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Apr. 10th, 2015
Edition #449
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This Day
in History: 1866
ASPCA is Founded
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On April 10, 1866, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is founded in New York City by philanthropist and diplomat Henry Bergh, 54.
In 1863, Bergh had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln to a diplomatic post at the Russian court of Czar Alexander II. It was there that he was horrified to witness work horses beaten by their peasant drivers. En route back to America, a June 1865 visit to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in London awakened his determination to secure a charter not only to incorporate the ASPCA but to exercise the power to arrest and prosecute violators of the law.
Back in New York, Bergh pleaded on behalf of "these mute servants of mankind" at a February 8, 1866, meeting at Clinton Hall. He argued that protecting animals was an issue that crossed party lines and class boundaries. "This is a matter purely of conscience; it has no perplexing side issues," he said. "It is a moral question in all its aspects." The speech prompted a number of dignitaries to sign his "Declaration of the Rights of Animals."
Click here to read more. |
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Trending This Week...
This week, ahead of eBay and PayPal's upcoming split, agreements were signed intending to keep both companies friendly after the fact for five years. Most notably, PayPal is forbidden form creating its own marketplace for physical goods, while eBay must steer clear of building a payments system. However, if PayPal happened to be acquired by an eBay competitor, eBay could dive into payments.
On the mobile payments front, it appears that Microsoft is ready to head into battle. In February they quietly applied for licensing to be a money transmitter in all 50 states, which has now been approved for its first state - Idaho. While no products have been announced at this time, one can assuming they are looking to compete with Apple, Samsung, and Android.
Other highlights include:
**Payments Madness CHAMP**
The Final between EMV and mWallets was a tough match-up, but the favorite, EMV, took home top prize!
Thank you to everyone who took the time to vote in TSG's Payments Madness bracket!
Miss TSG's Recent Releases? Check Them Out!
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4/10/15 Pymnts
Generally speaking, among untrustworthy statements "we'll still be friends," when uttered in the context of people breaking up, ranks right up there with "the check is in the mail." Luckily, despite legal conventions that say otherwise, corporations are not exactly people, which means that when they go their separate ways - as eBay and PayPal will be doing formally later this year - they are able to negotiate detailed contracts to make sure that relations stay friendly.
Related: After Planned Split, eBay and PayPal Promises to Stay Friends
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4/07/15 Ars Technica
A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars that it's too early to herald Microsoft Payments just yet, however. "As a mobile-first, cloud-first company, Microsoft continues to evolve our offerings to meet the needs of both our commercial customers and consumers," the spokesperson said. "Becoming a money service business gives us the flexibility to provide new, innovative cloud services to our customers but we do not have any product announcements at this time."
Related: Mobile Payments Wars Heat Up as Microsoft Prepares to Enter the Market
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4/08/15 American Banker
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has filed a massive lawsuit against more than a dozen debt collectors, payment processors and related entities that the agency said failed to detect fraudulent collection tactics. The complaint, filed under a seal on March 26, accuses a handful of connected debt collectors based in Georgia and New York of harassing consumers about "phantom" debts. But the potentially groundbreaking part of the case is that the CFPB also sued several payment processors, including worldwide processor Global Payments and its contracted parties, because the agency said they "should have known" about the alleged violations.
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4/07/15 Trustwave
Trustwave® announced that Singapore Telecommunications Limited (Singtel), Asia's leading communications company, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Trustwave Holdings, Inc., a privately held information security company headquartered in Chicago. The acquisition strengthens Singtel's information security capabilities and bolsters Trustwave's ability to expand its leadership in managed security services globally.
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4/09/15 Finextra
New York State's financial services watchdog is set to tighten up the rules on cyber-security standards for third party vendors working for banks after finding "significant" vulnerabilities in current relationships. The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) surveyed 40 Wall Street banks about their relationships with third-party vendors, many of which have access to IT systems, offering a potential backdoor entrance for hackers looking to steal customer data.
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4/08/15 American Banker
Mounting yet another defense of JPMorgan Chase's size and scope, Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon pointed out the fallibility of smaller banks in his annual letter to shareholders, which was released Wednesday.
"Larger does not necessarily mean more risky," Dimon wrote. "For example, many large banks had no problem navigating the financial crisis, while many smaller banks went bankrupt" (by which he presumably meant "seized by regulators").
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4/09/15 The Cannabist
Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City president Esther George on Thursday listened intently to a group of 20 businessmen, bankers and government officials who talked about the troubling lack of banking services available to the marijuana industry, but offered little indication about how it could be resolved. In the first meeting of its kind, George heard tales from marijuana business owners that ranged from one who was made to close more than a dozen bank accounts - each time leaving with an armful of cash - to another who described how a family member uninvolved with the enterprise was forced to close an investment account, according to people who attended the closed-door affair.
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 Mobile Payments & Bitcoin |
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4/09/15 The Wall Street Journal
American Express Co. is experimenting with facial recognition and wearable technology that could turn into new capabilities for some of its mobile apps, including products aimed at customers traditionally underserved by financial services companies. To boost business growth, the company wants to use emerging technologies to appeal to consumers in new segments, such as heavy mobile users who want to use digital payments and those with little or no credit.
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4/08/15 Venture Beat
Jack Dorsey's Square is hunkering down on food delivery with its latest acquisition. Today Square announced it is integrating Fastbite, a service that offers fast delivery of quick food items, to its Caviar offering. The new service, which is the result of Square's recent acquisition of Fastbite, is called Caviar Fastbite, and it promises to deliver affordable meals in under 10 minutes to hungry patrons in downtown San Francisco. Square says plans for expansion of the service are in the works.
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4/07/15 Adweek
Linking up online and offline marketing is the ultimate challenge for bricks-and-mortar retailers these days. And after years of powering credit card transactions and mobile payments for small businesses, Square thinks it has found a solution. The San Francisco-based payment company launches Square Marketing-a marketing tool that lets small businesses target customers who shop in stores through email promotions. Since launching in 2009, the mobile payment company has helped merchants and businesses electronically accept credit card payments, collecting a trove of data in the process.
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4/06/15 The Atlantic
Last week, Amazon introduced a program that represents the next notch on retailers' asymptotic approach toward a perfectly seamless transaction. One element of the program is a collection of branded ordering buttons that customers can stick to surfaces in their home-press the Tide button on your washing machine to order more detergent, for instance. The brilliance of the buttons isn't just that they offer up a transaction right when consumers run out of a product-it's also that they diminish the discomfort that usually kicks in when you part with money.
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4/07/15 Recode
Groupon is contemplating divesting some or all of its Breadcrumb business unit, which makes checkout software for restaurants and bars that runs on iPads, according to multiple sources. Groupon executives have discussed the possibility internally and even floated it to a competitor during a recent meeting, these people said. Groupon acquired Breadcrumb in 2012 to help Groupon merchants manage their businesses more efficiently and make it easier for them to redeem Groupon vouchers.
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4/08/15 AppleInsider
Customers can now use Apple Pay at Acme, Davis Food & Drug, Firehouse Subs, Gamestop, Luby's, Rubio's and T-Mobile locations. In addition to retail stores, Apple also notes NBA fans can use their iPhone 6 or 6 Plus - or come April 24, Apple Watch - to buy official team gear at three arenas. In all, there are 68 featured merchants spotlighted on Apple's page, though there are many more around the U.S. who accept Apple Pay through contactless payment terminals.
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4/08/15 FierceRetalIT
With the rise of the Internet of Things and smartphone-equipped consumers, the preeminent role of the retail checkout lane may be greatly diminished. Many shoppers carry sophisticated smartphones capable of doing everything expected of a point-of-sale system, signaling that the day of the handheld self-checkout device may have finally arrived. As RetailWire asked in a recent headline addressing content derived from the Integrated Marketing Solutions blog: "Why do retail stores still have cash registers?"
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4/07/15 Bitcoin Magazine
Former Nike CIO and member of the exclusive Fortune 40 Under 40 list Anthony Watson has joined the Bitcoin bank Bitreserve as President and Chief Operating Officer. "I am thrilled to join Bitreserve at such a pivotal moment in the evolution of cloud money and financial technology," says Watson. "Money is a common language around the world, and Bitreserve democratizes how people access, hold and move value. We have the unique opportunity to craft a lasting legacy of delivering transparency, massive innovation and positive social impact to financial services and in peoples' everyday lives."
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Regulation & Security |
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4/08/15 Digital Transactions
As the U.S. payment card industry continues its monumental shift to EMV chip card technology, one group of merchants will lag. More than 70% of small merchants will not be EMV compliant by Oct. 1, the date the card networks have set to shift liability for point-of-sale fraud to unprepared merchants, finds a survey from 451 Research LLC. Among merchants with fewer than 20 employees, 37% did not plan to have EMV POS terminals by Oct. 1. Thirty-five percent say they have no plans, but are considering EMV acceptance but have no timeframe in mind for doing so.
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4/06/15 Bank Info Security
Security experts are warning about a new breed of point-of-sale malware dubbed Poseidon after the Greek god. Researchers at Cisco say it's the latest attack code designed to steal card numbers immediately after payment cards get swiped through POS terminals. While the appearance of any new type or variation of attack code triggers alarm in financial services and retail circles, Charles Henderson, vice president of managed security testing at information security firm Trustwave, says there's a bigger problem than the POS malware du jour: Too many retailers use POS devices without changing their default passwords or running them via segmented networks.
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4/09/15 PCWorld
A large hotel management company has confirmed a second payment card breach in less than 14 months, underscoring the difficulties businesses are having with data thieves. White Lodging Services said the second breach was detected on Jan. 27 after unusual payment card activity was discovered on cards used at four Marriott-branded hotels. The compromised data includes customer names, card numbers, security codes and expiration dates, it said in a statement.
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4/06/15 KrebsonSecurity
Most of the ATM skimming attacks written about on this blog conclude with security personnel intervening before the thieves manage to recover their skimmers along with the stolen card data and PINs. However, an increasingly common form of ATM fraud - physical destruction - costs banks plenty, even when crooks walk away with nothing but bruised egos and sore limbs.
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Economy |
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4/09/15 Yahoo! Finance
ShopKeep, the cloud-based technology provider with more than 16,000 registers in use by retail shops, restaurants, and other organizations, today announced the release of the Q1 2015 ShopKeep Small Business Index (SSBI). The SSBI, which draws upon insights gathered from a survey of 1,480 ShopKeep merchants as well as first quarter same-store sales data, reveals that small businesses are growing, and by all accounts, are the strongest they've been in recent years.
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4/08/15 The New York Times
The Federal Reserve is increasingly unlikely to start raising its benchmark interest rate in June, judging by the recent comments of Fed officials. Officials expressed doubts about a June liftoff during the March meeting of the Fed's policy-making committee, according to an account the Fed published Wednesday. And those doubts have since been reinforced by a disappointing estimate of March job growth and the continued sluggishness of inflation.
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4/09/15 CNBC
More Americans sought unemployment benefits last week. Yet even with the increase, applications for jobless aid remain low, a reassuring sign after hiring slowed last month. The Labor Department says weekly applications rose 14,000 to a seasonally adjusted 281,000. The increase occurred after applications plummeted to match a 15-year low in the previous week.
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4/07/15 Certify
In our quarterly SpendSmart™ Report, we analyze the most recent business expense and vendor ratings submitted by Certify users, providing valuable insights to our clients, and to the corporate T&E industry at large. The report showcases at a global level the sort of data Certify customers can access at a company level, and can be used to benchmark how individual company spend compares to national averages and trends.
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Payments Press
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4/08/15 ISO & Agent
Convinced that consumers know the Brink's name and associate it with strong security, prepaid card provider NetSpend has launched a Brink's-branded prepaid card. Brink's Global Payments LLC and Total System Services unit NetSpend are not strangers to each other. Two years ago, Brink's established its prepaid payroll card for its employees through the technology and management of Austin, Texas-based NetSpend.
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4/08/15 BTN
BBVA Compass is launching real-time payments through Dwolla, but the really interesting part is what's going on beneath the surface: the bank is opening its technological black box to a nimble startup in order to speed innovation. At most banks, the technological heart of everything they do is a massive set of hardware and software called the core processing engine. It often runs on a mainframe and it processes all day-to-day transactions - debits and credits to checking and savings accounts, loan payments, ATM transactions, and so on. The core may be old, but it works and is kept very secure.
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4/06/15 BusinessWire
Elavon, a leading global payments provider and wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp, announces its new software development kit, Commerce SDK which enables businesses to start accepting ApplePay™ and streamlines a path to EMV. Elavon was one of the first acquirers to offer Apple Pay to merchants for consumer use in the U.S. and continues to bring the easy, secure and private payment service to merchants.
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4/09/15 MarketWatch
ProPay, a TSYS® company, announced that their customers now have the ability to leverage QuickBooks accounting software with their ProPay account. This will enable businesses to process credit and debit card payments directly from the QuickBooks application and export data directly from their ProPay Merchant Account to QuickBooks. ProPay's connection to QuickBooks provides a seamless way for its users to integrate their ProPay Account with QuickBooks accounting and inventory software.
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4/07/15 TransFirst
TransFirst®, a leading provider of transaction processing services and payment-enabling technologies, and First Commonwealth Bank, a subsidiary of First Commonwealth Financial Corp., with $6.4 billion in assets, announced an exclusive five-year partnership to bring payment processing services with superior customer support to First Commonwealth merchant customers.
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4/08/15 TechCrunch
The rise of e-commerce in India has triggered a wave of startups that are leveraging the increasing adoption of smartphones to provide mobile payment solutions. Alibaba invested in Paytm at an apparent billion dollar valuation earlier this year, and now MobiKwik is the latest to be flushed with new cash. New Delhi-based MobiKwik has pulled $25 million in funding, led by Singapore-based hedge fund Tree Line Asia. The deal included participation from a couple of interesting strategic investors - Cisco and American Express.
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4/09/15 KYTX
BlueSnap today announced its Smarter Payment Gateway has been selected as a finalist in the Best Tech Innovation in Shopping / Commerce category for the 19th Annual MITX Awards. Held annually by the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange, the awards recognize excellence in concepts and creations in marketing and technology produced or developed in New England.
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4/06/15 Newtek
Newtek Business Services Corp., an internally managed business development company ("BDC"), today announced that it has attracted and retained the talent of Mr.
Michael Campbell.
Mr. Campbell will join Newtek as Chief Credit Officer and Chief Risk Officer for Newtek Merchant Solutions. Mr. Campbell has 25 years' of extensive experience in merchant bankcard operations including credit and risk management, bankcard credit, risk management policy, fraud, regulatory, data security and portfolio management.
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4/06/15 MarketWired
ControlScan®, a security, compliance and risk management partner to hundreds of merchant service providers representing millions of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), announces that version 2.0 of the SiteWatch™ merchant risk monitoring service is now generally available. The 2.0 release features cyber-intelligence enhancements, an all-new risk-scoring system, a full-featured integration suite and more.
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4/08/15 EON
When disasters strike, the American Red Cross provides food, shelter and comfort in the face of devastation. U.S. Bank will now be part of that vital effort as the American Red Cross' sole prepaid card provider offering Red Cross staff and clients safe, reliable and immediate access to emergency money with the U.S. Bank Prepaid Debit MasterCard® Disaster Relief Client Assistance and Mission cards.
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4/06/15 PRNewswire
Womply won the 2015 Technology Innovation Award at the Electronic Transaction Association's (ETA) TRANSACT 15 conference in San Francisco. The Technology Innovation Award is awarded each year at the ETA's annual conference to the company that delivers the greatest technology innovation in the payments industry, as measured in terms of breadth and magnitude of impact. Nominees and winners for the ETA Star Awards are determined by a panel of payments industry leaders, executives, and ETA members.
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4/07/15 The GreenSheet
CardinalCommerce and The Fraud Practice announce the results of the second annual survey on Consumer Authentication. This survey, which takes a 360o view of the payments eco-system, builds on the data collected last year and provides rich information on the attitudes about and adoption of Consumer Authentication today. The results were presented yesterday during the Merchant Risk Council event in Las Vegas.
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4/07/15 L'Atelier
Shell is bidding to improve the customer experience from this month in the UK, by letting motorists pay for their petrol using a PayPal app on their smartphones. To make life easier for its customers, fuel major Shell is about to introduce a mobile payments system at the petrol pump. This customer-friendly move may well be a signal that the days when a driver has to get out of the vehicle and go into the petrol station store to pay are numbered. Shell has teamed up with PayPal to offer its mobile payment system via a smartphone app.
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