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BBVA opens up: Just as Mastercard and Visa opened technology development to third parties to get a jump on new payments innovation, BBVA is making eight of its application programming interfaces available to other companies and developers to enable integration with third parties and to speed development. More than 1,500 businesses and developers have already registered with the BBVA API Market, which has been in testing for the past few months. Outside parties will be able to use data from BBVA to build opt-in services for consumers, and access anonymous aggregated data sets broken down by region or business line. One of the bank's goals is to make it easier to comply with pending PSD2 European regulations that require banks to share data with third parties. It also hopes to enable use cases such as allowing consumers to finance purchases at the point of sale by directly applying for a BBVA loan. Conversion, onboarding, payments management, ID security, notifications and CRM can also be expanded, according to BBVA. The API market is initially available in Spain, but will come to other markets shortly.
A BBVA logo sits on display outside a Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA bank branch in Madrid, Spain, on Tuesday, July 22, 2014. BBVA, Spain's second-biggest bank, agreed to purchase state-run Catalunya Banc SA for 1.19 billion euros ($1.6 billion) as the government lined up buyers for nationalized lenders. Photographer: Angel Navarrete/Bloomberg
Angel Navarrete/Bloomberg
How bad is online fraud?: More than one in ten U.K. residents, or 12%, have cancelled a credit or debit card in the past year, reports AOL's news site, citing research from comparethemarket.com, which reports the number of people cancelling cards rose to 5.5 million from 4.5 million. The size of the loss is also getting worse, as the average amount taken increased to about $700 from about $530. A quarter of British consumers who had money stolen from a credit or debit card changed or are in the process of changing their bank, according to the research. Online payments were the largest source of hacking, accounting for 46% of incidents, and 10% of victims had their card duplicated at an ATM. And 11% of hacks were ID theft. Despite the numbers, consumers are not doing enough to ensure safety. Nearly 20% said they have the same PIN for all of their cards, while nearly 10% have the same online password for all of their accounts.
No payment for six months, then...: A group of investors including FirstMark Capital and New Enterprise Associates have poured $12 million in Blispay, a company that helps small retailers offer six-month payment deferments. The Baltimore-based Blispay told TechCrunch it's taking on Affirm and PayPal Credit in the store credit space by expanding to brick and mortar merchants. Consumers making a purchase of at least $199 can sign with Blispay via its app and can obtain approval in less than a minute. They can then leave the store with the item and don't have to start paying for six months. At that point the consumer is subject to interest of up to 19.99%. The business pays the same card fee of about 3% it would be paying anyway, Blispay told TechCrunch. The three-year-old Blispay claims 500 merchant clients, and plans to expand beyond the Mid Atlantic region this year.
SIA's postal marketing: Poste Italiane, a partially privatized Italian mail carrier and financial services provider, will allow debit card and Postepay cardholders to receive discounts via the Extra Sconti app. Finextra reports the app was developed by Ubiq, an SIA unit, and uses a cash-back mechanism to credit consumers' postal accounts for grocery purchases of brands marketed by the Extra Sconti app. The new marketing program is part of the larger Sconti BancoPosta loyalty program. The Sconti app uses Ubiq technology that recognizes information on supermarket receipts to trigger the discounts for the consumers, which include about 24 million debit and prepaid cardholders in the BancaPosta network.
From the Web
Judge denies injunction against Visa, Mastercard ATM fee rules Reuters | Tue May 23, 2017 - A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has rejected a bid by independent automated teller machine operators to block rules issued by Visa and Mastercard that they claim restrict competition by fixing ATM access fees.
Google Helps Advertisers Track Spending in Physical Stores U.S. News & World Report | Tue May 23, 2017 - The internet company said Tuesday that a new tool will track how much money people spend in merchants' brick-and-mortar stores after clicking on their digital ads. The analysis will be done by matching the combined ad clicks of people who are logged into Google services with their collective purchases on credit and debit cards.
The gig economy gets the sandbox treatment 'Gig' companies often run into a snag when trying to integrate payments for a complex network of contractors, freelancers and other small clients, a challenge Jeff Shea hopes open development techniques can conquer.
Swift unveils real-time tracker for international payments Calling it a first in international payments, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication [Swift] is providing a cross-border, real-time payments tracker for banks handling global transactions.
Apple Pay changed the rules in the U.K., but is it enough to win? Apple Pay's recent move to waive the £30 contactless transaction limit in the U.K. removes one of the key restraints it faced when competing with credit and debit cards at the checkout. But at this point in the mobile wallet adoption cycle, does this change really matter to consumers and merchants?
Regulators hope changes to the supplementary leverage ratio will improve Treasury market function, but whether that happens depends in large part on how banks react and adapt.
While banks will likely increase near-term dividend plans, analysts and investors are more focused on the long-term outlook for capital requirements from regulators.
The Financial Technology Association — which had been granted the right to defend the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's open banking rule after the bureau declined to defend it — filed a motion Sunday to preserve the rule.
