Sat.May 19, 2018 - Fri.May 25, 2018

article thumbnail

Privacy Critic Files GDPR Complaints Against Facebook And Google

PYMNTS

As Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect, Facebook privacy critic Max Schrems has filed four complaints over consent required to use online services. The complaints were filed against Facebook — along with its Instagram and WhatsApp services — and against Google ’s Android, TechCrunch reported. “It’s simple: Anything strictly necessary for a service does not need consent boxes anymore,” Schrems wrote in a statement.

article thumbnail

State & Local Tax Update: 5/25/18

Katz,Sapper&Miller

The Kentucky legislature recently passed significant tax law changes with House Bill 366 and House Bill 487, including an overhaul to much of Kentucky’s corporate tax system and addressing the state’s conformity to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. These bills broaden Kentucky’s tax base through various income and sales tax provisions and introduce a flat income tax rate.

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

How Much Can Technology Improve Healthcare Payments?

PYMNTS

Among the latest hopes for healthcare payments is blockchain. Touted by observers and industry players as one of the top trends that could impact medical billing and data management for 2018, the technology is increasingly being viewed as part of the path to better efficiency in payments. For instance, ConnectingCare , a company that helps far-flung practitioners view patient data across different points of care, wants to use blockchain for cost forecasting and to enable direct pay options for h

article thumbnail

HPS Builds API For FinTechs To Connect To Banks

PYMNTS

Payments software company HPS is launching an API for other FinTech innovators to integrate into banking systems. The company announced news on Monday (May 21) that its PowerCARD Connect-Open API aims to help FinTech developers integrate mobile payment, tokenization, biometrics and other emerging banking technologies into their own solutions. The rollout follows a pilot version of the API launched last year, HPS noted, adding that the API can support “servicing” and “transacting,” enabling push

article thumbnail

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

Speaker: Amanda Adams, Fractional CFO, CPA

Are you ready to elevate your accounting processes for 2025? 🚀 Join us for an exclusive webinar led by Amanda Adams, 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.

article thumbnail

Hy-Vee’s First Wahlburgers Restaurant Opens In Minnesota

PYMNTS

Hy-Vee amps up its partnership with the Wahlberg brothers by opening its first Wahlburgers restaurant at the Mall of America in Minnesota. The opening comes as Hy-Vee plans to open another 25 restaurants over the next few years, The Star Tribune reported. Hy-Vee Chief Executive Randy Edeker was not initially interested in the partnership. “But I promised him I’d consider it,” Edeker told the newspaper.

article thumbnail

European Banks Want More Regulation Of Large Tech Companies

PYMNTS

Some of the biggest banks in Europe are urging regulators to increase oversight of large technology companies that are moving into the financial services market. The Financial Times , citing some of the banks, reported that the new open banking rules that require European Union lenders to provide account access of customers to third parties has resulted in concerns on the part of bankers that Chinese and U.S. technology companies will choose to go only after the best parts of the financial servi

More Trending

article thumbnail

Flywire Expands With New London HQ

PYMNTS

Flywire , a provider of global payment and receivables solutions, has announced a major expansion of its U.K. and European operations and team. The company has moved to Folgate Street in London’s Spitalfields District, into a new office space that is quadruple the size of its previous location in Canary Wharf. Flywire processes billions of dollars in payments around the world each year.

article thumbnail

Coupa: How CFOs Become Chief Business Drivers

PYMNTS

CFO. Chief financial officer , of course. But might we tweak the title a bit? Maybe to “chief fundamentals officer?” The fundamentals of business is what we’re talking about here: Stretching across everything from external forces, such as competition, to internal workings spanning expense management to communications to defining and spearheading strategy that can change with haste.

article thumbnail

TRENDING: Inside GDPR’s Enforcement Strategies

PYMNTS

Cyberattacks on American financial institutions are at an all-time high, with more and more cybercriminals eyeing consumers’ financial data and other sensitive information. A February 2018 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that 75 percent of American financial institutions incurred losses due to fraud last year. And with that, governments and security solution providers are stepping into the fray with the aim of combatting fraudsters.

article thumbnail

Blockchain: Payments Execs Unpack The Hope From The Hype

PYMNTS

Remember when blockchain was the new technology buzzword on the … block? Still buzzy, if not so new in the nomenclature. Now blockchain is on everyone’s lips, and has been for a while. Where once the concept of the digital ledger was linked to bitcoin , now blockchain stands on its own, as a conduit to any number of transactions across cryptocurrencies and other vessels of exchange, including data.

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

Chase Launches Ink Business Unlimited Credit Card

PYMNTS

Chase announced news on Tuesday (May 22) that it is launching Ink Business Unlimited, a new credit card geared toward small business owners that gives them unlimited 1.5 percent cash back on purchases. In a press release, Chase said Chase Ink Business Unlimited rewards business owners on every purchase without requiring them to make purchases in special categories.

article thumbnail

Corporate Treasurers On The Lookout For FinTech, PSD2 And Brexit

PYMNTS

Corporate treasurers gathered for the Association of Corporate Treasurers (ACT) annual conference last week, and there, treasury professionals made clear where their priorities stand today. At the top of the list, according to reports, is incoming FinTech disruption, legislation like PSD2, market shifts stemming from Brexit and more. According to reports in Global Finance , an estimated 1,100 corporate treasurers from across the U.K. and Europe gathered for the conference.

article thumbnail

Estonia Sees $13B In Money Laundering Over Four Years

PYMNTS

After reports of money laundering caused lenders in Estonia and Latvia to close, police said on Friday (May 25) that more than $13 billion (or about €11 billion) was laundered through banks in Estonia between 2012 and 2016. Much of the money was reportedly laundered through bank accounts belonging to non-residents, Reuters reported. “In 2012, more than €7.3 billion in securities from Russia were processed through the Estonian financial system.

article thumbnail

Vocalink: How To Stop Fraud In The Era Of Real-Time Payments

PYMNTS

As the speed of payments increases around the world, the potential scope of fraud shifts to targets beyond cards. Criminals are taking advantage of the global spread of real-time digital transactions to con chief financial officers, invoice managers and the like, hoping to steal massive sums before anyone knows they’ve been ripped off. That is among the themes of a recent discussion that Karen Webster had with two fraud experts from Vocalink , the Mastercard -owned payment company that powers re

article thumbnail

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.

article thumbnail

WePay: Contextual Is The Future Of Commerce

PYMNTS

In 10 years, no one will talk about “contextual commerce” — it’ll just be commerce. That’s what Rich Aberman, co-founder of WePay , predicts. Native commerce is where Aberman believes all platforms are headed — and that’s not just true for software developers like Apple, Google and Microsoft, but also for social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.

Retail 47
article thumbnail

Bringing A New Social Context To eCommerce

PYMNTS

Though the idea of contextual commerce is widely loved, delivering on it is a significant challenge. As it turns out, finding the right context — a moment when a customer is perfectly primed to buy a good or service, if only someone would give them an easy way to do it — is not as easy as simply declaring something a good context for commerce. For example, the rocky launch of the eCommerce chatbot over the last year has proven this problem.

Gaming 47
article thumbnail

Independent Restaurants Increase Spending With Suppliers

PYMNTS

The number of independent restaurants continues to decline in the United States, but they still make up more than half of the country’s eateries, and account for 15 percent of total restaurant operator spend. That’s according to research released on Monday (March 21) by The NPD Group. The research firm said that “while the number of independent restaurant units in the U.S. dropped by 3 percent, 346,105 independent restaurants remained opened, which represents over half of the 647,288 commercial

article thumbnail

The Automotive Aftermarket Eyes Its Digital Future

PYMNTS

The experiment did not work out for AutoZone. The retailer of aftermarket automotive parts had tried offering “aggressive promotional discounts” for items ordered online and then shipped to consumers’ homes, according to CEO William Rhodes — a nod to how eCommerce is changing customer expectations. The discount program, while only a small part of the chain’s overall revenue mix, had a “negative impact on our sales, which also negatively impacted our overall same-store sales,” he said on Tuesday

B2B 46
article thumbnail

Usage-Based Monetization Musts: A Roadmap for Sustainable Revenue Growth

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

article thumbnail

Fundbox Links With Eventbrite For Events Financing

PYMNTS

Small business invoice financing platform Fundbox is targeting the events industry through a new partnership with Eventbrite. A press release late last week said Fundbox is integrating its solution into the Eventbrite platform to link event creators with access to credit. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics cited in Fundbox’s announcement, the event industry is slated to grow 44 percent between 2010 and 2020.

Finance 46
article thumbnail

Sensory CEO On How Voice Recognition Is Growing Up

PYMNTS

The ideal goes something like this: Consumers at any location — a friend’s house, a car — could speak into a voice assistant or smart speaker and be instantly recognized by the device no matter who owns it. That consumer could make secure transactions or add items to a daily calendar or perform any of the other tasks possible in a world where voice recognition has become ubiquitous.

article thumbnail

Sodyo’s Vision For The Next-Gen QR Code

PYMNTS

What if QR Codes could transition consumers seamlessly between the online and offline worlds, blurring the lines between physical and digital retail, and ingraining shopping as part of the everyday experience? They can’t, but the next generation of scannable codes aims to do exactly that, leveraging a color matrix that can be scanned from afar and renders well on TV screens.

article thumbnail

How Data And AI Are Changing The Real Estate Game

PYMNTS

Are the days of the real estate agent numbered? Probably not — no matter what, someone has to put out cookies and snacks for potential home buyers — but artificial intelligence is taking more command in the industry. The latest evidence comes from SetSchedule , a real estate data analytics and marketing firm. It recently announced its launch of a service called SetValue, which the company describes as a “tool that is the first of its kind to combine data analytics and artificial intelligence and

article thumbnail

Harness the Potential of Your Enterprise Knowledge

The first Market Momentum Index: AI and Unstructured Data Management, conducted by Deep Analysis with support from AIIM and M-Files, surveyed 500 enterprises across various industries to assess their readiness to employ AI. The results reveal that AI is already far more embedded into organizations' operations than previously realized. These findings and more insights have been brought to you in the "Market Momentum Index: AI and Unstructured Data Management.

article thumbnail

Adobe To Aquire Magento Commerce For $1.68B

PYMNTS

Adobe has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Magento Commerce for $1.68 billion, subject to adjustments. The addition of the Magento Commerce Cloud will enable commerce to seamlessly integrate into the Adobe Experience Cloud, and delivers one platform that serves both B2B and B2C customers around the world, Adobe said in an announcement.

B2C 45
article thumbnail

Business Owners Turn To Personal Credit Cards

PYMNTS

The wallets of small business (SMB) owners are bulging with plastic, thanks in large part to the difficulty of securing funding, which leads to those merchants using their personal credit cards to meet expenses. That’s according to Nav , which helps business owners find financing and access credit. To arrive at its findings, Nav “analyzed anonymized personal credit card usage data from 143,004 of its small business customers and 128,281 of its consumer customers.

Finance 45
article thumbnail

More Payment Platforms Mean More Headaches For B2B Sellers

PYMNTS

Paper checks may be the No.1 way to pay suppliers in the U.S., but only by a slight majority. ACH, wire, virtual and physical cards, and other rails all come into the mix, particularly as each vie for a chance to take B2B payment market share away from paper. For vendors, this means managing acceptance of multiple payment rails, often based on what their corporate customers prefer.

B2B 45
article thumbnail

Comcast Faces Fallout From Website Bug That Leaked Consumer Data

PYMNTS

It looks like a flaw in Comcast’s website used for the activation of Xfinity routers can be exploited to harvest sensitive consumer information. According to reports, the purpose of the site is to make it easy for customers to set up their home internet without having to wade through a customer service call. It’s a useful service except for the fact that it can apparently be tricked into displaying the home address of wherever the router happens to be.

Retail 45
article thumbnail

Solve Your Firm's Automation Complexities Once and For All

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.

article thumbnail

The Gig Economy’s $1.2T Digital Payments Potential

PYMNTS

A smart entrepreneur dropped out of college, identified an unmet market need and created an entirely new market segment. He did it by establishing a platform that matched an underutilized source of supply with a growing demand for services. One of his platform’s competitive advantages was the centralized payments platform he created to remove the friction involved in paying suppliers.

article thumbnail

To Earn Customer Trust, Rethink Digital Identity

PYMNTS

Welcome to the new world of trust. Identity is the new currency, and the costs of mishandling it – or making it easy to steal – can end up higher than the mere theft of funds. That’s one of the insights offered by Tony Ball, senior vice president and general manager of identity and access management for Entrust Datacard , during an interview with Karen Webster for the PYMNTS “ Economy of Trust ” podcast series.

article thumbnail

Amazon: Too Many Returns? You Don’t Return

PYMNTS

Remember that old saying, “You break it, you bought it?” A tweak on that might read: “You click on it, you bought it.”. Or, in simpler language: “That’s enough.” So says Amazon , it seems, when it comes to returning items bought from the site. The premise breaks down to this: Too many returns and you don’t return. The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon has been banning shoppers for what the financial publication notes are “infractions such as returning too many items, sometimes without tel

Retail 44
article thumbnail

Digital Economy Is Good For Women, But Must Do More

PYMNTS

For women around the world, freelancing in the digital economy isn’t just convenient – it’s empowering, especially as gender pay disparity comes under scrutiny across the corporate workspace. But what’s not empowering are the steep transaction fees and currency challenges, such as forex fluctuation or non-acceptance of customers’ preferred tender. The new way of working has “unquestionably broken down barriers to women’s economic empowerment,” according to Meghan Hagberg, senior vice president,

44
article thumbnail

It Takes Two to Tango

With automation, you’ll reduce errors and save valuable time, allowing you to focus on what really matters: strategic analysis and insightful decision-making. Picture accurate financial reports ready at your fingertips, giving you the confidence to tackle business challenges head-on. Embracing automation not only boosts productivity but also elevates your role from number cruncher to closing rockstar.