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…