There is so much happening in the payments and e-commerce world globally, it’s time to do a solid news roundup and share some of the best links to let you pick and choose the payments news you need to know. Let’s get at it.
China’s Ant Financial buys small stake in Swedish firm Klarna
Klarna, Europe’s most valuable fintech company, said on Wednesday that China’s Ant Financial Services Group had taken a small stake in it as the two strengthen their online shopping partnership. The Swedish ‘buy now, pay later’ app is already embedded in AliExpress, the international shopping platform run by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, an affiliate of Ant Financial. Read more…
Starling Bank looks to Irish banking license for European
expansion
UK challenger Starling Bank has concrete plans on a European expansion via an Irish
banking license its CEO Anne Boden has revealed. Boden says the bank is “working
on a process to get an Irish banking license” and that it will be looking into
the creation of a European center in Dublin. The challenger has been eyeing up the Emerald Isle for some time.
It was reported back in March 2019 by the Irish Times that
Boden’s firm was planning a 2019 launch and had lodged an application with the
Central Bank of Ireland for a license. Read
more…
PPRO partners
with UnionPay to give EU merchants access to Chinese shoppers
PPRO announced it has become a direct
acquirer for UnionPay International, the world’s largest card scheme in terms
of card issuance. The relationship will provide PPRO’s payment
service providers and their merchants in Europe the ability to accept
e-commerce payment from the hundreds of millions of shoppers who use UnionPay
as their preferred payment method. It opens up access to cross-border trade with
the Chinese B2C e-commerce market, valued at $1 trillion. Read more…
Inside the $7.1 billion into Intuit-Credit
Karma deal
The announcement of the planned $7.1 billion acquisition of Credit Karma by
Intuit represents the impact and the opportunity that fintech presents to more
traditional financial services companies. Founded in 1983, Intuit grew into a
global giant by providing accounting, tax filing, and financial planning
software and owns well-known brands including QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Mint.
Intuit has grown partly by acquiring 30 companies and with more than 50 million
product users, the Mountain View, CA company’s annual revenue was $6.78 billion
in 2019. Read
more…
Brazil’s Central Bank plans new
real-time digital payments system
Brazil’s central bank –
Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) – launched testing of a new real-time digital
payment system based on QR codes and is expected to go live by November this
year. Use of the new payment system called PIX will be mandatory for regulated
banks and financial institutions with more than 500,000 customers in the
country. The new system will allow digital payments through mobile phones,
online banking and ATMs by using QR codes or entering a phone number, email
address or tax identification number. Read
more…
ATB Financial’s digital bank Brightside launches in Canada
ATB Financial, owned by the Alberta provincial government, has officially launched its own digital bank called Brightside. With the help of Florida-based digital banking provider Technisys, the $39 billion holding bank has focused on “making saving easy” with its new venture. Customers can also turn on automatic saving with a customizable schedule what’s lets them pick the amounts to save and dates of the same. Read more…
24 global fintech unicorns were born in 2019
In 2019, a record 24 fintech unicorns were born, with more than half of them (13) being from the US, according to data from CB Insights. Following the US is Germany with three new fintech unicorns, and the UK and Brazil both with two. Other countries and locations represented include Hong Kong, France, Japan, and Australia. These new additions brought the total number of fintech unicorns around the world to 64, as of December 2019. Read more…
Chinese fintech attracted investments of more than $900 million in second half of 2019
Fintech companies in China attracted USD 962.2 million in investments from venture capital, private equity and M&A in 2H 2019, resulting in a total of USD 4,479 million in investments for the whole of 2019, according to KPMG’s Pulse of Fintech H2’19 bi-annual report on global fintech investment trends. Fintech investment in China took a breather after a massive 2018, but the country’s fintech market continued to see substantial activity and Chinese companies still ranked among the largest fintech deals in the Asia Pacific for the whole of 2019. Read more…
Target ramps up plans for more 6,000-square-foot stores
In 2019, Target’s small-format stores contributed more than $1 billion in total sales. Following the opening of its 100th small-format store last year, 2020 will be the biggest year to date for Target’s small-format expansion, with nearly three dozen new stores. Throughout 2020, Target will be adding Drive Up to dozens of small-format stores across the country that have parking lots, making it even easier for guests to shop. Target will also begin exploring sites for stores that are approximately 6,000 square feet – roughly half the size of its smallest small-format store – reaching even more guests in urban neighborhoods and on college campuses. Read more…
Unlimited Coffee-as-Service – Panera launches $8.99
monthly subscription
It was inevitable. You can
get pretty much Anything-as-a-Service thanks to the cloud. That includes
payments, banking, insurance, investment advice, cloud storage, clothing,
groceries, and now coffee. That’s right. Coffee-as-a-Service, for just $8.99 a
month, courtesy of Panera Bread. In fact, more than 15% of Americans have
signed up for online subscription services of one kind or another according
to McKinsey and Panera is hoping millions of consumers will
grab a cup of this coffee subscription service. Read more…
Walmart developing an Amazon Prime-like membership
the new service called
Walmart+ will expand on the retailer’s existing delivery subscription service,
which it introduced last year. Walmart previously tried to introduce a loyalty delivery
program called ShippingPass in 2017 but it was closed after failing to get
momentum. Prime members spend about twice as much as other customers, and their
willingness to splurge is a big reason why Amazon captured an estimated
40% of all sales growth at US retail in the holiday quarter. Read
more…
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