12.10.18 Your morning briefing

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

Cloaking device
Mastercard has applied for a patent that would use a blockchain to anonymize both the origin and amount of a transaction.

That means the data that surrounds a transaction would be obscured in a manner that would make it "innocuous," and thus potentially more secure.

Mastercard recently won a patent for blockchain technology that operates a travel auction platform and is seeking several other blockchain patents that address different parts of the payment route.

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Russian wearables
Russian payments service Yandex.Money, which embeds payments in emails and other formats, will support Garmin Pay and other apps for smartwatch payments at physical stores.

Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay will be among the payment options as Yandex uses to win customers as contactless payments expand in Russia.

Garmin Pay has already come to other parts of Europe in a similar manner.

A decade to share
Data regulations such as GDPR will result in gradual adoption from consumers, according to Nick Bennett, Tandem Bank's COO.

Finextra quotes Bennett as contending the more regulations are applied to data protection, the slower the attitudes toward privacy change.

GDPR compliance has been difficult, and Bennett argues banks are making the problem worse by marketing open banking without providing enough context on how it will benefit both the industries and consumers.

Opening up
One place where open banking is catching on quickly is on the Arabian Peninsula, where Token.io Limited, an open banking platform company, is collaborating with Almoayed Technologies, an infrastructure development firm.

The collaboration coincides with the debut of Bahrain's open banking regulations, and includes a single API to connect all banks in Bahrain with third-party fintechs and other companies, a construct that does not exist in many other markets, which have a more fragmented API ecosystem for data sharing.

From the Web

China says rejecting physical cash is illegal amid e-payments popularity
Reuters | Mon December 10, 2018 - China’s central bank on Monday warned that rejecting cash as a form of payment was illegal, saying that such practices could eventually could cause the loss of confidence in physical money and was unfair to those not accustomed to electronic payments.

Singtel's Dash e-wallet goes global with Visa and Apple Pay
The Straits Times | Mon December 10, 2018 - Apple Pay users can now make near-field communication (NFC) payments worldwide with Singtel’s mobile wallet app, Dash, which has just been accepted on Apple Pay..

Payment service Toss becomes Korea’s newest unicorn
TechCrunch | Sun December 9, 2018 - South Korea has got its third unicorn startup after Viva Republica, the company beyond popular payment app Toss, announced it has raised an $80 million round at a valuation of $1.2 billion. This new round is led by U.S. firms Kleiner Perkins and Ribbit Capital, both of which cut their first checks for Korea with this deal.

More from PaymentsSource

Chase Pay partners with airline network to add mobile checkout
Chase and UATP, the airline-owned payment network, are collaborating to make Chase Pay an option on airline websites and mobile apps.

Amex, WEX target corporate cards in B2B automation push
Mainstream payment companies are quickly siding with fintechs to dilute the weight of paper on accounts payable and supply chains. American Express is pushing change by making it less of an ordeal.

Authentication is best served as a diverse menu
By giving options, business can ensure that when users are in a hurry and suddenly faced with an elaborate setup for a new logon procedure, they won’t leave for a different provider, writes Marco Lafrentz, a vice president at tyntec.

Open banking opens a world of potential data mistakes for banks
Just prior to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) going into effect both Europe and Britain instituted open banking policies that are pushing many large banks to open up their data, simultaneously allowing consumers to opt in to making this data available to third parties.