Interview with Stax Founder and CEO, Suneera Madhani
In this interview we sat down with Suneera Madhani, Founder and CEO of Stax, to learn more about her meteoric rise through payments and Stax’s journey as an emerging tech unicorn.
A Seattle CEO who announced in 2015 that he was giving himself a drastic pay cut to help cover the cost of big raises for his employees has announced his resignation. Dan Price, the embattled CEO of credit card processing company Gravity Payments, resigned Wednesday, The Seattle Times reported. "My No. 1 priority is for our employees to work for the best company in the world, but my presence has become a distraction here," Price wrote in a statement on Twitter. He founded the company 18 years ago.
Adyen, the global financial technology platform of choice for leading businesses, is pleased to announce the launch of its first in-house designed terminals. Innovated to facilitate diverse payment use cases, the terminal range marks the latest step forward in Adyen’s growing unified commerce offering. Running on the company’s single platform, the new devices remain inherently flexible, in order to address a rapidly advancing payment landscape and ever-evolving customer needs.
Celero Commerce (“Celero”), a top ten U.S. non-bank payment processor, announced the acquisition of Community Bankers Merchant Services (CBMS), a provider of electronic transaction processing through community and regional banks nationwide. With the addition of Arkansas-based CBMS, Celero will serve over 53,000 merchants nationwide, processing approximately $21 billion in annual card volume. “For three decades, the CBMS team has supported their bank partners’ growth through industry-leading service and support,” said Celero founder and Chief Executive Officer Kevin Jones. “The talented and experienced CBMS team fits well within our organization, and we are excited to serve community and regional banks together.”
US Bank-owned payments firm Elavon has hired Visa executive Hemlata Narasimhan as its president in Europe. Narasimhan most recently led the merchant and acquiring business for Visa in Europe, where she oversaw growth in both employee numbers and local presence across several markets. Prior to Visa, she spent almost seven years at American Express in New York and London, and had a career in management consulting.
When Marqeta filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering last year, it listed 10 key executives leading the company. Now, just over a year later, only three of them remain, including CEO Jason Gardner, who plans to exit that role soon. He announced Aug. 10 that the digital card company is searching for a new CEO, and he will become executive chairman when it finds one. A day earlier, Marqeta’s chief operating officer, Vidya Peters, had tendered her resignation, with plans to leave the company on Sept. 3, according to an SEC filing.
E-commerce platform BigCommerce Pty. Ltd. is expanding its deal with installment-payment provider Affirm Inc. to now include merchants of all sizes. Additionally, the broadened deal affords merchants the ability to offer custom payment options, such as bi-weekly and monthly options for eligible customers on purchases ranging from $50 to $17,500. Merchants also will be able to tap into Affirm’s network of more than 12.7 million users. BigCommerce first integrated with Affirm in 2016.
Rising interest rates have brought highflying consumer lenders back to earth.
Finance companies such as Upstart Holdings Inc. and Mosaic lend money to people for purchases such as cars, solar panels and home electronics. But they have to borrow the money they lend out to consumers—and that is becoming increasingly expensive as the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates aggressively. As borrowing costs for the companies rise, bad loans are going up too. With red-hot inflation pushing up prices for food and rent, more customers are starting to fall behind on payments.
Ethereum is changing. The world's most popular blockchain platform is about to undergo a radical change that will make it greener, and pave the way for many optimizations. It's immensely important for the nascent spaces of decentralized finance and NFTs; on the flip side, its immediate effects on Ethereum's speed, scalability and fees are often overstated.
Klarna has made a big step forward in its long-term strategy to become the sole shopping app consumers use. The BNPL giant has updated its app so consumers can use it to keep track of all online shopping, not just Klarna purchases. Klarna says the move will help UK consumers save time and manage their online purchases more conveniently. Users connect their email accounts to the app and Klarna scans details from order confirmation emails and imports the data into the Klarna app.
Walmart had good news Tuesday for investors and economists worried about a looming recession, as the retail giant gave a much rosier picture of consumer spending than it offered less than a month ago. On July 25, Walmart warned about its earnings for the rest of the year, saying that high fuel and food prices were prompting consumers to cut back on other spending, forcing the chain to cut prices on some non-essential goods, such as clothing, electronics and home goods.
Home Depot is seeing sustained demand for goods related to home improvement projects despite soaring prices and mortgage rates for homes. Despite record profit and revenue, the Atlanta home improvement chain maintained its guidance for the year. Revenue for the three months ended July 31 rose 6.5% to $43.79 billion, which topped projections of $43.35 billion on Wall Street. Sales at stores open at least a year, a key indicator of a retailer’s health, climbed 5.8%, and 5.4% in the U.S.
BJ’s Wholesale Club Holdings Inc. beat analyst expectations as it reported its best-ever earnings in the second quarter of fiscal 2022. Total revenues rose 22% year-over-year to $5.1 billion from $4.2 billion. Adjusted net income increased 27% to $141 million from $111 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2021, while adjusted earnings per share (EPS) grew 29% to 1.06 from $0.82.
Target continues to hope that short-term pain leads to long-term gain — even if that short-term pain is piercing and casts doubt on the near-term direction of the stock price. On Wednesday morning, Target uncorked its second consecutive significant earnings miss as it battled a three-headed monster attacking profits: deep discounts to clear slow-moving inventory in apparel and electronics, high levels of inflation from vendors, and a more cautious consumer.
Retail sales grew in July, supported by moderate improvements in ongoing inflation. Core retail sales as calculated by the National Retail Federation (NRF) rose in July 2022, even as overall sales reported by the Census Bureau remained flat on a monthly basis. Both calculations showed strong year-over-year gains as consumers kept shopping despite high inflation, the NRF said.
The U.S. Payments Forum, a subsect of the Secure Technology Alliance, released its latest Market Snapshot. It provides an overview of the state of the industry including contactless payments’ role in the post-pandemic economy, digital wallet growth, alternative payment rails and mounting fraud concerns. The snapshot also explores advancements in faster payments, open payments for electric vehicle (EV) charging, PCI DSS compliance standards and current challenges facing the payments stakeholdership.
US’ Federal Reserve Board has announced its final guidelines that establish a consistent set of factors for Reserve Banks to use in reviewing requests to access Federal Reserve accounts and payment services. The final guidelines are similar to those proposed by the Board in its May 2021 proposal and March 2022 supplemental proposal.
Two bills in the U.S. Congress could set the direction for regulating the crypto industry in the coming months, said Kristin N. Johnson, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Johnson, who was sworn in earlier this year, told CoinDesk TV on Wednesday the agency wants to give the crypto market clear guidance on which agency regulates it, and CFTC's regulatory role.
The European Central Bank, or ECB, laid the foundation for the criteria it would be considering when harmonizing the licensing requirements for crypto in Europe. In a Wednesday statement, the ECB’s banking supervision division said it would be taking steps to regulate digital assets as “national frameworks governing crypto-assets diverge quite extensively” and given the seemingly differing approaches to harmonization following the passage of the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision issuing guidelines for banks’ exposure to crypto.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, has only grown more confident that the US economic recovery is intact. "This is not a recession. It's not even in the same universe as a recession," Zandi told CNN. "It's just patently wrong to say it is." Zandi said the only thing signaling an ongoing recession is those back-to-back quarters of negative GDP. Yet he predicted those GDP declines will eventually get revised away. And there are early indicators that GDP will turn positive this quarter.
Retail activity was flat in July as falling fuel prices held back gas station sales and consumers turned more heavily to online shopping, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday. While advance retail sales were unchanged, total receipts excluding autos rose 0.4%. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a 0.1% increase in the top-line number and a flat total ex-autos. June’s gain was revised down to 0.8% from 1%. Retail and food sales excluding gasoline and autos rose 0.7% from a month ago.
MVB Financial Corp., the holding company for MVB Bank, Inc., announced that it has entered into a definitive merger agreement pursuant to which MVB will acquire Integrated Financial Holdings, Inc. in an all-stock transaction. The strategic combination is expected to accelerate a fast track growth vehicle for MVB by expanding its government guaranteed lending business, including SBA and USDA originations and servicing.
Remitly Global, Inc., a leading global digital financial services provider for immigrants and their families, announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rewire, an Israeli-based financial services platform for migrant workers. Under the terms of the agreement, Remitly will acquire Rewire for approximately $80 million consisting of a mix of cash and stock.
Financial technology leader FIS® announced that financial services veteran John Durrant has joined the organization and will assume the role of President of the company’s Banking Solutions business effective Sept. 1. Durrant comes to FIS with 25 years of consumer, commercial and small business banking and payments experience, working for some of the most prestigious financial institutions in the United States including Bank of America, Chase, Morgan Stanley and most recently, Capital One.
According to Mastercard SpendingPulse, which measures in-store and online retail sales across all forms of payment, Canadian spending excluding automotive increased +15.4% since pre-pandemic (YO3Y) in July, indicating consistent levels of spending despite current high levels of inflation. Mastercard SpendingPulse accounts for nominal spending and is not adjusted for inflation.
Shopify on Tuesday introduced Shopify Collabs, a new directory to connect Shopify merchants with content creators. This is Shopify’s latest push to drive more influencers to its platform and help merchants counter a slowdown in e-commerce sales. The Canadian tech behemoth has previously staked its future on influencers to spur growth. The company has been developing a full-fledged suite of services specifically targeted at influencers across Facebook, TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, Pinterest and more.
Chargeback Gurus, a global leader in chargeback prevention and recovery services, has announced the development of chargeback dispute packages specifically designed to be processed by automated systems. These dispute packages will help support increasing automation by issuing banks and ensure maximum efficiency and win rate. Chargeback dispute packages typically include a wide variety of data elements in many different form factors.
WebBank announced an agreement with American Express to become a card issuer and participant in the American Express network. The collaboration allows WebBank to issue credit card and payment solutions that include American Express benefits. American Express selected WebBank as one of its key issuing banks focused on the fintech industry.
viafintech, part of the leading specialized payments platform, Paysafe, announces a partnership with Pecunpay to launch a new cash deposit and withdrawal network in Spain. Pecunpay, a brand from e-money institution Pecunia Cards EDE, specializes in innovative e-payment and e-money processing systems. The collaboration enables fintechs who partner with Pecunpay to leverage its core banking system and licenses to offer consumers easier access to cash deposit and withdrawal services at numerous supermarket checkouts across Spain.
Ripple, the leading provider of enterprise blockchain and cryptocurrency solutions, announced the launch of RippleNet’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) in Brazil with Travelex Bank, the first bank in Latin America to utilize ODL. Travelex is the first bank registered and approved by the Central Bank of Brazil to operate exclusively in foreign exchange.