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Cryptobills: ZenCash is collaborating with digital currency payments company Welto to power ZenCash's virtual currency for bill payments, as well as track payment status. The combined service will support ZenCash payments via an integration of CoinPayments, a gateway system that eliminates the need to use an exchange to convert cryptocurrency to fiat currency, according to an announcement from ZenCash. Users will be able to pay bills in ZenCash, processing in 24 to 48 hours through a link to their ZenCash wallets. Welto additionally tracks the exchange rate of ZenCash to U.S. dollars, which is automatically updated every 15 minutes. Welto is available at the iTunes and Google Play stores, and is also integrated into Amazon Echo devices. "We are confident that this integration will incentivize more users to adopt ZenCash not only as a store of value, but also as a means of payment,” said Rob Viglione, founder of ZenCash, in a release.
Federated ID gets more users in Canada: A
Cash free in six years: Sweden may be totally cash free by 2023 as cards, and to a lesser degree mobile apps, take over. Citing research from the Copenhagen School of Economics,
From the Web
TechCrunch | Wed Oct 11, 2017 - FastPay has acquired AnchorOps in a deal that brings together two businesses focused on media financing. FastPay’s model revolves around lending money to digital media companies, helping them deal with cashflow issues as they wait to get paid by advertisers. AnchorOps, meanwhile, has built invoicing and payments software for those media companies. In the acquisition announcement, CEO Jed Simon said the deal allows FastPay to create “a single platform to address the full spectrum of customer needs.” He also said the entire 30-person AnchorOps team will be joining FastPay, with founder and CEO David Frogel becoming chief revenue officer. “The AnchorOps team will comprise the core of FastPay’s payment business and we intend to continue investing it and growing the team,” Simon said.
China Daily | Thu Oct 12, 2017 - Moving from cash to digital payments will provide enormous direct advantages to consumers, businesses and governments, according to a research released by Visa, a leading global payments technology company, on Wednesday. Thanks to technological developments, more and more people have been adopting digital payments in their daily life all around the world. A cashless society, says Michael Busk-Jepsen of the Danish Bankers Association, "is no longer an illusion but a vision that can be fulfilled in a reasonable time frame." The research covered 100 major cities across 80 countries in the world, and found that increasing digital payments across these cities could result in total direct net benefits of $470 billion per year, representing more than three percent of combined GDP of all these cities.
Wired | Wed Oct 11, 2017 - Security engineer Diogo Mónica put a name to an IT architecture idea that's been technically possible for years, but only more recently adopted in firms that actually need to safeguard troves of sensitive user data: "Crypto Anchors." The system, which Mónica and his colleague Nathan McCauley put into place at the payment firm Square before moving to enterprise software firm Docker in 2015, encrypts the contents of databases with a key that's stored on a separate, single-purpose, hardened computer known as a Hardware Security Module, or HSM. When another computer in the company's network tries to access a database's records—whether it's an innocent query from an employee's PC, or a hacked web server hijacked by intruders to suck out a cache of secrets en masse—that HSM acts as a strict gatekeeper, decrypting each of those records one by one.
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Using an automated solution to process virtual card payments is the first step in overcoming the challenges of this payment technology, writes Ed Jordan, CFO of Billtrust.
Discover joined Apple Pay nearly a year after the mobile wallet came to market, so it has some catching up to do if it wants to be the top-of-wallet choice. Its new in-app rewards feature may give it the visibility it needs.
Amazon is giving its Prime members another channel for spending with a service for teenagers to do their own shopping on a household account, subject to parental review.
It has now been two years since the EMV fraud liability shift took effect in the U.S. for most companies. This is enough time to evaluate the EMV migration's effect on fraud, and whether it can be blamed for anything happening in digital channels.