The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web:
Career criminals
National Australia Bank and Commonwealth Bank of Australia have shut their career pages after a breach at job site
It's a particularly dangerous breach, since authentication details often overlap from one relationship to another, so the crooks could gain access to other user accounts. The breach also impacted myriad Australian companies and the nation's central bank, with most clients shutting their job portals as a result, reports
PageUp said it's responding to and investigating the breach, adding that its job site is still safe to use and employment contracts signed through the job site are handled separately.
By the sea
American Express is collaborating with Parley for the Oceans to develop a payment card that's made entirely out of recycled plastic that has been harvested from the ocean.
The card is a prototype that will be tested and made available over the next 12 months. The card is part of a "green" initiative for card products, though Amex also plans to use the initiative as part of a marketing campaign.
Amex also plans to reduce the amount of "virgin plastic" it uses in all of its card products as part of the campaign.
Angolan wallet
That creates a market opportunity for Kamba, an Angolan startup that has launched a mobile wallet that allows people to send funds to each other, or to make online payments through a QR code.
Blockchain's limitations
While blockchain is advancing in
Fabio Panetta, the deputy governor of the Bank of Italy, said central banks at this time are not equipped to handle government-issued virtual currencies, reports
Panetta based his view on the lack of a tangible asset to back the virtual currency.
From the Web
The Motley Fool | Fri June 8, 2018 - PayPal Holdings Inc. went to market and made another merchant-related acquisition. That's right, within weeks of acquiring iZettle, the European-based payment processing company that caters to small merchants, PayPal made another acquisition that augments the overall package it can offer merchants looking for its services.
TechCrunch | Sun June 10, 2018 - Forty-seven and a half million dollars is a big commitment to African technology companies — even with the recent uptick in VC investment on the continent. But for the Kenyan-based fintech firm Cellulant, whose digital payments platform processed 7 million transactions worth $350 million across 33 African countries in the last month alone, raising that amount in a series C round led by TPG Growth’s Rise Fund just makes sense.
South China Morning Post | Sat June 9, 2018 - In the past decade “going global” often described the ambition of Chinese bricks-and-mortar enterprises to expand overseas. Today, Chinese fintech companies say “going global” has also become their top priority.
More from PaymentsSource
Beem It, a startup owned by three of Australia’s largest banks, has launched a free real-time social payments app designed to run on older debit networks instead of the country's new faster payments platform.
The deal could be harmful to their bottom line because it will provide Amazon with more visibility into an even wider percentage of their e-commerce data, writes Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap.
The cashierless Amazon Go store is barely more than an experiment — it's live in only one location in Seattle, with plans for a handful of stores to follow this year — but it has already sparked a race to put similar models in place.
Two factions that have taken on the card networks on separate fronts are combining their might in the latest effort to pressure Visa and Mastercard. Even so, there is not a lot of reason for the credit card brands to change their methods,
