PYMNTS
JUNE 18, 2019
The endless speculation over Facebook ’s plans to build a new set of global payments rails and launch a global cryptocurrency comes to an end today with the official launch of Libra. Or does it? The announcement today establishes Libra as the foundation for a new, low or no cost, global payments and financial services ecosystem, one built by Facebook, to give billions of people access to the “internet of money.
Katz,Sapper&Miller
JUNE 17, 2019
KSM’s Chad Halstead will present at “Leveraging Opportunity Zones,” an informational event presented by Greater Fort Wayne Inc. and the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership on the newly created Qualified Opportunity Zone program.
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PYMNTS
JUNE 17, 2019
Sometimes there are two approaches to the same problem in FinTech: EMVCo’s recently released EMV Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) Specification version 1.0 promises to enable many more seamless retail transactions, and the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C ) Payment Request application programming interface (API) aims to reduce checkout friction. Modo CEO Bruce Parker told PYMNTS.com in an interview that they are both looking to solve the same problem, “which is simply and securely gathering payment d
PYMNTS
JUNE 17, 2019
To address a major pain point for the LGBTQIA+ community, Mastercard is introducing the True Name card. The product will allow for chosen names to appear on the front of the card, according to news from Mastercard. In an announcement, the company said, “For many in the LGBTQIA+ community, the name on their credit, debit or prepaid card does not reflect their true identity.
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
JUNE 17, 2019
In what could be one of the first investments by a crypto-based firm in a major U.S. firm that is publicly traded, Ripple Inc. has arranged to invest up to $50 million in MoneyGram International Inc. Ripple is the company behind the XRP digital currency, The Wall Street Journal reported. Ripple’s Chief Executive Brad Garlinghouse said, according to the newspaper, “This deal is a major milestone for the entire industry.
PYMNTS
JUNE 20, 2019
Friction bedevils all types of retail — and that holds true for transactions inside stores or via eCommerce sites. At the same time, the ongoing effort to create true omnichannel experiences for consumers often runs into roadblocks of friction, frustrating merchants and consumers alike. That being obvious doesn’t make it any less true — or any less meaningful to those involved in payments and commerce.
Accountant Advocate brings together the best content for small business accounting professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
PYMNTS
JUNE 18, 2019
Is it prime time for real time, especially for B2B? The rise of Zelle , and any number of peer-to-peer (P2P) payment options, has increasingly brought consumers on board with the need for speed in payments — where settlement is marked by seconds and minutes, not hours or days. It’s a well-known fact, too, that corporate payments (the B2B kind) are ripe for digitization, and for a wholesale move away from the paper chase, where checks are still stubbornly tied to 50 percent of corporate transacti
PYMNTS
JUNE 17, 2019
Open banking is nothing if not a lot of moving parts and complications. But could merchant incentives help fuel this ongoing effort at digital payments innovation? That was one of the questions raised in a new PYMNTS interview with Ireti Samuel-Ogbu, Citigroup ’s head of payments and receivables for Europe, Middle East and Africa. In a discussion with Karen Webster, Samuel-Ogbu talked about the role of API aggregation and how incentives can help to ignite open banking, one of the main efforts no
PYMNTS
JUNE 19, 2019
Facebook’s Tuesday (June 18) news of the launch of its Libra cryptocurrency was heard around the world, and the Group of Seven (G7) nations definitely noticed, with the coalition calling for an investigation into the supposed risks of cryptocurrencies and how they would affect the current financial system, according to a report by The Financial Times.
PYMNTS
JUNE 20, 2019
Facebook ’s cryptocurrency initiative grabbed its share of attention this past week, of course. The business model of offering the digital wallet Calibra to back Libra, and tie it all to real assets (along with the Libra Association), shone the spotlight on crypto’s role in eCommerce. However, beyond that deluge of headlines were ripples (literally) and continued cross-border, digital payment efforts from other firms.
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
JUNE 20, 2019
To offer “surveillance as a service,” Amazon earned a U.S. patent for an “unmanned aerial vehicle.” It was granted on June 4 after its filing approximately four years ago on June 12, 2015, Quartz reported. An “unmanned aerial vehicle” is drone’s technical terminology, according to the report. It “may perform a surveillance action at a property of an authorized party” as well as “image the property to generate surveillance images.
PYMNTS
JUNE 20, 2019
Apple has expanded the test phase of its credit card with Goldman Sachs to its retail employees, according to a report by Bloomberg. The company, which has tens of thousands of retail workers, launched an internal beta program for the Apple Card, and it is the first major trial for the upcoming product, set to launch publicly in the summer. The group using the card, despite the size of the workforce, will be a controlled one, and the workers were asked to not talk about the card, even though the
PYMNTS
JUNE 20, 2019
Retailers focused on combating fraud have credit cards in the cross-hairs of their efforts. Between data breaches exposing customer details and card information and the rise of card-not-present fraud as operations move online, digital businesses are challenged to stay abreast of payment security trends — and fraud is a massive issue for firms large and small.
PYMNTS
JUNE 19, 2019
The announcement of Facebook’s Libra has buoyed other cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin, which gained in the neighborhood of 12 percent this week, to $9,477. However, supporters of the coin want it to reach the $10,000 mark, a threshold which could be difficult to accomplish, according to a report by Bloomberg. The last time Bitcoin got close to the $10,000 level was in May 2018, but it couldn’t close the gap.
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
JUNE 18, 2019
Cybercrime is both pervasive and expensive, as modern problems go. According to reports , citing the University of Maryland, there is an attempted hack every 39 seconds. By some estimates, cybercrime will have cost the world $6 trillion by 2021 in damaged and destroyed data, stolen money, lost productivity, theft of intellectual property, theft of personal and financial data, embezzlement, fraud and post-attack disruption to the normal course of business.
PYMNTS
JUNE 15, 2019
Summer is here and while schools nationwide are emptying, families across the U.S. are readying for the annual pilgrimage to beaches, national parks, amusement parks, resorts and campgrounds nationwide. And those families heading out by planes, trains and automobiles each summer represent a pretty hefty chunk of change commerce-wise. Depending on the estimate, the average American vacation costs $1,145 per person — meaning a trip for a family of four averages out around $4,500.
PYMNTS
JUNE 18, 2019
Shares in Western Union have fallen on Tuesday (June 18) on the news that Facebook is going to release a new cryptocurrency called Libra , according to a report by CNBC. Western Union stocks fell 1.7 percent, making the company one of the worst performing ones on the S&P 500 index. Libra is expected to debut sometime before July 2020. Libra is going to offer cross-border, or remittance, payments — and people who want to send money to other countries could use Libra to do so and eschew the fe
PYMNTS
JUNE 16, 2019
A computer science student scraped seven million Venmo transactions to warn users that their public activity can still be stolen. Dan Salmon said he scraped the transactions over the course of six months to prove to users that they need to set their Venmo payments to private. Venmo payments between users are set to public by default. The move comes a year after privacy researcher Hang Do Thi Duc downloaded 207 million Venmo transactions to prove a similar point.
Advertiser: Paycor
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PYMNTS
JUNE 17, 2019
Smart technology is what makes ordering by voice and remotely monitoring your home possible. Promising as intelligence of things (IoT) solutions are, though, security has been a stumbling block. The June IoT Tracker explores the latest advancements in IoT security and new applications of smart technology. According to the tracker, the global IoT security market is expected to increase by a 35.5 percent CAGR from 2019 to 2026.
PYMNTS
JUNE 17, 2019
Target faced a register outage that lasted for about 90 minutes on Sunday (June 16), which meant it couldn’t process cards or other forms of payment. The complication caused long lines and wait times in the store, and the company placed the blame on an issue related to a vendor, according to a report by Reuters. The outage was the second one in a week experienced by the retail giant, and the company blamed payments vendor NCR, saying that there was an issue in a data center that completely affec
PYMNTS
JUNE 18, 2019
India is asking messaging service WhatsApp to put a digital fingerprint on every message sent by the service, but without breaking the encryption, according to a report by the Economic Times. Indian officials want to be able to see where a message came from and how many people interacted with it, either by reading or forwarding, without the official having to read the actual message.
PYMNTS
JUNE 19, 2019
Small business platform Xero has announced a partnership with Stripe to work on small business payments innovations. The companies will develop new tools that aim to help small businesses get paid faster in various ways while also gaining more visibility over their business performance. The global partnership, announced at Xerocon San Diego 2019, revealed the first two innovations: a new Stripe feed that will bring comprehensive transaction data for all Stripe payments into Xero for easy reconci
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
JUNE 17, 2019
You know the old adage: a customer who has a bad experience with customer service does not need to be motivated to communicate with others about it. Quite to the contrary, that customer will be sure to tell as many people as they can get to listen to them on the subject. It is why every marketplace — and every business, for that matter — needs to be critically and centrally worried about that customer service experience, Yapstone EVP of International Operations Peter Rowan told PYMNTS.
PYMNTS
JUNE 20, 2019
News of the launch of Facebook cryptocurrency Libra has highlighted how the U.S. government will respond to the introduction of new digital currencies. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Federal Reserve and the Senate Banking Committee will both closely scrutinize the implementation of Libra. On Wednesday (June 20), Fed chairman Jerome Powell said that the country’s central bank has “significant input into the payments system,” which is the eCommerce system that Libra will affect.
PYMNTS
JUNE 17, 2019
The United States is currently weathering a healthcare worker shortage that is estimated to get quite a bit worse before it gets better. According to healthcare staffing consultancy Mercer , to cover the needs of an aging population as baby boomers sail into their golden years, the U.S. will need to hire 2.3 million new health care workers by 2025.
PYMNTS
JUNE 20, 2019
The last thing that anyone wants to hear in almost any financial organization is that the people tasked with risk management is feeling less than fully confident about their ability to actually do that job — because they aren’t sure if their data is good. If the risk experts aren’t feeling confident — it is hard to know how anyone else in an organization is going to.
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
JUNE 19, 2019
Libra may have dominated the news so far this week — and, of course, the new cryptocurrency announced by Facebook is underpinned by blockchain. But elsewhere, DLT continues to make inroads into tracking items as they move across supply chains. To that end, the MediLedger project debuted a new pilot program this week, billed as a cross-industry initiative that eyes using blockchain for drug supply chains.
PYMNTS
JUNE 19, 2019
The connected vehicle ecosystem is taking shape, and that brings new opportunities to retail. But challenges remain, not the least of which include securing the emerging ecosystem for those connected cards and trucks. Some of the latest developments from the retail side of the ecosystem come from the world of QSRs. Cars and quick-service restaurants (QSRs) have been interconnected since drive-ins were the latest innovation.
PYMNTS
JUNE 21, 2019
Consumers’ lives are becoming more digitally focused, which means it’s natural and expected that credit unions (CUs) are feeling the pressure to raise the level of their services across channels. This fact is borne by data in the latest edition of the Credit Union Tracker , a PYMNTS collaboration with PSCU , which found that 59.9 percent of customers reported that having a mobile app is “very” or “extremely” important to them in terms of their CUs’ offerings.
PYMNTS
JUNE 19, 2019
Corporate audit and accounting company PwC is expanding its existing collaboration with small business cloud accounting company Xero. The companies announced in a press release Tuesday (June 18) that their expanded collaboration enables local PwC firms to connect their clients with Xero solutions, building on their existing relationship within the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
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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