Mastercard Card Clearing In China, Unattended Retail, Rapid Settlements Top This Week’s News

It’s the end of the workweek, and the PYMNTS Weekender is here to make sure you didn’t miss anything with the latest in payments and commerce news.

We have deep dives into unattended retail, rapid settlements and cybersecurity, as well as news on Mastercard receiving the go-ahead from China’s central bank to set up a bank clearing business.

Top News

Mastercard Gets Nod To Join China’s $27T Payments Market

China’s central bank gave Mastercard the green light on Feb. 11 to set up a bank card clearing business, providing it with access to a $27 trillion payments market. The People’s Bank of China said it has approved an application by Mastercard’s Chinese joint venture to run a bank card clearing business in the nation.

Wells Fargo CEO Reorganizes Business Units

Wells Fargo CEO Charles Scharf wants to get rid of any inkling of scandal by overhauling the firm’s reporting lines, revamping its three divisions into five. The wholesale bank will be divided into a separate investment bank that has a capital markets focus and a commercial bank providing back-end services for companies. The consumer bank will be divided into one section focused on consumer lending, and the other on branches and small businesses.

Is No-Factor Authentication Digital Security’s Future?

CAPTCHA is an obvious example of a “security” step that mostly succeeds in locking out valid customers, and the same idea applies to all of the little hurdles users must overcome during an experience. None of these things are necessarily deal-breakers on a digital journey, DataVisor’s CEO and Co-founder Yinglian Xie told PYMNTS, but they are certainly an annoyance. What is necessary, Xie said, is a different, more holistic paradigm for combating fraud — with a wide aim of not adding more authentication steps.

Mastercard: The Role Of ‘Instant’ In Improving Consumer Financial Health

Speed matters for FinTechs aiming to bring new products to market digitally and to target consumers not well served by traditional banking models. In an interview with Karen Webster, Sherri Haymond, executive vice president of Digital Partnerships at Mastercard, and Diwakar “Dee” Choubey, founder and CEO of digital banking membership MoneyLion, dived into how collaboration between the card network and the FinTech firm will foster new card program rollouts this year and beyond.

What Amazon At 10 Can Teach Us About Uber At 10

Uber reported its earnings last week. Analysts seemed happier than they’ve been in a while about the firm — mostly because they heard from its chief executive that it is now geared toward stemming its losses and achieving profitability a year earlier than expected. That’s a real change from the drubbing analysts have mostly given Uber since it went public in May 2019.

Lyft stormed out of the IPO gate with a vengeance, with a market cap of $26 billion and a stock price of $72 per share. As of Friday (Feb. 7), it was trading at $49.92 a share with a market cap of $14.6 billion, well off its high the day it went public — and unable to get close ever since.

Sound familiar? It should, since it’s nearly identical to the drubbing Amazon received 10 years into its existence as a disruptor aiming to transform how consumers sought, found and purchased items.

Trackers and Reports

NEW DATA: Consumers Like Cashier-less Retail But Retailers Aren’t Hitting The Mark

Approximately one in every five American consumers expresses an interest in unattended channels to shop for electronics, clothes, cosmetics and health products, to cite a few examples. The challenge, however, is just 14.1 million consumers or 6.9 percent of the populous, in fact, purchased anything via unattended channels during the past three months.

This situation highlights not just a major gap between the demand for and supply of unattended retail options, but also indicates a large potential for market growth.

New Report: One Day Too Long: Why Small Businesses Want Rapid Settlement

A small business with an excellent offering can go internationally nearly overnight, but growth opportunities haven’t resolved the age-old problem of tight cash flow that small businesses face. In fact, more online payments mean merchants have less cash in the till. Aside from cash, most forms of payment can take a day or more to settle in merchant accounts, with the inclusion of digital wallets, which usually run on card rails already in existence.

How Greyhound Bus Makes Fraudsters Play Fare

Outdated fraud protection measures are as damaging to companies in the present day as outdated customer service standards. Merchants require digital platforms that can help their customers fulfill their needs fast while making sure that they do not fall victim to bad actors working to take their financial information or data. For this reason, Greyhound has enhanced its cybersecurity features and software to keep fraudsters at bay.

Fun, Cool and Otherwise Interesting

Chinese Ties To Equifax Hack Signal Tough Questions On IP, Trade

Four People’s Liberation Army (PLA) members were indicted by the United States in connection with the Equifax hack in which information linked to 145 million Americans was taken. The indictment unsealed Monday spans nine counts and charges the suspects in connection with their activities with the army’s 54th Research Institute.

Reynolds CEO: Recreating Grocery’s Home Goods Aisle For The Millennial

All customers want convenience, but the focus among millennials is particularly strong. Reynolds Consumer Products President and CEO Lance Mitchell told Karen Webster in a recent conversation: “What we’ve heard from millennials, and what we’ve seen in the data, is we can drive the occasion for use via at-home cooking with ease. The message we get is ‘make it easy, and I’ll do it.’” For this reason, Reynolds has been geared toward recipe integration in recent years. Among the trends it has seen, millennials are excellent followers of recipes.

The Coronavirus Is Making The Global Economy Sick

The COVID-19, or the coronavirus, claimed its latest economic victim. The annual Mobile World Conference (MWC), scheduled in Barcelona for late February, has been officially called off by organizers, citing high-profile pullouts by Google, Sony, Intel, Nokia, Vodafone, Amazon and others over concerns of encouraging the spread of the virus.

Visa On Tap To Pay, Cash Displacement And B2B Payments

Visa executives laid out a roadmap to displacing cash and checks across the worldwide stage, digitizing payments via tap to pay, click to pay, digital wallets, and cross-border flows — along with capturing a sizable slice of B2B spend — at its investor day presentation this week.

Visa President Ryan McInerney said beyond the core card business, there is still an opportunity to “capture new flows of money using our expanding network of networks.”