News

B2B Payments
American Express Global Business Travel Simplifies Structure to Reduce Compliance Costs
July 11, 2023

American Express Global Business Travel has begun eliminating its umbrella partnership-C corporate (UP-C) structure. With the series of transactions it has undertaken to do so, all of the company’s stockholders now hold the same class of common stock: Class A common stock, the B2B travel platform...

Artificial Intelligence
Salesforce Debuts AI Products and Raises List Prices
July 11, 2023

After seven years of no increase in list prices, Salesforce will be increasing the average list price globally by 9% in August. Salesforce is raising the cost of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Industry and Tableau, the company said in a Tuesday (July 11) press release. “Salesforce’s last...

Artificial Intelligence
End of an Era at Google DeepMind Hints at New Future for AI
July 11, 2023

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) as we know it began in earnest in 2017. That’s when a paper from Google’s DeepMind group titled “Attention Is All You Need” introduced the foundational architecture of transformer neural networks and socialized the revolutionary concept of multi-head attention, effectively slingshotting the capabilities of AI models...

Regulation
CFPB Fines Bank of America $250 Million Over Junk Fees
July 11, 2023

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has ordered Bank of America to pay more than $250 million in penalties and restitution to customers. The move comes in response to the bank’s “systematically double-dipping” on fees imposed on customers with insufficient funds, failure to pay reward bonuses explicitly promised to credit card...

Retail
Checkout.com Introduces AI-Powered Video ID Verification Tool
July 11, 2023

Checkout.com says it is using artificial intelligence to onboard customers in under two minutes. The payments solutions provider on Tuesday (July 11) announced the launch of Identity Verification, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered video verification tool. “Identity fraud is evolving, with deep fakes and deceptive documents growing in sophistication,”...

Retail
Brands Realize They Can’t Go It Alone, Overhaul D2C Focus 
July 11, 2023

The direct-to-consumer (D2C) playbook really had a moment. It even had staying power through the pandemic as it provided brands with a way to reach consumers directly, bypassing traditional distribution channels and establishing a closer connection with their audience. D2C strategies enabled companies to control...

Retail
Is Resale Losing Its Appeal as Consumers Cut Back on Spending? 
July 11, 2023

Despite being in operation for 12 years, The RealReal has yet to achieve profitability. However, other brands and retailers have observed the popularity of resale and are embracing it. This leads to the question of whether the efforts put into resale initiatives are truly worthwhile.  ...

Payment Methods
Flutterwave Launches Tuition to Pay School Fees in Local Currencies
July 11, 2023

Flutterwave has launched a product to help African students pay school fees when studying abroad and at home. The new payment product, Tuition, will enable African users to conveniently pay fees to educational institutions both within Africa and overseas by using their local currencies, the payments technology...

Regulation
EU and US Reach Much-Anticipated Data-Sharing Accord
July 11, 2023

In a victory for companies like Google and Meta, Europe and the U.S. have reached a data-sharing agreement. The European Commission announced Monday (July 10) the finalizing of the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework after concluding that the U.S. offers a level of data protection in line with...