10.22.18 Your morning briefing

The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web:

Amazon Go has company in San Francisco
Amazon has received approval to open its first Go cashierless store in San Francisco, but others have beaten it to the punch.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports the store will be in the financial district, citing local property records.

After opening its first Go store in Seattle, Amazon is getting more aggressive with expansion and plans to open 3,000 stores over the next few years. There are also two Go locations in Chicago, with New York and Los Angeles slated for Amazon Go stores as well.

But in tech-savvy San Francisco, Amazon isn't the first cashierless store. Zippin opened a cashierless store in San Francisco in August and Standard Cognition opened its first store in San Francisco in September. There are also hundreds of cashierless stores in China.

Mike Kane/Bloomberg

Score update
Fintechs often position themselves as alternatives to traditional credit scoring by using alternative data such as past payment records to predict future risk.

As the market becomes more complex, Experian and Fincinity are adding more data to their research. A new score released Monday uses account aggregation and user-contributed data on transactions, payments and account activity to improve visibility into users that fall just outside traditional thresholds for credit cards or other credit products.

The new score could be a way to serve the growing market for installment payments, or could provide an alternative for banks that wish to compete against installment products by offering higher credit card limits.

Fintech branch
JPMorgan Chase plans to open a fintech campus in Silicon Valley to support the bank's investments in the area.

The campus will be in Palo Alto, between Facebook and Google, in the Stanford Research Park, reports CNBC, which adds it's scheduled to open in 2020.

More than 275 employees from WePay will also be located in the Palo Alto campus. JPMorgan Chase acquired WePay in 2017 to compete with Stripe and other fintech startups.

A new lease on mobile
Subscription models have become dramatically more diverse over the past few years as companies try to find new ways to make payments flexible for consumers.

Volvo is launching a mobile-friendly subscription service that's adding a new model, the Volvo S60, during the next few months.

Engadget reports the drivers can "subscribe" to the car through Volvo's Care by Volvo subscription service. Additionally, the subscription service has caught on with smartphone users, as Engadget reports half of the people who subscribed to an earlier model, the XC40 SUV, handled the sign up and payment schedule through Volvo's mobile app.

Western Union, banks and IBM fight human trafficking
Technology such as machine learning is seen as a way to combat human trafficking by analyzing transactions, and Western Union is joining IBM and a group of financial institutions to use AI and payments information to predict where and when human trafficking may occur.

Voa News reports Western Union, Barclays, Lloyds, Europol and the telco Liberty Global will use IBM Watson to support a data hub that will use transactions and other data to provide analysts with actionable data on the activities that often precede or accompany human trafficking.

IBM's natural language technology will combine with other data to identify predictable patterns and hotspots.

From the Web

Square's Cash App Isn't Slowing Down Venmo One Bit
The Motley Fool | Fri October 19, 2018 - Square has had a ton of success with its Cash App over the last year or so. Earlier this year, third-party data indicated that Cash App downloads surpassed those of PayPal's Venmo, a competing peer-to-peer mobile payments service. However, despite Square's success, Venmo is growing faster than ever.

TransferWise targets Asian faster payments systems in regional growth push
Reuters | Fri October 19, 2018 - UK-based financial technology firm TransferWise plans to nearly double its Asia Pacific headcount and link up with new instant payments infrastructure in both Hong Kong and Singapore, its chief executive said in an interview. Competition in digital payments in Hong Kong, Singapore and across Asia is becoming increasingly fierce, as traditional financial institutions and new technology firms from around the world vie for dominance both within markets and in cross border payments.

SEC’s New Fintech Hub Helps Blockchain Startups Navigate ICO Rules
CCN | Fri October 19, 2018 - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced the launch of a “New Strategic Hub for Innovation and Financial Technology.” In a surprising move, the project — dubbed “FinHub” — allows blockchain innovators and initial coin offering (ICO) operators, among other fintech stakeholders, to speak with the SEC directly on rules and market integrity.

More from PaymentsSource

Tech can't solve everything in global e-commerce
The international payments infrastructure has reached a point where consumers can use their cards in many parts of the world as easily as they can in their own country. But finding retailers who can accept all of these cards is a completely different story.

7 ways VR and augmented reality transform payments
As virtual reality and augmented reality devices become increasingly affordable and available to consumers, banks and payment companies have more opportunities to engage their customers in virtual worlds.

TD in VR: More Disney than The Matrix, and that's fine
TD Ameritrade's new virtual reality experience, an immersive video viewable through Facebook's Oculus Go headset, feels more like stepping onto a Disney ride than going into a virtual world. And that's probably the ideal approach for the current state of VR adoption.

Event ATMs can address one of cash’s final bastions
Cash is king when it comes to community events, and event organizers know this; which is why they hire qualified, professional mobile ATM companies to manage the ATMs they have on site, writes Yonas Marcos, president and CEO of Star Financial Services.