🎙️ 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
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.
Excerpt: In your opinion, what makes selling payment processing different from selling in other industries?
James:I like this question. When I started out in the industry 13 years ago, I would say that it actually was very similar to selling other things. I really felt like there was a lot of similarity. I think what makes it so different today (that it’s kind of good and bad) is that there is so much opportunity. But at the same time, there’s very little accountability and structure.
So, it’s very different, because as an agent, you come in, and it’s like, “Well, you say you sell payment processing, what does that mean?” Are you saying that you sell a point-of-sale systems to restaurants? Or you sell gateway solutions to B2B companies? Or do you sell an API solution to software companies that need recurring payments? Saying you sell payment processing today could mean so many different things. So, I think it’s an amazing opportunity because number one, you’ve got all these different things that you can do, and different things you can focus on. But then also, you have this recurring income and I really believe the payment processing industry is one of the few industries left that really gives the ISO or the agents the opportunity to make a significant cut out of this recurring revenue that’s generated.
The Collisons have come a long way from the precocious boy wonders who, a dozen years ago, wowed Silicon Valley with just nine lines of code—which was all developers needed to copy and paste to enable credit card payments on their sites. Stripe now offers a broad suite of financial tools to handle everything from DoorDash driver payouts to taxes for Duolingo in-app payments and subscriptions to the Atlantic. At the heart of it all: Patrick and John Collison, who still review every product that goes out the door, an act akin to scientific “core sampling” or restaurant owner–style kitchen visits, depending on which brother you ask.
Not all fintech unicorns are cutting jobs. After Klarna announced plans to lay off 10% of its workforce Monday, some rival fintechs are making it clear that they have no intention of cutting jobs or freezing hiring. Revolut, the $33 billion digital banking start-up, said the company is “actively hiring,” with over 250 open roles listed on its website. Meanwhile, Wise CEO Kristo Kaarmann said the London-based money transfer firm is in a “different place” to tech firms that are letting staff go.
Payments players have suspected for the past two years that digital payments were becoming increasingly routine, but now research is indicating they may have become “second nature.” That’s the term Marqeta Inc., the card-issuing platform, used Thursday in announcing the results included in its latest research paper, entitled “2022 State of Consumer Money Movement.” The study, which earlier this year surveyed 2,011 U.S. consumers and a roughly equal number of users in the United Kingdom and Australia, found that mobile-wallet usage is increasing steadily.
JPMorgan Chase's push into the UK retail banking market has seen the giant Wall Street bank attract half a million customers and $10 billion of customer deposits since its launch eight months ago. The figures were revealed in the bank's investor day by Sanoke Viswanathan, chief executive of JPMorgan's international consumer business. He told analysts that the bank has set a five to six-year timeframe to hit breakeven, reinforcing the bank's long-term commitment to the business which is set to lose $450 million this year.
The crypto market was valued at $3.1 trillion in November 2021, but fell to $1.3 trillion in recent weeks. This massive downturn has also pushed marketing spend in this sector to plummet, especially after unprecedented highs seen during Super Bowl LVI. A drop-off in ad spend after the Super Bowl is understandable, as marketers spent big during that tentpole event and subsequently pulled back investments after the game. Thirty-second spots during the game were said to cost about $6.5 million this year.
As the U.S. economy moves farther from the worst of the Covid pandemic, credit and debit card spending may be stabilizing, according to new data from The Strawhecker Group, a payments advisory and research firm. Released as part of the AIM Headline Report series, the Growth & Inflation Analysis 2022 report suggests 2022 is shaping up as a year of correction. While acquirers’ small-business portfolios boomed in 2021 when compared to a lackluster 2020, similar growth is unlikely in 2022.
Payments processing and financial infrastructure giant Stripe has launched a new apps marketplace, designed to bring third-party accounting, analytics, CRM, marketing and esignature features directly into Stripe. While Stripe has offered extensions for several years already, this only allowed businesses to transfer Stripe features and data into other products. Its latest offering works in reverse — it creates new possibilities for developers to build additional functionality directly in the Stripe Dashboard and addresses one of the “top requests” that Stripe said that it receives from customers.
Ripple will explore the possibility of an initial public offering once its lawsuit with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has ended, CEO Brad Garlinghouse told CNBC. The company uses XRP, the world’s sixth-largest cryptocurrency, to facilitate cross-border payments. Effectively, fiat is converted to XRP which lowers the cost and increases the speed of the transaction. The XRP is then converted back to fiat. But the SEC alleges Ripple, Garlinghouse and executive chairman Chris Larsen engaged in an illegal securities offering through sales of XRP.
Apple will begin rolling out its new Tap to Pay feature for the public, a report said Wednesday (May 25). The feature was unveiled in February and lets iPhones that were compatible take payments through Apple Pay, contactless credit and debit, or other digital wallets. The feature will let small businesses and merchants take contactless payments via supported iOS apps.
May require account to read. American Express is the first company to adopt Google technology that supports virtual cards with minimal input from users while shopping — eliminating the need to type a three-digit security code from the back of a plastic card at checkout. While many websites let users store payment card details for later checkout, they still require users to provide the three- or four-digit security code printed on the plastic card as an extra measure of authentication.
One-click checkout startup Bolt has laid off at least 100 employees and counting across go-to-market, sales and recruiting roles, sources say. CEO Maju Kuruvilla confirmed the workforce reduction in a blog post but did not say how many people were impacted or what roles were targeted. “It’s no secret that the market conditions across our industry and the tech sector are changing, and against the macro challenges, we’ve been taking measures to adapt our business,” Kurvilla wrote in the blog post.
Drone delivery has been a long time coming, but its actual implementation has largely arrived in fits and starts. Some companies (Alphabet’s Wing) have made decent headway, while others (Amazon) have struggled. There are still plenty of issues to contend with ahead of any sort of mainstream adoption, from regulation to congestion to safety concerns. But a number of parties have found small successes in limited markets.
Amazon Style is officially open. The approximate 30,000-sq.-ft., two-level store — Amazon’s first brick-and-mortar location dedicated to apparel and accessories — is located at The Americana at Brand, an upscale lifestyle center in Glendale, Calif. Featuring a sleek, modern design, Amazon Style offers men’s and women’s apparel from a wide assortment of popular and premium brands that range from Calvin Klein and Levi’s to Vince, Equipment and Theory.
May require an account to read. The retail sector has been hard-hit by a selloff in recent weeks amid warnings from major companies that surging inflation has impacted profits, and despite a rebound on Wednesday, experts predict further challenges ahead as consumer spending becomes increasingly hard to predict.
Edge by Ascential's annual "Future of the Digital Shelf" report, which illustrates the impact that e-commerce is having on traditional retail, predicts that shoppers will spend over $2.4 trillion dollars online by 2026. It also predicts that from 2021 to 2026, e-commerce will make up 63% of all total gross merchandise volume (GMV) growth, more than double the amount generated by all the store-based channels measured in the report.
Yottaa, Inc., the leading cloud platform for accelerating eCommerce, announced the publication of key findings from a new eCommerce survey titled, “2022 eCommerce Executive Key Initiatives Survey Report.” The objective of the research was to gather data from online retail executives to identify their key eCommerce initiatives for 2022.
The CFPB has a message for banks and lenders: You've got to explain your algorithms. The agency stressed in a new circular that financial services companies must give a clear explanation for denying a credit application and cannot simply argue that the systems they use are “too complicated.” “Companies are not absolved of their legal responsibilities when they let a black-box model make lending decisions,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement.
To help customers strengthen their cyber resilience, Mastercard has invested in risk quantification, always-on security monitoring and fraud prevention in recent years. With global cybercrime expected to cost $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, innovating cybersecurity remains critical across industries facing rapid digitization. Today, Mastercard announced the launch of new attack simulation and assessment platform Cyber Front, enabled by a strategic minority investment in Picus Security.
Ransomware breaches have increased by 13% – more than the last five years combined – according to a new report. The Verizon Business 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report reveals an unprecedented year in cybersecurity and details focal issues affecting the international cybersecurity landscape. In addition to the increase in ransomware breaches, it also found that 82% of cyber breaches involved the human element, including social attacks, errors and misuse.
America's economy shrank at a slightly faster rate than initially reported, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said Thursday. US gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic activity, decreased at an annualized rate of 1.5%, adjusted for seasonal swings, according to the second estimate of the data. Last month, the Commerce Department's advance estimate of the data showed GDP had contracted at a rate of 1.4%. Economists had expected Thursday's revisions to improve slightly, with a decline of 1.3%.
Federal Reserve officials thought they would need to raise interest rates by a half-percentage point at each of their next two meetings when they approved an increase at their gathering earlier this month. Minutes from the Fed’s May 3-4 meeting, released Wednesday, show that officials discussed the possibility that they would raise interest rates to levels high enough to slow economic growth deliberately as the central bank races to combat high inflation. Officials “noted that a restrictive stance of policy may well become appropriate,” the minutes said.
The tail end of first quarter earnings season has brought two clear investor desires — more cash and less inventory — to the fore. Tech companies are scrambling to gather the former while retailers are stuck with too much of the latter. And in their own way, each industry is telling the market that a paradigm shift brought on during the pandemic has turned into a passing phase of this economic cycle.
Sales of new U.S. single-family homes tumbled to a two-year low in April, likely as higher mortgage rates and record prices squeezed first-time buyers and those in search of entry-level properties out of the housing market. The fourth straight monthly decline in sales reported by the Commerce Department on Tuesday added to data last week showing a plunge in single-family building permits in April and continued weakness in sales of previously owned homes in suggesting that demand for housing was cooling.
EVO Payments, Inc., a leading global provider of payment technology integrations and acquiring solutions, announced it has acquired North49 Business Solutions, Inc. ("North49"), a certified Sage Development Partner, to provide enhanced B2B integrated payment solutions for Sage customers. As both a Sage Authorized Partner and Sage Development Partner, North49 provides accounts receivables solutions and business automation tools to allow customers to streamline their payment workflow via certified integrations to the Sage 300 and Sage Intacct solutions.
Payoneer, the commerce technology company powering payments and growth for the new global economy, appointed John Caplan co-Chief Executive Officer and Director alongside current CEO Scott Galit, effective immediately. Galit and Caplan will lead the firm as co-CEOs during a transition period through the end of 2023, when Caplan will take the helm as CEO and Galit will continue in a strategic role.
Adyen, the global financial technology platform of choice for leading businesses, announced that Radial, a bpost group company, a leader in ecommerce technologies and operations, will use Adyen for Platforms to streamline and consolidate their payment offerings to benefit their roster of clients in the US and Canada including health, beauty, apparel, and luxury accessory brands.
Splitit and BlueSnap, a global payment orchestration platform committed to helping B2B and B2C businesses accept and optimize payments around the world, announced the companies are enhancing their existing relationship to elevate BlueSnap to Splitit's preferred processing partner, to simplify the buy now, pay later (BNPL) checkout experience and jointly target key verticals. The collaboration provides added visibility and distribution for Splitit through BlueSnap's extensive network of mid-market and enterprise customers.
Bank of America and Electrify America announced plans to more than double the number of financial centers equipped with electric-vehicle (EV) charging stations by the end of 2023. As of the beginning of this year, 172 Electrify America individual EV chargers have been installed at 46 financial centers – totals the companies intend to grow to more than 350 chargers at over 90 financial centers by the end of 2023.
Paysafe, a leading specialized payments platform, announced its expanded partnership with the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG), the Ontario government agency that conducts and manages gaming facilities, the sale of province-wide lottery games, and OLG.ca internet gaming, including its digital sports platform PROLINE+. The new OLG.ca affiliate program is powered by the affiliate software of Income Access, Paysafe’s marketing technology and services provider, which is also managing the program.
WooCommerce, the flexible, open-source commerce solution built on WordPress, and Affirm, the payment network that empowers consumers and helps merchants drive growth, today announced a deepened partnership to provide WooCommerce merchants the opportunity to offer consumers the ability to pay over time through Affirm. WooCommerce has 3.7 million merchants, including brands such as Gardyn, Tonal, Mint Mobile & Teeter.
Quisitive Technology Solutions Inc., a premier Microsoft solutions and payment solutions provider, reported financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2022. "Quisitive once again recorded significant progress across the two segments of our business, highlighted by a 256% increase in revenues; providing a strong start to fiscal year 2022," said Quisitive CEO Mike Reinhart.
Valor PayTech, a fast-growing fintech provider of end-to-end, processor-agnostic omnichannel payments solutions, announced platform integrations with Electronic Payments Inc. (EPI) and Electronic Payments Exchange (EPX), a wholly-owned subsidiary of North American Bancard, are currently underway. Valor strives to provide resellers and their merchant customers with comprehensive, cutting-edge tools and flexibility they need to succeed in today’s rapidly changing business environment while creating revolutionary value.
xpate, the rapidly-growing simplified cross-border payments platform, has announced the launch of its disruptive core banking solution, which links merchant and acquirer systems to offer agile, flexible and harmonised payment processing, and crucially helps them to bypass legacy IT platform limitations. xpate’s core banking solution has been designed and engineered to speed up and simplify merchant payment gateway integration with multiple acquiring systems.
