Plenty of payments news stories in March 2019 – from Apple hitting the headlines last month with Apple Card, FIS’s purchase of WorldPay through to the Money20/20 conference in Singapore. Check out below the top payment news stories from March 2019:
1. Payments News – Cyber Security
- United Nations Security Council report states North Korea is using cyberattacks to transfer money from financial institutions to evade sanctions and prop up its economy
- Mastercard propose their digital identity vision for an increasingly connected world
2. Payments News – Mobile Payments
- Natwest to trial biometric/fingerprint debit cards
- Paypal rolls out Instant Transfer to bank, enabling users to have faster acces o their funds
- Contactless payments in the UK go from strength to strength, total contactless spend in 2018 was £69 billion, an increase of a third on 2017
3. Payments News: Blockchain / Digital / Crypto-currencies
- Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) to run a blockchain-issued Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) pilot within the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU)
- Visa looks to build a crypto-focused team based with the product manager based in Palo Alto
- Australia announces a national blockchain strategy to boost local industry
4. Payments News: Banks
- Danske Bank implements AI technology to predict IT breakdowns
- Goldman Sachs chills the dress code
- Mexico’s Central Bank is in discussions with Amazon about implementing a government backed mobile payments system
- Bank of England to take action over Visa’s June 2018 outage
- JPMorgan to open 90 bank branches in the US
- Parliamentary Select Committee highlights Bank of England compliance inefficiencies, lack of staff diversity and the need to modernise
- Bank of America’s, virtual financial assistant, Erica passes 6 millions users and completes over 35 million customer requests
- FCA fine Goldman Sachs for transaction reporting failures
- TSB brings IT infrastructure responsibilities back in-house
- Citi to enable customers to make digital payments to financial institutions
- Standard Bank partners with Amazon Web Services as its preferred cloud providers as the banks embarks on its digital transformation journey
5. Payments News: Fintech
- Apple reveals the Apple Card
- Ant Financial develops Distributed Core Banking Platform (DCBP), a next generation banking product
- FIS buys WorldPay for $35 billion – the biggest deal in the payments industry
- Money20/20 Asia takes place in Singapore, discussing with some of the biggest names the hottest financial industry topics
6. Payments News: Europe – SEPA, PSD2, Open Banking, GDRP
- European Banking Authority (EBA) launches a PSD2 central electronic register of payments/electronic payment institutions and agents within the EU
- Equens Worldline implements SEPA Proxy Lookup (SPL) service – enabling a truly pan-European solution for secure mobile P2P payments
- Tink survey reveals 41% of banks missed a 14th March deadline to provide a PSD2 /testing sandbox environment for third party providers
7. Payments News: SWIFT
- SWIFT to kick start a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) e-Voting Proof of Concept (PoC)
- Reserve Bank of India (RBI) fines local banks for SWIFT compliance failures
- Russia proposes international use of its SWIFT alternative
- Finextra live blog at the SWIFT Business Forum Nordics 2019
8. Payments News: Reports
- MMC Ventures – The State of AI 2019: Divergence
- Link – Access to Cash Review
- Christine Lagarde – The Financial Sector: Redefining a Broader Sense of Purpose
- Finextra – The challenger bank playbook: A deep dive
- Finextra – The The future of Personal Identity
- TheCityUK – Brexit & the City – the impact so far
- Finextra – The platform ecology model: a deep dive
- Citi – Bank X: The New New Banks
That’s it folks! Let me know below if I missed anything important…