Category: Archive | Page 41

Allpago Grows Using Location Location Location

allpago, one of Latin America’s leading payment facilitators, is using a real estate golden rule to achieve stunning growth, mirroring PF growth in the region. Enabling companies globally to do business and accept payments across Latin America, allpago uses locally-preferred credit cards and alternative payment methods via location-based checkout, and recently achieved 150 percent annual growth in transaction volume.

Double Diamond Group president Todd Ablowitz says allpago’s dominance is further proof of the power of payment facilitators.

PIN Is Not A Win. Merchants Don’t Get That

Don’t pin your hopes on PIN. That’s the advice of a report from the Aite Group, which claims that the cost of having to implement PIN for all card transactions, especially for merchants who don’t already have PIN pads, may just not be worth the expense considering the limited impact on fraud and merchant liability.

The report “Chip Cards in the United States: The PIN, PINless, Debit, Credit Conundrum” says because merchants misunderstand fraud and their own liability risks, a large majority (65 percent of those surveyed) are in favor of implementing chip and PIN in EMV card transactions. None of the issuers surveyed were in favor of it.

India’s Razorpay Onboards A Month Faster Than Rivals

Onboarding merchants in less than a week, nearly a month quicker than what the CEO says is the industry standard, Indian payment facilitator Razorpay has used that impressive stat to sign up more than 8,000 Indian merchants, including mom-and-pops and global chains such as Papa John’s. Not bad for a company that wasn’t even a Mastercard payment facilitator until last year.

A member of Mastercard’s Start Path program since 2015, Razorpay is precisely how the card brand envisions signing 40 million merchants by 2020. The challenges are as plentiful as the opportunities.

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.”

On China’s Payments SuperHighway, Regulators Stomp The Brakes And AsiaPay Hits The Gas

When you drive on rough roads you don’t have to slow down, but you do steer more carefully, guiding your car to smoother surfaces. Chinese payment facilitator AsiaPay is welcoming China’s recent regulation tightening as a move to help clean up the country’s payments industry’s fraud-infested reputation. AsiaPay is reading the new road sign as it zooms by, according to our interview with its CEO Joseph Chan, a key player in the massive payments market that is China.

How massive? In their 2015 report on global payments, Capgemini and the Royal Bank of Scotland said China’s non-cash transaction volume growth in 2013 led the world’s countries at 37 percent, with the region they call Emerging Asia (India, China, Hong Kong and other Asian countries) leading global regions with more than 21 percent growth. Alipay and WeChat are the dominant third party service providers in the online and mobile payments. ApplePay and SamsungPay have entered the market as well, though they use NFC rather than the QR code conduit favored by Alipay and WeChat.

Hug a Payment Facilitator, Save A Tree

Payment facilitators are helping to save the planet.
By enabling electronic and mobile payments for all sorts of markets – like lunch money and rent and race registrations– that used checks and cash before, less paper is being used, and less paper needed means more trees left standing to produce more oxygen. That’s not a stretch at all.

One such example of a new marketplace is Bill.com, which allows small- and medium-sized companies to electronify the entire accounts payable and accounts receivable process, chopping waiting times for both parties using it. And while Bill.com facilitates payments, it is not a payment facilitator, also not a stretch.

Global Mobile Brew Is Strong

Turkish coffee is almost as strong as Turkish use of mobile devices for banking and shopping and payments, but not as strong as the payments industry action in Europe. The Turks led a group of 15 countries in most of the categories of questions asked about mobile device usage for a recently released report on mobile banking, mobile shopping and mobile payments conducted for ING International by Ipsos.

The report is titled ING International Survey Mobile Banking 2016 but as ING economist Ian Bright explains, one thing has led to another, as it usually does in fintech, and banking only scratches the surface now, four years after its first mobile banking report.

Alipay To Begin Conquest Of Munich And Beyond

In two weeks, Chinese tourists landing at Munich Airport will be able to use coupons sent to them through their mobile devices by retailers in the terminals. They will get a notification, directions to the retailer with the coupon, then once they bring the item to the POS, have a bar code scanned without worrying over currency conversion.

Alipay, a mobile payment app run by Alibaba partner Ant Financial, will be accepted in all POS terminals run by German processor Wirecard, which struck a deal with the company that operates 69 shops inside the airport. Markus Eichinger, head of mobile services at Wirecard, which is acting as both acquiring bank and processor for Alipay, gave an interview to paymentfacilitator.com just after coming from the partnership’s final testing session.

The Payments Standard Bearers Are Waking Up To The Payment Facilitator Opportunity (And Threat)

There is growing realization among researchers that the payment facilitator model is a rocket ship, and that old models in the payments industry have slowed their rolls at the PFs’ expense. Major players are now saying what we’ve been shouting from the rooftops for years.

In the past three years, I said: “We are seeing more ISOs looking to do frictionless on-boarding and move into aggregation. Support for the aggregation model among acquirers is also increasing.”

It Was Hip To Be Square In Portland

Not only can small merchants ride the coming wave of mobile payments, they can make more in tips. That was part of the fun learned from a two-month Square promotion in Portland, Ore., that ended last week. The drive highlighted the company’s NFC/chip readers in a marketing siege of a city chosen for the tactic because of its high implementation of the new Square hardware and its commerce counterculture.

Apple got in on the techfest because its wallet Apple Pay is the other side of the two-way connection Square needs to boost not only wallet use but comfort with wallet use. Apple hosted a merchant tutorial on Apple Pay in one of its stores one day during the Square campaign.