PYMNTS
DECEMBER 20, 2018
In life, change is the only constant, so why should it be different for payments? From cash to digital, from plastic cards to mobile wallets, from cash registers at the front of restaurants to tablets brought to tables (redefining the concept of “dine and dash”) — the way we pay shifts along with the availability of technology, and tech shifts as commerce demands new features.
Katz,Sapper&Miller
DECEMBER 20, 2018
When the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) made qualified transportation fringe benefits (QTFs) nondeductible, it changed how parking expenses are treated. Recently, the IRS released interim guidance (Notice 2018-99) on how not-for-profit organizations can determine the amount of these expenses that must be treated as an increase in unrelated business taxable income (UBTI) as of Jan. 1, 2018.
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PYMNTS
DECEMBER 18, 2018
Amazon , Apple and Google are among the large tech companies that are throwing their support behind the creation of a real-time payments network in the U.S. led by the Federal Reserve. According to a report in the American Banker citing a letter submitted by a trade group representing Amazon, Apple, Google, PayPal , Square , Stripe and Intuit , they all expressed their support for the Fed being in charge of the development of a system that can connect all the banks and credit unions in the U.S
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 16, 2018
Facebook , the beleaguered social media giant that is facing intense scrutiny into its business practices, could be on the hook for a multibillion dollar fine, reported CNN. According to the report citing the Irish Data Protection Commission, Facebook is under investigation by the regulator over allegations it failed to protect the privacy of its users.
Speaker: Victor C. Barnes, CPA, MBA
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 17, 2018
Use of alternative finance (AltFin) sources among small business (SMB) owners is on the rise, but still has a long way to go before it poses a legitimate threat to traditional banks’ market dominance. Mercator Advisory Group data released earlier this year found that 27 percent of small businesses in the U.S. have already used an alternative lending platform, particularly among younger entrepreneurs.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 18, 2018
New technology continues to change the way consumers order and pay for quick-service restaurant (QSR) food: Kiosks and online ordering, among other experiences, let consumers ditch the counter for faster and higher-tech alternatives. But these restaurants are not innovating all that fast — even with all sorts of new technologies hitting the market. According to the PYMNTS Restaurant Readiness Index , the average technological implementation score is far from perfect at 38.7 out of 100.
Accountant Advocate brings together the best content for small business accounting professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 17, 2018
There’s a new method hackers can use to break into someone’s smartphone: create a 3D-print life-size replica of the owner’s head. To show how the method can work, Forbes reporter Thomas Brewster had a 3D print of his own head created at Backface in Birmingham, U.K. He then used his real-life head to set up facial recognition on five phones, including the iPhone X and four Android devices: an LG G7 ThinQ, a Samsung S9, a Samsung Note 8 and a OnePlus 6.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 20, 2018
Morgan Stanley wants to make it easier to acquire new tech from startups as well as pick up the pace of collaboration amid concerns from FinTechs that partnering with big banks can be slow and expensive. According to a report in Reuters citing Shawn Melamed, Morgan Stanley’s head of technology business development and innovation office, Melamed said the company is streamlining documentation and expanding the instances where executives can look at new products in an effort to improve partn
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 16, 2018
Robinhood , the FinTech that garnered a lot of attention last week after announcing a checking and savings product with 3 percent interest, has retreated from that, removing any mention of checking and savings from the product. According to a report in Bloomberg , when Robinhood announced the products last week , it compared them to traditional bank accounts, boasting a 3 percent interest rate on both checking and savings.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 21, 2018
Lloyd’s of London has announced that it might impose a ban on insurance brokers who refuse to digitalize their business in 2019. In a press release , the company revealed that starting next year “each syndicate will be required to have written no less than 40 percent of its risks using a recognized electronic placement system with the target increasing to 50% in Q2.
Speaker: Kim Beynon, CPA, CGMA, PMP
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 21, 2018
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators has expressed concerns that FinTech startup Robinhood is not being transparent about its cash management service. After announcing a checking and savings product with 3 percent interest earlier this month, the company then removed any mention of the products from its site just one week later and instead rebranded it as a “cash management service.”.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 21, 2018
The conversation about credit in the U.S. has become one of extremes. There is a growing chorus of voices that eschew credit as a “dangerous trap” that lures consumers into spending more than they can afford, in part, they say, because credit products are designed to make repayment expensive and therefore difficult. Avoiding that trap, they advocate, means consumers should avoid credit entirely — limiting purchases to only what they can afford to pay in full with funds on hand.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 21, 2018
The holiday season always brings with it a major crush of hiring for temporary employees — and the year 2018 was widely forecasted to be one for the record books on that account. According to a Challenger, Gray & Christmas analysis, employers were predicted to bring in around 700,000 seasonal workers for the December holidays, the biggest hiring spree since 2015.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 20, 2018
From using instant messaging to getting directions and shopping online, consumers are constantly generating a trail of data about their preferences and whereabouts. However, while all that happens in the background, consumers are growing increasingly wary of how their data is collected and stored. With data breaches making headlines almost every other day, consumers want to know that their data is being protected, and that it’s not being used in ways they don’t approve.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 21, 2018
Southeast Asia’s Grab might be in for more funding: SoftBank’s Vision Fund may invest $1 billion in the ride-hailing company, according to The Telegraph , and is reportedly nearing a deal. Grab has notched $2.7 billion in funding this year alone and has raised more than $6 billion overall. SoftBank is no stranger to Grab: The firm made a $250 million investment in the firm four years ago.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 18, 2018
Amazon’s third annual Digital Day, which offers savings on digital content across the site, will be on Dec. 28, the company announced. Interested customers can access digital deals on movies, TV shows, eBooks, mobile games and apps on Amazon ’s Digital Day website. “Amazon Digital Day continues to provide great deals on digital content,” said Aaron Rubenson, Amazon’s vice president of digital, app and game services.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 21, 2018
Microsoft issued an emergency security update for Internet Explorer after hackers were able to exploit a new flaw in several versions of the browser. “A remote code execution vulnerability exists in the way that the scripting engine handles objects in memory in Internet Explorer,” the company revealed in a statement. “The vulnerability could corrupt memory in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 17, 2018
Payments have been a pain point throughout the evolution of merchants. As commerce globalizes, merchants are left wondering whether they have the payment methods that people want to use through digital channels, while also facing the sheer magnitude of declines. “Merchants have problems with payments in new and broader and deeper ways than they have in a while,” Modo CEO Bruce Parker told PYMNTS in an interview.
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PYMNTS
DECEMBER 20, 2018
Amazon announced on Thursday (Dec. 20) that it’s planning to lower some of the fees it charges to third-party sellers, according to a report from Reuters. The marketplace unit allows third-party sellers, which make up more than 50 percent of all the units Amazon sells, to sell items on Amazon’s site and its app. Analysts at Baird, an investment and financial services company, said the move will benefit customers.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 20, 2018
Bitcoin, the leading digital currency, is having a bit of a resurgence this week. Surpassing $4,000 for the first time in two weeks, this is seen as a breakout from a decline that has been going on for some time now. According to a report in CNBC , citing CoinDesk, the price of bitcoin gained close to 7 percent in trading on Thursday (Dec. 20) hitting $4,037.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 17, 2018
A financial technology company called B-Social has raised £3.2 million ($4 million) in funding from undisclosed but high net-worth entities, according to reports. The funds are just the ambitious company’s beginning steps toward its goal of becoming a wholly licensed bank — one that completely redefines what banking means and framing it around social interactions.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 19, 2018
NASA has suffered a data breach that exposed its employees’ Social Security numbers and other personal information. According to a memo sent Tuesday (Dec. 18) by Assistant Administrator Bob Gibbs, the agency began looking into the breach of its servers on Oct. 23. “Upon discovery of the incidents, NASA cybersecurity personnel took immediate action to secure the servers and the data contained within,” the memo stated. “NASA and its Federal cybersecurity partners are continuing t
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
DECEMBER 19, 2018
Regulatory changes, particularly those in Europe, are making it an interesting time for companies to be in the forex and money exchange businesses. “They’re dealing with the need to comply with things like GDPR,” Global Data Consortium (GDC) Co-founder Charles Gaddy told PYMNTS in an interview, adding they can’t take information out of a certain location and only use it for particular purposes.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 21, 2018
With new products bolstering online sales of apparel and footwear, Nike came out ahead of Wall Street quarterly estimates. The company’s stock rose 7 percent on the news on Thursday (Dec. 20), Reuters reported. Nike has grown online retail partnerships over a period of more than a year, and it has also hastened the speed of new item releases. Reuters reported that Nike’s online sales jumped by 41 percent during the quarter and its digital sales increased by over 30 percent “in its home mar
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 19, 2018
As far as B2B FinTech goes, much attention has been paid to empowering a range of processes, including accounts payable, expense management and financial analysis — many of which had previously been a part of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. While innovation and digital disruption have taken these financial processes out of the ERP and made them independent platforms for corporate users, the ERP remains a critical component of financial management in the enterprise, particularly
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 19, 2018
With the launch of Ingo Money QuickConnect last week , the company capped off a year that CEO Drew Edwards told Karen Webster could best be characterized as the “Great Awakening” of push payments. “We’ve finally moved beyond ‘so what is a push payment?’ to ‘how do I deliver real-time payments or fast funds to my customers?’” Edwards explained. The proof point, Edwards said, is the sheer number of Request For Proposals (RFPs) “flying at the top of the smokestack economy left and right” at the sam
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
DECEMBER 17, 2018
Shoppers might have to wait until the New Year to get their hands on one of Amazon ’s Echo smart speakers. Bloomberg reported that several of Amazon’s online stores in North America and Europe are sold out of various Echo models, with shipment delayed to January or beyond in some areas. The eCommerce giant said that it sold “millions” of Echo devices around the world during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and Cyber Monday, with the Echo Dot reigning as its best-selling product during that
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 21, 2018
It’s a tale of two kinds of brick-and-mortar retailers amid the rise of eCommerce: Some traditional department store chains like JCPenney and Macy’s are shuttering stores, as some retailers with other business models are more than surviving. TJX, the owner of off-priced retailers like T.J. Maxx, is “growing steadily” in the words of the Los Angeles Times , and has brought in $36 billion in yearly sales.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 17, 2018
The holiday season brings in a staggering number of returns for eCommerce sales: According to estimates from CBRE, online returns could reach $37 billion amid the gift-giving season. Some of those unwanted items, however, don’t end up being resold by retailers themselves. They fall into the hands of entrepreneurs who scour liquidation and auction websites for items like routers, televisions and printers.
PYMNTS
DECEMBER 21, 2018
Quick-service restaurants (QSRs) are breaking out loyalty rewards in hopes of luring customers away from the competition — and turning one-time buyers into loyal, frequent customers. Burger King , for one, recently turned heads with a rather pointed promotional campaign that rewards customers for abandoning McDonald’s and placing a mobile order with Burger King.
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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