In today’s top news, Paysafe started trading on the New York Stock Exchange, and Amazon acquired retail tech firm Perpule. Plus, Deliveroo’s valuation fell after limited investor appetite as it opened trading on Wednesday (March 31).
Paysafe Goes Public; Eyes Double-Digit Growth
Paysafe started trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday (March 31) after merging with the blank-check firm known as Foley Trasimene Acquisition II Corp. The FinTech is targeting $103 billion in payments volume this year, according to the SEC filing.
Amazon Acquires Indian Digital Retail Platform Perpule
Amazon has bought retail tech startup Perpule in an all-cash deal worth nearly 1.1 billion Indian rupees (about $14.7 million). Amazon aims to use Perpule’s cloud-based point-of-sale (POS) offering, UltraPOS, to offer a new suite of tech products for kirana partners, the report stated.
Investor Appetite Poor For Deliveroo London Stock Market Debut
Even after pricing its shares on the lowest end of the range, Deliveroo couldn’t spark investor appetite for its much-anticipated trading debut on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). Shares fell some 30 percent on opening day, Wednesday (March 31), shaving over £2 billion pounds from the U.K. delivery startup’s valuation.
Consumer Confidence Reaches Highest Point Since March 2020
The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index surged to new levels for the pandemic’s standards in March and now sits at 109.7. More people think business conditions are “good” right now and believe the job market is likely to improve as well.
35 CEOs On Payments As The Connected Economy’s Power Source
As Q1 2021 comes to a close, PYMNTS asked 35 CEOs to share their thoughts on the role of payments in enabling new consumer and business experiences. What we heard was nearly universal: Payments is the power source for connecting commerce across use cases and ecosystems – and no longer simply an aspirational goal.
Restaurants Serve Up Machine Learning To Personalize Order, Payments Preferences
Data is on the restaurant menu, as keeping track of customers’ ordering and payment preferences across different channels is key to offering the right digital options. In the Digitizing Restaurant Payments Report, Piada Italian Street Food’s Matt Harding and Jason Profitt explain how restaurants can tap machine learning to use data to personalize their experiences.
PayPal’s Scale Drives Crypto’s Utility
With 377 million customers and 29 million merchants on its roster, PayPal is betting that scale will help drive mainstream adoption of cryptos in commerce. To speed up the process, it is introducing its Checkout with Crypto feature to give users the option to pay with bitcoin or other crypto choices when using their PayPal wallets.