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:
NFC class: POSB Bank has deployed about 6,000 Smart Buddy watches in 19 elementary schools in Singapore, introducing wearable technology to teach children about payments, spending money and financial services.
IBM's DLT partners: Elsewhere in technology-heavy Singapore, IBM has made substantial investments in
Pocket cards: Australian youth payment company Spriggy is adding capital to enhance its "pocket money" app that links to a card account to allow young people to make payments. It has raised about $2.6 million from Alium Capital, Perle Ventures and a handful of angel investors. Spriggy was created by former derivatives traders from Citigroup and has about 35,000 customers after two years in business. It charges $2.50 per month for each child that's signed up to the account, and has many of the parental controls common for youth payment apps. After a few slow years, the youth card market has perked up recently with new entrants such as
Alpha's postal play: Generally considered part of the distant past—it's been decades since The U.S. Postal service
From the Web
Reuters | Thu Aug 17, 2017 - Talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) must include a discussion of new financial services, a Mexican negotiator said on Wednesday, singling out so-called fintech companies rapidly gaining ground in the region. Created 23 years ago, NAFTA includes Canada, Mexico and the United States and is being renegotiated at the behest of U.S. President Donald Trump who made a campaign promise to get a better deal for U.S. workers.
Yahoo! Finance | Wed Aug 16, 2017 - MoneyGram’s merger with Ant Financial Services Group, an affiliate of the Chinese e-commerce goliath Alibaba Group , is on track. In May, the company’s board of directors unanimously approved the amended merger agreement, pursuant to which each of its share will fetch $18 from the acquiring company. The transaction, which is expected to close by the end of this year, will strengthen MoneyGram’s business, which operates in an intensively competitive and fast-changing payments industry. While on its own, the company has to continually invest in business in order to keep pace with the constantly evolving industry, a union with a stable partner will make its journey easier.
TechCrunch | Wed Aug 16, 2017 - Analyst Gartner is projecting that worldwide spending on IT security products and services will grow seven per cent, year over year, to reach a total of $86.4 billion in 2017 — suggesting opportunities for security startups to tap into rising demand for specialist b2b services. Within the infrastructure protection segment, the analyst is forecasting fast growth in the security testing market, though it notes this is coming from a small base. Factors that Gartner points to as driving spending here include continued data breaches and growing demand for app security testing.
More from PaymentsSource
Tokenization is one aspect of a rapidly-evolving movement toward more fluid and decentralized forms of value exchange.
Credit card issuers are still targeting high-spending customers, who tend to be resilient to economic swings, but competition at the top is brutal and marketing costs are high.
One of the objections often raised to bitcoin is that it is not—cannot be—secure, existing as it does online where cyberthieves and hackers can pilfer it. The best way to keep one's digital gold safe is to store it in a "cold wallet" on a device not connected to the internet. But that typically leaves users unable to spend or sell it on short notice.
Looking at the rise in issuers that support mobile wallets, one might think the concept has finally gone mainstream. But the actual usage numbers remain dismal, with few indications of what — if anything — will steer the market toward mobile payments.
