The US regulator, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), wants to extend its regulatory scrutiny to include tech giants such as Apple and Google and their digital payment apps and wallets. Currently they do not receive the same regulatory scrutiny and oversight as banks and credit unions.
The aim is to protect consumer privacy, guard against fraud, and prevent illegal account closures.
The CFPB is introducing rules that cover organisations handling more than fifty million transactions per year. This affects Apple, Google, Amazon, PayPal, Venmo, Block, and Zelle. The CFPB wants to supervise the providers in relation to privacy and surveillance, errors and fraud, and debanking. It will come into effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register.
New research involving 4,000 consumers and 2,000 consumers in Nordic countries, conducted on behalf of Nets, part of Nexi Group – the European PayTech, reflects the growing dominance of mobile payments, with Apple Pay now surpassing MobilePay in Denmark and closely competing with Swish in Sweden.
At least 30% of Nordic consumers say they never use cash, with nearly half in Norway and Sweden reporting the same.
76% of Nordic consumers use some form of mobile payment in physical stores and 12% rely solely on mobile payments.
This shift persists despite Norwegian laws requiring businesses to accept cash payments. As mobile payments continue to rise, cash is now third among preferred payment methods.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has developed a Digital Policy that aims to help connect government services to populations to promote economic growth and development. This includes digital payments.
USAID and Visa will work together in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Caucasus, based on shared interests and goals. The aim is to empower communities with digital and financial literacy and support access to digital systems that will help drive financial inclusion.
France’s new retail payment strategy is a continuation of the 2019-2024 strategy but will now include the challenges of cash and is in line with the strategic orientations set out since 2021 by the European Commission and the Eurosystem. The strategy aims to safeguard trust in money, to uphold the principle of freedom of choice of payment instruments for users and, in particular, defend the universality and full acceptance of cash.
In the first half of 2024 £570 million was stolen in payment fraud in the UK and £710 million prevented, up 13%. While the value stolen was down 1.5%, the number of cases was up 16%. Card Not Present fraud is growing fastest.
The US Treasury’s Office of Payment Integrity has published data for October 2023 to September 2024. The use of machine learning allowed them to prevent and recover over $4 billion in fraud and improper payments up from $652.7 million in the year before.
The Cointelegraph website reports that, based on survey evidence, the Pew Research Center has concluded that seven in 10 Americans (72%) reported at least one personal experience with extreme weather in 2024. Recent storms have demonstrated, yet again, that for digital payments to work, everything has to work, and often they don’t. At this point cash is the only payment option.
The digital tenge is a digital form of the Kazakh currency issued as a unique digital sequence (tokens) or electronic records stored on special electronic wallets.
Transactions in digital tenge will exceed 200 billion (US$401.1 million) by the end of the year according to the National Bank.
The digital tenge has been introduced to ensure transparent government spending, reduce costs, speed up cross-border payments and allow the introduction other innovations. The whole process from opening a bank account to final settlements has been digitized.
The National Bank has created an interbank infrastructure that is processing almost 87% of all non-cash transactions in the economy. What is described as an identification data exchange centre helps financial institutions provide services in a remote digital format, processing nearly 2.5 million requests a month.
According to the National Bank, banks are no longer just traditional financial institutions, but rather a large digital ecosystem, including e-commerce services, government services and much more.
Last year, Kazakhstan launched the initial phase of the digital tenge project and fullscale implementation is expected by the end of 2025.
Another US bank has decided to invest in its branch network. PCN Bank will add 100 new locations alongside renovating 200 existing branches at a cost of $500 million.
This comes on top of an announcement in February that it was adding 100 new locations and renovating 1,200 branches.
The bank’s total investment over five years for these additional 200 branches and 1,400 renovated branches is approximately $1.5 billion. All this to be able to provide solutions and financial advice to the millions of clients conveniently and inperson.
PNC Bank has the fourth largest branch network in the US with more than 2,200 branches across the country.
Brazil’s digital banking giant Nubank now has 100 million customers in Brazil, 57% of the population. In May it had reported reaching 92 million customers in Brazil and 100 million across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. Nubank launched in 2013 with just one product, a credit card.
The journey to 100 million customers began based on organic member-getmember growth. One million customers took two years. In 2017 it introduced a savings account which allowed personal loans, SME solutions, investments, and crypto. Today, the portfolio includes marketplace and insurance, among others.
Growth in Mexico and Colombia is faster than the initial growth spurt recorded in the bank’s home market. It is now beginning to expand its product range from credit cards and savings in those markets to include investments, payroll products and higher credit lines.
In 2023, Nubank achieved $1 billion in net profit on revenues of $8 billion.
