Morning Brief 10.11.19: Salesforce ties its sales tech to ordering and payments

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

After the buy button

Salesforce has built an integration layer to tie its sales, service and marketing technology to ordering functions such as warehouse management, ERP and payments.

The company's order management technology attempts to streamline steps after the "buy button," reports TechCrunch, adding the company considers the order life cycle the "brains" of the shopping experience.

Salesforce has been attempting to improve invoicing and payment processes, including a recent investment in GoCardless, a U.K. payments technology startup that handles subscriptions and other recurring payments.

SalesforceBL
Pedestrians pass in front of the Salesforce Tower in New York, U.S., on Thursday, May 30, 2019. Salesforce.com Inc. is scheduled to release earnings figures on June 4. Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg
Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg

Dialing up payments

Airtel Africa and Mastercard have agreed to provide access to virtual payment cards in 14 African nations, reaching an addressable market of more than 100 million users.

The partnership includes QR-code based in-person payments, and is open to consumers without bank accounts, reports Business Post in Nigeria.

Spurred by mobile money services such as M-Pesa, digital payments have expanded in Africa over the past decade, creating opportunities for international payment companies to forge local partnerships, often with telcos. Airtel recently partnered with Adyen and Cellulant to extend its reach with merchants and banks.

AI returns

CaixaBank has used AI to build a system designed to automatically manage returned direct debit payments, which can have varied resolutions.

If a bill is sent to an account that does not have a large enough balance, that payment can be rejected, allowed to go through or postponed. The bank's advisor receives information on such payments each morning, which Caxiabank contends is a difficult task because of the variables involved.

The AI "imitates" reasoning and makes a decision on the payment, which in testing matched the human decision more than 99% of the time.

Checkout-free purchase

Standard Cognition has acquired assets from DeepMagic, a New York-based startup that develops tools designed to recognize items in a store. DeepMagic's technology will be integrated into Standard Cognition's platform.

The San Francisco-based Standard Cognition is one of the more than a dozen companies building checkout-free technology, in part to give traditional retailers a competitive option to Amazon Go.

Part of the challenge for the technology is its ability to recognize items at scale, and Standard Cognition hopes DeepMagic's technology will enhance those capabilities. Standard Cognition also recently acquired Explorer.ai to add robotic mapping to its technology stack.

From the web

‘Teenage Bitcoin Millionaire’ Co-Founds $1 Million Investment Fund for Crypto Startups
COINDESK | Thu October 10, 2019
The leaders of crypto payment app Metal Pay, Marshall Hayner and Erik Finman, are launching an investment fund. Dubbed Metal VC, the $1 million dollar fund will focus on micro and angel investments, primarily in early-stage companies involved in banking and decentralized finance. The fund will allow the startup to align with partners as it expands globally, according to Metal CEO Hayner.

Libra Is a ‘Better PayPal,’ Not A Liberating Currency Like Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, And LTC
FORBES | Thu October 10, 2019
Facebook’s global currency, Libra, is "another" payment system — i.e., a better version of PayPal, but not a liberating currency like Bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies. That’s according to Alex Karasulu, CEO and founder of OptDyn.

Imperva blames data breach on stolen AWS API key
ZDNET | Thu October 10, 2019
Cybersecurity firm Imperva published today a detailed post-mortem report of a security breach the company disclosed two months ago, in August. The company blamed the security breach on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) API key a hacker stole from an internal system that was left accessible from the internet.

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