Elavon’s Sage Pay Acquisition, Google’s Citi Deal, Facebook Pay Top This Week’s News

It’s the end of the workweek and the PYMNTS Weekender is here to make sure you didn’t miss anything — and that you start off your weekend right, with the latest in payments and commerce. We have a deep dive on immediate payments, analysis on Google’s deal with Citi and news on Elavon’s acquisition of Sage Pay.

Top News

Elavon Spends $300M For Sage Pay

Elavon, a U.S. Bancorp subsidiary, is acquiring U.K. payments gateway Sage Pay for $300 million. The deal comes as Sage Pay’s parent company Sage Group said in September that it was seeking “strategic alternatives for the payments business.”

Why Google’s Deal With Citi Isn’t About Becoming A Bank (But Is Still A Big Deal)

Google confirmed that it will partner with Citi and Stanford Federal Credit Union to launch a checking account linked to Google Pay sometime next year. Cache, reportedly the project’s code name, is described by Google as a “smart” DDA.

Amex Offers Big Cash Incentives To Businesses To Boost Acceptance

American Express, which has long lagged behind rivals such as Mastercard and Visa when it comes to business acceptance, has been aggressively pushing to close the gap, offering some businesses thousands of dollars in signup fees as well as other incentives.

PayPal On Facebook Pay And The Power Of Consumer Choice

Facebook Pay is a tool to take all the commerce already happening in its marketplace, on Instagram and so forth and make it easier for consumers to quickly pay from within the application in lieu of moving offsite to finish a deal. The mechanism for this is a single sign-on functionality highly reminiscent of Google Pay.

Trackers and Reports

Two-Thirds Of SMBs Show Interest In Immediate Payments To Boost Cash Flow

PYMNTS found that one of the biggest ways in which businesses expect to benefit from immediate payment platforms is increased revenue. The survey showed that 60.5 percent of firms believe these platforms can boost their revenues as sellers, and 64.8 percent believe they can bolster their revenues as buyers.

How Wahlburgers Keeps Fraud Off The Order-Ahead Menu

Wahlburgers recently became the latest entrant to the mobile order-ahead field with its WahlClub digital ordering app and rewards program. In a feature story, PYMNTS spoke with Wahlburgers Senior Vice President of Marketing and Innovation Dan Wheeler about how the quick-service restaurant (QSR) works to meet the security challenges inherent in the mobile order-ahead space tapping into two-factor authentication and machine learning.

What Wayfair’s Lawyer Says About The Wayfair v. South Dakota Decision

Lawyer George Isaacson argued Wayfair’s side in the historic 2018 South Dakota v. Wayfair case. Isaacson has watched remote sales tax policies unfold since that time in a flurry of new laws that differ by state, and even municipality.

In a feature story, Isaacson explains how this disparate tax landscape favors overseas sellers compared to domestic, what the chances are for federal eCommerce tax legislation and why more states are refraining from simplifying their tax codes.

Can AI Solve Home Sharing’s Fake Listings Problem?

Online platforms have to ensure that product listings on their sites are properly verified, as the fallout from failing to do so even once can have devastating effects. This is particularly the case for facilitators of products or services, such as homesharing rentals, where potential buyers could be stranded in an unfamiliar city in the case of a false listing, or sellers could be cheated out of potential revenue.

Managing the isolation and removal of these false listings is key to user trust, according to Chung-Man Tam, CEO of P2P business travel booking site 2nd Address.

Fun, Cool and Otherwise Interesting

Big Tech Antitrust Examination By AGs Gathers Steam

Antitrust headlines dominated the regulatory sphere this past week — focused, of course, on marquee names like Google and Facebook. In one salvo, U.S. House of Representatives lawmakers said antitrust regulators should take action against larger tech companies, which typically evade much oversight at the expense of smaller players.

Can Western QSR Brands — And Others — Gain More Power In China?

Two well-known North American-based quick-service restaurant (QSR) brands are preparing to duke it out in China for chicken-meal supremacy, the most recent sign of how Western brands are aiming to grow their footholds in that massive country.

Magic Mirror On The Wall, Is AR The Innovation For Retailers All?

Trying on clothes in the store can truly be an experience of fashion out of context — a problem that MIT graduate Salvador Nissi Vilcovsky decided to formally tackle 2013 when he along with MemoMi Co-Founder Ofer Saban launched a product that had heretofore never been seen in the market: a smart mirror.

How To Make Online Sports Gaming A Sure Bet For Payments, State Governments

George Connors, senior vice president of gaming solutions at Fiserv, told Karen Webster in a podcast that it’s only a matter of time before more state governments, as well as payments industry stakeholders, see the positives from legalized online gaming and sports betting.

Part of the impetus comes from the fact that sports betting is legal in 19 states, though mobile betting is only allowed in 13 of them.