March, 2016

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Mobile Helps Boost Subscription Box Sites By 3,000 Percent

PYMNTS

We’ve known that subscription box sites were on the rise, but new data showing the particular numbers in that regard is nonetheless impressive. EMarketer reports that, according to a recent study from Hitwise, visits to subscription box sites (online subscription retail services like BarkBox , Birchbox and Dollar Shave Club , which, on a monthly basis, provide their members with goods delivered quite literally in a box) in the United States have increased by nearly 3,000 percent in the pas

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Cumulus Funding Consumer Finance Co. Raises $30 Million+

PYMNTS

Cumulus Funding, a consumer finance company specializing in providing Income Share Agreements (“ISAs”) to individuals seeking a more flexible consumer finance alternative, has announced a major funding round today (March 17). Cumulus announced it has closed a round of financing of over $30 million in capital, including $6 million in equity funding and a committed $25 million debt financing facility.

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Google Goes ‘Hands Free’ For Mobile Payments

PYMNTS

We’ve said it before and we will say it again — when it comes to mobile payments, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, any more than there is one-size-fits-all payment method. But what is clear is that the mobile solution that will ultimately garner the critical mass needed to ignite it will solve a problem for a consumer. Paying in a store hasn’t ever really been much of a problem – until EMV, anyway — so convincing consumers that it was better for them to pull out their phone and tap at some

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Blockchain Supply Chain Network Makes Its Debut

PYMNTS

The blockchain has been considered a possible means to overhaul an array of aspects in B2B payments, including cross-border and smart documentation. One company wants to use the technology for supply chain management, including payments and invoicing, and, late last week, rolled out its solution to do so. Fluent said Friday (March 11) that it is debuting the Fluent Network, a blockchain-based software platform for cross-border B2B trade aimed at the businesses and financial institutions that pla

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The Growth Architect: How Financial Leaders are Unlocking Potential

Speaker: Ashley Harlan, MBA

What if your role as a fractional CFO went beyond operational support to actively shaping the future of your clients’ businesses? 💼 ✨ In this session, discover how fractional finance professionals can position themselves as architects of growth, guiding their clients toward sustainable success and preparing them for full-time financial leadership.

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Loan Company Employee Got $400K From Stolen Identities

PYMNTS

A loan company employee has pleaded guilty to stealing identities of several customers and fraudulently seeking $400,000 in tax returns. According to court documents , Montgomery, Alabama resident Wendy Huff, who worked at two different insurance companies between January 2013 and August 2015, stole personal information of her employers’ customers, including their names, social security numbers and dates of birth.

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Roofstock’s Better Way To Buy And Sell Rented Homes

PYMNTS

It seems like every innovative, disruptive service changing the world today was immediately met with skepticism upon release. When Uber came out, taxis and regulators claimed that nobody would want to get into a random driver’s car. When Airbnb launched, hotels laughed at the premise that travelers would give up on their traditionally luxurious experiences.

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PayPal’s Schulman Joins Obama’s Cuba Delegation

PYMNTS

By any stretch, President Barack Obama’s trip to Cuba is a historic event. After all, he is the first United States president to visit the tiny nation, so long a U.S. adversary, in roughly 90 years. Obama has reopened the U.S. embassy there and has also paved the path for commercial airline flights to begin to that nation. Mail will go back and forth between the two countries.

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Solange Taps BigCommerce For Saint Heron Site Relaunch

PYMNTS

If Beyoncé and Jay Z ever see their musical careers go in the tank (they won’t), at least now they have their own music streaming service to fall back on for day jobs. On the other hand, Solange — Beyoncé’s sister — has to make her eCommerce venture work without the luxury of a few Billboard charting tunes. That’s the mission behind the relaunch of Solange’s online store for her Saint Heron fashion line, which aims to incorporate diversity into every design it sells.

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Don’t Fear The Rise Of The Machines

PYMNTS

Payment fraud evolves in ways that are truly frightening — and with haste. Fraudsters are continually scrambling to keep up with, and have one foot in front of, technology, with recent stumbling blocks in the form of EMV, in the United States, likely to give rise to greater card-not-present fraud. But the would-be payments criminals have potent weaponry at hand, including ever faster, ever more powerful and ever cheaper computing power, and they have been targeting, according to data science fir

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2025 Payroll Calendar Templates (Biweekly, Semi-Monthly, and Monthly)

Use these handy calendar templates to stay on top of payroll in 2025! Download them today to share with your HR team or post for employees. Whether your company has biweekly, semi-monthly, or monthly pay periods, Paycor has you covered. Get your templates today!

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For Banks, A Lesson On Blockchain From The Age Of Internet Startups

PYMNTS

The whispers have grown to loud chatter when it comes to blockchain technology and the impact it might have on the financial services sector. What once may not have been taken seriously — cryptocurrencies and futuristic payments — is today exploding as the innovation financial institutions are targeting for investments, largely hoping to get a jump on the blockchain before disruption takes a bite out of their traditional business.

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The Fastest Path To Faster Payments In The US

PYMNTS

The path to faster payments in the U.S. doesn’t have to be paved with a 500+ person task force analyzing what the world would look like if we were starting from a clean sheet of paper, competing propositions for who’s going to build and operate a new set of rails, or even what sort of spiffy software can make existing rails faster. Instead, we could do something right away — or almost right away — that would make payments between consumers and businesses faster.

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China $1.1T eCommerce Market On Horizon

PYMNTS

While some Asian country economies may be slowing down, the health of the online retail markets across the continent is booming. According to a recent report from Forrester, as reported on by ZDNet , total eCommerce revenue for China, Japan, South Korea, India and Australia is projected to nearly double in the next five years, from $733 billion in 2014 to $1.4 trillion by 2020.

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Malware Strikes Merchants Behind The EMV Curve

PYMNTS

Cybersecurity firm FireEye warns of the dangers that custom-built malware poses to retailers due to its ability to capture payment card details directly from retail point-of-sale (POS) systems. In an article posted to its research blog on Monday (March 28), FireEye warned about the POS malware called TREASUREHUNT that it said is designed to enumerate running processes, extract payment card data from memory and then transmit the stolen information to a command and control server.

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From Start to Scale: Driving Growth Through Seamless Payments Implementation

Speaker: Michael Veatch, Senior Director, Implementations & Ella Aguirre, Director of Solution Consulting

Embedding payments can be a transformative step for software companies looking to enhance their platform capabilities, boost customer satisfaction, and drive long-term growth. However, the success of payments hinges on a single thing: implementation. Drawing on real-world insights and experiences, payments implementation experts Michael Veatch and Ella Aguirre will explore actionable strategies that can lead to a transparent, friction-free launch and mitigate potential challenges like technical

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GM Asks Hackers For Cybersecurity Help

PYMNTS

GM is amping up its cybersecurity unit to ready itself against rising possibilities of threats to its automobile firewall. The company has called for hackers to help it uncover loopholes in its cybersecurity net for vehicles, websites and software, under a “coordinated disclosure” program. The program’s launch comes at a time when cybersecurity gaps in the automobile industry are increasingly drawing scrutiny on a regulatory level and are leading to massive recalls, The Wall St

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A Closer Look At Ripple’s Money-Saving Claims

PYMNTS

Blockchain proponents say the disruptive technology is worth the onboarding process. Among one of the loudest of these blockchain champions is Ripple, a FinTech firm that has recently secured millions of dollars in investments and strategic partnerships aimed at promoting blockchain technology’s use for traditionally friction-rich areas, like cross-border payments and real-time payments.

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DOJ: Apple ‘Deliberately Raised Technological Barriers’ For FBI

PYMNTS

The feud between Apple and the FBI has turned hostile, with the government agency calling out Apple’s actions as false and corrosive to the very system meant to protect rights. “Here, Apple deliberately raised technological barriers that now stand between a lawful warrant and an iPhone containing evidence related to the terrorist mass murder of 14 Americans.

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Apple Pay’s Big Drop

PYMNTS

About 18 months ago, Apple Pay awakened the world to the possibilities and potential of using a mobile phone as a replacement for a plastic card at the physical point of sale. Could Apple succeed where so many had failed? The world watched, waited and speculated. PYMNTS, in partnership with InfoScout, decided to put some data behind the watching and launched the PYMNTS/InfoScout Apple Pay Adoption Tracker in November of 2014.

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Less Stress, More Success: Accounting Best Practices & Processes for 2025

Speaker: Duke Heninger, Partner and Fractional CFO at Ampleo & Creator of CFO System

Are you ready to elevate your accounting processes for 2025? 🚀 Join us for an exclusive webinar led by Duke Heninger, a seasoned fractional CFO and CPA passionate about transforming back-office operations for finance teams. This session will cover critical best practices and process improvements tailored specifically for accounting professionals.

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How Lipstick Plus Payments Equals The Internet of Things

PYMNTS

Let’s go back for a minute to the year 1999. It was just about a decade years after Tim Berners-Lee gave people the ability to actually use the Internet via World Wide Web. 171 million of the 6 billion humans on the planet were using the Internet. And 51 percent of CEOs said that the Internet probably wouldn’t have a big impact on their business.

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FBI Wants Businesses To Help With Ransomware Probe

PYMNTS

As the FBI works to combat a specific type of ransomware virus, it is calling on businesses and software security experts for emergency assistance in its investigation. Over the weekend, Reuters obtained a confidential “Flash” advisory from the FBI: “We need your help!” The particular strain of ransomware the FBI is fighting is known as MSIL/Samas.A and is being used by hackers for extortion.

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SMBs On Payment Technology: What’s In It For Me?

PYMNTS

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are the backbone of the American economy. They account for almost half of payroll (48%) and have created about 60% of new jobs since 2009. Given the rapid growth of technology solutions that can help these businesses thrive, not to mention get an edge with their customers, PYMNTS.com and Sage set out to measure the rate of adoption of these technologies for SMBs across the U.S.

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Wielding Cuddle Power To Affect Retail

PYMNTS

An inherent truth of the retail industry — that consumers, at the end of the day, wield the ultimate power in determining what products and companies succeed — can even be applied to entire business models. Pet retail is, by and large, in no danger of slowing down any time soon, given that consumers’ affection for cuddly companions (and not-so-objectively-cuddly ones, like fish and reptiles) translated into a $17.5 billion business worldwide as of last year.

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Avoiding Lease Accounting Pitfalls in 2025: Lessons Learned from Spreadsheet Errors

Speaker: Abdi Ali, Sr. Lease Accounting Consultant

Join this insightful webinar with industry expert Abdi Ali, who will discuss the challenges that can arise from managing lease accounting with spreadsheets! He will share real-world examples of errors, compliance issues, and risks that may be present within your spreadsheets. Learn how these tools, while useful, can sometimes lead to inefficiencies that affect your time, resources, and peace of mind.

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TGI Fridays, Fast Casual Food To Cater To Millennial Expectations

PYMNTS

Every generation has to eat, but every generation doesn’t have to eat the same way. Whole Foods and other retailers capitalizing on the at-home health food craze were able to get out in front of millennial eating trends — or, at least, start riding at the crest of the wave. Fast casual restaurants weren’t so prescient, though, and now, cracks are appearing in one of the Baby Boomer generation’s most enduring retail trends.

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How Hackers Stole $101M From A New York Fed Account

PYMNTS

The story behind the massive $101 million bank hacking that hit Bangladesh’s central bank last week just got even juicier. It turns out those funds were stolen from Bangladesh’s account at the New York Fed through the use of official government codes. This has left officials across four countries digging for answers, and one top bank chief has turned in his resignation.

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The Force Behind Connected Commerce

PYMNTS

Cars that can find cheap gas, a table for 2 at a restaurant nearby and advance order milk, cereal and paper towels for a quick pick up on the way home are no longer a wild and crazy idea never to see the light of day. Software and applications are eating commerce. Well, to be precise, enabling it in ways that are limited only by the imaginations of the innovators who see ways to tuck commerce into the places where consumers and businesses meet to do business.

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Bitcoin Payments Go NFC

PYMNTS

“There exists a bizarre gap in today’s state of financial services.” That’s the philosophy of Shake, a new startup in the bitcoin world that is (unsurprisingly) trying to pitch a payment method that doesn’t involve banks, governments or regulators. Instead, its latest product rollout is all about making bitcoin and digital currency payments easier to make.

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Back to Basics with Reconciliations

Join us in this webinar, where we share best practices on how to think about the reconciliation work each month, when best to do reconciliations, how they should be prepared, and some common pitfalls to avoid. Learning Objectives: This course objective is to understand how to properly prepare and review balance sheet reconciliations and its impact on the financial statements.