The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the web:
Carbon counter
Buy now/pay later firm Klarna will provide carbon impact calculations for transactions through Doconomy's Aland Index. The announcement is pegged to Earth Day and is part of a strategy at Klarna to reduce company emissions by 50% over the next nine years, along with financial donations to environmental initiatives.
The Aland Index measures CO2 emissions, and is part of a carbon-reduction service
Klarna plans to add more information to its app, detailing the cost of consumption for particular products and providing recommendations to reduce emissions based on shopping habits. Klarna's app has about 18 million active users.
On the payroll
New Orleans-based B2B payments firm Gilded has launched a service called Mass Pay that allows businesses to simultaneously pay as many as 500 employees in stablecoins or ethereum-based tokens.
Gilded provides back-office technology, with a specialization in firms that use blockchain, distributed finance or other forms of distributed ledgers.
Gilded is anticipating more interest in cryptocurrency payroll following the NBA's
Caller ID
Carrier billing firm Boku has teamed with French mobile providers SFR, Orange and Bouygues Telecom to produce mobile identity products that are designed to mitigate payment fraud in France.
Boku will match existing mobile subscribers' account registration details with new account registration information to ensure the person's identity. It will also use a phone number verification system that checks the number assigned to a mobile device by using a connection to the mobile operators' networks.
The companies are concerned with the threat of hacks, account takeover attacks, SIM theft and digital fraud that
Early learning
The U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority is expanding the "sandbox" concept for fintech startups by adding a "nursery" for firms that have just received a licence.
While a sandbox provides limited regulatory relief for companies that are in early development, the nursery involves the regulator keeping in regular contact with a new firm to spot compliance issues early, reports
The FCA will also grow its sandbox from a quarterly program to a year-round initiative, and will run an advertising campaign to draw new fintechs with a focus on firms that are connected to digital payments, sustainability and the coronavirus recovery.
From the web
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL | Wednesday, April 21, 2021
The European Union’s executive arm proposed a bill that would limit police use of facial-recognition software in public and ban the marketing or use of certain kinds of AI systems, in one of the broadest efforts yet to regulate high-stakes applications of artificial intelligence
REUTERS | Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Amazon.com Inc. said it is rolling out biometric technology at its Whole Foods stores around Seattle starting on Wednesday, letting shoppers pay for items with a scan of their palm.
TECHCRUNCH | Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Since 2019, Plaid-esque companies, but with different twists to their offerings, have emerged to solve these issues. Today, Nigeria’s Okra, arguably the first to gain mainstream attention, is announcing that it has closed a seed round of $3.5 million.
More from PaymentsSource
Banks face increasing competition from fintechs, third-party lenders and large technology companies as customer demands evolve, says Mastercard's Fabrizio Burlando.
Cardholders get a discount, but anyone can use the issuer's new airport lounge — even kids.
Through the launch of Apple Card Family, consumers can now combine credit lines to better build a credit history, while parents can build in guidelines for younger card users in the family.
Venmo may be slow to add cryptocurrency support behind Visa, Mastercard and even its parent company, PayPal — but it serves a younger and more tech-savvy audience that may be more willing to use digital currencies for payments.
Chargebee, a startup that helps enterprises with subscription billing and revenue management, raised $125 million in funding and boosted its valuation to $1.4 billion, reaching so-called unicorn status for the first time.
Comdata has launched Fintwist OnDemand to provide instant earned wage access services to working adults amid an increasingly crowded market for faster payroll payments.
It is now evident that what we are witnessing is a dramatic shift in the financial world. We are pushing past outdated and antiquated modes of thought and the leaders of the central banks can place all of the roadblocks they wish to in the path of decentralized finance’s progress, but can do little to derail it now.
As more electric-powered commercial vehicles enter the market, fuel card operators like FleetCor must confront a future where gas stations become less relevant.
Modern payment processors using AI to interpret and analyze trends and point-of-spend data can detect fraud across ecommerce in real time and provide that knowledge onwards to the bank just as quickly, says Paymentology's Abe Smith.
Dozens of banks are gearing up for the Federal Reserve’s real-time payments system, which is expected to go live as early as 2023.
Stripe's growth has made the fintech a popular distribution partner for a fast-growing range of financial services, with the latest move extending a card-issuing portal to Europe.
Mastercard is buying Ekata, a startup that has been rapidly developing AI-powered digital identity tools that weed out online fraud during the recent surge in e-commerce during the pandemic.
Private businesses are beginning to embrace the Reserve Bank of India's plan to create competition in the country's retail digital payment space, seeking new licenses to develop alternatives to the state-owned National Payments Corp. of India system.
Britain’s Treasury and the Bank of England are weighing the potential creation of a central bank digital currency, joining authorities from China to Sweden exploring the next big step in the future of money.
We’ve seen many companies embrace faster and easier payments systems, says Citizens Commercial Banking's Matt Richardson.
By using a direct listing instead of an IPO, Coinbase can quickly draw mainstream investors to fuel a payments franchise.
The surge in digital and cloud-based payments technology hasn’t killed off point-of-sale terminals; their role is simply changing, as cloud-based payment providers like Podium roll out their first hardware.
Top executives from the 49 companies that earned a spot in this year's ranking of the Best Fintechs to Work For cite the need for nimble shifts in business strategy, leadership style and recruiting tactics among the lessons they took away from the challenges of the coronavirus crisis.
