The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web:
High street Amazon
Amazon's aggressive moves to use its technology to disrupt traditional retail have reached the U.K., where the e-commerce giant plans to open a series of pop-up stores to sell products such as housewares, electronics and food.
The stores will also include Amazon Lockers to receive e-commerce orders, reports
Amazon's other U.K. retail moves include opening cashierless
SMB credit
eBay and fintech app Asto are collaborating on small-business loans in the U.K., picking up on a trend among technology firms to use payment data to support lending.
eBay sales, payment and cash flow data will support lending decisions, reports the
PayPal and Square also offer lending for small businesses as an alternative to banks, using payment data as a way to vet borrowers.
Medical breach
An issue with a billing vendor has caused a breach at Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest blood-testing services in the U.S., potentially exposing the records of up to 12 million consumers.
The breach affects personal, financial and medical information, reports
While the information included credit card numbers, bank account numbers and general medical information, lab test results were not exposed.
Utility coin
Barclays, Nasdaq and UBS have invested about $75 million in a venture that's building a asset-based digital cash instrument on a distributed ledger.
Called Fnality International, it will issue a Utility Settlement Coin, completing work that began in 2015 when UBS pitched a Utility Settlement Coin to streamline cross-border payments, reports
The venture will create digital versions of Canadian dollars, U.S. dollars, euros, Pounds and Yen. These currencies will be backed by traditional currencies. Other banks such as BNY Mellon, ING, Sumitomo, MUFG Bank, Lloyds and State Street are also backing Fnality.
From the Web
The Wall Street Journal | Tue June 4, 2019 - Square has forwarded receipts documenting transactions as mundane as a cup of coffee and as sensitive as an obstetrician’s visit to people who were uninvolved in the purchases. In some cases, neither the purchaser nor the recipient could say why Square sent receipts to the people it did.
TechCrunch | Mon June 3, 2019 - Tink, the European open banking platform that recently raised €56 million in new funding, is disclosing that PayPal has become a strategic investor. The online payments giant joins a long list of existing backers that includes U.S.-based Insight Venture Partners, Sunstone, SEB, Nordea Ventures and ABN AMRO Digital Impact Fund.
Fortune | Mon June 3, 2019 - Mastercard wants the world to stop paying with paper money—but that doesn’t necessarily mean paying with a plastic credit card. While swiping a card or scanning a mobile app are more popular payment methods in the United States, cash still accounts for 30% of U.S. transactions.
More from PaymentsSource
China UnionPay is assembling the relationships it needs to directly issue cards in Europe, but local saturation suggests UnionPay’s best bet is to use European merchant relationships to counter its own domestic rivals in China rather than disrupting Visa and Mastercard.
While major card issuers such as Chase and Wells Fargo roll out NFC-enabled credit and debit cards incrementally, Bank of America is taking a much more aggressive approach.
After criticizing the prevalence of social sign-in buttons on the internet, Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, unveiled one of his company's own. It's essentially Apple Pay without the payments.
Cross-border money transfer provider WorldRemit has secured $175 million in new capital in a Series D funding round to challenge legacy money transmitters in the fast growing cross-border payments market.
