Episode 18: 28th October 2015

Good morning, welcome to Payments Monitor, my name is Faisal Khan, today is the 28th of October 2015, some stories for today are:

TOP STORIES

With the number of increasing innovative payment methods like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, it should come as no surprise that Juniper Research’s new study predicts a huge increase in biometrically authenticated transactions. Biometric payments are cited to go up to nearly 5bn by 2019, up from less than 130 million this year.

Speaking of Apple Pay, there’s good news for people in Canada and Australia. Apple Pay will be available in these countries later this year thanks to a recent tie-in with Amex. While Hong Kong, Singapore and Spain will be able to use Apple Pay in 2016.

In the world of Cryptocurrencies, Nasdaq’s new blockchain-enabled platform has signed up its first batch of clients. The operator plans to use distributed ledger technology for a host of other tasks and it will be interesting to follow its development.

Meanwhile, Russia's Ministry of Finance has decided to tighten regulations about Bitcoin by suggesting a four year sentence for the issuance of cryptocurrencies. Reasons cited for presenting this bill include the negative impact of cryptocurrencies on economic stability and the use of digital currencies by drug traders and anonymous hacking groups.

After the recent scandals, Volkswagen has experienced its first quarterly decline in more than a decade. A net loss of $1.84 billion was reported in the third quarter. Remember that Volkswagen had to spend €6.7 billion on recalling and repairing about nine million cars which had been equipped with the illegal software. Analysts predict that sales and revenue is likely to get even worse in the coming quarters.

Fastacash, the Singaporean company that is making waves with their social media payments product has now added Xpress Money to their list. XOPO is the newly launched money transfer service using social media messaging.

STARTUP OF THE WEEK

This week’s startup is a Canadian company called Mogo. Mogo is engaged at reducing debt. As we all can fall into the debt trap pretty easily, getting out is difficult. Mogo provides two things: (a) A prepaid VISA, so that you spend the money that you have in your bank and not on your credit card and (b) they provide lower APR loans, so that you can transfer your credit card loans to their and pay it off using on-time payments. Their website is www.mogo.ca.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Another interesting monetary fact for you. The savings of top 100 CEOs equals to 41% of the US families, i.e. 116 Million families in America = savings of just top 100 CEOs.

You can access all the links of this podcast on paymentsmonitor.com - If you would like to suggest an improvement or would to comment (provide feedback), please send me an email at podcast {at} faisalkhan.com

That’s all for today, my name is Faisal Khan and you’ve been listening to the Payments Monitor. Speak tomorrow!