9.28.18 Your morning briefing

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

Big backers
Goldman Sachs, Google Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank and Kleiner Perkins are all part of a $25 million strategic funding round in Veem, a cross-border business payment startup.

Veem uses an API and integrations with Quckbooks, Xero, Netsuite and a dashboard to offer an alternative to Swift.

Like many fintechs that target cross-border transactions, Veem contends these tools can cut costs by eliminating the third parties — mostly correspondent banks — that have traditionally processed parts of international payments.

Former Alipay exec Badran, fintech vet Bedier join RS2 board
Payment technology veteran Osama Bedier and former Alipay North America chief Souheil Badran have joined RS2's North American Board of Directors as the payment technology company plots a debut in the region. RS2 will target ISOs, banks, payment facilitators and merchants in North America.

Besides Alipay, Badran's career path includes executive roles at edo Interactive and First Data. At Alipay, Badran was part of the company's focus on expanding payment options for Chinese travelers in the U.S. An Alipay spokesperson confirmed Badran is no longer with the company but did not provide more detail.

Bedier has served in executive positions at Google, PayPal and Poynt; and is a member of the supervisory board at the mobile technology company Veon.

Green light
While Ripple is taking a combative stance with regulators in the U.S., its payment venture in Japan is having a smoother ride.

SBI Ripple Asia, a collaboration between Ripple and Japanese firm SBI Holdings, has completed registration with Japanese regulators to operate a distributed ledger-powered payments app.

Ripple is working with a group of Japanese banks to operate a mobile phone, bank account number or QR code-based payment system that uses RippleNet as a faster and less expensive alternative to the country's legacy payment rails.

Not private enough
PayPal has settled with the Federal Trade Commission over Venmo's privacy controls, but Mozilla is unsatisfied with Venmo's protections.

Mozilla contends it has gotten 25,000 Americans to sign a petition asking Venmo to automatically set its transactions shared to private.

Millions of users' spending habits are accessible to the public, according to Mozilla, because users currently must manually update their settings to hide payments.

Refund
Uber will pay $148 million spread out over all 50 states as part of a data breach settlement with California.

The NewEconomy reports the settlement follows a 10-month investigation into a 2016 data breach that exposed personal data of more than 57 million accounts and 600,000 drivers.

Uber also paid a hacker $100,000 in an attempt to conceal the breach.

From the Web

Tencent & Alibaba chase remittances in battle for Southeast Asia
Reuters | Thu September 27, 2018 - For Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, Southeast Asian domestic helpers in Hong Kong may prove key to their global ambitions in financial services. Both companies recently launched money-transfer services that allow Hong Kong-based workers from Indonesia and the Philippines to send money home cheaply and easily.

Fujitsu looks to enliven shopping experience with new retail tech centre
The Irish Times | Thu September 27, 2018 - Fujitsu Ireland has set up a new centre in Dublin to show retailers how technology can be used to create a better shopping experience for customers while also aiding productivity, improving stock control, and cutting costs. The experimental centre, which is based at Fujitsu’s headquarters in Swords, aims to provide an insight into how tech can make shopping a more enjoyable event.

Ten people arrested for cloning credit cards, stealing fuel
NBC | Thu September 27, 2018 - Nearly a dozen people are behind bars after an elaborate scheme to clone credit cards and steal diesel fuel. The Lee County Sheriff's Office said it found the suspects with over 250 cloned credits of nearly $20,000 in fraudulent charges. The arrest report said the suspects "would transport the fuel in various vehicles equipped with illegal, homemade fuel tanks."

More from PaymentsSource

Alibaba partners with Banking Circle
China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is partnering with Saxo Payments Banking Circle, a European B2B payments platform specializing in online cross-border transfers.

Data: Why contactless is still dead in the U.S.
Contactless payments are a big success story in most countries around the world—including developing markets—but not in the U.S.

U.S. way behind the curve on open banking
Across North America, policymakers, fintech companies, and financial services firms are finally beginning an earnest dialogue about open banking. The Senate Banking Committee recently touched on the issue at a Sept. 18 hearing — one of the first official discussions in the halls of Congress.

Video Banks have innovation backwards: John Thomas, TD Bank
John Thomas, head of U.S. payments and data strategy at TD Bank, says banks are approaching innovation the wrong way.