FinTech news in Apple category
With new App Store rules, Apple said that marketers don’t need to use in-app purchases to manage and purchase campaigns across different media types like TV, apps, and outdoors. However, they will have to use Apple’s in-app purchase system to buy boosts for social media posts— this would only apply to apps offering in-app tools for promoting posts. Until now, they might be used NFTs as a way to thwart Apple’s App Store fees and simultaneously as a token or key to unlock features for users — but that won’t be allowed anymore. Over the last few years, Apple has had to reduce its App Store fees and allow third-party payment systems for in-app purchases in many regions across the world.
The payments giant today announced that it adding passkeys as a log in method for PayPal accounts, allowing iPhone, iPad and Mac users on PayPal.com to sign in without using a password. Users with devices that don’t support passkeys can still tap an iPhone to log in with a PayPal passkey, but they’ll have to scan a QR code that appears after they enter their username. Passkeys are a relatively new industry standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium — in partnership with Apple, Google and Microsoft — that are designed to replace passwords with bits of data called cryptographic key pairs. The pairs consist of a public key stored in the cloud and a private key stored locally on users’ devices, separated to ensure that a compromised server won’t give an attacker access to account credentials.
Apple launched Apple Pay, which lets customers make payments in stores and online through iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch or Mac, in Malaysia on Tuesday. Currently, Apple Pay is supported for Malaysian customers using Visa and Mastercard cards from banks including AmBank, Maybank and Standard Chartered Bank with support for American Express cards coming later this \[…\]
Bluecopa, an Indian startup building a finance operations automation platform for high-volume companies, has raised $2.3 million to expand its offering in the global market.
Although it’s currently not making any money in its Russian operation, Viber, which is end-to-end encrypted, has kept the service live where it hasn’t been blocked by Russian authorities, since a lot of communication happens between Ukrainians and Russians (there remain a lot of links between the people, despite the actions and rhetoric of the Russian government), and it’s continuing to operate its service in Ukraine where it can — the occupied territories where Russia has taken control of communications being the exception. The company is not quick to disclose exact monthly active user figures, but in 2016, Viber was widely reported to have 823 million users (note: not active users — one citation of this number from its PR firm here); in that same year, an exec told journalist that it had 266 million monthly active users. Now it is making a move to double down on that strategy: it launching Payments on Viber — a new service that will let users set up digital wallets tied to their Viber accounts. Viber, the messaging app owned by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, has long been dancing around the area of fintech, launching services like money transfer and chatbot payments in various countries over the years.
Eventually, Kasheesh plans to develop its technology so users can use the same card across multiple transactions rather than having to generate a new single-use card each time, Miller said.
While Apple has partnered with payment providers and others on the financial side of things before in order to make Apple Pay and Wallet work, Pay Later represents the first time the company is handling the actual loans, risk management, and credit checks itself.
Apple is also getting into the game, it announced today, with a service called Apple Pay Later. So we did get to see Apple’s event impact a stock, just not the one that we expected it to; investors are paying attention, at least somewhat.
Key among these are features for managing podcast storage across devices, tools to enable annual podcast subscriptions and the newly announced Apple Podcasts Delegated Delivery system that will soon allow creators to more easily distribute their podcasts directly to Apple Podcasts from third-party hosting providers.
Its open source network allows custom smart contracts to be built on Bitcoin, enabling developers to use the Bitcoin blockchain to create dApps. Laughlin explained that without the Taproot upgrade implemented on the Bitcoin network late last year, which makes it easier and faster to verify transactions, the growth of Bitcoin as an ecosystem would have been much more limited. Bitcoin supporters, including Thiel, ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood and MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor, all spoke at Bitcoin 2022 about its ability to act as a store of value when central banks relax their policies and let inflation run hot, as has been the case in the United States throughout the majority of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is building infrastructure for the Bitcoin Lightning Network akin to Visa’s payments network, Lightning Labs CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Stark told journalist.
Sold as a SaaS itself — basic pricing is 5% + 50 cents per transaction — Paddle premise follows the basic principle of so many other business tools: payments is typically not a core competency of, say, a video conferencing or security company (one of its customers is BlueJeans, now owned by Verizon, which used to own journalist; another is Fortinet).
According to antitrust investigators, Apple abused its dominant position, as competitors can’t provide NFC-enabled contactless payments on the iPhone to develop other mobile wallets and compete fairly with Apple Pay.
Sequoia crypto partner Shaun Maguire talked about the firm’s commitment to the sector, regulatory challenges and what plenty of crypto investors still don’t understand.
Dapio’s launch is a sign of where the U.K. payments scene is currently — where contactless payments aided by NFC technology have exploded, making up a quarter of all payments in the country.
But Jack Kudale, the founder and CEO, tells me that it’s projecting its policy holder base to grow three-fold in the next 12 months, to 35,000-40,000 customers (which would imply something around 17,000-20,000 businesses currently), and that its premium run rate (the insurance industry’s revenue run rate equivalent) has grown 40x this year, to $200 million, in what is still a very nascent market, with less than 10% of small businesses in the country currently taking out cyber insurance policies.
Apple has announced plans to introduce a new Tap to Pay feature for iPhone that turns the device into a contactless payment terminal. The company says that later this year, U.S. merchants will be able to accept Apple Pay and other contactless payments, including Google Pay, by using an iPhone and a partner-enabled iOS app. \[…\]
French startup Sunday, which didn’t even exist in 2020, has raised large sums to allow people to easily pay and share the bill, freeing up wait staff and increasing turnover in restaurants. The payment solution for consumers in restaurants has now raised $17 million in seed financing in a round co-led by Berlin Cherry Ventures and Point Nine Capital of Germany. The benefits for restaurants include a higher potential turnover of tables, more possibility of tips for wait staff and returning customers who enjoy the simple experience. The founding team of Qlub consists of Arun Sharma, Eyad Alkassar, Filiberto Pavan, Gizem Bodur, Jeff Matsuda, Jianggan Li, John Mady, Mahmoud Fouz, Oscar Bedoya and Ramy Omar.
While Twig may be seeking to minimize/offset its own energy usage/carbon footprint, the bigger potential environmental impact is likely to be from secondary (for want of a better word) usage — aka, any consumption, energy use and CO2 emissions that Twig’s users and suppliers generate as a result of what its platform enables them to do.
Dedicated crypto platforms like Coinbase or even Paypal, Venmo and Stripe, which recently added abilities to use crypto for payments, could evolve into the U.S. versions of super apps, assuming crypto issuers can work with regulators to find a middle ground between protecting the consumer and creating new financial and investment opportunities.