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Vote of confidence
As the October 31
The bank-backed blockchain consortium, which has built a substantial business supporting
Italian contactless
Wirecard and SisalPay have signed a digital payments deal with a focus on contactless payments in Italy, where firms such as
SisalPay is regulated by Italy's central bank, and covers 40,000 points of sale, 15 million consumers and processes about 200 million transactions per year. Sisal estimates about half of Italy's current payments are contactless.
Beyond contactless, the partnership also addresses utility bills, tax payments, mobile phone top-ups and subscriptions to television services.
Another breach
Clothing e-commerce site Poshmark has been hacked, exposing full names, usernames, genders, email addresses, hashed passwords, clothing sizes and social media information. The scale of the breach was not disclosed.
The hashed passwords are encrypted, according to Poshmark, though
The Poshmark breach follows a major breach at
Crypto credit
Nexo and Mastercard are offering a crypto card that allows consumers to use their cryptocurrencies to back their purchases, a model that's designed to support spending crypto without actually using the crypto for payments.
The consumers can use the value of their crypto for a later sale to pay the balance on the card, reports
Like most cryptocurrency payment products, consumers don't actually touch cryptocurrency, since the crypto is converted to traditional currency before the point of purchase.
Blockchain sandbox
The South Korean government has waived blockchain regulations in Busan in an attempt to encourage innovation around distributed ledgers.
The government is pushing for financial services, tourism and safety uses, reports
South Korea has been a hotbed of blockchain and cryptocurrency, with nearly a third of all cryptocurrency activity in the world, despite having only 1% of the world's population, according to
From the Web
The Wall Street Journal | Sun August 4, 2019 - Big banks are fighting a likely U.S. government effort to speed up how money moves through its payments system, arguing this could derail a private network they have developed. The battle is dividing financial firms and policy makers at a time when payments are becoming a potential flashpoint between banking and big tech.
Yahoo Finance | Mon August 5, 2019 - Fed Chairman Jerome Powell sent a letter to lawmakers defending the idea of an upgraded network, which would aim to support instant transactions for individuals and businesses. Currently, the Fed operates a payments network that sits alongside the networks run by banks and credit card companies, but it is underpinned by outdated technology and does not support instant, 24-7 transactions.
TechCrunch | Fri August 2, 2019 - Nyca Partners, a firm with investments in financial technology businesses including PayRange, Trellis, Affirm and Acorns, has collected another $210 million for its third venture capital fund.
More from PaymentsSource
Walmart has filed a patent application for a digital currency that, like Facebook's Libra, would be a stablecoin backed by traditional currencies. And it envisions a very specific use case where its coin could stand in for cash — or even for a bank account.
Square has worked hard in the past several years to offer more than just mobile card acceptance, but not all of its efforts have paid off.
The question of upgrading to 3D Secure 2.0 authorization is relatively easy for European e-commerce merchants, since it's a straightforward way to comply with part of PSD2, the revised Payment Services Directive.
Capital One's recent breach reveals lessons that all financial institutions and payment companies can learn from.
