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In the U.K., Amazon’s ban on Visa cards has been abandoned, but the ripple effects may last long and reach far. To that end, some of the biggest retailers in the world — via the Merchants Payments Coalition — sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) Wednesday (Jan. 19) urging those regulators to take a deeper look into credit card fees. “We are writing to bring your attention to the recent decision — and subsequent reversal — by Amazon to stop accepting Visa credit cards in the United Kingdom because of the high fees charged to process transactions.”
NMI, a leading full commerce enablement technology company, today announced it has acquired IRIS CRM, a premier merchant services CRM and comprehensive merchant management platform servicing clients in the payments industry. Together, the duo will provide added value for partners by bringing together easy sign-up and onboarding for merchants with the ability to quickly monetize payments. With the addition of IRIS CRM’s payments-centric customer relationship management system (CRM), NMI is uniquely positioned to create an even stronger commerce enablement strategy for its channel partners and merchants.
Celero Commerce made its second acquisition in a month with its deal to acquire Omega Technology, a Fort Thomas, Ky.-based payments provider. Nashville, Tenn.-based Celero says the combined company will process payments for more than 50,000 merchants at approximately $20 billion in annual card volume. Celero acquired Everest Payment Solutions in December. Celero says Omega—the deal was announced Tuesday—is its eighth acquisition since its launch in 2018. Terms of the deal were not released.
The payments sphere is growing so fast that demand for industry executives is outstripping available talent, say recruiters in the field. That’s generating offers that are often 30% above a job candidate’s current compensation because that’s what it takes to pry workers away from employers desperate to keep them, or to outbid competitors in quick negotiation cycles. “There’s a shortage of talent because there’s so much demand,” said Chris Pantelidis, who oversees payments industry searches for the global executive recruiting firm EMA Partners.
Paya, a leading integrated payments and commerce solution provider, announced the acquisition of VelocIT Business Solutions (“VelocIT”). Founded in 2018 and based in Clarkson, WA, VelocIT provides fully integrated, omnichannel payment solutions to accounting and ERP partners, including Acumatica and Sage, driving frictionless commerce experiences for their end users. VelocIT brings to Paya industry-leading technologies, deep knowledge of the ERP market, and strong integration experience and expertise.
Ford Motor Company has signed a five-year agreement with Stripe, an online payment processor, to scale the automaker’s e-commerce capabilities. Stripe will facilitate transactions for vehicle orders and reservations, handle financing options for Ford’s commercial customers and route customer’s payments from the automaker’s website to the correct local Ford or Lincoln dealer. Ford plans to begin rolling out Stripe’s technology in the second half of 2022, starting with North America, but with aims to roll out in Europe, as well, according to the company.
Over the last decade, digital wallets have gone from an exciting curiosity to a mundane part of our everyday lives. Whether you're shopping online, buying something in a store, or sending money to a friend, tools like Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Pay help power our modern digital economy. Despite launching in 2011 — and relaunching in the US with a new app last year — Google has struggled to get a foothold in the market. In 2020, it only accounted for 3% of the US market, compared to 5% for Samsung Pay and a colossal 92% for Apple Pay.
May require account to read. The challenger bank Revolut launched commission-free stock trading to U.S. users Wednesday, a major enhancement as it looks to become “all things money” for its users. Revolut, which is based in London and has its U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, is adding retail trading to services including fee-free payments, crypto trading, two-day salary advances and other features it says will make it a “financial super app.” Revolut, which says it has 18 million users internationally including more than 300,000 in the U.S., is set to further expand its list of services and step up its challenge to traditional banks.
Plaid, a fintech unicorn known for its APIs that connect consumer bank accounts to financial applications, announced today that it is buying Cognito. The price is around $250 million, paid in a blend of cash and stock TechCrunch understands, though we couldn’t suss out the exact mix of each. The deal highlights where Plaid is heading in its post-Visa form. Recall that the company had previously intended to sell itself to the consumer credit giant before the deal ran into a regulatory wall; since then Plaid has raised capital and expanded its valuation by a factor of around four.
Mastercard has partnered with cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase to make purchasing NFTs easy for everyone, the companies said on Tuesday. The partnership will allow people to purchase NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, with Mastercard cards on Coinbase's NFT marketplace once it goes live. With this move, Mastercard and Coinbase hope to make purchasing NFTs as simple as purchasing a T-shirt on any e-commerce site. "We're working to make NFTs more accessible because we believe tech should be inclusive," said Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard's executive vice president in charge of digital assets and blockchain partnerships, in a release.
Cryptocurrency exchange transcoin.me has extended its cooperation with leading specialized payments platform, Paysafe, to add a cash-based payment solution for buying cryptocurrency. Customers across Europe who prefer to use cash for online transactions can now use Paysafecash, one of Paysafe’s eCash solutions, to add cash into their transcoin.me fiat account. Transcoin’s existing suite of payment methods already includes Paysafe’s digital wallets Skrill and NETELLER.
A global pandemic closed stores, kept people home and caused waves of disruptions for two years and retail sales still grew by record amounts. So is it any wonder that the biggest U.S. retailers don’t seem too worried about inflation, labor shortages, or other challenges 2022 will throw at them? “We’ve got this” was the prevailing attitude at this year’s National Retail Federation Big Show, a combination retail conference and trade show that the NRF hosts every January at the Javits Convention Center in New York.
Class is in session at Taco Bell, which announced yesterday that it’s opening a business school—but not to give students a bachelor’s in burritos. The fast-food chain is teaming up with the University of Louisville to introduce the Taco Bell Business School, a franchisee training program it hopes will eliminate barriers to entrepreneurship for its employees. Amid a tough labor market, Taco Bell hopes to challenge the idea that fast-food jobs are “stepping stones to other careers,” CEO Mark King said in a statement.
In time for Valentine’s Day, 1-800-Flowers.com is unveiling offerings including floral subscriptions and buy now, pay later (BNPL). The specialty gift retailer expects to deliver approximately 23 million flowers across the U.S. for Valentine's Day, the second largest floral holiday of the year. In addition to its recent purchase of the floral livestreaming platform Alice’s Table, 1-800-Flowers.com is streamlining several aspects of its shopping experience ahead of Valentine’s Day.
May require account to read. Walmart Inc.’s top U.S. e-commerce executive Casey Carl is leaving the retailer, according to an internal memo, adding to a string of recent executive shifts at the company. Tom Ward, a senior vice president who has led Walmart’s efforts to use its stores as hubs for online pickup and delivery orders, will become the company’s new head of U.S. e-commerce, according to the memo sent Thursday and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
In a blog post published in the early hours of Thursday morning, cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com acknowledged that the company had lost well over $30 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum after a hack that took place on January 17th. The company has been criticized for vague communication around the hack, which was only officially confirmed yesterday by CEO Kris Marszalek. The new blog post said that the total value of the unauthorized withdrawals was 4,836.26 ETH and 443.93 BTC — equivalent to roughly $15.2 million and $18.6 million respectively, at current exchange rates — as well as $66,200 worth of other currencies.
JPMorgan Chase announced it will earmark $12 billion for technological updates - including cloud migration, upgrading legacy architecture, data strategy, and emerging technologies. About half of this budget will go toward security modernization, while the other half will be invested into digital innovation, according to Jeremy Barnum, the finance firm's CFO, who spoke at a recent quarterly earnings call. Barnum said that the financial giant is placing security practices front and center in 2022.
QR codes are useful shortcuts to online resources via a phone's camera, but scammers are now tampering with them to direct victims to phishing pages and cryptocurrency scams. QR or 'Quick Response' codes have been connecting scanners to real-world objects since the 1990s, but got widely adopted during the pandemic as businesses moved to contactless communication and payments via QR codes on restaurant menus, parking meters and other public spaces.
The Bank of Russia has advocated for a complete crypto ban as part of a report issued by the country’s central bank on Thursday. The report titled “Cryptocurrencies: trends, risks, measures” argued that the speculative nature of cryptocurrency investments poses significant threats to the financial stability of Russian citizens. As part of the blanket crypto ban, Russia’s central bank also stated that commercial banks and other financial institutions should be prevented from facilitating cryptocurrency transfers.
The Biden administration has a long list of metrics to make the case that the U.S. is enjoying the strongest economic recovery from Covid-19 in the world: low unemployment, higher wages, a record 6.4 million jobs created in 2021. One number, however, could erase any gains: 7%. It represents the highest annual increase in inflation since 1982. Republicans are wasting no time seizing on that fact, and it’s working. A year after taking over, Biden’s approval ratings are headed downward and consumer confidence has sunk to its lowest in more than a decade. We looked at the metrics that best sum up where the U.S. economy stands at the end of Biden’s first year.
Weekly new jobless claims unexpectedly jumped last week by the most since October, with some renewed virus-related disruptions at least temporarily impeding the labor market's recovery. Initial unemployment claims rose for a third straight week, coming in near the 300,000 level. This represented some backsliding from recent progress in the trajectory of jobless claims. Claims had reached a 52-year low of 188,000 in December, as many employers attempted to keep their existing workforces in the face of widespread labor shortages.
A survey of American consumer sentiment fell to 68.8 in January from 70.6 in the prior month owing to fresh worries about the coronavirus omicron variant and high inflation, signaling another rough patch for the economy. The latest reading in the University of Michigan sentiment index was the second-lowest in the past decade. The index had fallen to 67.4 in November during the tail end of the delta wave of coronavirus cases.
The lender said that fourth-quarter profit rose 28% to $7.01 billion, or 82 cents a share, topping the 76 cents a share average estimate of analysts surveyed by Refinitiv. Revenue rose 10% to $22.17 billion, just under the $22.2 billion estimate. The second-biggest U.S. bank by assets said that credit quality improved during the quarter, allowing it to release the $851 million in reserves and book a nearly half-billion-dollar benefit after $362 million in charge-offs. The bank said it was the lowest loss rate for loans in more than five decades.
"Our record results in 2021 reflect the benefits of our integrated digital banking and payments model, the strength of our value proposition, and a supportive macroeconomic backdrop," said Roger Hochschild, CEO and President of Discover "It's great to see that our investments in acquisition, brand, and technology contributed to our return to loan growth this past year, and should drive accelerated growth in 2022."
T-Mobile Arena, home to the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights and the premier destination for top sports and entertainment events on the Las Vegas Strip, has partnered with Shift4, the leader in integrated payment processing, to deliver the latest commerce technologies to the venue. Shift4 will power payments at T-Mobile Arena for all food & beverage purchases, using the company’s VenueNext point-of-sale solution to streamline the entire fan event experience.
More than 1,000 users representing businesses of all sizes across a range of industries are using PolCard® Go from Fiserv, a leading global provider of payments and financial services technology and the owner of PolCard, a well-known Polish brand. Initially announced in late 2019 as a first-of-its-kind software point-of-sale solution, the newly branded PolCard Go enables businesses to accept contactless transactions easily, quickly, and securely on their own smartphones or tablets, with no additional hardware required.
Epicor, a global leader of industry-specific enterprise software to promote business growth, announced it has acquired JMO Business Systems Ltd., a premier provider of warehouse management systems (WMS), enterprise mobility solutions and related services for automotive aftermarket and original equipment (OE) parts distributors. Financial terms were not disclosed. The JMO acquisition extends Epicor’s industry-leading portfolio of business growth solutions to virtually every functional area of the automotive parts and service industry.
Payroc, a global payments leader, has announced the acquisition of East Commerce Solutions, a leading merchant service provider offering an array of products and services that has a customer centric approach. With $2 billion dollars in annual processing volume, ECS’s client base extends throughout the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii.
Buoyed by strong gains in the healthcare and business-to-business sectors as well as Same Day ACH payments, ACH Network payment volume grew 6.1% during the fourth quarter of 2021. There were 7.5 billion ACH payments in the final quarter of the year, 426 million more than the same time in 2020. The value of those payments, $18.9 trillion, is a 13.4% increase. "The fourth-quarter results reaffirm what we have been seeing almost from the start of the pandemic: a sustained move to electronic payments among businesses, consumers and governments," said Jane Larimer, Nacha President and CEO.
Financial technology leader FIS® announced that it has been named to the America’s Most Responsible Companies 2022 list by Newsweek magazine. Newsweek’s third annual ranking identifies leading companies for corporate responsibility in the three areas of ESG – environment, social and corporate governance. FIS was selected and ranked from 2,000 companies evaluated in 14 industries. “FIS has established ESG as a top priority for the company so we’re thrilled to be recognized for our achievements in advancing this critically important topic,” said Greg Montana, Chief Risk Officer at FIS.
Nuvei Corporation, the global payment technology partner of thriving brands, announces it has been granted approval by the New York State Gaming Commission to process payments with recently licensed digital sports betting platforms launching in the state. The commission approved five operators this month – Caesars Sportsbook, BetMGM, DraftKings, FanDuel and Rush Street Interactive – to accept mobile and online sports wagers.
Billtrust, a B2B accounts receivable automation and integrated payments leader, surpassed $1 billion in supplier invoices delivered to accounts payable (AP) portals in 2021, its largest single-year total and a 58% increase over 2020. The dramatic rise can be attributed to increased adoption of Billtrust’s Business Payments Network (BPN), which began enabling invoice presentment to accounts payable (AP) portals in addition to its existing payment and remittance acceptance capabilities. In all, Billtrust delivered approximately 400,000 invoices to over 175 different AP portals in 2021.
BBVA has created a global software development division that brings together more than 16,000 developers across the bank in an effort to speed up and better coordinate the delivery of digital services and products. Headed by Francisco Leyva, the new unit will execute and coordinate the bank’s core technological transformation programmes at a global level, providing a home to more than 16,000 internal and external personnel dedicated to designing, developing and maintaining software.
Ingenico, a Worldline brand, confirms its leadership in unattended payments with the launch of Self-Modular, the world’s first unattended POS modular configuration to achieve PCI PTS v6 certification. This latest addition to the Ingenico Self Series portfolio of solutions means the range now comprehensively covers all verticals - such as vending, EV charging, transportation, parking and ticketing kiosks, for both indoor and outdoor use cases.
Verifone, a global FinTech leader and payment solution provider to the world’s best-known retail brands, and Affirm, the payment network that empowers consumers and helps merchants drive growth, announce a new partnership that will make Affirm’s transparent and flexible payment options widely available on Verifone’s eCommerce and card-present payment solutions. The partnership will enable merchants to offer their customers the ability to pay at their own pace using Affirm online and in-store, reinforcing Verifone’s commitment to staying ahead of market trends and meeting merchant and consumer needs in the ever-evolving payment space.
Stash announced the launch of its first-ever crypto offering, designed to give customers a simple and easy way to own digital currencies as part of a fully managed account called Smart Portfolio. “Millions of everyday Americans want to invest in crypto, but they have no idea where to start. We built Stash to make it easy, affordable, and accessible for them to build wealth, and integrating crypto into Smart Portfolio is the perfect way to get started for the long term,” said Stash’s CEO and co-founder, Brandon Krieg.
i2c Inc., a leading provider of digital payment and banking technology, announced that the company has been selected to power payment programs across nine countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and is set to partner with some of the most innovative financial services providers throughout the region. At present, i2c is supporting the launch and implementation of 22 programs across Antigua, Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico.
Alliance Data Systems Corp (ADS) has lost BJ’s Wholesale Club as a client, The WSJ reported Tuesday. The club has moved its co-branded credit cards to Capital One, which is a major detriment to ADS, which specializes in branded credit cards. Per the report, BJ’s was among its biggest partnerships, and its accounts totaled nearly $1.5 billion in balances. During its third quarter, ADS had around $15.5 billion in overall balances. Additionally, BJ’s filed a lawsuit against ADS on Tuesday in Massachusetts Superior Court, over claims that the company has slowed down the transfer of the existing card accounts.
