Today In Data: Acquisitions, ICO Hacks And Digital Ad Spend Reductions

Today in PYMNTS data, payment service providers are joining forces to create even stronger offerings, initial coin offerings (ICOs) fall prey to hackers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, digital advertising may not be doing as much good as some think, businesses are having a difficult time forecasting risks and U.K. small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are seeing a shift in global trade.

Here are the numbers:

$1.05 billion | Amount payment service provider TSYS spent to acquire payments solution company Cayan in a bid to boost its omnichannel offerings, a deal that was completed in January 2018. Cayan is the company behind Genius, a cloud-based platform that integrates payments processing, acceptance and tokenization services.

$400 million | Funds raised by ICOs that fall prey to hackers, comprising approximately 10 percent of the total, according to Ernst & Young research. ICOs have been pegged for everything from tax evasion to a long list of incidents by which hackers have lured the unwitting into lost funds — not to mention technical glitches that have had the same impact.

$200 million | Value of digital advertising spend Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser, cut in the last nine months of 2017. That year, the company’s ad spend totaled just $7.1 billion, and Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard bluntly admitted the reduction in spend had no impact on the company’s business.

51 percent | Percentage of businesses that say forecasting risks will be more difficult three years from now than today. Research from Atradius released in 2016 found that risks down the supply chain are 75 percent higher than they were pre-financial crisis. The Association for Financial Professionals performed a survey that found nearly half of businesses say exposure to uncertainty is higher today than three years ago too.

26 percent | Portion of SMBs that were trading internationally in the U.K. in Q4 2017, a massive dip from 52 percent of exporters at the end of 2016. According to analysts, this means 1.5 million fewer small businesses were a part of the global trading market headed into 2018.