PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 1, 2016

Investment bankers in Hong Kong were tricked out of millions of dollars by a cash-advance business called Global Merchant Funding (GMF). According to Bloomberg , smooth-talking fraudster Avery Stone and his partners at GMF convinced bankers from prominent international banks to invest in the business to the tune of $32.5 million before disappearing. “This isn’t a deal that went bad; these guys systematically preyed off their friends,” Thomas Gallagher, a GMF investor, told Bloomberg.

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NOVEMBER 22, 2016

Bitcoin wallet iPayYou continues to work toward a future with bitcoin as the default currency. It was just announced that iPayYou has made a way for consumers to pay for items on Amazon with bitcoin, called Amazon Direct. Now iPayYou users can transfer any amount of bitcoin from their bitcoin wallet to Amazon. Customers can use the Amazon Direct tab to the iPayYou platform to determine an amount of bitcoin to transfer and the destination account.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

Fact. Digital commerce has been a reality for more than two decades. Fact. The launch of the iPhone in 2007 and the App Store in 2008 opened everyone’s eyes to the impact that mobile would have on payments and commerce. Fact. Twenty years and hundreds of millions of smartphones later, the digital payments experience is anything but consistent anywhere — online, in-store and in-app.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 16, 2016

American consumers have fallen for mobile banking apps, but up to now, most businesses were not seemingly showing apps the same love. With the number of mobile banking customers now outnumbering those who bank at branches for the first time, consumers have warmly embraced banking via mobile apps. Despite that, the vast majority of American companies, particularly small businesses, have yet to adopt mobile financial management apps.

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Speaker: Amanda Adams, Fractional CFO, CPA

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NOVEMBER 16, 2016

Upward and onward seems like a hopeful phrase, doesn’t it? Unless it’s fraud you are talking about. At the end of 2014, the average U.S. household held five mobile devices, while, at the start of 2016, that number has increased to about 13. Tech is a wonderful thing, when used for the forces of good and for quality of life. But alongside that iPad your 10-year-old daughter needed, the rate of online fraud attacks on retailers has doubled, up 137 percent year over year in the first quarter of thi

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

The holiday season has arrived — meaning sales, snowflakes, good cheer, Christmas carols and fraudsters working day and night to break open your bank account through a variety of creative means. One of this year’s favorites so far, according to reports in The New York Times, has been fake retail and product apps popping up in the Apple App Store of late.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

Poland’s startup ecosystem may be considered still in its infancy compared to larger European tech hubs, like London and Berlin, but that doesn’t mean it should be overlooked by entrepreneurs or investors. In this week’s installment of PYMNTS’ Weekly Tech Center Roundup , we look at how the country’s capital city is developing a tech landscape that’s quickly catching up with its western counterparts.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 22, 2016

Visa said Monday (Nov. 21) that its latest chip data update showed 388 million Visa EMV cards in the U.S. Of those, the firm said there are nearly 181 million chip credit cards in the field and 208.3 million chip debit cards. The firm also said that there are 1.7 million chip-active locations across the country. The 1.7 million tally, up 191 percent in the past year, represents 37 percent of all storefronts nationwide, according to Visa’s statistics.

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NOVEMBER 23, 2016

Mention “mobile payments,” and many people might immediately answer that they 1) pay with smartphones or other devices but 2) spend much more time bellying up to the register and paying with physical cards or cash. Therein lies a conundrum. The promise of mobile has yet to meet reality, and many retailers find that the lines between channels (hence the term “omnichannel”) are increasingly becoming blurred.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 14, 2016

Singapore-based B2B FinTech firm MC Payment announced a new funding round, as well as global expansion, late last week. Reports Friday (Nov. 11) said MC Payment raised $3.5 million from an investment firm in Thailand, as well as participation from Aura Funds Management, tryb Capital and Perle Ventures. The funds have also allowed the company to enter the Thailand market, reports said.

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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.

Account

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NOVEMBER 4, 2016

The seed of FinTech innovation often comes from a desire to do things differently. In B2B payments, that can mean discontent in the way traditional banks and FIs do business or a need for disruptive technologies to come to market faster than banks can offer. But as finance and payments tech expands, these traditional FIs are learning that perhaps the best way to meet the demands of their corporate clients isn’t to compete with FinTech innovators but to collaborate with them.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 24, 2016

The U.K. is already a hotbed of FinTech startups, but the government is getting behind it in a bigger way, committing to invest £500,000 a year into financial technology companies. According to a report , the U.K. government is also gearing up to launch a network of regional FinTech envoys as an effort to enhance the country’s status as a leader in FinTech.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

In the opening scenes of “The Graduate,” a (supposedly) successful man whispers in Benjamin Braddock’s ear the key to the future: “One word: plastics.” Fast forward 50 years, and that single word could be recast: “One word: FinTech.”. The premise is the same no matter the verbiage. Technology’s inexorable march marches on, and the newest wave is FinTech — the disruptor of the way financials services are rendered and the key to how those services are to be reimagined.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 15, 2016

Apple announced that it is expanding Apple Pay to allow nonprofit organizations and charities to accept donations via the mobile payments service and Apple Pay on the Web. The change takes effect immediately in the U.S. Previously, charitable donations were barred on Apple Pay due to a lack of safeguards and the ability to validate the legitimacy of charities accepting donations.

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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.

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NOVEMBER 9, 2016

For some businesses, cybersecurity may be an abstract threat. Business owners may think “it won’t happen to me,” or they may be confident in their ability to remain unaffected by a cyberattack. But a new report by Accenture uncovers just how big of a threat cyberattacks are on businesses. According to the company’s latest data , released this week, about one-third of cyberattacks on businesses are successful in their attempts to infiltrate a firm’s existing defenses

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 4, 2016

Risk has been around at least as long as transactions have been around. How to manage for risk has been a question that has bedeviled firms across the ages. One way to mitigate risk, of course, comes with insurance — and, more specifically, covering the possibility that the other side of a transaction will not deliver on its financial promises. To that end, Fluent, which operates an open account trade platform online using distributed ledger technology (through blockchain), has linked up with Eu

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 9, 2016

If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then a company is only as strong as its weakest competitor. Nowhere does that analogy hold more true than in banking, especially when it comes to earning and keeping a consumer’s trust. It’s been a long road back to strengthening those weak links as banks have weathered the aftermath of the financial crisis.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

Why make one’s life hard hacking consumer accounts — or taking up armed robbery — when one can get the best of both worlds by directly attacking the banks’ computers and getting ATMs to do things like start spewing cash for no apparent reason? Taiwan and Thailand saw such attacks earlier this year when cyber criminals programmed bank ATMs to spew cash.

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Speaker: David Warren and Kevin O’Neill Stoll

Transitioning to a usage-based business model offers powerful growth opportunities but comes with unique challenges. How do you validate strategies, reduce risks, and ensure alignment with customer value? Join us for a deep dive into designing effective pilots that test the waters and drive success in usage-based revenue. Discover how to develop a pilot that captures real customer feedback, aligns internal teams with usage metrics, and rethinks sales incentives to prioritize lasting customer eng

Sales

PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 9, 2016

In the wake of the fake account scandal at Wells Fargo, companies are rethinking how they compensate salespeople, reported The Wall Street Journal. According to a report, companies are trying to overhaul how they compensate salespeople in an effort to improve customer service and prevent the bad behavior that did Wells Fargo in. Sure, commissions can motivate people to ink deals and boost sales, but they also have risks associated with them.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 22, 2016

The biggest dilemma facing innovators isn’t whether what they’re doing will cannibalize what makes them money today but rather getting enough people to try their innovations so that they become mainstream and can make money tomorrow. Getting people to embrace the new — and make it a habit — is very, very hard to do. University of College London researchers conclude that it takes 66 days, on average, for a consumer to do that “something new” each and every single one of those 66 days to totally b

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 4, 2016

Mobile devices, apps, new technologies have given birth to new platforms that match supply and demand easier than ever before. And the ability to embed payments into those platforms is what has ignited those marketplaces. But how many people participate in the gig economy? How big is it? And what do they do? We were curious, too, and collaborated with Hyperwallet to measure and size the market.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

The U.S. Federal Reserve is turning heads for its attention to faster payments, but the Fed has recently announced yet another initiative in the payments innovation space. Last week, the Fed’s Secure Payments Task Force called for comment from industry stakeholders about what challenges they face when it comes to payments security. The task force, made up of about 160 members, will explore areas of payments security, like identity management and data protection, in hopes the survey will he

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NOVEMBER 22, 2016

Small businesses may not always be at the forefront when it comes to technology, but when it comes to how its customers pay, most are on board when it comes to mobile payments. That’s according to a new survey commissioned by Samsung Electronics America and conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, which found the majority of small businesses polled said customers want to pay with their smartphones and they expect the use of mobile payments to grow.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 7, 2016

Cash may be king, but for small businesses, cash is expensive. New research from Sage finds that small businesses in the U.K. are losing out on $11.8 billion every year because of their cash transactions. Those costs can rack up in a number of ways, researchers found. For instance, nearly a quarter of small businesses surveyed by Sage said they had been the target of cash theft by a member of their own staff.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 2, 2016

A Japanese bank consortium gearing up to create a new real-time payments platform using blockchain technology from SBI Ripple Asia has expanded to 42 members. According to a report , the group launched in August with 15 members, and SBI Ripple Asia had expected to increase the size to 30 banks. “Because of active responses from many financial institutions, the consortium was finally launched with 42 member banks,” said SBI in a statement, according to the report. “Member financ

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

Equity-crowdfunded FreeAgent, a U.K.-based small business accounting firm, has listed on the nation’s AIM stock exchange, the LSE ‘s market for smaller firms. FreeAgent broke ground with the listing but, according to reports, missed the mark on valuation. Friday (Nov. 18) reports said FreeAgent has become the first IPO on the market delivered by an equity crowdfunding platform, Seedrs, which launched a funding campaign for the startup last year.

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Speaker: Mark Stovel

When it comes to automating, many firms focus on finding the latest tech, believing that efficiency is something achieved through new tools. Yet true efficiency is achieved by delivering real value to clients, not merely by upgraded systems. Without a clear approach, no level of automation can overcome the complexities of serving every client’s needs.

PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 14, 2016

U.S. prosecutors late last week charged a Florida man in connection with an illegal bitcoin exchange. According to a report by Reuters , Ricardo Hill, 38, was arrested in Florida in October and charged with conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting firm. Hill is linked to an illegal bitcoin exchange owned by a person in Israel that is accused of hacks on JPMorgan Chase.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 11, 2016

In this week’s Bitcoin Tracker, bitcoin soars, then settles down and plans for its yearly sale abound. Switzerland gives bitcoin a hand by way of rail ticket machine sales, an Australian startup banks on the aptly named Dash and Zcash fervor fades. The election came and went and, with it, brought some stock market shock. First, they slid way down ( investors don’t like surprises ), then they rose back up a bit.

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 25, 2016

Bad guys know retailers and businesses are working to stay one step ahead of their sophisticated and malicious attacks. To combat this, hackers are looking to gain access to sensitive information by taking a much easier route: using legitimate credentials to go right inside. In this week’s Hacker Tracker , Ryan Stolte , cofounder and CTO at Bay Dynamics , joined PYMNTS to shed light on the growing cybersecurity concern of insider threats and how retailers are making big strides in keeping hacker

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PYMNTS

NOVEMBER 1, 2016

Shopify’s online store platform is integrating with Sundown AI’s artificial intelligence platform named Chloe. The collaboration is expected to bring enhanced mobile commerce to online stores with the use of voice and text commands. Shopify users will be able to access immediate assistance on their mobile phones via Chloe for any inquires or requests while navigating a store.

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Sales 76

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