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Payments gig
Asto, a financial services company for freelancers, is adding invoice financing to its range of products, giving the Santander-owned company a path to approach a wider range of businesses.
The move comes after Santander, Asto's parent, acquired Albert, an expense app for gig economy workers, reports
The companies hope to build a range of services for self-employed people and microbusinesses, a market segment that has traditionally struggled to obtain financial services, though the so-called
Not open
Three U.K. banks are falling short of providing the APIs required to meet new
Barclays, Lloyds HBOS and Santander were found to have "inadequate APIs" to meet service levels, though they are among the best resourced in the U.K., reports
RBS, Danske, Ulster, NatWest and Nationwide led the open banking performance ranking.
New breach
The
The information included more than 3,000 Stripe-processed invoices that had the last four digits of the consumers' credit card number, though no full payment data was leaked, reports
There were also more than 440,000 records that had IP addresses, location coordinates and information about what devices consumers use to stream content.
Bitcoin phone phishing
The New York Police Department has discovered a growing cryptocurrency scam in which people pretend to be government agents asking for payments in bitcoin, prepaid cards and wire transfers.
The scammers, who usually say they're from the Social Security Administration, have stolen more than $2 million this year, reports
The attacks use
From the Web
CoinDesk | Sun May 5, 2019 - Launched Sunday by Bluewallet, one of the more popular lightning network wallets, their new app for Apple Watches allows users to receive bitcoin over its new payment technology: lightning. Transactors can use the smartwatch app to generate a QR code that someone else can then scan with their smartphone to send over a payment.
TechCrunch | Sun May 5, 2019 - Cross-border fintech continues to be an area of interest for venture capitalists. The latest deal sees GGV Capital — the U.S-China firm that’s backed Xiaomi, Airbnb, Square and others — lead a $10 million investment in Singapore-based startup Thunes.
South China Morning Post | Fri May 3, 2019 - Three men from Bulgaria believed to be key players of a fraud syndicate that ripped off card information then used it to make unauthorized withdrawals. Investigation showed more than HK$200,000 had been stolen from accounts of seven clients of AEON Credit Service Limited.
More from PaymentsSource
Facebook’s pursuit of a crypto-based payment system would seem to be filled with potholes and red flags. The social network’s stealth project isn’t much of a secret, and another Facebook virtual currency has already failed years earlier. But Facebook also has a lot in its corner — enough to threaten the e-commerce and payment processing establishment, should its crypto project take off.
Speculation has been in the air about whether TSYS—one of the last large legacy processors—may be next in a big M&A deal after the pairings of FIS-Worldpay and Fiserv-First Data were announced this year.
Mastercard has agreed to acquire digital bill payment platform Transactis, a deal the card network expects to close during the second quarter of 2019.
As the saying goes, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” However, summoning up the will can be difficult, as inertia is a powerful force. We are reminded of this every day when we type in a password to access our computers, online shopping accounts or to make a payment.
