Well, January went by pretty quickly! Lots of payments news stories unravelling at the beginning of 2019. Check out below the top payment news stories that caught my eye in January 2019:
1. Payments News – Cyber Security
- Contactless card fraud in the UK almost doubles in 2018
- Redbanc, the Chilean interbank network, is tricked into downloading malware which instigated a cyber-attack
- Techcrunch reports weak server controls at State Bank of India exposed the financial information of millions of customers
2. Payments News – Mobile Payments
- Mastercard appoints a Chief Experience Officer
- Huawei and UnionPay launch Hauwei Pay in Russia
- Mastercard drops its name from the logo as it rebrands itself
- Church of England trials contactless payments via a digital collection box
- European Commission fines Mastercard EUR570 million over interchange fees
3. Payments News: Blockchain / Digital / Crypto-currencies
- JP Morgan to recruit a Blockchain Delivery Manager
- New York State will create a Digital Currency Task Force
- ING signs up to R3 Corda for 5 years
- Samsung’s new Galaxy S10 might come with a cryptocurrency wallet
- The Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA) and the United Arab Emirates Central Bank (UAECB) plan to launch “Aber“, a digital currency
4. Payments News: Banks
- BBVA reach a global digital tipping point
- Starling Bank’s chief Anne Boden outlines how they’ll change banking in 2019
- Tandem Bank -Matt Ford “more likely to get divorced than to change your bank”
- N26, the German digital bank becomes Europe’s most valuable fintech startups
- UniCredit establishes Transformation & Innovation advisory board
- Lloyds Banking Group customers are hit by an IT outage
- Santander will close 140 branches in the UK, almost 1 in 5 branches in the UK
- BNP Paribas continues its digitisation by deploying IBM Cloud solutions
- First direct launches fdpay, allowing customers to make payments from social media apps
5. Payments News: Fintech
- Ant Financial in advance talks to buy UK payments company WorldFirst for £550 million
- UK prefers Apps to online banking
- Malaysia switches on real-time payments
- US government shutdown is hurting the the Fintech sector
- Fintech sector in Scotland grown by 3 times in the last 8-12 months
- Fiserv acquires First Data for $22 billion
- Snoop Dogg becomes Klarna shareholder
- Alipay is granted a electronic money license in Luxembourg
6. Payments News: Europe – SEPA, PSD2, Open Banking, GDRP
- Open Banking is a year old, whats the Verdict
- TransferWise makes Brexit contingency with plans to open an office in Belgium
- Finextra interview highlights the importance of the developer experience to the overall Open Banking solution
- Finextra recap a year of Open Banking
- Euro Banking Association Secretary General, Thomas Egnar, describes the required evolution of real time Euro payments
7. Payments News: SWIFT
- SWIFT launches proof of concept connecting SWIFT gpi network with the R3 Corda platform to enable payment initiation, payment tracking, payment authorisation and credit confirmations
8. Payments News: Reports
- European Banking Authority Report on Crypto Assets
- Finextra and FINASTRA – The Innovation Game: Escaping Legacy with New Technology
- BIS – Proceeding with caution – a survey on central bank digital currency
- Citi – Five Emerging Tech Trends to Watch in 2019
- Refinitive – Revealing the true cost of financial crime
That’s it folks! Let me know below if I missed anything important…