Published
- 03:00 am
eftpos today launched its new eftpos Settlement Service (eSS). This new service is an essential core function in closing out the Company’s transformation phase and demonstrates its ability to increasingly deliver value for Members and the Australian payments industry.
eSS enables the centralised settlement of CHQ and SAV transactions processed via the eftpos Hub. eftpos now determines the multi-lateral net settlement obligation for each Member, and initiates the settlement of those obligations through instructions to the Reserve Bank’s Information and Transfer System (RITS).
eSS replaces all previous arrangements for eftpos POS transaction Settlement, including bilateral arrangements and use of the existing Low Value Settlement Service (LVSS). The launch of the new service required all Members to be technically and operationally ready to go live on the same day, signalling the significance of this industry achievement.
eftpos Acting CEO, Mr Paul Jennings, said: “The successful implementation of the new service is a tribute to the collaboration, dedication and persistence of our Members who have worked cooperatively with eftpos to bring it to life in just 18 months.
“The service is made possible through the recent completion of the eftpos Hub project. With all Members now processing eftpos CHQ and SAV transactions through the eftpos Hub, the ability to deliver value added services that drive operational efficiencies and reduces the cost of change, is key to our value proposition to Members and the Australian payments industry.”
- 09:00 am
Blackhawk Network, Inc., a global financial technology company (“Blackhawk”), announced today that it has acquired CashStar, Inc., a leading provider of gift card commerce solutions at the forefront of mobile payments and digital gifting innovation.
The acquisition strengthens Blackhawk’s position in the emerging digital gift card market and establishes Blackhawk as a leading provider in the fast growing first-party digital gift card market. The first-party gift card market transaction dollar volume is estimated in excess of $100 billion with digital being the fastest-growing segment of that market.
CashStar’s commerce platform enables retailers to market, sell and distribute digital and plastic gift cards in the first-party digital card business, which is directly to consumers and businesses across a wide range of channels. With CashStar’s flexible platform, merchants can use digital and physical gift cards to engage consumers throughout the customer lifecycle, including marketing and promotions, sales and customer service. CashStar increases Blackhawk’s offerings and deepens merchant relationships, while extending Blackhawk’s strength in the third-party and incentives businesses to the large first-party market. In addition, the acquisition provides retailers and distributors with more powerful options in mobile and digital distribution—two of the fastest-growing gift card segments in the industry today.
“The acquisition strategically enhances Blackhawk’s ability to provide the right digital solutions to our partners to meet the changing needs of business customers and consumers,” said Talbott Roche, CEO and president of Blackhawk Network. “With the addition of CashStar, Blackhawk is now a leading provider in the fast growing first-party digital market. Also, with CashStar margins projected in the range of 25 percent to 30 percent for fiscal 2018, Blackhawk maintains its focus on margin expansion. Finally, Blackhawk remains committed to optimizing capital allocation to enhance shareholder returns and will continue to evaluate acquisition candidates as well as potential share repurchases in the future.”
“Joining forces with Blackhawk will help us deliver even more powerful capabilities and new revenue opportunities for our clients and partners,” said Ben Kaplan, CEO and president of CashStar. “Together, we can provide merchants with unified end-to-end solutions for B2B and B2C gift card distribution. The combination of our platform and Blackhawk’s product breadth and global reach creates innovative new applications for branded value and mobile payments. We couldn’t be more excited.”
CashStar becomes part of Blackhawk’s digital and incentives businesses. Kaplan continues to manage the business and reports directly to Blackhawk’s General Manager of Digital and Incentives, David Jones.
“We’re looking forward to leveraging the synergies across our businesses and technologies to offer comprehensive gift card solutions for a brand to sell directly to consumers or businesses through digital channels,” said Jones. “We are committed to maintaining CashStar’s merchant-centric culture that has earned the company so much success to-date. As we integrate their SaaS platforms and organization into Blackhawk, we will provide the same exceptional service and partnership that Blackhawk and CashStar customers have come to expect.”
Transaction Details
Blackhawk acquired CashStar for approximately $175 million in cash. “We expect the acquisition to be at least earnings neutral in fiscal 2017 and meaningfully accretive after synergies in 2018, adding $12 million to $15 million in adjusted EBITDA, $3 million to $5 million in adjusted net income and $0.05 to $0.09 in adjusted EPS,” said Jerry Ulrich, Blackhawk’s chief financial and administrative officer. “In addition, it is projected to generate positive cash flow in 2018 and helps us gain leverage in our digital products category by accelerating topline growth. With projected 2018 Adjusted EBITDA margins above our corporate average, it’s also consistent with our margin expansion objectives. We completed the acquisition using a combination of available cash and borrowings under our revolving credit facility while maintaining further borrowing capacity with a projected pro forma debt to EBITDA leverage ratio of approximately 3.8 at the end of our fiscal third quarter.”
- 03:00 am
Temenos, the software specialist for banking and finance, today announces that Baxter Credit Union (BCU) has successfully implemented the Lifecycle Management Suite in Microsoft Azure.
The implementation, which included the Collection, Service, and Loan Origination modules, incorporated an upgrade spanning four major releases, as well as the inaugural launch of the Lifecycle Management Suite in the Cloud.
Jeff Johnson, CIO, BCU, commented: “We have a strategic initiative in place to move all of our technology into the Cloud. Since BCU uses the Lifecycle Management Suite frequently as part of our day-to-day activities, we felt it was necessary to explore hosting our technology on Microsoft Azure. We are already well embedded with Azure, so they were a natural choice. We are looking forward to benefitting from the ability to scale more efficiently, reduce system response time, enhance disaster recovery abilities and run on optimally-sized hardware.”
The project spanned nine months, with significant testing from all parties in order to confirm both the functionality of the technology in previously untested waters, and the security of the system in a new environment. The decision to move the Lifecycle Management Suite to Azure has also allowed BCU to reduce IT overhead. Moving forward, the credit union will be able to focus their time and effort on optimizing and providing the best products and services.
Emily Steele, COO of North America, Temenos, stated: We are thrilled to announce the successful completion of this project. The teams at BCU, Temenos and Microsoft invested a lot of time and energy to ensure that all of the security and functional features of the system went live without any unplanned interruption to BCU’s service. The successful completion of this project is not only a testament to the longevity of the technology, but also to our strong relationship with BCU. We look forward to continuing to push the boundaries of possibility with both BCU and Microsoft, and continuing to propel the Lifecycle Management Suite to the forefront of financial technology.”
David Koscheski, Director, US Financial Services Industry for Microsoft Corp., added: “Microsoft and Temenos work together with financial institutions around the world, and BCU is taking advantage of the scale and efficiencies gained by combining Temenos technology powered by Microsoft Azure. We are thrilled to see the results of our work with Temenos come to fruition and we look forward to collaborating on more projects in the future.
- 06:00 am
WEX Inc., a leading provider of corporate payment solutions, today announced its European office has secured an Electronic Money Institute (EMI) license by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and, as a result, is now a principal member of Mastercard.
The EMI license enables WEX to offer credit and therefore the full product suite, in all 31 countries in the European Economic Area, which according to the latest figures from PhocusWright, is a travel market worth an estimated €273 billion. This new license accelerates WEX’s European expansion plans, which have been a core part of the global strategy of the virtual payments line of business.
“Having our own e-money license and becoming a principal member of Mastercard are key elements of our European strategy,” said Ian Johnson, Commercial Director Europe, at WEX. “Almost all businesses are looking for effective ways to manage supplier payments, and we are pleased to provide our full range of products and credit services across EEA."
He continued, “We’re always looking for ways to deliver more service to our customers and this enables us to do so yet again: being the card issuer ourselves makes us more agile in the marketplace and with the widest product portfolio in this space we are able to make significant savings for our customers. We’re very customer focused and strongly believe that this move will make us an even more valuable partner to them.”
- 02:00 am
Hminers ( www.hminers.com ) looks all set to script an unprecedented success story in the worldwide industry for cryptocurrencies. The company's three mining rigs are quickly emerging as the most preferred option amongst thousands of bitcoin miners around the world. The most extraordinary feature of these mining rigs is their ability to deliver extremely high hash power, while keeping the power consumption under reasonable limits. These multi-algorithm mining rigs can be used to mine Bitcoin (hash power of up to 650 TH/s), Litecoin (hash power of up to 22.5 GH/s), Ethereum (hash power of up to 15 GH/s), and Dash (hash power of up to 50 GH/s).
Though the concept of cryptocurrency is now understood by many people around the world, the term cryptocurrency mining still remains to be relatively unknown. As far as the income perspective of cryptocurrency mining is concerned, hash rates are of prime importance. Functionally speaking, this is a measure of the power of the miner's hardware and reflects the hash function computation frequency per second. The performance of the miners is measured in MH/s (Mega hash per second), GH/s (Giga hash per second), and TH/s (Terra hash per second).
Hminers is a team of industry experts that hit the headlines in the past by designing and creating the world's first 10 nm ASIC Chip. Their three mining rigs H2U Miner, H4U Miner, and Rack Equipped with 5 x H4U were designed to ensure higher profitability for the users. This goal has been accomplished by maximizing the hash rate and minimizing the power consumption to a level that hasn't been achieved so far. Unlike any other similar product available on the market, Hminers has made it possible to mine multiple algorithms such as SHA-256, Scrypt, Etehash, and X11.
Some key features of the Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum miners from Hminers include:
- Hash rate of up to 650 TH/s, 22.5 GH/s, 15 GH/s and 50 GH/s for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and Dash, respectively.
- Low power consumption, operating temperature, and noise
- Guaranteed return on investment within a month
- User-friendly with pre-installed software
- Built and Designed to operate under multiple algorithm
Highlighting the superior qualities of these mining rigs, the CTO of Hminers, Benjamin Berglung stated, "Some of the biggest products available on the market offer 13TH with a power consumption of 1300W. We are offering much higher hash rates with the same power consumption."
To find out more about the new Hminers Mining Rigs, please visit https://hminers.com/products/.
About Hminers: Hminers is the most recognizable companies in the cryptocurrency industry and the proud creators of the world's first 10 nm ASIC Chip. The core team of this organization comprises of top level specialists from globally renowned organizations such as IBM, Microsoft, and Samsung.
- 06:00 am
Starting today, Chinese tourists in South Africa will have more opportunities to pay via smartphone as Alipay, the world's largest online and mobile payment platform, operated by Ant Financial Services Group ("Ant Financial", "Ant"), partners with Zapper, the fast-growing mobile payment, customer insights and digital marketing platform developed in South Africa.
This partnership will allow them to use their Alipay app to settle payment at 10,000 Zapper-affiliated merchant locations across the country. Chinese tourists will also be able to search for restaurants, bars, theatres, book shops, adventure parks and more through Alipay's in-app Discovery platform, and pay for their orders in RMB via Alipay by scanning a Zapper QR code.
"South Africa is a must-experience country for Chinese tourists visiting Africa. We are excited to partner with Zapper, the largest mobile payment provider in South Africa, to offer Chinese tourists a safe and convenient payment solution and seamless travel experience," said Rita Liu, Head of Alipay EMEA.
"This cross-continental alliance is in line with a series of expansions into new verticals that Zapper has undertaken to diversify its services and further strengthen its position as South Africa's mobile payment and loyalty rewards app of choice. These verticals include hospitality, retail, bill payment, e-commerce, donations, parking, fuel and convenience," said Will Heygate, General Manager of Zapper South Africa.
This development arrives on the heels of the online payment service for "hop-on-hop-off" bus ticketing in Cape Town and Johannesburg that Alipay launched in June this year.
According to statistics from the South African Department of Tourism, over 110,000 Chinese tourists visited South Africa in fiscal 2016, with a year-on-year growth rate of 38%. Tourism in South Africa has grown continuously for 7 years and comprises 9% of the country's GDP.
The South African government has recognized the tourism sector's potential to generate economic growth and employment. Through the Department of Tourism's strategic plan - National Tourism Sector Strategy (NTSS), the tourism sector is committed to creating a total of 225,000 additional jobs by the year 2020.
With Alipay's more than 520 million Chinese users and Zapper's rapidly burgeoning presence within the global payment landscape, each brand is now better positioned to support this local strategy and to strengthen its respective appeal to both Asian and South African customers.
Simon Cadbury
Head of strategy and innovation at leading financial technology at Intelligent Environments
Today’s findings from the Citizen’s Advice Bureau – that credit card companies are targeting customers struggling with debt, with one in five seeing their credit limit automatically increased – is see more
- 06:00 am
Emirates NBD’s Pepper has now learnt to speak Arabic! The artificial intelligence (AI) powered humanoid robot, brought to the UAE by Emirates NBD last year, has been widely popular due to his novel proposition and charming personality, and will now also cater to the bank’s Arabic-speaking customers.
Adding a fun element to the banking experience, the bilingual Pepper will continue to interact with customers at the bank’s Jumeirah Emirates Towers and Dubai Mall branches and provide assistance with issuing branch queueing tokens, presenting information about products and services in an engaging manner and obtaining customer feedback through a happiness meter.
“Pepper has been extremely popular with customers and well received at our branches and promotional events,” said Suvo Sarkar, Senior Executive Vice President & Group Head - Retail Banking & Wealth Management, Emirates NBD. “As a bank that has been at the forefront of digitisation and in bringing innovations to the region, we are pleased to offer our customers the opportunity to interact with Pepper in the language of their choice. Pepper brings in a modern and contemporary aspect to banking, complementing our multi-channel yet personalised banking proposition.”
Pepper made his first appearance in 2016 at Emirates NBD’s futuristic banking space in the Jumeirah Emirates Towers branch. The bank also recently announced a planned investment of AED 1 billion over the next three years to carry out a digital transformation program.
Howard Berg
Senior Vice President & Managing Director at Gemalto
Mobile devices are the backbone of digital transformation, enabling new innovations such as smart cities and connected cars. see more
- 05:00 am
Torstone Technology, the leading provider of post-trade securities and derivatives processing, today announces that Peel Hunt, the leading independent corporate broking, advisory and trading house has selected Torstone’s InfernoRC module in order to comply with the transaction reporting obligations of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) and its accompanying Regulation (MiFIR).
The news follows Torstone Technology’s announcement in March this year that it began live testing the new InfernoRCmodule with its clients.
InfernoRC will enable Peel Hunt to comply with the expanded scope and detail in transaction reporting obligations in MiFIR, including the much wider range of financial instruments and disclosure of additional mandatory data which the regulation requires. In addition to sourcing and validating data, InfernoRC accounts for data security, data privacy and data quality requirements on the information collated from across a multitude of disparate systems.
Sunil Dhall, Chief Financial & Operating Officer at Peel Hunt, said: “We have a long-standing partnership with Torstone Technology having used Inferno for over 10 years. The modular platform provides us with a flexible, easily scalable solution. We have selected Torstone's MiFIR transaction reporting service as their offering provides speed to market, as well as reliability. We look forward to continuing to work with Torstone as we prepare for the MiFID II implementation deadline.”
Brian Collings, CEO, Torstone Technology, said: “We are extremely pleased that Peel Hunt has chosen to implement the InfernoRC module for transaction reporting under MiFIR. This extension of our existing partnership with Peel Hunt is testament to Torstone’s commitment to its clients to build highly automated, scalable and flexible solutions designed for rapid deployment.”
InfernoRC provides a comprehensive workflow for transaction reporting; managing the capture and storage of sensitive information, the data enrichment and report generation function, alerting and resolution of exceptions, the submission of transaction reports, monitoring the file delivery and validation function as well as the execution to the National Competent Authority (NCA) via an Approved Reporting Mechanism (ARM). Inferno’s core reconciliation function provides validation of the report submitted to the NCA by the ARM, a key requirement of the regulation.
Torstone’s InfernoRC is ARM agnostic and will provide connectivity to enable transaction reporting to multiple ARMs, including Unavista, Abide and DTCC.
