouses for online grocery orders and departure locations for direct-to-fridge drop-offs. Eventually, they will help pack and ship goods for individuals and independent companies that sell on Walmart’s website through its third-party marketplace.
eCommerce is shaking up the upper ranks of the top retailers in the United States. Amazon will overtake Walmart to become the largest retailer in the United States by 2024, and add more than $294 billion in U.S. sales between 2021 and 2026, according to an annual report by Edge by Ascential. The report predicts that the top three retailers in the United States by 2026 will be Amazon, Walmart and Costco, with 14.9%, 12.7% and 4.4% of the retailer market share, respectively. The Home Depot and The Kroger Co. round out the top five.
If you're the type of investor that still believes fervently in NFTs despite all signs pointing to waning interest, you'll be very happy to learn that GameStop has a lot in store for you this year. In its first quarter earnings call on June 1, GameStop's solution to its losses is one many other businesses are betting on too: shoveling its bets into the blockchain market.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has started legal proceedings in the Federal Court against Mastercard Asia Pacific and Mastercard Australia for alleged anti-competitive conduct that substantially lessened competition in the supply of debit card acceptance services. The consumer watchdog alleges between November 2017 to at least November 2020 that Mastercard had a "substantial degree of power" in the market for the supply of credit card acceptance services under the Reserve Bank of Australia's (RBA) least-cost routing initiative.
Lawmakers in the United States are moving to protect the country from the potential undesirable impacts of the global adoption of China’s national digital currency. Three ​​Republican senators, Tom Cotton, Mike Braun and Marco Rubio, introduced a bill on Wednesday, aiming to limit the use of China’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) in the United States. The bill is referred to as “Defending Americans from Authoritarian Digital Currencies Act” and proposes to prohibit the use of China’s digital currency payment system, e-CNY, for U.S. app stores and other purposes.
Jamie Dimon, Chairman and Chief Executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co described the challenges facing the U.S. economy akin to an "hurricane" down the road and urged the Federal Reserve to take forceful measures to avoid tipping the world's biggest economy into a recession. Dimon's comments come a day after President Joe Biden met with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to discuss inflation, which is hovering at 40-year highs.
The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell last week as demand for labor remained strong, helping to underpin the economy amid rising interest rates and tightening financial conditions. The weekly unemployment claims report from the Labor Department on Thursday, the most timely data on the economy's health, also showed state jobless benefits rolls declining to their lowest level since 1969 in the second-half of May.
U.S. consumer confidence edged lower in May as Americans’ view of their present and future prospects dimmed in the midst of persistent inflation. The Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index dipped to 106.4 in May — still a strong reading — from 108.6 in April. The business research group’s present situation index, which measures consumers’ assessment of current business and labor conditions, also fell in May to 149.6 from 152.9 in April.
US home prices continued to surge higher in March, as buyers raced to lock in homes before the average mortgage rate hit 5%. Home prices rose 20.6% in March from the year before, an even higher rate than the 20% growth seen in February, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller US National Home Price Index. It was the highest year-over-year price change in more than 35 years of data. Sun Belt cities again saw the biggest price increases among the 20 US cities tracked by the index.
Worldline, a global leader in payment services, is proud to announce it is one of the first payments companies to enter the Metaverse with the launch of a dedicated virtual showroom. The company aims to bridge the gap between the network of virtual worlds and the real world for e-Commerce enterprises and provide its merchants with the opportunities needed to benefit fully from the incredible potential the Metaverse has to offer.
Visa, a world leader in digital payments, announced that it is partnering with Fundbox, an embedded working capital platform for small businesses, to strengthen Fundbox’s platform with the power of digital payments. The first step in this collaboration is the launch of the Fundbox Flex Visa Debit Card, issued by Pathward, N.A., which helps small business customers better manage their cash outflows.
Global Payments Inc. announced the appointment of Josh J. Whipple, currently Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy and Enterprise Risk Officer, as its new Chief Financial Officer, effective July 1, 2022. Paul M. Todd, currently Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, will retire at the end of June. Jeff Sloan, Chief Executive Officer of Global Payments, said "Josh has been a senior leader at our company for more than seven years, helping guide us through some of the most significant milestones in our history.
KeyBank announced the release of its end-to-end payment facilitation capabilities, allowing software companies to easily own and process payments. The concept of embedding financial products like payments and lending into software is at the forefront of the financial services industry. This release highlights KeyBank's commitment to being a leader in Embedded Banking. KeyBank acquired XUP Payments in November 2021 to help advance its embedded banking solutions.
Paysafe, a leading specialized payments platform, launched a new program for its Skrill USA digital wallet that caters to the wagering preferences of high-stakes American online gamblers. Building on the recent Skrill USA product upgrade, the new program, which has been first rolled-out with the PlayUp USA sportsbook, provides enrolled players with the U.S. iGaming industry’s highest limits for instantly funding a deposit.
Nexi SpA has entered a strategic partnership with BPER Banca SpA and Banco di Sardegna SpA with an overall transaction value of 318 million euros ($341.4 million), the Italian payment-solution company said Wednesday. As part of the deal, the merchant and acquiring business of BPER and Banco di Sardegna will be transferred to Nexi. In addition, Nexi will take ownership of Numera Sistemi e Informatica SpA from Banco di Sardegna, following a carve-out of certain operations.
Swedish account-to-account payments platform Trustly has acquired UK open banking vendor Ecospend. The acquisition gives Trustly a foothold in the UK market and a marquee client in Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, for whom Ecospend has enabled open banking payments. FCA-regulated Ecospend also counts several blue chip private sector clients such as ITV, Toolstation, Anglian Water and London Mutual Credit Union.
Furthering efforts to help renters balance their paychecks and landlords to collect rent on time, letus (previously RentMoola), an award-winning FinTech platform, announces its partnership with MRI Software, a global leader in real estate technology. The partnership enables commercial and residential real estate companies to streamline the payments process and offer an innovative, flexible payment experience for customers.
Optty, the world's first independent Buy Now, Pay Later integration platform, announced that it has partnered with Payoneer, the commerce technology company powering payments and growth for the new global economy. Payoneer is the latest to offer Optty to its global ecosystem of merchants through its Payments Platform. Optty's solution is increasingly being adopted by business-to-business (B2B) payment gateways and payment service providers (PSPs) to meet rising customer demand for multiple BNPLs.
HitPay, a payments platform for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), announced Tuesday (May 31) that it had raised $15.7 million in a Series A funding round. The Singapore-based company said it will use the money to continue building its payments infrastructure platform, which includes support for local and international payment methods and integrations with accounting and eCommerce platforms. The round funding was led by Tiger Global, with help from returning investors Global Founders Capital and HOF Capital.
JAGGAER, the global leader in Autonomous Commerce, announced a strategic relationship with Billtrust, a B2B accounts receivable automation leader. Suppliers can now reduce manual work and lower administration cost by automating the process of sending out invoices within or outside of JAGGAER’s network of suppliers.
