Gelato Messina launches world leading mobile payment app
Gelato Messina, pioneers of weird and wonderful gelato creations and one of Australia’s most popular brands, are ditching their cash-only policy and moving towards mobile payments to the joy of cashless customers nationwide. On 4th October 2016 Messina launched a mobile payment and loyalty app that allows customers to pay with their phone and be rewarded with points. Points are redeemable for gelato, merchandise and unique Messina experiences — including the chance for one loyal customer to take seven friends on a seven course gelato experience at the Messina Creative Department. Powered by LOKE, a Melbourne fintech startup, customers will be able to add their preferred payment type, including their Paypal account, […]
Worldpay heads down under with Australia licence
Worldpay, the global leader in payments, is expanding in Australia after winning its licence to process payments in what is one of Asia Pacific’s largest eCommerce markets. The company’s expansion in Australia comes at a time of sustained growth for Worldpay, which processed 13.1bn transactions in 2015 with transaction value of £401.9bn. A number of global companies, including ASOS, Expedia, Cathay Pacific Airlines, Digital World International and Freelancer have already turned to Worldpay for payment processing in Australia. They have been attracted to Worldpay both by the company’s extensive international reach, as well as its ability to process a wide range of alternative payment methods such as eWallets and bank […]
Challenging the big banks
Atlassian’s co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes jokes that he loves the famous quote from Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos: “Your margin is my opportunity.” Bezos has created one of the world’s biggest and most successful retail giants using that approach. Atlassian’s spectacular global growth as a start-up software company from Australia shows that Cannon-Brookes has been able to adopt a similarly disruptive style. But one of Cannon-Brookes’ key targets in terms of taking advantage of margin and opportunity remains Australia’s big banks. It also made him an early supporter of Tyro Payments and now of chief executive Jost Stollman’s determination to challenge the power of the banks with Tyro’s new banking licence. To Cannon-Brookes, […]
Banks to develop new digital cash unit for settlement
Four of the world’s biggest banks have teamed up to develop a new form of digital cash they believe will become an industry standard to clear and settle financial trades using blockchain, the technology underpinning bitcoin. UBS, the Swiss bank, pioneered the “utility settlement coin” and has now joined forces with Deutsche Bank, Santander and BNY Mellon – as well as the broker ICAP – to pitch the idea to central banks, aiming for its commercial launch by early 2018. The move is the first example of a group of leading banks coming together to co-operate on a specific blockchain technology to harness the power of decentralised computer networks and […]
PayPal ‘miles ahead’, welcomes rivals to the ecosystem
PayPal’s global head of product, Bill Ready, is confident his company’s dominance in digital payments is set to continue, declaring PayPal is just scratching the surface of its potential as it enters the Fortune 500 for the first time. Mr Ready, who remains responsible for PayPal’s Braintree unit after it was acquired in 2013 and runs PayPal’s engineering operations, said the company was miles ahead of the competition. “This is something we can solve better than anyone else in the world,” he said. “We can control the process end to end, in a way that consumers don’t have to do any extra work and the merchants don’t either.” According to […]
Square powers Kanye West “Pablo” pop-up stores Australia, the US & Canada
Square is making selling Yeezy. Kanye West announced today that Square is the exclusive point-of-sale at Kanye’s “Pablo” pop-up stores in Australia, the U.S., and Canada this weekend. The previous Pablo NYC pop-up store reportedly generated more than $1 million in a weekend from fans eager line up for blocks to purchase Kanye’s “The Life of Pablo” clothing collection. Square Reader, which launched in Australia in March 2016, will be powering the Melbourne and Sydney Pablo pop-ups with point-of-sale and credit card acceptance using the smallest, most mobile and most affordable card payment device in market. Customers will be able to check out quickly with Square and start wearing […]
Kerry Agiasotis of WUBS: Win-win when rivals turn partners
One of the world’s largest non-bank providers of international business payment solutions says aspiring fintech companies should seek to pursue partnerships with their big company rivals rather than fighting them if they want their ideas to reach their full potential. The chief executive of Western Union Business Solutions, the dedicated business payments unit of the New York Stock Exchange-listed Western Union Company, said the firm was increasingly looking to partner with fintechs and other start-ups. WUBS is primary spot foreign currency trading provider to 20 per cent of the SME market in Australia and secondary provider to another 20 per cent, including the big four banks. It has more than […]
Fintech needs security baked in from the start
Fintech has been labelled a modern day gold rush fuelled by ambitious entrepreneurs and innovative technologies and consumer demand. KPMG and CB Insights’ “The Pulse of Fintech”report found that global investment in fintech currently sits at $13.8 billion with $4.5bn invested in the Asia-Pacific, across 140 deals. But as the relationship between new technologies, such as bitcoin and blockchain, and financial services deepens, so do the threats posed by increasingly sophisticated hackers. No market is more affected by cybercrime than financial services. PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2016 Global Economic Crime Survey found that 48 per cent of financial sector respondents reported to have been affected by cybercrime, compared with 36 per cent across […]
