The Top Payments News Stories in July, 2016 1

I have been pretty busy lately and am getting ready for a couple of weeks off – Woohoo! So i am going to keep this edition of Payments news stories in July 2016 short and sweet. There seem to be featured quite a few cosying up stories and a couple of technical glitches too. And of course the usual stuff – fintech, bank branch closures, the move to contactless payments. Check out the following top payments news stories for July 2016:

1. Payments News – Cyber Security

• The Payments Association of South Africa cosy up with MasterCard and Visa to deliver a standardised solution for biometric authentication
• Visa survey reveals that Europeans are ready to use biometrics to secure their payments

2. Payments News – Mobile Payments

• MasterCard and Paypal getting cosy according to the FT
• Aussie banks get ready to rumble with Apple Pay
• The death of cash in the US…?
• MasterCard will acquire VocaLink
• Digital wallets will replace card based payments within a decade says ANZ CEO
• MasterCard pays Sainsbury £68.6 million over credit card fees
• Visa promote wearable payments in Rio
• TfL licensing deal with Cubic takes London’s contactless ticketing technology global

3. Payments News: Digital / Crypto-currencies

• Agentic Group – a US blockchain consortium – expands into London
• Miami judge says bitcoin “not real money”
• The UK government tests the use of blockchain technology to monitor benefit payments spending
• The Bank of England asks “Britcoin anyone…?”

4. Payments News: Banks

• Ex-Citibank guy imprisoned for sabotaging the banks computer system
• DBS cosy up with Amazon Web Services
• BBVA gets ready to stir up their management structure
• Lloyds, Brexit, the economic slowdown and the banks cost cutting program
• Deutsche Bank profits crumble in a weak economic environment

5. Payments News: Fintech

• The UK Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) says the UK infrastructure has been rumbled and needs reform
• The European Commission (EC) issues an invitation to tender for a study on the fintech sector
• UK and South Korea cosy up and establish a fintech bridge
• Thomson Reuters and Imperial College London cosy up to lead FinTech and RegTech innovation
• Square will come to Europe in the form of Squareup Europe Ltd, registered in the UK
• Santander InnoVentures committed to fintech with $100 million investment from the Santander Group
• The German Regulator and banks clash over PSD2
• Lloyds launch mentoring scheme for fintech start ups
• Thought Machine aim to ‘fix’ banking with Vault OS, banking software in the cloud

6. Payments News: IT Glitches

• A BT power fault at a partner site hurts broadband users and banks
• WorldPay experiences an outage and causes duplicate charge havoc for many users such as Etsy,
• Citigroup fined $7 million by SEC for computer coding error
• Singapore Exchange (SGX) experiences another technical glitch and suspended trading from 11:38am for the whole day

7. Payments News: Reports

• Finextra publish a report on A Roadmap for Fintech Standards
• A Google and BCG study highlights the huge expected growth in Indian digital payments to $500 million by 2020
• Finextra publish a paper on How to get ahead on operational resilience: Strategies for financial institutions
• BBA publish their annual The Way We Bank Now report – and here is a nice little summary by Payments UK
• Bank of England publish a working paper on The macroeconomics of central bank issued digital currencies
• Cifas release a report Fraudscape – UK Fraud Trends
• Bain publish Distributed Ledgers in Payments: Beyond the Bitcoin Hype
• Citi publish their report on EMEA fintech, focusing on Payments – Sinatra was Right: The best is yet to come
• The UK Payments Strategy Forum publishes a draft strategy for Payments systems in the UK

8. SWIFT

• SWIFT call in BAE systems and Fox-IT and establish a Customer Security Intelligence Team

That’s it folks! Let me know below if I missed anything important…