Today In Payments: Stripe To Offer Banking As A Service To Merchants; Affirm Expands Canadian Presence With PayBright Buy

In today’s top news, Stripe will offer financial services to merchants on its platform, Affirm acquired BNPL firm PayBright, and J.P. Morgan analysts predict merger and acquisition deals to continue to surge through the holiday season.

Stripe to Offer Banking as a Service to Merchants on Its Platform

Stripe announced Stripe Treasury on Thursday (Dec. 4), a new service that will offer debit cards, bank accounts and other financial services to online merchants and vendors using Stripe’s payment processing platform. The venture will work with Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and other financial institutions (FIs).

Affirm Expands Canadian Presence With $264 Million PayBright Buy

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) payments startup Affirm announced its acquisition of Canada’s installment payments firm PayBright. The acquisition will help Affirm expand its network of merchants in both Canada and the United States.

JPMorgan: Year-End Deal-Making Surge Will Keep Bankers Busy

The year-end acceleration of mergers and acquisitions worldwide will keep bankers busy until the close of 2020, with deals emerging in most regions and industries, Bloomberg reported. Since July, global transactions hit valuations of $1.8 trillion, up more than one-third.

Census Data: A Third of Americans Expect Job Losses, Less Pay

About a third of Americans are anticipating further job loss, pay cuts and foreclosures or evictions due to COVID-19’s economic fallout, according to the third phase of the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

DATA: Digital-First Consumers Want the COVID-19 Vaccine, But It Won’t Change Their Digital-First Habits

Consumers who have embraced digital-first lifestyles are more likely to get vaccinated for COVID-19, but 79 percent of these consumers are less likely to return to their pre-pandemic ways of shopping and paying. In the latest installment of the Pandenomics series, PYMNTS surveys 2,806 U.S. consumers to examine how their perceptions around the COVID-19 vaccine relate to their adoption of digital-first habits.

Sticky.io CEO: Walmart+ About Attracting, Building Strong Relationships With New Customers

This year’s digital-first holiday shopping season should be “tremendous” for both subscription programs like Walmart+ and subscriptions as gifts, sticky.io CEO Brian Bogosian tells Karen Webster. He says that done right, subscriptions open up a whole new set of opportunities for merchants to retain and upsell consumers.

DATA: Millennials, Gen X Liked BNPL for Black Friday Clothing Purchases

Apparel was on the holiday shopping list on Black Friday, and so was buy now, pay later for making those purchases. New PYMNTS data finds that millennials and Gen Xers were most interested in using BNPL to make those purchases.

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