Looking at the top payments news stories in February 2017, cybersecurity continues to be an ever present and growing threat, while mobile payments go from strength to strength with various innovative options from in-car to smart-mirror payments solutions. Incumbent banks continue their respective digital transformations, Ant Financial pursue their quest for global domination and blockchain continues to hit the headlines. Interesting month…! Check out the following top payments news stories for February 2017:
1. Payments News – Cyber Security
- Russian police arrest further Lurk Malware gang members
- Bank of England partners with Anomali to help monitor and mitigate cyber threats
- Hitachi Payment Services ATM network in India is hit by malware resulting in the country’s biggest debit card data breach
- Finextra report on how some Polish banks were apparently infected by malware that orginated from the countrys financial regulator!
- Capgemini research reveals how just 1 in 5 banks and insurers are confident that they could detect a cyberattack
- Symantec research reveals that the Polish bank malware attack last year was part of a wider global attack
- The Cloudfare bug caused by a few lines of bad code inadvertantly resulted in some websites containing unencrypted private data
2. Payments News – Mobile Payments
- Visa opens Silicon Valley office for its data and research teams
- Paypal launches its first payments bot for Slack
- Norwegian banks team up DNB to deliver Vipps person to person payments in Norway
- Jaguar and Shell team up to deliver in-car payments using PayPal or ApplePay
- Oak Checkout will enable shoopers to complete their payments via a contactless / smart mirror…!!
- MasterCard extends Qkr! with MasterPass – their mobile order ahead and payments platform – to Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Singapore, South Africa and the United States
- WorldPay analysis highlights significant growth of mobile contactless payments in the UK
3. Payments News: Digital / Crypto-currencies
- Synechron survey shows that 94% of executives believe boards have bought into Blockchain
- Bain and Broadridge research highlights 80% of financial firms expect blockchain adoption and transformative effect within 3-5 years
- IBM and Dubai government agencies launch blockchain initiative
- Liverpool to get its own digital currency courtesy of Colu
- Traity release Kevin, a chatbot for insurance to deliver an “open blockchain balance sheet”
4. Payments News: Banks
- Gartner says IT spending in banking and securities across the APAC region is set to reach $67.1 billion in 2017
- BNP Paribas partners with Plug and Play, a Silicon Valley innovation platform for startups, corporations and investors
- Sberbank launches assistant that utilises machine learning in its Sberbank Online application
- BNP Paribas to double digital spending (to €3bn) in its bid to build a “bank of the future”
- RBS launches Scotland’s first fintech hub in Edinburgh
- Wells Fargo focuses on Payments, AI and APIs
- ING establishes a transformation “War Room“
- Standard Chartered teams up Tencent FiT to launch WeChat Pay for corporates in China
- Starling experiments with Google Home and preps the launch of its banking-as-a-service platform
- Bank of America incorporates Zelle, P2P payments network, within its mobile banking app
- Santander will utilise IBM MobileFirst for iOS to digitally boost customer engagements
- HSBC suffer online banking outage and Barclays customers encounter ATM problems
- Citi launches APIs for corporate Treasury functions in 96 countries
5. Payments News: Fintech
- Mizhuno partners with Soracom to research and create a next generation IoT payments platform
- Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Patrick Harker explains how regulation is key to protecting fintech and consumers
- Klarna acquire German online payment company BillPay
- National Bank of Abu Dhabi use Ripple for cross border payments solution
- IBM and Visa partner to switch as many as 20 billion devices into potential points of sale
- In India MasterCard, Visa and National Payments Corporation of India develop BharatQR – an interoperable mobile payments acceptance solution
- Ant Financial invests in Philippine mobile operator, Mynt and South Korean mobile platform provider Kakao
- TransferWise launches a Facebook Messenger chatbot enabling international money transfers via Facebook
- Visa opens the Visa Innovation Centre London
- UK Government proposes to boost UK banking competition with RBS at the heart of the plan
6. Payments News: Reports
- Fintech Mundi – Innovation. Distributed: The Fintech Disruptors Report 2017
- Fintech Mundi – Fintech Disruptors 2017 Report
- IOSCO Research Report on Financial Technologies (Fintech)
- ESMA Discussion Paper – The Distributed Ledger Technology Applied to Securities Markets
- Bank of Canada paper – Canadian Bank Notes and Dominion Notes: Lessons for Digital Currencies
- The Clearing House – A New Paradigm: Redesigning the U.S. AML/CFT Framework to Protect National Security and Aid Law Enforcement
- KPMG Report – The Pulse of Fintech Q4 2016
- PSD2 – EBA’s Andrea Enria speech on PSD2 at Westminster Forum
- SIDN Report – DNSSEC Inventory 2017 describes the DNSSEC security status of the Netherlands’ most important domain names
- Kaspersky Report – Financial Cyberthreats in 2016
That’s it folks! Let me know below if I missed anything important…