Fintech, Finance, Technology, Banking Highlights – 10 September 2018
PaymentVision Announces Partnership with MoneyGram to Provide Integrated Payment Solutions
PaymentVision, a provider of electronic payment processing technology and merchant processing for financial services, government, collections and receivables, auto finance, consumer finance, and utility industries, announced a partnership and completed integration with MoneyGram, a global provider of innovative money transfer and payment services, providing streamlined walk-in bill payment services to PaymentVision clients.
The integration provides billers and receivables management firms with a number of new features, including:
In-Person Payments: Consumers can pay their bill in-person at more than 30,000 retail locations across the nation including Ace Cash Express, CVS Pharmacy, Walmart, and many more.
Staffing Efficiencies: Retail locations are staffed by trained customer service personnel in the consumer’s local market.
Urgency Payments: Give consumers the ability to start a payment in the MoneyGram MobilePass app and complete their payment in-person at their selected retail location.
Streamline the Customer Experience: Help consumers avoid costly late fees by accepting in-person payments on their auto, credit card, healthcare, mortgage and rent, taxes, citations, or other bills.
Real-Time Communication: Payments at MoneyGram retail locations are communicated in real-time.
“We are very excited to launch this new partnership to make it easy for consumers to reliably process cash payments in-person at thousands of walk-in bill payment centers across the nation and seamlessly post activity directly into the biller or merchant’s existing core billing and collection software,” said Eugene O’Rourke, PaymentVision’s vice president of marketing.
PayPal Milestone: Payment Platform Surpasses 250 Million Active Accounts
The total number of active accounts on our platform recently surpassed 250 million.
This is an important milestone for our company, and a key marker on our journey to fulfill PayPal’s potential. On February 27, 2017, we announced that we had surpassed 200 million active accounts. The fact that we’ve added an additional 50 million accounts in a little more than 18 months – nearly 3 million accounts per month – is a testament to the tireless work you’ve done on behalf of our customers to add more and more value to our platform.
250 million is a big figure. After all, if the PayPal platform was a country, it’d be the 5th most populated in the world, ahead of Brazil (210M) and just trailing Indonesia (266M). But like with everything else in our business, it’s not about the macro numbers, it’s about the individual experiences. The small businesses that support families and fuel communities. The single-parents managing for their families. The college students figuring out their budgets. The non-profits working to serve those in need. The people and families and entrepreneurs who are new to digital finance and turn to us because they need a better way to borrow, to save, to spend, to share. The immigrants working hard to create a better life for their families and using our platform to send money back home.
Alibaba’s Jack Ma to step down in one year, hand baton to CEO Zhang
Jack Ma, the charismatic co-founder of China’s largest e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, will step down as chairman in one year to concentrate on philanthropy and education, passing on the reins to trusted lieutenant Daniel Zhang.
Ma, who turned 54 on Monday, has long flagged plans to step back, insisting that Alibaba management should be relatively young and his retirement is not expected to affect the running of the company.
But it is still extremely rare for a founder of big and transformative tech firm, especially one with a cult-like status like Ma, to retire so early.
“There’s only Bill Gates who has done the same. No other tech founder in the world has just resigned like that at the top,” said Rupert Hoogewerf, Shanghai-based founder of the Hurun Report, which publishes an annual influential list of China’s richest people. (Reuters)
