Sat.Sep 21, 2019 - Fri.Sep 27, 2019

article thumbnail

Serving Mobile P2P Payments To The Gen X Crowd

PYMNTS

Financial providers worldwide are working to give small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) quick access to their funds. Digital banks , for one, are teaming up with technology providers to accelerate settlement times for payments collected at the point-of-sale (POS). Legacy banks are similarly at work, with one major FI seeking to beat out FinTech competition by offering same-day access to credit card deposits.

Banking 98
article thumbnail

Book Review: The New Stock Market

CFA Institute

The New Stock Market is a truly impressive achievement.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Trending Sources

article thumbnail

Asian firms plan job cuts

Future CFO

More than two-third of Asian firms surveyed by INSEAD recently plan to cut jobs out of recession fear though their confidence lifted slightly in the September quarter from 10-year lows , said INSEAD recently. The business school and Thomson Reuters surveyed 102 companies during Aug 30 - Sep13 from a range of sectors in 11 Asia Pacific countries where 45% of the world's population live and almost a third of global gross domestic product is generated.

article thumbnail

Passage Of SAFE Banking Act Gives Cannabis Businesses Access To Banking

PYMNTS

The U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 1595, known as the Secure And Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act, on Wednesday (Sept. 25). The bill was sponsored by Congressmen Ed Perlmutter of Colorado, Denny Heck of Washington, Steve Stivers of Ohio and Warren Davidson of Ohio, all members of the House Financial Services Committee. The legislation aims to ensure that state-authorized and regulated cannabis businesses are not forced to operate with cash only.

Banking 94
article thumbnail

The Human Side of Finance: The Intersectionality of People, Culture, Adaptability, and Resilience

Speaker: Melissa Hurrington

Finance isn’t just about the numbers. It’s about the people behind them. In a world of constant disruption, resilient finance teams aren’t just operationally efficient. They are adaptable, engaged, and deeply connected to a strong organizational culture. Success lies at the intersection of people, culture, adaptability, and resilience. Finance leaders who master this balance will build teams that thrive through uncertainty and drive long-term business impact.

article thumbnail

Why Being ‘Invisible’ Isn’t Enough For Payments In The 2020s

PYMNTS

If for nothing else, Uber and Lyft will be remembered for one big thing: making payments all but invisible via a seamless transaction process that was pretty much revolutionary. In a short amount of time, that ideal has become the general gold standard for digital and mobile payments and commerce, a guiding light for all types of companies in all kinds of sectors.

B2B 87

More Trending

article thumbnail

IoT’s Impact On Supply Chains And Security

PYMNTS

This week, along with Amazon’s announcement about new Echo devices and Alexa’s celebrity voices, came news of Amazon Sidewalk , a new wireless protocol that uses low bandwidth to extend the distance at which IoT devices can be controlled and requires less power than Wi-Fi. This seemingly small move signals Amazon’s faith in the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), however.

article thumbnail

New Apple OS Reportedly Has Payment Security Issues

PYMNTS

Two Apple iOS 13 users took to Reddit to share some payment security issues they faced when using the tech giant’s newest iteration of its operating system, according to reports. Apple has already announced it will release iOS 13.1 on Tuesday (Sept. 24) to fix problems concerning reliability and usability. Two users said they were trying to update their payment information when another person’s information popped up in the information box.

article thumbnail

Facebook Acquires Israeli Hybrid Chatbot Startup Servicefriend

PYMNTS

Israel-based hybrid chatbot startup Servicefriend was acquired by Facebook to build customer service bots for its planned digital wallet Calibra , reports said on Saturday (Sept. 21). . Servicefriend was launched in 2015 by co-founders Ido Arad and Shahar Ben Ami to offer customer service using hybrid artificial intelligence (AI) bots. Facebook’s acquisition of Servicefriend is expected to help the social media giant roll out its cryptocurrency Libra in 2020.

article thumbnail

Fedwire’s ISO 20022 Migration Delayed By Federal Reserve Bank 

PYMNTS

The phase 1 implementation of the ISO 20022 migration strategy that was scheduled for November 2020 is being postponed by the Federal Reserve Bank, the U.S. central bank said in a press release on Monday, Sept. 23. The Payments Market Practice Group asked the Federal Reserve to reassess its approach to the project, which involves a three-phased migration to the ISO 20022 messaging standard for the Fedwire Funds Service.

Banking 76
article thumbnail

Maximizing Profit and Productivity: The New Era of AI-Powered Accounting

Speaker: Yohan Lobo

In the accounting world, staying ahead means embracing the tools that allow you to work smarter, not harder. Outdated processes and disconnected systems can hold your organization back, but the right technologies can help you streamline operations, boost productivity, and improve client delivery. Dive into the strategies and innovations transforming accounting practices.

article thumbnail

How To Trust And Verify In The Platform Economy Age

PYMNTS

Platform economies want to make it easy for consumers to join. After all, scale means everything. But where there’s scale — millions of users and masses of digital IDs — there are, of course, fraudsters lying in wait and plying their trade, stealing IDs and money. And it may be the case that in the tradeoff between convenience and security, companies would do well to start looking harder into whether identity verification efforts need to be stepped up a bit, even if that means injecting friction

article thumbnail

Post-Data Breach, Ecuador Pushes For Stricter Privacy Laws

PYMNTS

Ecuador ’s government has rushed a draft privacy law to Congress after the nation was hit with a massive data breach impacting more than 20 million people. The breach, according to the Financial Times , was discovered by researchers at VPNMentor , who reported that the data was found on an unsecured server owned by Novaestrat, a data analytics company in Ecuador.

article thumbnail

Half Of Americans Now ‘Middle Class’ With $78K Average Annual Earnings

PYMNTS

Data from the Pew Research Center shows that 52 percent of American adults live in “ middle class ” households, with the median income at $78,442 in 2016. According to Pew, the middle class is defined as adults whose annual household income is two-thirds to double the national median, after being adjusted for household size. The data found that about one-fifth of American households are considered upper class, while 29 percent are lower class.

article thumbnail

Nike Earnings Beat The Street With Digital As Growth Driver

PYMNTS

With digital as an important growth driver for the sportswear brand, Nike reported quarterly estimates per share that beat The Street’s most bullish estimate. The beat comes after the company came out below the consensus earnings estimate last quarter, Bloomberg reported. Nike ’s gross margin rising by 150 basis points, according to Cowen’s John Kernan, is “indicative of the power of Nike’s innovation and scaling digital platforms and apps.

article thumbnail

Smarter Card Solutions: Meeting the Challenges of Mid-Market Travel & Expense

Our 2025 Center Travel Survey is clear: as corporate travel increases, so does corporate credit cards distribution, and a rise in off-platform travel booking. This 61% rise causes various challenges: compliance, spend control, reporting problems, and a lack of visibility across organizations. To evolve with the ever-changing needs of travelers, decision-makers need a better solution.

article thumbnail

Futures May Not Be The Way Of Crypto’s Future

PYMNTS

For bitcoin, and perhaps cryptocurrencies in general, does the future lie in … futures? As reported this week, the first bitcoin futures contracts that in turn settle in that marquee name in crypto started trading Monday (Sept. 23). Thinly, as Bloomberg noted. The move is being heralded as a “new chapter” in bitcoin’s storybook. The initial foray of the Bakkt/ICE futures on the Bakkt Exchange does indeed seem muted.

article thumbnail

For AML, Three ‘I’s: Innovation, Interoperability … And Identity

PYMNTS

Trust is the backbone of digital commerce. Knowing who’s on each side of the transaction, and verifying their identities, is the backbone of trust. That sentiment was underscored earlier this month when South Korea said it would delist a number of altcoins from an exchange over privacy concerns – namely, the anonymous nature of the transactions are at odds with the goals of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which include combating money laundering and fraud.

article thumbnail

PayPal Changes Seller Refund Fee Policy

PYMNTS

PayPal has decided to once again collect a fee when a seller issues a refund. While the company had rolled back the policy in April, it has decided to reinstate collecting the initial 2.9 percent commission fee sellers give up during a transaction, even when the seller is refunding a customer in full. “Earlier this year, PayPal updated its User Agreement to change our refund policy,” a PayPal spokesperson told The Verge.

Finance 72
article thumbnail

FinCEN Director Talks Digital Identity And Fraud Protection

PYMNTS

The director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Kenneth A. Blanco, gave a speech at the 2019 Federal Identity (FedID) Forum and Exposition on Tuesday (Sept. 24), to talk about digital identity today, how safe it is and what the agency is doing to protect it against financial crimes, according to prepared remarks. . One of the biggest problems, Blanco said, is account takeover. .

article thumbnail

Bringing AI to Finance: How to Leverage Technology for Efficiency and Control

Finance teams are balancing more than ever, but manual processes shouldn’t slow you down. In this ebook from BILL, discover how AI is transforming finance—automating AP, expense tracking, and document management to reduce errors, increase efficiency, and improve financial control. Learn how real companies are using AI-powered automation to streamline workflows, detect anomalies, and gain deeper insights.

article thumbnail

Amazon Touts Benefits Of Evolutionary AI Algorithms

PYMNTS

Amazon researchers have published a paper revealing what they have found to be a better way to select an architecture when crafting an artificial intelligence (AI) model. In “ On the Bounds of Function Approximations ,” the researchers explained that they were trying to establish a framework to better understand the computational bounds of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) in relation to its search space.

article thumbnail

Chinese Businesses Will Be Subjected To Social Credit Surveillance

PYMNTS

Big Brother will keep an eye on Chinese businesses as the government’s social credit system compiles data on the country’s 1.4 billion people, The New York Times reported on Sunday (Sept. 22). As China increasingly becomes a market economy, the government is becoming more concerned about improper conduct in the marketplace. Various agencies in the country are sharing information like copyright violations and payroll figures so a comprehensive database can be created.

article thumbnail

Amazon Now Offers Whole Foods Two-Hour Delivery In 30 Cities

PYMNTS

Amazon has expanded its two-hour delivery service for Whole Foods customers to almost 30 cities in an attempt to take on Walmart. The eCommerce giant launched a pilot program in August, using the purchase histories of Whole Foods shoppers who use their Prime memberships to suggest the same products on its main website with the bonus of free two-hour delivery.

article thumbnail

Congress Presses Fed On Real-Time Payments Plan

PYMNTS

The Federal Reserve’s buildup to faster payments innovation came to a head in August when it announced FedNow , its proposed real-time payments infrastructure under the draft Payments Modernization Act of 2019. Reception toward the initiative was not, however, universally positive. The U.S. House Committee on Financial Services Task Force on Financial Technology held a hearing Thursday (Sept. 26) titled “ The Future of Real-Time Payments ” to discuss the development of FedNow and its impl

article thumbnail

Say ‘Goodbye’ to Clunky Spreadsheets and Say ‘Hello’ to Month-End Automation

Technology is rapidly changing the way accountants perform and manage month-end activities. Spreadsheets, emails, and shared drives no longer need to slow you down. In under four weeks, your team can start reaping the benefits of month-end close automation by vastly reducing spreadsheets, cut down on reconciliation work, speed up the month-end close, and better manage your remote team.

article thumbnail

FinTech Brex Teams With JetBlue On Rewards Points Transfer

PYMNTS

Silicon Valley credit card startup Brex has begun a points transfer partnership for its rewards program with JetBlue Airways , Brex announced in a press release on Tuesday (Sept. 24). The partnership allows customers to use Brex rewards points on JetBlue’s TrueBlue loyalty program. “ JetBlue is an innovative and exciting brand and Brex is thrilled to offer access to their valuable TrueBlue loyalty program within the Brex Rewards platform,” said Brex Co-Founder and Co-CEO Henrique Dubugras.

article thumbnail

Crypto Startup RSK Acquires Social Network Taringa

PYMNTS

Crypto startup RSK will buy Spanish social media network Taringa in a bid to expand and to gain access to the platform’s 20 million users, according to a report by Forbes. RSK, a subsidiary of IOVLabs, is self-described as the “first open-source, smart contract platform secured by the bitcoin network.”. The partnership will encourage Taringa users to share content and receive cryptocurrency rewards in return.

article thumbnail

Fundbox CEO: How To Fix The ‘Net Terms’ Economy

PYMNTS

Allow us to be blunt: The B2B finance and invoice settlement system is broken. Well, that’s not entirely true – things tend to work pretty well for the largest firms out there, as the largest buyers can basically set their own terms and essentially pay when they want. But for pretty much everyone else, it’s broken. And as Eyal Shinar, CEO at Fundbox , noted to Karen Webster in a new PYMNTS discussion, that’s an approximately $3.1 trillion problem, according to PYMNTS research – and, of course,

B2B 68
article thumbnail

What Does Innovation Mean For Financial Institutions?

PYMNTS

Innovation can be a blanket term in the banking world. Is artificial intelligence (AI) for anti-money laundering (AML) compliance innovation? Is real-time global payments expanding to new markets? Much focus has been given to fundamentals like the payment technologies needed to support features from transactions on real-time payment rails to instant cross-border payments.

article thumbnail

Outsourcing Vs. In-House: The Ultimate Battle For Better Collections

Speaker: Susan Richards

Your past-due accounts are growing, cash flow is tightening, and the pressure is on. The big question: Do you handle the collections internally or outsource to experts? Both strategies come with advantages and risks - but which one delivers the best impact for your business? In this session we’ll dive deep into the in-house vs. outsourcing debate, examining cost-effectiveness, efficiency, compliance risks, and overall recovery success rates.