“If you think traffic in city centers is bad now, just wait until self-driving cars emerge on the scene, cruising around to avoid paying hefty downtown parking fees. Even worse, because cruising is less costly at lower speeds, self-driving cars will slow to a crawl as they “kill time,” says transportation planner Adam Millard-Ball, an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.”

“Examples are beginning to be rolled out. RBS Group will soon launch Bó, a greenfield digital offering, built with new technology in under 12 months. National Australia Bank (NAB) has had success with QuickBiz, a fully digital unsecured lending solution, and German insurer ERGO has built Nexible as a challenger to its existing auto-insurance business. Goldman Sachs launched Marcus in the US and Europe, allowing it to enter consumer banking.”

“More than one billion people leave behind trails of information on WeChat every day as they use the messenger to chat, read, shop, hail rides, rent umbrellas and run many other errands. And the Tencent app has quietly started using this type of signal to determine whether a user is worthy of perks such as deposit-free renting services.”

“Total U.S. retail sales, excluding automobiles, rose 5.1% between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24 from a year earlier, according to MastercardSpendingPulse, which tracks both online and in-store spending with all forms of payment. Overall, U.S. consumers spent over $850 billion this holiday season, according to Mastercard.”

“WhatsApp Chief has written to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), seeking a formal nod to expand payments services to all its 200 million users in India. The messaging app, which has drawn fire from the government over spread of fake messages on its platform, continues to wait for a regulatory clearance to launch full-fledged payments operations in India – months after its ‘testing’ amassed nearly one million users, and almost two years since it first began discussions with the government on its payments services plan.”

“Mailchimp, the popular email newsletter service and marketing platform, today announced a partnership with Square that will allow its users to create landing pages with built-in e-commerce features. These shoppable landing pages are meant to give businesses a new sales channel to sell things like limited-edition goods or run-targeted promotions.”

“Singapore is about to introduce a new law to prevent shadow banking by requiring mobile wallet operators and payments startups to ring-fence deposits so they don’t function as unregulated banks.”

“Growth of revolving consumer credit balances slowed to 6.1% in 2017 from 6.8% in 2016, according to Federal Reserve data. It slowed further in the first half of this year, contracting slightly in the first quarter and rising at a 2.9% annual rate in the second. But lending recently reaccelerated to a 5.6% annual rate in August, the data show, suggesting the period of retrenchment could be ending.”

“The fintech revolution is changing the way banks and payments companies have won and retain customers. Traditionally, one institution could serve all of your financial needs. In the near future, business and consumers will interact with multiple companies in a more decentralized, technology-driven system.”

“The four major U.S. wireless carriers today detailed a new initiative that may soon let Web sites eschew passwords and instead authenticate visitors by leveraging data elements unique to each customer’s phone and mobile subscriber account, such as location, customer reputation, and physical attributes of the device. Here’s a look at what’s coming, and the potential security and privacy trade-offs of trusting the carriers to handle online authentication on your behalf.”

“About 27% of U.S. households are either unbanked or underbanked, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Despite economic growth and the proliferation of online services that have made it easier than ever to open and access bank accounts, those figures have remained little changed since the FDIC started tracking them in 2009. What’s more, those households — which are more likely to be poor, less-educated, young, black or Latino — pay a lot for their financial services. CFSI estimated Americans spend more than $100 billion every year for products or services such as payday loans and check cashing, as well as overdraft fees, effectively a penalty for being short on cash.”

“The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a federal law that effectively banned commercial sports gambling in most states, boosting the prospect of such gambling across the nation. The case concerned New Jersey, but it has implications for other states eager to allow and tax sports gambling. Americans are estimated to annually place $150 billion in illegal wagers on sports. State officials and representatives of the casino industry greeted the ruling with something like glee.”

“From card issuers and acquirers to ISVs and gateways, payments providers are working to simultaneously embrace new technologies and keep pace with rising customer demands. The result is a dramatic change in how payments products and services are being built, deployed and utilized. As part of this transformation a variety of trends are emerging that are reshaping the payments value chain.”

“Today, Stripe, the six-year-old online payments company that has been valued at $9 billion by private investors, is expected to announce a $1 million donation to California Yimby, a housing advocacy organization that was a driving force behind a recently killed bill that would have required “

“As smartphone adoption continues to grow, the P2P market grows with it.”

“In a ruling with potentially sweeping consequences for the so-called gig economy, the California Supreme Court on Monday made it much more difficult for companies to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees. The decision could eventually require companies like Uber, many of which are based in California, to follow minimum-wage and overtime laws and to pay workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance and payroll taxes, potentially upending their business models.”

“Part of the reason we see radical change in markets like China is the lack of inertia associated with well-established banking business models. But the “it won’t happen here” brigade in developed markets are beginning to see enough signs of disruption to be worried. In Europe, the leading fintech “challengers” are passing the 1 million customer threshold.”

“Everything old is new again, it seems. My most recent column covers an idea for a government “job guarantee” that has faded into and out of the popular consciousness since the 1940s. Now Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) wants to use the U.S. Postal Service to compete with retail lenders, another idea that resurfaces periodically.”

“But even though Early Warning Services, the payment network behind Zelle, has focused many of its efforts on peer-to-peer services since then, it has “several” large corporate customers that use Zelle to disburse money to individuals, said Lou Anne Alexander, Early Warning’s group president for payments. Their transactions tend to be smaller in volume but larger in dollar amount compared to Zelle’s average p-to-p transaction. She declined to name or specify how many companies offer Zelle’s business-to-consumer payments.”

“As open banking continues its rapid ascent, nearly 90 percent (87) of banks globally plan to move forward with open APIs, according to new benchmark data, “2018 Global Payments Insight Survey: Retail Banking,” from ACI Worldwide (NASDAQ: ACIW) and Ovum. The benchmark, comprised of responses from executives across financial institutions, merchants and billing organizations such as consumer finance and insurance, also showed that the emphasis on real-time payments has doubled from 31 percent to 62 percent within a 12-month span.”

“The combined company will be named T-Mobile, and it will be a force for positive change in the U.S. wireless, video, and broadband industries. The combination of spectrum holdings, resulting network scale, and expected run rate cost synergies of $6+ billion, representing a net present value (NPV) of $43+ billion will supercharge T-Mobile’s Un-carrier strategy to disrupt the marketplace and lay the foundation for U.S. companies and innovators to lead in the 5G era.”

“The Banks in Fintech report, released this week, found that banks have been foregoing big investments and partnerships over the past five quarters with a preference for building products in house — particularly in lending, payments and personal financial management. In both the U.S. and Europe banks spent more of their architecture investment dollars on capital markets software companies than blockchain startups.”

“So, what does the future of banking look like with access to all of this technology? The way customers interact with their financial institutions will continue to evolve and will leverage the technologies laid out in this article – even though the core tenets of banking (lending, deposit taking, and financial advice) will more than likely continue to be at the center of the banking customer relationship.”

“Machine learning and huge swaths of data are being enlisted in the battle to counter online fraud, with CyberSource announcing an enhancement to its fraud-prevention service and processor Worldpay Inc. launching a new fraud-prevention service Wednesday at MRC 2018, the annual conference held by the Merchant Risk Council.”

“German startup N26 just raised a $160 million Series C round led by Tencent and Allianz — some of N26’s existing investors are also participating. The company has attracted 850,000 customers and raised $215 million in total. N26 is building a retail bank from scratch.”

“How will consumers use biometrics for payments in the future? With the advance of face, finger, and voice identification, biometric technologies will be integrated with IoT devices to provide a better customer payment experience.”

“Pockit, the mobile banking app that provides current account functionality for the U.K.’s “underbanked”. The company has teamed up with financial inclusion fintech Nooli to launch ‘Pockit Loqbox,’ a potentially clever way for people with a poor credit rating to improve their score without taking further credit.”