Top News In Payments: Sensory, OEMS Team For Independence From The Cloud; PBOC Says Stablecoins Threaten Yuan

In today’s top news, Sensory released TrulyNatural, its speech recognition and natural-language-understanding platform for smart appliances, and China’s Central Bank says stablecoins threaten the yuan’s international development. Also, Apple shares are predicted to continue to soar with the introduction of their 5G iPhones.

Sensory Teams With Appliance OEMS for Smart Voice Platform

Privacy concerns regarding the cloud continue to grow as smart appliances adopt voice services. Silicon Valley firm Sensory has unveiled its solution to the friction with its domain-specific assistant for smart appliances, TrulyNatural. The vocabulary speech recognition and natural-language-understanding platform helps to ensure that smart appliances won’t have to send voice requests to the cloud.

China’s Central Bank Says Libra, Stablecoins Are a Threat to Yuan

Stablecoins like Facebook’s Libra could hamper the international development of China’s yuan, leading to fluctuating asset prices and weakened impacts of capital controls, said the People’s Bank of China. But the PBOC is also looking to create a digital yuan for “spend, not for speculation,” like other digital currencies.

Analyst: Apple Will See 25 Pct Jump in Stock Price Due to 5G

Analyst Dan Ives says “we’re only halfway through the supercycle” of Apple’s soaring stock prices, predicting that their upcoming 5g iPhones will set fire to their currently lagging phone sales and raise the stock another 25 percent.

Klarna Co-founder Among Swedish Startup Execs Funding Social Change

Leaders from startups like Klarna, Minecraft and Candy Crush Saga are joining H&M’s founding Persson family to fund firms that are trying to solve the world’s biggest problems, like poverty, food waste and climate change.

Payments Flash-Forward: Why December 2020 Will Be One to Remember

We asked 29 payments executives to make a prediction about payments and commerce that they’d put in a time capsule to be unearthed at the end of 2020. Amid the common themes that emerged: Change will come to the point of sale, spurred by the continued shift to contactless ways to pay and more buying power for the mighty millennial.

A ‘Diaper’ by Any Other Tax Code: The Complexities of Selling Across State Tax Laws

When it comes to taxes, “necessity items” in one state can be viewed as “discretionary purchases” in another. That’s a problem for retailers trying to navigate tax compliance while selling items like diapers that are taxed very differently across state lines. In this month’s Next-Gen Sales Tax Tracker, we explore these compliance complexities, their impacts and the policies that state governments and businesses are developing to streamline retailer obligations.