In this interview, TSG sat down with TSG Senior Associate, Chuck Fillinger, to address areas of his expertise in payments and where he sees the industry heading. Continue reading.
Excerpt: Tell me more about the introduction of Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC) and your role in the development process of this solution.
Chuck:At the time, DCC was prevalent throughout Europe and other regions and provided cardholders with a convenient and efficient method of making purchases internationally. While traveling in Europe for business, I was able to select the U.S. dollar for my transactions. When I returned to my office, I was able to reconcile and submit my expenses without having to wait for the next billing statement and the card schemes unknown currency conversion rates. Because of this, we knew it would be a successful solution for North America. Upon building out FDC’s international platform to integrate Multicurrency and DCC, I coordinated and managed a team within FDC’s IT, Product, Operations, Finance, Sales Channels, OmniPay and FEXCO to launch and enable selected merchants in specific markets and geographic areas that had high international travelers. This was a very successful program and continues to this day.
Digital payments company Payoneer is partnering with Mastercard to offer small businesses a digital payments card. The Payoneer Digital Purchasing Mastercard will allow the company’s customers to make global purchases, connect to mobile wallets and digitally access multiple cards that help streamline business expenses, such as advertising services from Google, Facebook and Amazon. “Small businesses will be empowered to choose how they pay and get paid and have immediate access to funds earned, which is critical as the demand for digital payments continues to accelerate,” Sherri Haymond, Mastercard’s executive vice president of digital partnerships, told CNBC.
The U.S. Senator who gave his name nearly a decade ago to a law that caps debit card interchange made it plain Thursday he now has the rates merchants pay for credit card acceptance squarely in his sights. Commenting during a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he heads, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., accused the major card networks of looking to use higher credit card interchange to compensate for the fee income issuers have lost via the 2011 Durbin Amendment. “They didn’t forget,” Durbin said, referring to Mastercard Inc. and Visa Inc., both of which have set plans for multiple credit card rate changes next month. “They’re waiting for an opportunity to get even again."
Lightspeed POS Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based, omnichannel commerce platforms, announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire VendLimited (Vend), a cloud-based retail management software company. The acquisition strengthens Lightspeed's global retail base and reinforces the company as a premier omnichannel retail platform worldwide for high-performing small and medium-sized businesses. The acquisition also builds on Lightspeed's foothold in Asia-Pacific, approximately doubling the company's customer base and expanding its retail footprint in that region.
JPMorgan (JPM) will be shuttering its Chase Pay method of payment for apps and websites on March 31, according to a note on the bank's website. According to Chase’s complete list of retailers accepting the payment method, only customers of Shell, Starbucks, and Walmart will be affected. “As technology has evolved, so has our strategy for integration at the merchant point of sale. We are incorporating the most popular features directly into the Chase mobile app and chase.com, including receipt capture, direct provisioning of Chase cards to partner wallets, Pay with Points and Chase Offers,” a spokesperson told Yahoo Finance. “In addition, we are working closely with our merchant clients on ways to integrate our digital experiences within their own respective sites.”
“We are pleased to close out the year with strong financial performance across the business, particularly given that we are not immune to the effects of the global pandemic. Accelerating volume trends in the fourth quarter combined with favorable revenue and EBITDA performance, demonstrates execution against our growth initiatives,” said Jeff Hack, CEO of Paya. “Specifically, record new boardings on our Paya Connect platform, continued strength in our B2B vertical, key partner wins and robust growth within our proprietary ACH solutions position us well as we look to deliver on our 2021 priorities. Our performance continues to highlight Paya’s differentiated value proposition, focused on integrated payments within attractive vertical end markets.”
The fourth quarter of 2020 represented the strongest period of growth for Nuvei in its company history as it reported revenue of $115.9 million, a 46 percent year-over-year increase. The company’s full-year revenue also increased noticeably to $375 million, a nearly 53 percent increase from last year when the company pulled in $245.8 million (all numbers in USD). The Montréal-based Nuvei released its financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year ended December 31, 2020, on Wednesday morning. This is the second quarterly earnings report Nuvei has issued since publicly listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) after a successful year of financing.
The smattering of fintechs seeking bank charters has become a herd. In just the last six weeks, Square opened a new bank, LendingClub completed its acquisition of Radius Bancorp, Brex applied to open an insured depository and, most recently, SoFi announced a deal to purchase a small California bank to accelerate its quest for a charter. The tech-fueled upstarts all have different business plans, and they typically have different motivations for seeking a charter.
PayPal will acquire cryptocurrency security firm Curv as part of its push into digital tokens, the company announced Monday. The deal is worth less than $200 million, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. It’s expected to close in the first half of 2021. Shares of PayPal were down more than 1% Monday morning. Founded in 2018, Curv provides companies with digital asset security technology that’s delivered as a cloud service. PayPal said the deal will help “accelerate and expand” its support of cryptocurrencies and digital assets.
Paytm said on Tuesday it is turning NFC-enabled Android smartphones into point-of-sale machines, as it looks to win more merchants in one of the world’s largest mobile payments markets. A Paytm merchant partner will now be able to enable the card acceptance feature on their NFC-enabled smartphone from the Paytm Business app, the Indian startup said. Once activated, they will be able to process a transaction by tapping a plastic card to their phone. Paytm Smart POS supports Visa, Mastercard and Rupay, the startup said, whereas the amount limit on a single transaction is set to 5,000 Indian rupees, or about $69.
Flutterwave, an African fintech startup has secured $170 million in capital injections from investors, the firm said in a statement Wednesday. The new capital flows -- facilitated by "a leading group of international investors" -- will bolster Flutterwave's client base in the global market, the statement said. "The fundraise brings the total investment in Flutterwave to USD $225 million and is one of only a very small number of African fintech companies to have raised significant funds in a period of widespread disruption and economic uncertainty," the statement added.
X5 Retail Group, Russia’s largest food retailer, has partnered with Visa and Sber to launch what it describes as ‘pay with a glance’ biometrics at self-service checkout terminals in X5’s Perekrestok supermarkets and Pyaterochka convenience stores. And the facial recognition payment system may be expanded to some 3,000 X5-owned stores by the end of 2021. After trials at 52 Perekrestok supermarkets, the biometric identification is set to become available at 150 Perekrestok supermarkets by the end of March, with several of Moscow’s Pyaterochka convenience stores to follow suit in April.
PayPal Holdings Inc will launch its “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) option in Australia this June, the U.S. payments giant said on Wednesday, muscling in further on Afterpay Ltd and others for share in the booming industry. So far PayPal’s new BNPL option has been rolled out in the United States and Britain where by the end of the December quarter it said it had handled more than $750 million of transactions.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is exploring how it can meet rising customer demand to own and invest in bitcoin, while still staying on the right side of regulation, bank President and Chief Operating Officer John Waldron said on Wednesday. “Client demand is rising,” Waldron said. “We are regulated on what we can do. We continue to evaluate it...and engage on it.” The bank recently restarted its cryptocurrency trading desk and this month it started dealing bitcoin futures and non-deliverable forwards for clients.
As the global pandemic sent office workers home, forced businesses to close and imposed a general lockdown on practically everyone, it looked like romance was gone in 2020. Given that people were no longer eating at restaurants, watching baseball games in-person or going out on the town to meet people, the only avenue left to find someone special was online. It’s also where fraudsters quickly congregated to take advantage of lovelorn consumers. Further, in this online-only dating environment, fraudsters had an opportunity to hone their skills.
U.S. lawmakers and security experts are voicing concern that foreign governments are staging cyberattacks using servers in the U.S., in an apparent effort to avoid detection by America’s principal cyberintelligence organization, the National Security Agency. When hackers recently targeted servers running Microsoft Corp.’s widely used Exchange software, they employed U.S.-based computers from at least four service providers to mount their attack, according to an analysis by the threat intelligence company DomainTools LLC. The attack that Microsoft disclosed last week affected at least tens of thousands of customers and has been linked by the software giant and other security researchers to China-based hackers.
John McAfee, who already faces federal tax evasion charges, has now been indicted for allegedly using his vast social media following to run cryptocurrency pump-and-dump schemes as well as promote virtual currencies to investors without revealing his stake in them, according to the Justice Department. McAfee, the founder of the cybersecurity firm that still bears his name, along with his business partner and bodyguard, Jimmy Gale Watson, Jr., are facing numerous new criminal charges, including conspiracy to commit commodities and securities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities and touting fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and substantive wire fraud, according to a seven-count indictment unsealed Friday.
The second year of the coronavirus pandemic is starting with rising hopes for the economic outlook — and a long way to go. Positive signs are emerging as restrictions on businesses lift and the pace of vaccine distributions ramps up. But millions remain unemployed, and many economists are cautioning that a return to pre-pandemic conditions could take months, if not years. That reality became all the more evident on Thursday, when the Labor Department reported that a total of 709,000 workers filed first-time claims for state unemployment benefits in the week that ended March 6.
At first, it was expected to be brief. At least that was the hope. Instead, a once-in-a-century pandemic has ground on for a year, throwing millions out of work and upending wide swathes of the American economy. Delivery services thrived while restaurants suffered. Home offices replaced downtown offices. Travel and entertainment spending dried up. The job losses were swift and harsh. But they hardly fell equally across the economy. Black and Hispanic workers fared worse than others. And many women, mostly mothers, felt compelled to quit the workforce to care for children being schooled online from home.
American Express released the American Express Travel: Global Travel Trends Report today, which provides unique insight into consumer sentiment toward travel nearly one year after the COVID-19 pandemic began. The findings in the report, grounded in survey research across seven countries, including the United States, Australia, India, Canada, Mexico, Japan and the United Kingdom, demonstrates that consumers are looking forward to traveling again and that they are planning for future trips.
This year, 400 lucky college grads will not only land their first “real” job but will also be the beneficiaries of a new student-loan repayment program from an employer. FIS, a publicly traded provider of technology solutions for merchants, banks, and capital-market firms, just announced this benefit for the U.S.-based college graduates it’ll hire starting in 2021. FIS claims it’s the first employer in the financial-services sector to do so. Only about 4% of private-sector employers offer a similar benefit, up from 3% in 2015. The benefit comes at a time when student-loan debt is topping $1.5 trillion (yes, with a t) and a whopping 45 million Americans owe money for their education—some of whom weren’t even able to earn their degree.
Priority Technology Holdings, Inc., a leading payments technology company, and Finxera Holdings, Inc. ("Finxera"), a pioneer in the fintech industry that launched and operated one of the first Banking as a Service ("BaaS") platforms, announced they have entered into a definitive agreement to merge. Finxera will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Priority. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021. Priority's omni-channel payments platform supports proprietary and third-party software applications built for businesses of any size.
JPMorgan Chase & Co has hired former HSBC Holdings Plc executive Jeremy Balkin as head of fintech and innovation for wholesale payments, the bank said on Tuesday. In his new role, Balkin will oversee fintech and innovation initiatives for wholesale payments, and be involved in JPMorgan’s decisions to invest or partner with companies that can help further its strategy in the space, the bank said. At HSBC in the United States Balkin served as head of innovation and strategic digital partnerships, leading a team whose responsibilities included improving digital customer experience and identifying new products and services. Among the team’s projects was the deployment of humanoid robot Pepper in HSBC’s Fifth Avenue flagship New York branch.
Fast Company has named Fiserv, Inc. to its list of World’s Most Innovative Companies 2021, a group of businesses that have not only found a way to be resilient in the past year, but also turned those challenges into impact-making processes. Fiserv, a leading global provider of payments and financial services technology solutions, was recognized for its role in facilitating the acceptance of online Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) payments in support of the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Online Purchasing Pilot. The program scaled rapidly in 2020 to allow millions of underserved Americans to buy groceries online for the first time.
Mastercard is expanding the Engage platform, offering customers easy access to a growing network of qualified technology and fintech partners that can quickly deploy Mastercard Digital First solutions. These solutions will enable customers to provide entirely digital payment experiences for consumers, from acquisition and card usage to management and engagement, with a physical card option. “The expansion of Mastercard Engage is happening at a critical time when financial institutions and digital players are seeking to fulfill consumer demand for digital experiences but may not have all of the in-house capabilities to do so.”
Klarna, a leading global payment and shopping service, announced an expanded suite of marketing products and services designed to provide retailers with even more tools to drive consumer demand, and acquire, convert, and retain customers. This newly enhanced suite enables retailers and publishers to offer nearly unlimited shoppable content in native formats, on their own digital properties, through the Klarna ecosystem, and across the wider internet, including social channels.
Citi is streamlining the cross-border payments process for institutional clients by releasing a single electronic platform for payment instructions and the associated documents that accompany them. The service, which is being rolled out initially in South Africa, has the potential to cut days off execution timelines for overseas transfers, says the bank. Shahmir Khaliq, global head of treasury and trade solutions (TTS) at Citi says: "We’re investing heavily in digital technologies and platforms to simplify, integrate and automate our clients’ payment and FX-related activities, end-to-end.
Leading specialized payments platform, Paysafe, announces today a new multi-year, global deal which will see Microsoft support Paysafe’s strategic move to cloud-based transaction services. As part of the collaboration, Paysafe is leveraging Microsoft Azure's open and flexible cloud computing platform and tools for its US payment processing and merchant services. This will enable more agile delivery methods and establish a scalable global cloud footprint for Paysafe’s Card Present transaction systems.
Dwolla, a modern payments platform, announced the appointment of a new President and COO with more than 20 years of experience in the enterprise payments space. Dave Glaser will join Dwolla as President and Chief Operating Officer, enabling Dwolla to rapidly scale by enhancing the company’s enterprise growth strategies and building world-class customer onboarding, implementation and service processes. “Dave’s breadth of experience in scaling large organizations is critical as we continue to expand our enterprise payment services.
MerchantE, a leading end-to-end digital commerce platform, now offers UnionPay SecurePlus powered by Payscout, opening trillions of dollars in spending by billions of global consumers to U.S. businesses. “UnionPay serves a vast and rapidly growing market in the U.S. and around the world,” says Sandra Blair, Chief Product Officer at MerchantE. “U.S. retailers and others that accept online payments can tap into a huge revenue source if they include UnionPay credit and debit card acceptance among their options for payment methods.
RevSpring, the leading provider of healthcare engagement and payment solutions, announced the extension of its Assisted Payments capability—now called Deviceless Payments™—to include Point-Of-Service payments, in addition to previously enabled Contact Center payments. Public health threats from COVID-19 and other factors have fueled growing popularity of contactless payments, inspiring RevSpring to fully integrate Deviceless Payments to support staff-assisted payments within both its PersonaPay™ and MyEasyView™ portals.
Bluefin, the leading provider of data and payment security technologies including PCI-validated point-to-point encryption (P2PE) solutions, Powertranz, the local leader in Card Present gateway/payment processing for the Caribbean, and NRT Technology Corp, a global technology leader, have announced the first secure, self-integrated contactless kiosks with validated P2PE for the Caribbean market.
Handpoint, a pioneer in defining integrated payments and next-generation POS, announced its partnership with MagicCube, the leader in the new category of Software Defined Trust (SDT), to provide an industry-leading solution offering a powerful, secure software product which eliminates the requirements and costs for payments terminal hardware. This partnership will enable MagicCube's softPOS i-Accept product to be embedded into the Handpoint platform, offering a unified user experience across softPOS, mPOS and smartPOS.
MSTS, a global B2B payment company, announced a new brand identity and name — TreviPay. The company's new branding reflects its role as the preferred B2B payment provider for leading Fortune 500 companies and small- to mid-sized businesses. The transition to TreviPay builds on MSTS's legacy of helping clients grow by streamlining B2B payments through a combination of innovative technology, service expertise, and working capital to improve their customer's experience and free up funding for growth.
