Top News In Payments: Elavon To Buy UK Gateway Sage Pay; Germany To Make Digital Payment Providers Open Systems To Rivals

In today’s top payments news, U.S. Bancorp subsidiary Elavon is acquiring U.K. payments gateway Sage Pay for $300 million. Also, Apple criticized the vote of German lawmakers to pass new legislation that would make it open up its mobile payment system to rival providers. And the U.S. recorded its fourth bank failure this year.

Germany To Force Mobile Payment Providers To Share Systems With Rivals

Apple criticized the vote of German lawmakers’ to pass new legislation that would make it open up its mobile payment system to competing providers. The law was added as an amendment to a bill regarding anti-money laundering (AML) measures. It didn’t name Apple or Apple Pay specifically, but it impacts all digital payment operators.

SEC Probes WeWork For Potential IPO Violations

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is reportedly looking into WeWork to see if the embattled firm went against financial rules while it was gearing up for its initial public offering (IPO). The SEC’s enforcement arm is looking at the firm’s disclosures to investors amid reports of questionable fundraising practices and conflicts of interest.

Three Small US Banks Collapse Over Past Month

The U.S. recorded its fourth bank failure this year — the first collapse of financial institutions since 2017, per Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) data. The most recent failure was on Nov. 1 when City National Bank of New Jersey closed its three branches. Resolute Bank closed on October 25 and Louisa Community Bank also shuttered on that day.

Elavon Spends $300M For Sage Pay

U.S. Bancorp subsidiary Elavon is acquiring U.K. payments gateway Sage Pay for $300 million. The arrangement comes as Sage Pay’s parent company Sage Group said in September that it was eyeing “strategic alternatives for the payments business.” The firm had more recently been focused on accounting, people and payroll software.

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

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

Project Cache seems intent not to make Google a bank, but to use banks, beginning with these two firms, to leapfrog their FinTech and Big Tech competitors and gain the consumer’s trust for keeping their funds safe.

It will move the management of consumers’ financial services, payments, banking, investments, commerce, entertainment, messaging, offers, media and information apps into an app powered by Google’s ecosystem.

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 on and make it easier for consumers to pay quickly from within the application in lieu of moving offsite to complete a deal. The mechanism for this is a single sign-on functionality highly reminiscent of Google Pay. Users will also be able to view payment history, update settings and manage preferred payment methods.

That new and streamlined action for users on the front end with Facebook branding is being powered by PayPal, in part, and it’s the newest expansion of a partnership between the two companies that is more than a decade old, Arnold Goldberg, PayPal’s senior vice president of global merchant products and technology, told Karen Webster in a conversation shortly after the news about Facebook Pay broke.

“What we’ve seen for years is that Facebook was going to be a social selling hub and as of today,” Goldberg told Webster. “What that translates into is that one-third of social sales are happening on one of Facebook’s properties.” The problem, Goldberg emphasized, is that payments on those properties was a “wild west of sellers and buyers” and Facebook needed a place to enable “elegant, trustworthy interactions” that didn’t yet exist there.