PayThink

Just as Silicon Valley companies are happy to supply their employees with millions of dollars in free meals and snacks at the office to supplement incomes, many Chinese companies are similarly, indirectly liberal outside the office, around expenses, writes Josh Anish, director of marketing at AppZen.

It’s possible the G-SIB surcharge, an additional capital charge on large banks, contributed to market volatility at the end of last year, argues Sen. Thom Tillis.

Payment companies and businesses that want to leverage blockchain need to properly connect the decentralized platform they use to existing databases and back-end systems, writes IIya Pupko, chief architect at Jitterbit.

Given the competitive nature of the current marketplace and the low probability that interchange rates will actually go up, issuers and processors need to continually evaluate their infrastructure, writes Steve Gilde, director of global product marketing for Paragon Application Systems.

Big data and artificial intelligence will allow banks to do more for small businesses, former SBA head Karen Mills argues.

Fraudsters have evolved their strategies to focus on other flavors of fraud, and its actually encouraging to see retailers are still treating payment fraud as a top-of-mind concern as that evolution happens, according to Håkan Nordfjell, senior vice president of digital banking at Gemalto.

There’s no reason for the central bank to prohibit nonbank financial firms from entering the payments system as long as appropriate rules are put in place to protect against risk.

Despite complaints about the slow pace of change within government, policymakers, including agency heads, are increasingly focused on modernizing regulation, an important step forward for the industry.

Instead of investing in contactless cards, financial institutions should focus on moving their offerings to mobile — into apps that can do more than money management, argues Mehmet Sezgin, CEO and founder of myGini.

There are concerns that artificial intelligence could erase jobs across financial firms, but it will actually benefit employees by cutting rote tasks, giving them time to focus on more fulfilling work.