The news has just come that Paypal has acquired Hyperwallet for US$ 400 million (EUR 343 million) in cash. Hyperwallet, headquartered in Vancouver, BC, Canada, positions itself as a payout platform, in other words, a means for organizations to distribute funds to their global contractors, suppliers, and resellers. Over the last few months, Hyperwallet has announced agreements with tilr, which pays unbanked workers, Lyric, which pays artists, and many other niche markets. Paypal may appear as being on a buying spree after having acquired iZettle last month for US$ 2.2 billion (EUR 1.87 billion - cf. our post on May 22, 2018) and Jetlore, an artificial intelligence startup. Jetlore is a predic
Attention focus is sometimes different from the reality. While most of the secure transactions industry analysts keep on dreaming about NFC payments, talking about invisible payments, elaborating on enrolment solutions, anticipating embedded SIMs for consumers, focusing on dematerialization, … smart card sales are still making the bread and butter of our industry. In its latest forecast publication, Eurosmart, the Voice of the Digital Security Industry, anticipates smart card shipments for 2018 to pass the 10 billion units mark for the first time in history. In 2017, shipments grew 3.6% but with an uneven growth rate across segments. SIM cards and payment cards still account for more than 85
Open payment, or in other terms the fact a contactless payment card is directly used as a fare media in public transport, brings a solution to several issues at a time: it brings an efficient way for visitors to rapidly and efficiently access a mass transit network, it solves interoperability issues, and, as there are less single-trip tickets to be issued, it reduces the operation cost of a transport network. Developers of open payment in Dijon, France, have discovered another effect they did not anticipate: an increase in passenger traffic aboard public transport. Developers of the system are surprised to see it adopted ten times faster than they anticipated. This increase is a combination
Talking about ethics in a payment dedicated conference may sound like a challenge! A conference like Money20/20 Europe is filled up with company presentations and conferences at all levels of technicity covering all aspects of payment transactions. Sometimes, some topics are radically different and bring a fresh breeze to the audience. As we all know payment is built on trust, as we only accept a payment because we trust a payment means. Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, demonstrated to the audience that trust can be easily built among small groups of individuals thanks to a combination of long term relationship, reputation and transparency. I
“Identity has to be profitable to the individual, not the service provider,” said Ghela Boskovich, Founder, FemTechGlobal, as an introduction to her speech during Money20/20 Europe. Identity is the foundation on which citizen as well as commercial services can be built. However, identity becomes an increasingly complex topic as needs for connecting real-word identity with online identity arise. At the same time, these identity exchange between services need to be regulated to ensure each of us remains in control of our identity. Regulation, such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering), comes in to provide a framework to protect o
As usual, Money20/20 Europe brings its lineup of celebrities to share their views on the payments, Fintech, and financial services industry. Charlotte Hogg, Visa CEO Europe, developed her thoughts about invisible payments. After years of evolutions in payments that led Visa to try and become always more visible and to impose its brand at some point in the payment process, the payment scheme is now advocating invisible payments: situations in which the payer is not even made conscious of paying at the time the payment occurs. Under the term “invisible payments,” Visa puts both payments made by humans without any concrete payment action: think of Uber or payment at hotels, and payment by thing
