Welcome to the PaymentsSource Morning Briefing, delivered daily. The information you need to start your day, including top headlines from PaymentsSource and around the Web:
SoftBank grabs a big piece of Flipkart: SoftBank has made a substantial investment in Flipkart through its $100 billion Vision Fund in what is likely the largest private investment ever made in an Indian technology company. The size of the investment was not publically disclosed, though the
Russian e-commerce venture gets a kick: Sberbank will take a 50% stake in Yankex.Market, an e-commerce venture powered by Yandex, the Russian search engine. Sberbank's investment of $500 million will give it an equal stake in the venture, which will combine Yankex's online technology with Sberbank's digital payments and fulfillment, reports
Payments vets push Railsbank: Currencycloud co-founder Nigel Verdon has attracted $1.2 million from investors for a new company, Railsbank.
Virtual currency investment: Fidelity Labs has partnered with virtual currency wallet Coinbase on a pilot in which customers can authorize Coinbase to provide Fidelity with data on Coinbase wallet holdings. This will allow users to view Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin balances alongside other accounts in their Fidelity portfolios. Fidelity is making the move to get a sense of how virtual currency trading and use in transactions can impact a person's broader financial picture. Hadley Stern, senior vice president and managing director at Fidelity Labs, told
From the Web
The Guardian | Wed Aug 9, 2017 - A record number of payments took place by credit and debit cards in June, fuelled by the continued popularity of contactless transactions. UK Finance, the new trade body for the banking industry, said almost 1.4bn card payments were made during the month. The 12% increase was the biggest annual growth in the number of payments since June 2008. The data follows recent figures from the British Retail Consortium that found cards now make up more than half of all retail purchases. In June, a record 34% of card transactions were contactless compared with 33% the previous month.
CNBC | Wed Aug 9, 2017 - The bitcoin community is eagerly waiting for the next big development called the Lightning Network, a technology that enables instant transactions. This after it reached a new milestone on Tuesday, with the digital currency network "locking in" a decision to implement a new piece of technology called SegWit, that improves capacity of the bitcoin network.
TechCrunch | Thu Aug 10, 2017 - Glint, a stealthy London fintech startup that promises a new “global currency,” has raised £3.1 million from a plethora of individual backers in the financial services and asset management space, alongside early-stage investor Bray Capital. The Glint website describes the startup as “a new global currency, account and app” and says it will make your money “reliable and independent” and give you more control in the way you “store, spend, exchange and transfer money”. If that all sounds a bit vague — aside from alluding to a new (and more) stable currency tied to a payments app — it’s probably intended to be. The company isn’t pegged to launch until the last quarter of this year.
More from PaymentsSource
The ransomware threat is likely to get a lot worse before it gets better — if it ever does. And small merchants and ATMs may be the most at risk.
As consumers shift their spending to digital channels, their payment behavior changes as well, making “credential-on-file” (CoF) payments increasingly ubiquitous.
NCR Corp. says new ATM software it has placed in units at a European bank will "future proof" the machines and deliver more functions in an advancing contactless payment world.
Fifth Third Bancorp in Cincinnati plans to record a one-time, pretax gain of about $1 billion during the third quarter as it continues to sell off its equity stake in the payment processor Vantiv.
