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Opening up: Open development tools are becoming a primary way to extend e-commerce capabilities to small businesses, and their use is accelerating in the U.K., according to the country's Payment Systems Regulator. The regulator's annual access report said as many as ten new payment technology companies will open their systems this year. And recently, about a dozen new banks and payment providers opened their systems to third party developers. The cost of access is also going down, as the regulator estimates the IT project costs for technology providers to open their systems to third parties has fallen to about $3 million from about $5 million two years ago.
View of The Houses of Parliament at dusk.
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VC for kids' card: A group of investors including Expa and Human Ventures, and Future Perfect Venture, is investing $3.6 million in Current, which is mining the young person payments market once served by Virtual Piggy's Oink. TechProTimely reports Current is developing a feature that combines an app and plastic card that allows kids to manage and use their allowance with guidance from their parents. The app connects the card to the parents' bank account and can transfer funds back and forth via recurring or one-off transactions, and includes alerts and spending controls. Current also offers a feature that allows business colleagues to pay each other through Slack.
More problems for Monzo: A couple of days after announcing plans to insource its payments processing after an outage, Monzo is suffering from more technology troubles, according to Business Insider. The new issue causes errors in reporting of payment information. The company told the publication it is investigating the display problem, and noted the cards are working properly, and another problem that was causing the company's Android app to work incorrectly has been fixed. The company also fixed its problem from earlier in the week, when payments were not processing for a brief period of time.
Businesses want banks for B-to-B payments: Automating business payments remains a challenge, and it appears that businesses will likely stay within their banking relationships to get improvements in processing speed and efficiency. More than half, or 57%, of businesses say they do not expect to work directly with financial technology companies, reports Finextra, citing data from Nordea. The businesses expressed a preference to work with banks and vendors that resell payments technology, a model that more closely resembles how businesses have worked traditionally. The researched also showed 60% of business say a lack of standardization of transaction formats was a challenge, while 42% said a diversity of payment methods across different markets was a problem. Compliance and cross-border payments were a "significant challenge" for a third of the businesses polled.
Mobile wallets are on fire Business Insider • B.I. Intelligence A new study from MasterCard found that digital wallets were mentioned in 75% of tracked conversations that social media users had about new ways...
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