PYMNTS
JUNE 30, 2019
June was a busy month for cross-border payments — done across currencies and time zones, between consumers and corporates. Going by a simple perusal of headlines, cross-border was, has been and will be in the cross hairs of many a payments player, across many a strategy, via fiat or digital coins, that aims to fix what’s broken in transactions done across currencies — especially in B2B.
PYMNTS
JULY 5, 2019
It’s been a little over two weeks since we all got our first look at Libra and Calibra. No doubt there will be countless news stories to come, and opinions on why it will or will not fly. Here are the things I will be watching for over the coming months, things that I think provide a useful framework for understanding how Libra and Calibra’s future takes shape: How many of the 28 Founding Association Members will pony up $10 million to remain members.
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PYMNTS
JULY 2, 2019
Payment bottlenecks cause problems for all types of consumers and companies, not the least of which are small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). But a new offering from PayPal and Visa could help ease those frustrations and hassles. The two payments firms announced on Tuesday (July 2) the launch of PayPal’s Instant Transfer in Canada for SMBs and individual consumers.
PYMNTS
JULY 1, 2019
Passwords are increasingly vulnerable in today’s day and age. Hacks and data breaches have become all too common, with fraudsters turning to “brute force” attacks and plugging in commonly used passcodes to gain access to users’ accounts. There is a growing need for stronger authentication methods as the number of attacks continues to climb. Unfortunately, FIs are often caught between balancing more stringent security tools and offering the seamless experiences consumers crave.
Speaker: Victor C. Barnes, CPA, MBA
In the climb from contributor to leader, the rules quietly change. But if you’re aiming for the summit, the air gets thinner, and what got you here won’t be enough to get you to the top. 🗻 What made you successful early in your finance career—technical accuracy, sharp analysis, flawless execution—won’t be what carries you to the next level. The higher you go, the more your effectiveness depends on how you connect, adapt, and communicate.
PYMNTS
JULY 1, 2019
Younger consumers — millennials, Generation Z — seem to get all the focus when it comes to eCommerce and digital payments these days. But older citizens are still out there, shopping, buying and paying, and they are getting attention from businesses, too — and that consumer segment, in its own way, is pretty important to the future of retail and payments.
PYMNTS
JULY 3, 2019
Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) announced that it has launched a third privacy investigation into Apple. The tech giant’s main regulator in the European Union (EU) said it is looking into whether Apple has complied with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy law regarding an access request from a customer. Under GDPR, regulators can hit companies that do not comply with the regulations with fines of up to 4 percent of a company’s global revenue or €20 milli
Accountant Advocate brings together the best content for small business accounting professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
PYMNTS
JUNE 30, 2019
As a way to provide users with an alternative to sign-in platforms from Google as well as Facebook, Apple debuted a new Sign In with Apple platform at WWDC 2019 in June. But the OpenID Foundation is posing questions about some of Apple’s decisions regarding the Sign In with Apple platform, 9to5Mac reported. The foundation said in an open letter posted online, “OpenID Connect was developed by a large number of companies and industry experts within the OpenID Foundation (OIDF).
PYMNTS
JULY 2, 2019
Call them errors made at the speed of commerce. Payments are gaining speed, as is fraud — and sometimes, simple human error is costing companies revenue, precious time or both. That’s especially true in the corporate realm, where transactions increasingly cross borders online, where payments can — depending on the firm and vertical — be worth millions of dollars and where thousands of transactions can happen within a single day.
PYMNTS
JULY 5, 2019
FinTech firms are taking on real-time payments for business-to-business (B2B) use cases – and teaming with banking partners to drive innovation. AvidXchange , for instance, worked with Fifth Third Bank to enhance B2B payments while leveraging the inherent capabilities in the RTP network from The Clearing House. The team was named the overall winner in the recent RTP Buildathon with its submission that offered supplier alerts to provide discounts to buyers, immediate supplier payments, real-time
PYMNTS
JULY 2, 2019
Real-time payments (RTP) is a global initiative that’s been a decade in the making and counting, one that has gained momentum over the last several years. More than 50 countries are actively pursuing, piloting or already live with real-time payment programs. Just last week, the Nordic region — an area that includes Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland — took real-time payments up a level through an initiative led by the P27 Nordic Payments Platform , which is owned by Danske Bank, Handelsbanken,
Speaker: Kim Beynon, CPA, CGMA, PMP
The most overlooked, yet most critical, element of transformation is preparing people for change. Automation and AI aren't just technical upgrades, they’re cultural shifts which can challenge identities. That’s why change management isn’t a side project—it’s the foundation. In finance, where precision and process rule, navigating change can feel especially disruptive.
PYMNTS
JULY 1, 2019
When it comes to the new and emerging legal cannabis industry – along with the closely related trade in CBD products – payments and compliance issues, as one can imagine, have tremendous importance, and companies are striving to get into the game via those angles. The latest example comes from LegitScript , which sells verification and monitoring services for online pharmacies.
PYMNTS
JULY 1, 2019
Mobile order-ahead apps are growing more popular by the day, and restaurants are clamoring to get on board. A QSR Magazine study found that 73 percent of diners have used mobile ordering, 63 percent have at least one mobile ordering app on their phones and 35 percent use mobile ordering every time they visit QSRs. Consumers are eager to utilize these services, but cybercriminals are just as ready to exploit them.
PYMNTS
JULY 3, 2019
ANZ , Commonwealth Bank , IBM , Scentre Group and Westpac have announced they are partnering to launch a live pilot for Lygon, a new digital platform using blockchain technology to digitize the bank guarantee process needed for retail property leases. While bank guarantees have primarily been issued manually and on paper, digitizing the process reduces the risk of fraud, decreases the chance for errors and significantly speeds up the entire process.
PYMNTS
JULY 4, 2019
Cruise ships and musical festivals are not that different from each other, not these days. Both feature large crowds of generally like-minded people. Not only that, but aging and even younger rockers and other musicians are often featured on special cruises for serious fans — that includes groups that range from baby boomer favorites to extremely loud metal groups.
Speaker: Mark Gilham, FCCA, CPP
Finance used to be the function that counted, now it's the one that’s counted on. 📊 For accounting firms, controllers, and finance leaders, expectations are rising faster than headcount. Businesses want agile forecasts, granular analysis, seamless reporting, and smart automation—often without added resources while demanding uncompromised accuracy and compliance.
PYMNTS
JULY 2, 2019
Thanks to the digital economy and its supporting technology, we can say we are in the “golden age” of this and that. The golden age of delivery and quick fulfillment. The golden age of product reviews and price comparisons. What about the golden age of age verification? No, that doesn’t sound as exciting as the rest, and conjures up memories of those sloppy fake IDs in high school and college, or having that ne’er-do-well uncle agree to buy minors a 12-pack.
PYMNTS
JULY 4, 2019
U.K.-based iwoca is integrating its lending platform with marketplace lenders Funding Options and Funding Xchange to accelerate and further automate access to capital for small and medium-sized businesses, while connecting borrowers to price transparency. In a press release sent to PYMNTS, iwoca revealed its integration via the launch of its Landing API to provide small businesses with a loan decision within 30 seconds, rather than providing an instant “approval in principle.
PYMNTS
JULY 1, 2019
Smaller banks and credit unions enjoy a reputation of offering more personalized services than large financial institutions (FIs). When it comes to technological innovation, however, the smaller players have long been outgunned by larger FIs and their sizable IT budgets. This is changing — in a big way. Today, small banks are more aggressive and ambitious in their innovation strategies than medium-sized and large FIs.
PYMNTS
JULY 5, 2019
The ongoing and complicated work to build better digital identification systems for commerce and payments involves a host of players. The government is among those whose expertise and data can add fuel to digital ID innovation efforts — and such involvement will likely to have increase over time, according to a new PYMNTS interview. Neil Butters , head of digital identity, innovation and new ventures at Canada-based Interac , talked about how in addition to payment services firms, governments co
Advertiser: Paycor
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PYMNTS
JULY 3, 2019
In the B2B world, the time is now for faster payments. The bar may seem a bit low, as the majority of transactions are still mired in paper checks, with communications still tied to faxes and phone calls. In the Real-Time Payments Innovation Playbook , done in partnership between PYMNTS and Mastercard , financial decision-makers from nearly 400 firms across a dozen industries laid out a number of priorities for making their payment processes more efficient.
PYMNTS
JULY 1, 2019
Have you overdosed on Libra coverage yet? And it’s not even been two whole weeks. Facebook’s launch of Libra on June 18 unleashed a firestorm of media coverage, mostly repetitive, and mostly a piling on over the regulatory bear that it poked when unveiling its global payments plus cryptocurrency plans. If you need a balanced refresher of Libra’s impact on global payments, here’s how I called it in a piece that published one minute after the Libra news crossed the wire.
PYMNTS
JULY 1, 2019
The Bank for International Settlements ( BIS ) has announced the launch of a BIS Innovation Hub to enable central banks around the world to collaborate on financial technology solutions and innovation. The Hub will identify and develop insights into technology trends that have a crucial impact on central banking, as well as create public goods that will improve the global financial system and serve as a focal point for central bank experts on innovation.
PYMNTS
JULY 1, 2019
In payments fraud, it pays — literally — to change up the game a bit. As noted in a report by FireEye, the bad guys are continuing to leverage a tactic known as business email compromise (BEC), where that method of communication seeks to impersonate persons of authority from within a firm, or alternatively, legitimate business partners, to requests funds be sent to accounts (and then of course, pilfered).
Speaker: Cheryl J. Muldrew-McMurtry
Distributed finance teams are rewriting how the back-office runs, and attackers are taking notes. Disconnected workflows, process blind spots, and rising cyber threats are more than just growing pains—they’re liabilities. The challenge isn’t just going remote. It’s building resilient systems that protect accuracy, control, and speed across every transaction and touchpoint.
PYMNTS
JULY 1, 2019
As financial service conglomerates and innovators move deeper into the B2B payments field, they’re finding a field of opportunity to disrupt clunky manual and legacy processes far beyond the accounts payable (AP) department. One of the biggest opportunities is in fleet payments, where cash and checks remain prevalent (particularly in the U.S.), but where innovations in mobile payments, the Internet of Things (IoT) and autonomous vehicle technology have opened doors for FinTech firms to tac
PYMNTS
JULY 2, 2019
In a reported leak of billions of user records in a smart home data breach, researchers have found that a database that belongs to Chinese firm Orvibo has been left open without a password for protection. The database is said to encompass over 2 billion logs that include a range of information from account reset codes to user passwords, Forbes reported.
PYMNTS
JULY 5, 2019
Six major banks in the Nordic region will form a customer checking center to help combat money laundering and improve the reputation of the area’s financial institutions, according to a report by Reuters. . The banks involved will be Danske Bank, Swedbank Handelsbanken, Nordea, SEB and DNB. The banks said the KYC Utility would gather know your customer (KYC) checks to start with at large and medium-sized companies in the region, and also start offering commercial services. .
PYMNTS
JULY 3, 2019
Google has announced via its blog that some big updates are coming to make it easier for consumers to pay easily and quickly online, care of Chrome, no matter what device they happen to be using at the time. Therefore, going forward, consumers will be able to use payment methods previously saved to their Google Account to fill in checkout forms when signed into Chrome — across their devices and wherever Google Pay is accepted.
Speaker: Frank Taliano
Documents are the backbone of enterprise operations, but they are also a common source of inefficiency. From buried insights to manual handoffs, document-based workflows can quietly stall decision-making and drain resources. For large, complex organizations, legacy systems and siloed processes create friction that AI is uniquely positioned to resolve.
PYMNTS
JULY 3, 2019
When it comes time to pay suppliers, most accounts payable (AP) professionals will use whichever payment method they need to get the job done — but most are unhappy with what they currently use. Paper checks are AP departments’ seventh-favorite way to pay suppliers, yet 80.8 percent use them anyway. If given the choice between checks, digital wallets and ePayables, AP professionals would prefer to pay suppliers using digital payment solutions.
PYMNTS
JULY 3, 2019
In the financial services ecosystem, there are relatively invisible sources of power and fuel, those operations perhaps not well known in the mainstream, but which play vital roles. That holds true when it comes to the progress and growth of digital banking — something underscored by NCR with its recent acquisition of D3 Technology , an online and mobile banking specialist for the large financial institution (FI) market.
PYMNTS
JULY 5, 2019
It’s not enough to just be a retailer these days, it seems. Digital ads are also part of the process — at least that’s the story coming from recent developments involving major merchants. Take Target as one example. The retail chain reportedly has been in discussions with Triad Retail Media , the retail advertiser owned by WPP PLC, to acquire it.
PYMNTS
JULY 1, 2019
If chess is a game of evolution, where strategy takes pieces off the board — knight takes rook after rook takes queen — and only a few are left standing at the end, what might the merchant services chessboard look like a few years hence? The question is especially timely against a backdrop where megadeals have dominated the landscape. In a PYMNTS interview with Karen Webster, Daniela Mielke, CEO of RS2 North America , said what lies ahead is tied to what’s just behind us, where the mergers of 20
Speaker: Claire Grosjean, Global Finance & Operations Executive
Finance teams are drowning in data—but is it actually helping them spend smarter? Without the right approach, excess spending, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities continue to drain profitability. While analytics offers powerful insights, financial intelligence requires more than just numbers—it takes the right blend of automation, strategy, and human expertise.
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