Episode 13 - 20th October 2015

Good morning, welcome to Payments Monitor, my name is Faisal Khan, today is the 20th of October 2015, some trending stories today are:

TOP STORIES

Smartcard and security technology company Oberthur announced it will be filing for an IPO on Euronet Paris exchange. The IPO value has not been announced, but it will be close to the previous value of Euro 2 Billion (which was taken from the value assigned to Oberthur when it was a target of a failed private equity acquisition).

Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled that Apple Music has 15 Million Users out of which 6.5 Million users are paying subscribers. Spotify by comparison has 75 Million active users and 20 Million paid subscribers.

YouTube is seriously mulling about providing a payment wall for exclusive content on its video streaming platform. YouTube feels a paywall would not be out of scope, provided content that can suddenly reach 100s of million of users is available exclusively on YouTube. All this represents a reflection of the exclusive movies Netflix has been sponsoring and paying for, in which it has had a huge success.

Google makes its first investment in China after pulling out of the country in 2010 over privacy concerns. Mobvoi is a Chinese language voice activated search engine. Voice technology will become the cornerstone in payments in the coming years as voice biometrics are best poised for authorization that is both quick and secure. Think what Siri will do next.

Bitcoin’s price has been on the up, up and up. The latest price of the virtual currency was quoted at US$ 267, fueled by the trading volume by Chinese exchanges Huobi and OKCoin. Some cite the reason for this upsurge in price is because consumers are being sucked into a Russian ponzi scheme known as MMM.

In other news, Happy birthday for Apple Pay as it turns 1 year old today. Amazon pulls out of the travel business by quietly pulling its plug on its hotel booking service Amazon Destination, but fear not, Amazon sees a big holiday season around the corner and plans to hire 100,000 temporary workers for its holiday season.

BLOG OPINION

Daily Fintech has a really good article on how the US can learn about EMV adoption from Australia. EMV has been a major success in Australia however, contactless payments are not far outsrtipping chip and PIN authorisations. Add to this, mobile payments which seem to be heading towards domination. What will it mean for the US - well you can read the article and find out more.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Hope of striking it rich were short lived. Germany’s Deutsche Bank accidentally transferred US$ 6 Billion into another client’s account by entering the wrong numbers during transfer. How about that.

That’s all for today, my name is Faisal Khan and you were listening to the Payments Monitor.