John Adams

The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web. Today: Recruitment site hack exposes Australian banks; Amex makes a sustainability play; An e-wallet debuts in Angola; Italy gets bearish on blockchain.

Payroll needs can be tricky — especially on the open seas, where cruise staffers often have to go through several expensive steps to cash out their paychecks.

The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web: Mastercard gets a blockchain patent; A cryptocurrency for pot may sponsor Dennis Rodman's trop to the Singapore summit; The networks and XRP team on a wallet toolkit; ABN Amro gamifies technology hiring.

While the 'buy button' is designed to benefit merchants, issuers and the card networks alike, merchants may not be willing to risk any tradeoff in their access to customer data.

The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web. Today: Amazon picks spots in Chicago for Go; Italy deploys interbank blockchain; Indian bank gets hit with AML fine; Another startup emerges from the U.K.'s fintech standbox.

Visa's management faces an unwelcome choice: It can share more information about internal shortcomings or mistakes that caused payments to shut off temporarily, or get summoned to Parliament for a politically-infused public questioning.

The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web. Today: Grab's development center; Patreon acquires Kit.com to add options for creators; Visa's outage gets political; Belgiium's federated ID picks up steam.

One thing is clear: This outage, however brief, undermines the card networks' ability to market themselves as the fundamental platforms for a new era of payments technology.

The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web. Today: Citi embraces open banking for U.K. business; Ripple invests in blockchain studies; Paysafe's iPayment acquisition closes; Singapore and India will share fintech innovation.

Merchants, banks, fintechs and card networks may crave digital payments' treasure trove of data over cash's simple anonymity, but any weakness in a centralized ecosystem threatens the entire network, as Visa learned late last week.