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Pushing up tulips: Much like
WiFi troubles: The security that protects WiFi networks has a vulnerability that hackers can use to steal information, according to
Vlad's coin: Perhaps it's the introduction of
Big fintech investor eyes Uber: SoftBank has become a major investor in new payments technology, pouring more than $1.4 billion into
From the Web
Wired | Mon Oct 16, 2017 - Banking is boring. For most people this might seem instinctively true – in the United Kingdom it is an objective statement of fact. Here, five big banks – Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Santander and Natwest – control over 80 percent of the current account market, offering opaque variations on near-identical products. People pick a bank more or less at random (parents bank there; they have a branch nearby; they gave me a free young person’s railcard), then, once they’ve chosen, stick with it for life. Since 2013, only 3.5 million of an estimated 70 million UK account holders have changed bank. Now, this is about to change. In August 2016, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued a ruling ordering the nine biggest UK banks to allow licensed startups direct access to their data, right down to the level of current account transactions. Account holders must approve any exchange. If they do, then the data lying dormant in bank accounts – electricity bills; mortgage payments; weekly spend on cappuccinos – will become as easy to exploit as personal details online.
TechCrunch | Mon Oct 16, 2017 - BBVA, Spain’s second-largest bank that snatched up mobile banking startup Simple for $117 million back in 2014, is now entering the mobile money transfer business with today’s launch of a new app called Tuyyo. The app, which is available on both iOS and Android, is focused on the $73 billion annual market for remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean from the U.S. However, the service is initially launching with money transfers from the U.S. to Mexico, where the average amount sent by U.S. workers is about $1,900 per year, says BBVA. It also notes that the U.S. to Mexico corridor sees over $27 billion flowing between the countries annually, making it one of the world’s largest. Tuyyo (whose name spelled out as “tu y yo” would mean “you and I” in English), will later roll out to the rest of Latin America, following its pilot testing phase.
The New York Times | Mon Oct 16, 2017 - The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether federal prosecutors can force technology companies to turn over data stored outside the United States. Disputes between leading technology companies and the Justice Department have become increasingly common, and the new case will give the Supreme Court an opportunity to weigh in on the clash between the demands of law enforcement and the companies’ desire to shield the information they collect to protect their customers’ privacy. The case, United States v. Microsoft, No. 17-2, arose from a federal drug investigation. Prosecutors sought the emails of a suspect that were stored in a Microsoft data center in Dublin. They said they were entitled to the emails because Microsoft is based in the United States. A federal magistrate judge in New York in 2013 granted the government’s request to issue a warrant for the data under a 1986 federal law, the Stored Communications Act. Microsoft challenged the warrant in 2014, arguing that prosecutors could not force it to hand over its customer’s emails stored abroad. A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, ruled that the warrant in the case could not be used to obtain evidence beyond the nation’s borders because the 1986 law did not apply extraterritorially. In a concurring opinion, Judge Gerard E. Lynch said the question was a close one, and he urged Congress to revise the 1986 law, which he said was badly outdated.
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Consumers now expect money to move at web speed, be instantly available, and safe to spend, writes Drew Edwards, CEO of Ingo Money.
The government’s long-running antitrust case against American Express took a surprise turn Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court reopened a saga the New York-based card issuer hoped to put to rest.
Bank services provider FIS has connected its Trax corporate payments platform to Citigroup via a series of application programming interfaces (APIs), enabling treasury payments to flow in real time and improving cash management for corporate customers.
WASHINGTON – Student loan platform Social Finance has withdrawn its application for deposit insurance, a month after former CEO Mike Cagney retired in the wake of sexual harassment allegations.
