“According to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), Apple is enjoying 80% market share in the digital wallets space. Responding to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services inquiry into mobile payment and digital wallet financial services, CBA said it has seen a rapid increase in the number and value of payments made from mobile devices.”

“Procore Technologies, Inc. , (NYSE: PCOR), a leading provider of construction management software, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Levelset . This acquisition will add lien rights management to the Procore platform, enabling Procore to manage complex compliance workflows and improve the payment process in construction. It also presents future growth opportunities for Procore, including capitalizing on the companies’ complementary data assets.”

“The sweeping measures would require restaurants to grant couriers access to bathrooms, set a minimum per-trip payment and a guarantee that couriers receive full tips, and allow the workers to set limits on their routes. The apps will also be required to pay couriers at least once a week, offer payment options that don’t require a bank account and will be prohibited from charging fees to workers to receive earnings.”

“Yesterday, Chipper, one of the fastest growing African fintech start-ups that facilitates free peer-to-peer (P2P) money transfers and instant cross-border payments in Africa, officially launched Chipper Cash to offer domestic P2P money transfers in South Africa. Chipper Cash will enable South Africans to enjoy free unlimited instant domestic money transfers, invest in cryptocurrencies, and buy and send airtime and data to anyone.”

“To date, Monzo customers have only been to make payments from such ring-fenced funds — known as Pots — by direct debit or standing order, but the bank is now adding the option of making in-person and online card payments directly from an individual Pot without the user first having to transfer funds back into their main account. The service is available to holders of Monzo Plus or Monzo Premium accounts and enables users to set up a virtual debit card to draw on funds they have set aside in a Pot for the purchase of a high-cost item such as a car, for regular payments such as utility bills and subscriptions, and for types of expenditure that they wish to monitor and limit to a set budget.”

“The credit activity of POS financing applicants was a bit of a surprise, Pagel says. “We were surprised to see how credit-active these consumers are,” she says. “More POS financing applicants are building bank and retail card balances than the general credit population versus using POS financing instead of using their cards.” Continuing, “These new forms of financing are growing the credit pie—opening up more opportunities for both consumers and lenders.””

“Customers of Lloyds Bank , Halifax and Bank of Scotland will be able to set their own contactless spending limit when the UK increases its national transaction limit to £100 (US$137) on 15 October.”

“Online payments powerhouse Stripe Inc. Tuesday introduced Stripe Revenue Recognition, an application intended to automate the mapping of money to a balance sheet.  The development of Revenue Recognition was spurred by the accounting needs of merchants and businesses that are paid upfront for goods and services to be delivered in the future or over an extended period of time. These include software-as-a-service providers, SaaS, subscription, and e-commerce companies, all of which need to consolidate transactions in one place, appropriately categorize transactions, and automatically generate auditable reports.”

“Advance Intelligence Group is the parent company of buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) platform Atome, fintech company Advance.AI as well as Indonesian digital lending platform Kredit Pintar.”

“Affirm (NASDAQ: AFRM), the payment network that empowers consumers and helps merchants drive growth, today announced the launch of Adaptive Checkout™. This latest product enables Affirm merchants to seamlessly offer customers even more choice and flexibility at checkout while increasing sales. Leveraging Affirm’s proprietary technology, Adaptive Checkout builds upon Affirm’s existing product suite and dynamically provides optimized biweekly and monthly payment options for each transaction side-by-side in a single integrated checkout solution. Merchants using Adaptive Checkout in early access have seen, on average, a 26% increase in cart conversion, a 22% lift in approvals, and a 20% increase in sales, compared to offering monthly payments through Affirm alone.”

“Remitly will be valued at nearly $7 billion when it goes public on Thursday. The Seattle company priced shares at $43 on Wednesday evening, above its expected range of $38-to-$42, valuing the fintech giant at $6.9 billion. Remitly shares will begin trading Thursday morning on the NASDAQ under the ticker RELY. Update: Shares opened at $53/share, up more than 20%.”

“The rapidly expanding utility of open banking for instant funding came into sharp relief early Thursday with announcements from payments processors Nuvei Corp. and Circle Internet Financial Corp. Montreal-based Nuvei , which has been cultivating its stake in the U.S. gaming market, said consumers can now move money instantly from their bank accounts to digital wallets, payment cards, or other accounts. The company is working with open-banking firm Plaid Inc. to verify bank accounts for the transfers. The new capability, called Verified Withdrawals, adds to an existing feature allowing gamblers to deposit winnings instantly into their bank accounts.”

“Globally, the average ticket for a fraudulent CNP transaction rose from $126 during 2020’s first quarter to $134 in the first quarter this year. The high-water mark for CNP fraud came during Q4 2020, when the average ticket size totaled $155, suggesting criminals became more aggressive in CNP fraud despite only 10% of transactions being fraudulent, the report says. The lower percentage of attempted fraud was due to the higher volume of overall CNP transactions during the holiday season, Vesta says.”

“Twitter’s slate of new product announcements is not slowing down. The company today introduced a number of new initiatives aimed at better serving the conversations and community using its platform, including support for tipping with crypto, NFT authentication, and plans for other experiments designed to provide more context about a conversation to those just joining in. The company also said it’s preparing to launch its own creator fund in a few weeks to provide audio creators with access to financial, technical, and marketing support.”

“The transaction marks Zip’s entry into the Indian market as the company will acquire a minority stake in ZestMoney and a board seat. Founded in Australia in 2013, Zip has a presence in 12 markets across five continents, serving more than 7.3 million customers and over 50,000 merchants. ZestMoney will use the fresh funds to expand its product suite, deepen the transaction network, strengthen its balance sheet capacity and launch new business lines in insurance and savings.”

“Founded in 2016 and formerly known as Tiz, Provi has created a beverage marketplace that simplifies the ordering process between retailers and distributors. Its online platform lets bars and restaurants order all their beverages in one central location, rather than making multiple phone calls and creating additional invoices. Provi, which is short for “provision,” also provides companies with data on which drinks are performing well at particular locations.”

“Credit data generated by Ant Group Co.’s popular consumer lending service will be fully integrated into a government credit-reporting system, a significant step in a continuing effort to bring the financial-technology giant into line with Chinese regulators’ priorities.”

“The companies said they would have a combined presence in California, Washington and Oregon. Through the deal, U.S. Bank will gain more than a million consumer customers and about 190,000 small-business customers on the West Coast, in addition to about $58 billion in loans and $90 billion in deposits based on MUFG Union Bank’s June 30 balance sheet.”

“Six-year-old Bangalore-based fintech Razorpay, which was valued at $3 billion in a financing round in April this year, has courted one more high-profile investor: Salesforce Ventures. Razorpay said on Monday it has received a “strategic investment” from the venture arm of the American enterprise giant. The investment will help the startup “further strengthen its presence in the business banking space,” it said.”

“Open banking — a disruptive technology that seeks to bypass the dominance of card networks and other traditional financial rails by letting banks open their systems directly to developers (and new services) by way of APIs — continues to gain ground in the world of financial services. As a mark of that traction, a startup playing a central role in open banking applications is announcing a big round of funding with a milestone valuation.”

“JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) said on Tuesday it had acquired Frank, a college financial planning platform used by over 5 million students in the United States. The deal is the latest in a string of acquisitions by the largest U.S. bank, and will allow the bank to deepen ties with students, it said.”

“This frenetic digital shopping experience played out on Ntwrk, a three-year-old, live-shopping app that could be billed as “ QVC for Hypebeasts.” At appointed times, store owners, designers, and personalities like celebrity jeweler Ben Baller and ex-”HQ Trivia” host Scott Rogowsky host live-streams to show off whatever they’re selling that day. The streams are like extended infomercials, with enough uses of “sick” or “dope” to suggest that Ntwrk’s target audience is primarily those born after, say, 1985.”

“PayPal has been talking about its “super app” plans for some time , having recently told investors its upcoming digital wallet and payments app had been given a go for launch. Today, the first version of that app is officially being introduced, offering a combination of financial tools including direct deposit, bill pay, a digital wallet, peer-to-peer payments, shopping tools, crypto capabilities and more. The company is also announcing its partnership with Synchrony Bank for its new high-yield savings account, PayPal Savings.”

“Executives from American Express Co., Capital One Financial Corp., Synchrony Financial and other firms mentioned buy-now, pay-later products more than five dozen times during investor presentations last week, according to the Morgan Stanley report. The products allows consumers to split their purchases into scheduled payments.”

“The start-up is set to announce Tuesday that it secured a U.S. broker-dealer license, enabling it to compete with the likes of Robinhood and Square in the red-hot world of retail trading, according to CEO and founder Nik Storonsky.”

“Wise ( WISE.L ), formerly doing business as Transferwise, has finally launched its first iteration of an investment feature. A long, long time ago, Wise said it intended to create more options to hold funds that can generate a return. Last year, it was reported that Wise had received approval from the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to offer retail investment services.”

“The launch marks the first foray into retail banking outside North America by one of the United States’ most dominant lenders, heaping pressure on British incumbents such as Lloyds, Barclays, NatWest and HSBC which are already battling low interest rates and upstart digital rivals.”

“Just over two-thirds of consumers globally (67%) now expect bricks-and-mortar retail stores to accept contactless payments and just under half (44%) wouldn’t shop at a store that only offers payment methods that require contact with a cashier or shared device, a survey of merchants and consumers in nine countries around the world has found.”

“Already having conducted more than $5 billion in e-renminbi transactions, China has opened its digital currency up to foreigners. Next year, when Beijing hosts the Winter Olympic Games, authorities are expecting to let the world test drive its technological achievement. The U.S., by contrast, is having trouble even concluding its multi-year exploration into the possibility of an e-dollar. In fact, an upcoming Federal Reserve paper on a potential U.S. digital currency won’t take a position on whether the central bank of the United States will, or even should, create one.”

“A man armed with a knife robbed a convenience store in Tsim Sha Tsui, but instead of grabbing the cash he added HK$5,000 onto his WeChat Pay HK account.  The man who is around 30 years old broke into a 7-Eleven at Mody Square in Tsim Sha Tsui East with a knife at around midnight today.”

“Figure Pay is currently available in 26 states, and is expanding nationwide. It is built on the Provenance Blockchain payments infrastructure, which allows for faster payments and cuts down on merchant costs. Figure Pay offers its users a fee-free deposit account, seamless money transfer to friends and family, an extensive rewards program and free access to a network of 55,000 ATMs. Most notably, it has native Buy Now, Pay Later functionality built in, allowing a consumer to decide at the point of sale whether they want to finance any purchase. Figure Pay also has a commitment to financial inclusion and allowing underbanked users to access financing and build credit history.”

“Today, PayPal announced the new PayPal app, an all-in-one, personalized app that offers customers the best place to manage their financial lives. The new PayPal app will introduce new features including PayPal Savings, a new high yield savings account provided by Synchrony Bank, alongside new in-app shopping tools that will enable customers to earn rewards redeemable for cash back or PayPal shopping credit and uncover deals with hundreds of merchants.”

“First, Airwallex has built all the infrastructure for the business banking services that it provides directly to businesses with a focus on small and medium enterprise customers. Second, it has packaged up that infrastructure into a set of APIs that a variety of other companies use to provide financial services directly to their customers without needing to build those services themselves — the so-called “embedded finance” approach.”

“The decision to shelve its Lend product, which the company announced quietly in an update to an old blog post at 5 p.m. on Friday, comes after the Securities and Exchange Commission threatened to sue the firm if it moved ahead. It also represents a dramatic reversal for Coinbase, whose top executives made its skirmish with the SEC public in defiant posts on social media on Sept. 7.”

“A soaring number of mergers and acquisitions, many of them never publicly announced, is overwhelming antitrust regulators, a major problem for the Biden administration’s hopes of intensifying scrutiny of corporate power centers like Silicon Valley.”

“In its second year, the study aims to provide greater insights into the short to medium term impact of the global pandemic on fintechs, how they have performed in the face of global and local market conditions, what steps they have taken to respond to customer requirements and how the regulatory response to Covid-19 has affected their development and growth…The CCAF at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School is encouraging fintechs to take just 20-30 minutes to complete its survey before the 1 October 2021 closing deadline. The survey can be found here.“

“The survey shows that while the issue of European countries developing autonomous central bank digital currencies (CBDC) independently of the EU “drew a mixed reaction”, support for the idea is strongest in Italy (backed by 41% of respondents), Greece (40%), Estonia (39%) and Spain (37%). The Netherlands was the only country where the percentage of those opposing the idea (37%) exceeded those who supported it (18%).”

“City governments nationwide are joining a trend to make more cash payment options available to consumers looking to pay their bills, with Chicago undertaking a significant expansion and New York installing new kiosks for the first time next month. Cities take in more income when consumers have additional ways to pay for parking tickets and taxes, while residents benefit from conveniently placed kiosks that don’t charge them fees and that have access to their data.”

“Contactless credit card transactions caught up to their debit counterparts as a percent of volume in August, with 17% of total card-present volume, as tracked in the monthly PSCU Payments Index, attributed to the payment form. That matches the share for contactless debit transactions. PSCU, a St. Petersburg, Fla.-based credit union service organization, issues the PSCU Payments Index as a way to monitor payments activity.”

“The company said it will use the fresh funds for team expansion, product development and scaling distribution to serve more businesses. FloBiz will also focus on building additional technical capabilities within the organisation, as it prepares to venture into financial services soon.”

“Mastercard today announced the launch of its new Sustainability Innovation Lab, which will spearhead the further development of the company’s portfolio of environmentally conscious digital products and solutions. The Lab will focus on ways to empower businesses and consumers to transform how they produce, distribute and purchase products and services, ensuring both people and the planet can thrive as the global economy rapidly digitizes.”

“Visa Inc. (NYSE: V) today announced the addition of Shipt, Skillshare and Sofar Sounds – as exclusive benefits – for Visa’s U.S. Consumer Credit cardholders. Eligible cardholders can now get a free Shipt membership to receive free same-day delivery on groceries and household essentials on orders over $35; boost their creativity through Skillshare’s online learning community; and get access to presale tickets plus be eligible for a free concert ticket while discovering Sofar Sounds’ global community of music lovers.”

“INETCO BullzAI captures, decodes, correlates and analyzes each payment transaction as well as every one of the message fields  in real-time, from start to finish. Using this data, INETCO BullzAI is able to detect anomalies in a transaction using a card/customer specific machine-learning model paired with behavioral analytics. This enables real-time risk scoring for every individual customer – instantly updated every time a transaction occurs. The result is greater precision and timeliness in fraud detection and reduced false positives and false negatives. INETCO BullzAI can either replace or augment an existing payment fraud detection solution.”

“The solution uses the latest technology based on Mastercard, Visa and PCI standards to convert non-payment devices into secure and certified point of sale terminals. Those devices are then capable to accept contactless payments, both for transaction amounts within a country’s contactless floor-limit or for higher value amounts through secure PIN entry. The PIN entry is done directly on the merchant’s Android device, with no need for an additional hardware.”

“Trustly has been offering Instant Payouts to businesses in Europe for more than a decade, and now the company is thrilled to be extending its offering into the US, made possible by its relationship with Cross River, an early participant in the RTP® network, a new real-time payments rail built by The Clearing House. Cross River’s API-based platform connects directly to the network and provides backend technology to support advanced capabilities and enhancements for its partners. Businesses using Trustly’s Instant Payouts can fund payments directly with Cross River and the bank will send RTP payments on behalf of these businesses to their customer’s bank accounts at other RTP participants.”