July, 2022

• 1 July

  Payments 3.0: CFPB To Fintechs: No Special Favors

  

  A series of recent actions by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau gives the fintech industry some clues for navigating the new regulatory environment. The upshot is that the Bureau has been putting the pieces in place for a new approach to regulating any company that provides a financial product to …
• 1 July

  Security Notes: CBDCs: Hit the Pause Key

  

  Central banks around the world are gripped by an uncharacteristic frenzy. Almost every central bank is at least setting up “commissions” to look into the alluring—yet jarring—prospect of redefining their national currencies. A few countries simply embraced Bitcoin, straight. The second-biggest economy in the world, China, is actively experimenting with …
• 1 July

  Square, Apple, And ‘SoftPOS’

  

  Square intrigued the payments industry a decade ago when it emerged to provide small sellers with a simple dongle they could attach to a mobile phone to accept card payments. Now Square says it’s moving to the next step. The company announced in June that later this year it will …

June, 2022

• 1 June

  Security Notes: Crypto And Modern-Day Alchemy

  

  Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle were two geniuses who labored with passion on their vision to replace gold digging with science: alchemy. It was an overshot. But their labor lay the groundwork for modern chemistry. Hundreds of years later, brilliant mathematicians try to replace gold digging with cryptographic tools. History …
• 1 June

  The New Face of BNPL

  

  At least some payments players appear to be preparing for an important new phase in the buy now, pay later business, with an opening salvo to include significantly larger loans and revised credit terms that make the advances appear more like traditional installment programs. The move comes as the short-term …

May, 2022

• 1 May

  Payments 3.0: Open Banking is here. Here’s What It Means

  

  Over the past few months, Digital Transactions has reported on how companies across the payments value chain have entered into partnerships to offer a greater range of open-banking services to their customers. Easy data access will become the norm in banking. While open banking will change how individuals manage their …
• 1 May

  Security Notes: How Crypto Could Help Ukrainians

  

  It is incumbent on all of us, witnessing in our living room the horrors of Ukraine, to ask ourselves: is there something we can do? For the digital-payment community, the answer is yes. Bitcoin and its many variants are technologies that have been serving the purposes of investors, speculators, criminals, …
• 1 May

  The Next Big Visa-Mastercard Rival Is…Zelle?

  

  Is the Zelle peer-to-peer payments network soon going to the point of sale? That’s the big question raised by payments-industry experts after The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co.—two of the seven big financial institutions that own Early Warning Services …

April, 2022

• 1 April

  Payments 3.0: How EWA And BNPL Could Help End Poverty

  

  Buy now, pay later and earned-wage access services could be powerful tools to end poverty, if they are not regulated out of existence. Both of these products directly address one of the main factors causing poverty: income volatility. In “The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of …
• 1 April

  Security Notes: The Digital Dollar And Personal Liberty

  

  On March 9, President Biden unleashed the federal government to reform the U.S. dollar into a digital entity—an historic milestone. A big transformation is looming. Done well, the digital dollar will cement U.S. leadership in global finance. Ill-done, America will become second tier. The digital dollar has the power to …