Tag: Facebook | Page 2

Non-Profit PFs Won’t Like This – Facebook, The Latest PF, Is Going To Take Your Share

Facebook is charging back into the payments space but this time charging hard — taking 5% on every donation it processes through its recently launched non-profit features, announced to page administrators Tuesday. Facebook introduced a Donate button for 19 select non-profits in 2013, but didn’t charge a fee, instead sending 100 percent of donations to the charity. The social media giant says of each donation made through Donate buttons that keep donors on a non-profit’s page:

“We’re committed to building products that make it as easy and safe as possible for people to contribute to the causes they care about. To make this possible, starting in August, 2% of contributions will be used to cover a portion of the costs of nonprofit vetting, security, and fraud protection, operational costs and payment support and 3% of contributions will go to payment processing. The remaining 95% will go straight to the nonprofit. Facebook’s goal is to create a platform for good that’s sustainable over the long-term, and not to make a profit from these charitable giving tools.”

Wall Street Loves Comparisons, Which Is Why Square Is Driving It Crazy

As PF extraordinaire Square begins its IPO perp walk (aka roadshow), it is seeing consumer media criticism (such as this piece from USA Today) that its numbers are not as strong as so-called contemporaries. The problem is Square’s business model and execution approach is truly different, so much so that there are hardly any comparably-sized companies that are apples-to-apples comparisons—and certainly none that are already publicly-held.This concern is oft-cited by startups who claim to have no competitors, but with Square, the differences are much more significant.

Rick Oglesby, a senior analyst with payments consulting firm Double Diamond Group and a longtime tracker of Square, said he was concerned about the influence exerted by comparisons like the ones USA Today made.”This article keeps talking about tech companies and, if that’s the benchmark, then it probably isn’t that pretty. But if the benchmark is payments companies, Square is very pretty,” Oglesby said. “This is not a Facebook or a Twitter, but relative to the competitors listed in the article—which aren’t really even competitors—I’ll take Square.”

Apple Wants Into P2P Payments, Talking With Chase, CapOne, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp

In an attempt to control as much consumer payments as possible, Apple is in negotiations with J.P. Morgan Chase, Capital One, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp to launch a bank-account-based P2P payments service, according to a Wednesday report in The Wall Street Journal. If successful, it’s value would be huge to Apple, but not on a per-transaction fee basis. The goldmine would be the data, the equivalent of knowing every check, money transfer and payment card transaction made by millions of its customers.

Beyond the privacy implications of a consumer goods company having so much consumer personal data—on top of whatever health data is being gathered through Apple’s Health app—there are also security concerns. The more avenues of access that exist into a bank account, the more chances there are for a glitch to withdraw more than expected or for the ultra-sensitive bank account routing numbers to leak where a cyberthief could see it.