PayTrace was recently acquired by North American Bancard. North American Bancard processes more than $45 billion in transactions annually for hundreds of thousands of satisfied merchants. PayTrace is becoming their preferred gateway solution for all merchant types. One of thefirst steps with NAB is adding the EPX network to PayTrace. Electronic Payment Exchange, or EPX, is NAB’s wholly-owned payment processor, delivering a simplified, streamlined consumer shopping experience with strong data security.
The modern payments industry is at the forefront of innovation, and two years of pandemic disruptions only accelerated that trend. For women leaders at payments companies, the last year created unprecedented challenges and opportunities. This year's Most Influential Women in Payments honorees span the globe, demonstrating the universal importance of personal connections and career mobility, as well as the ways technology can connect a hybrid workforce and propel commerce.
“Electronic payments have proven even more valuable since the start of the pandemic, and that’s why we’re seeing merchants encouraging their customers to use electronic forms of payment,” says a Mastercard spokesman. He adds Mastercard is reducing rates for hotels, rental-car companies, and casual-dining establishments “to encourage recovery in the merchant categories that were hardest hit by the pandemic.” For its part, Visa is “lowering key in-store and online consumer credit interchange rates by 10% for more than 90% of American businesses,” according to a spokesman.
It turns out that buy now-pay later services appeal to the rich as well as those less well off in an inflationary environment because both are eager to save a buck — at least that's the conclusion in one equity analyst report on buy now-pay later company Affirm. Mizuho Securities, a financial firm that follows Affirm, said last week that a survey of households with at least $100,000 in annual income showed that nearly 37% have used Affirm, one of a growing number of digital payments companies that enable consumers to pay for goods and services in installment payments, often interest-free.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has signed into law a bill that effectively legalizes the cryptocurrency sector in the country. The decision comes as Ukraine has received cryptocurrency donations worth tens of millions of dollars from individuals and groups hoping to help the country’s war effort against Russia. The bill signed by Zelenskyy was approved by Ukraine’s parliament last month and “creates conditions for the launch of a legal market for virtual assets in Ukraine.”
From unconventional formative years to founding Draken International (a private air force provider), and Shift4 Payments, a payment processor, Isaacman has set a lot of benchmarks in the business world and also in the business of life! The self-made billionaire with a go-getter spirit aims to explore the world beyond planet Earth and go to orbit with SpaceX. He will travel further into space than any human has in the past 50 years; he is, after all, Jared Isaacman!
The last year and a half has seen a bank merger wave unlike any since the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009. In fact, seven of the 10 largest deals of the last decade, as measured by the target’s asset size, have been announced since October 2020, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. In recent months, there have been signs that the M&A surge may soon come to an end. Regulators are facing pressure from the Biden administration to apply greater scrutiny to bank mergers, and members of the Democratic-controlled board of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. have signaled that they agree with the White House.
Payments giant American Express could be readying a metaverse entry, recent trademark applications show. The company filed trademark applications for its logos and items including the Centurion black card and “Shop Small” program. Amex is also seeking to engage in virtual payments and electronic business transactions for digital media and non-fungible tokens (NFT). Amex’s applications come as traditional finance and large corporations increasingly aim to boost their metaverse exposure.
Kyash, a Tokyo-based mobile financial app, has raised $41.2 million (4.9 billion JPY) in Series D funding. The round comes from a number of investors, including Japan Post Investment Corporation, Block (formerly known as Square), Greyhound Capital, SMBC Nikko Securities, Altos Ventures, Goodwater Capital, StepStone Group, JAFCO Group, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Capital and others. According to a report by Nikkei, this marks Block’s first investment in an Asia-based company.
Israeli fintech company Rapyd has reached a valuation of $15 billion. Calcalist has learned that the company was valued at this figure in several secondary deals over recent months in which early investors sold shares. Rapyd’s investors include BlackRock, Fidelity, General Catalyst, Target Global and Spark Capital. These recent secondary deals make Rapyd Israel’s highest valued private tech company and highest valued fintech company.
The average contactless payment in the UK has increased by nearly 30% after the spending limit was increased from £45 ($59) to £100 last year, a new report says. In September, a month before to the contactless limit increase, the average spend per contactless payment was £11.86, which increased to £15.30 in December 2021. UK Finance’s December 2021 card spending report showed contactless payments reached a record high during the period and accounted for 69% of debit card transactions and 56% of credit card transactions.
Customers at six 7-Eleven stores in Japan can now make contactless payments using a holographic screen projected from the self-checkout terminal. Developed by Toshiba, the Digi POS system creates the illusion of a touchscreen interface hanging in the air in front of a shopper. The holographic displays are equipped with Neonode’s Touch Sensor Modules that make it possible to interact with the images projected by the vitrual touchscreens mid-air.
That’s according to the latest forecast from the National Retail Federation (NRF), which unveiled its retail sales forecast during its annual State of Retail and the Consumer live event. For 2022, the association predicts retail sales will reach between $4.86 trillion and $4.95 trillion, representing a growth of 6% to 8% over 2021 sales. NRF’s prediction excludes automobile and gas sales, as well as restaurants. The sales growth is expected despite major economic headwinds, including inflation pressures on consumers, rising gas prices and more.
Inflation has been the talk of the town lately, but new data suggests it’s not slowing down some online shoppers one bit. Of the $1.7 trillion spent via e-commerce during the two years of the pandemic, $32 billion was driven by higher prices, according to the Adobe Digital Economy Index. E-commerce spend on grocery has steadily climbed from $73.7 billion in 2020 (9.1% of e-comm market share) to $79.2 billion in 2021 (8.9% of market share). Adobe predicts the category will reach $85 billion in 2022.
Along the way, Starbucks has gotten gargantuan. It has become the third-largest global restaurant chain, after Subway and McDonald’s, although it’s growing faster than either. The company plans to add 2,000 stores this year, many of them in China, an explosive market—the company’s second-largest—where, since 2020, it’s been opening a new store every 15 hours. If you’d invested $10,000 during Starbucks’s initial public offering in 1992, today it would be worth north of $3 million. But even before the pandemic hit, the traditional third place was slipping as a priority for the company.
Walmart has a massive brick-and-mortar presence that makes it very easy for customers. No matter where in the U.S. you might be, you're never that far from one of the chain's locations, and that's a huge edge over its competitors. It's an advantage Target has as well. Walmart has 5,343 U.S. locations while Target has 1,926. Both chains cover an awful lot of ground and are readily accessible to an awful lot of Americans, according to comments from Thomas J. Holmes of the Federal Reserve of Minneapolis.
The Federal Trade Commission has filed an administrative complaint against Electronic Payment Systems and its owners, John Dorsey and Thomas McCann, for allegedly opening credit card processing merchant accounts for fictitious companies on behalf of Money Now Funding, a business opportunity scam that the FTC previously sued. By ignoring warning signs that the merchants were fake, Electronic Payment Systems assisted Money Now Funding in laundering millions of dollars of consumers’ credit card payments to the scammers from 2012 to 2013.
Banco Santander has been forced to compensate customers for making it almost impossible to conduct online banking without a mobile phone. The Financial Ombudsman has ruled in favor of customers who registered complaints about the lender after it made changes to account access in 2019 to comply with new regulations on banking fraud. This entailed sending customers a text code via SMS or clicking a link in the bank's mobile app.
Embattled global investment bank Credit Suisse was recently revealed to have requested investors to shred evidence linking the institution to business dealings with Russian oligarchs. Now it’s showing just how deep its connections with Russia go. In its annual report for 2021 released on Thursday, the bank revealed a gross credit exposure to Russia of 1.57 billion Swiss francs, almost $1.7 billion.
Consumers continued to spend in February though at a slower pace than expected, according to a Commerce Department report Wednesday. Advance retail sales grew 0.3% for the month, slightly below the 0.4% Dow Jones estimate. Stripping out autos, sales were up 0.2%, well below expectations for a 0.9% increase and indicative that after a rapid pace to start the year, consumers were slowing down. The spending numbers were well below the rise in prices, which increased 0.8% in February, according to Labor Department data released last week.
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised short-term interest rates for the first time since 2018, as high inflation pushes the central bank to pull back on its extraordinary pandemic-era support. The U.S. central bank lifted its benchmark Federal Funds Rate by 0.25%, to a target range of between 0.25% and 0.50%. The Fed also noted that the economic outlook remains “highly uncertain” in the face of the war in Ukraine. By notching up rates, the Fed kicks off a process of raising borrowing costs in the hopes of quelling the demand that may be pushing prices higher.
Fewer Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week as layoffs continue to fall amid a strong job market rebound. Jobless claims fell by 15,000 to 214,000 for the week ending March 12, down from the previous week’s 229,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. First-time applications for jobless aid generally track the pace of layoffs. The four-week average for claims, which compensates for weekly volatility, fell to 223,000 from the previous week’s 231,750.
Mastercard announced a growing list of leading partners, including BNPL specialists and globally recognized brands, further expanding Mastercard Installments, the unique BNPL program that delivers greater choice at checkout, both in-store and online. Amount, Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s, Deserve, H&R Block, i2c, Lithic, Saks Fifth Avenue, Sutton Bank and Walgreens join the wide array of partners already working with Mastercard on the BNPL program. They are the latest brands to embrace the benefits of adopting Mastercard Installments’ innovative open-loop model.
Priority Technology Holdings LLC late on Wednesday reported $144 million in revenue for 2021’s December quarter and $514.9 million for the full year, increases of 35.7% and 27.4% year-over-year, respectively. The Alpharetta, Ga.-based company, which ranks among the 25 largest merchant processors in the country, handles payments and related services for enterprise businesses as well as small sellers, a wide spectrum unusual among most payments providers.
Euronet Worldwide, Inc., a leading global financial technology solutions and payments provider, announced the completion of the purchase of the Piraeus Bank Merchant Acquiring (PBMA) business of Piraeus Bank (Bank) in Greece. Originally announced on March 16, 2021, Euronet’s completed purchase of PBMA’s acquiring services and assets includes approximately 205,000 POS terminals at 170,000 merchants throughout Greece as well as the Bank’s online merchant acquiring business.
Shift4, a leading provider of integrated payment and commerce technology, announced the launch of the “Caring with Crypto” campaign to raise over $20 million for nonprofit organizations on The Giving Block, a cryptocurrency fundraising platform that Shift4 recently acquired. Shift4 CEO Jared Isaacman will personally match the first $10 million in crypto donations through the initiative, with the company aiming to create the largest cryptocurrency fundraising campaign in history.
Fortis, a payment and commerce technology leader for software providers, marketplaces, developers and businesses, announced its partnership with Lockstep, further strengthening its breadth of ERP accelerated payment offerings. The partnership gives customers full access to Lockstep® Receivables, an award-winning, ERP-integrated accounts receivable (AR) automation software that automates collections, enables online payment acceptance and improves cash flow.
doxo, the innovative, all-in-one bill payment platform, announced that it has raised $18.5M in a Series C round led by San Francisco-based Jackson Square Ventures, with continued participation from other existing investors. The investment will help further the expansion of the company’s all-in-one bill pay platform that empowers consumers to improve their financial health. The raise will also be used to hire additional talent, to expand doxo’s bill pay provider directory, and to further accelerate the company’s doxoDIRECT platform that helps billers receive direct electronic payments, fast and free.
Inc. magazine revealed that leading payment processor VizyPay is No. 26 on its third annual Inc. 5000 Regionals: Midwest list, the most prestigious ranking of the fastest-growing private companies based in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Born of the annual Inc. 5000 franchise, this regional list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the Midwest region economy’s most dynamic segment–its independent small businesses.
The Retail Solutions Providers Association (RSPA) has promoted Chris Arnold to the position of Director of Marketing and Strategic Partnerships. In this new role, Arnold will develop and oversee all RSPA marketing campaigns, support membership sales and lead generation efforts, build awareness and positioning for the association’s brand, and lead the RSPA’s industry relationships. Since joining the RSPA in 2017, Arnold has played a key role in member engagement, new member recruitment, event promotion, messaging strategy and execution, and content creation.
BigCommerce announced, in strategic partnership with Bolt, a leading checkout and shopper network company, to now offer a brand new way for small-, medium-, and enterprise-sized BigCommerce merchants to set up Bolt One-Click Checkout in a self-serve manner within minutes. Bolt can easily be pre-built into merchants’ BigCommerce stores allowing them to deliver secure, one-click transactions to create fast and seamless shopping experiences that move customers beyond the “buy” button, driving engagement and increasing conversion rates by up to 53 percent.
Green Dot Corporation announced it is partnering with Plaid, the data network powering the digital financial ecosystem, to bring secure open finance solutions to GO2bank customers. Launched in 2021, GO2bank is Green Dot’s flagship digital bank designed to give all people the power to bank seamlessly, affordably and with confidence. The companies joined forces to offer GO2bank customers an API-based, token-based open finance experience enabling the data connectivity that today’s consumers expect.
