Today In Data: Crypto Thresholds, eCommerce Boosts And SMB Loan Origination Declines

Today in PYMNTS’ data, bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices have a psychological barrier threshold, online merchants are scored on ease of online checkout factors, manual investigation timeframes are decreasing (and saving firms money in the process), small- and medium-sized business (SMB) loan origination is less than half what it was before the financial crisis and U.K. SMBs are being unnecessarily penalized for international money transfers.

Here are the numbers:

$10,000 | The psychological barrier threshold associated with bitcoin and cryptocurrency prices, particularly amid raids on suspect operators, tax rates in South Korea and hacks of crypto exchanges. Beyond the excitement and excitability of the trading, perhaps, are real-world business use cases based largely on the distributed ledger technology across which transactions are recorded.

750 | Number of online merchants in the quarterly PYMNTS Checkout Conversion Index (CCI) merchant sample. The CCI measures frictions associated with checking out online and via mobile devices. For the last two and a half years, PYMNTS has shopped the same random sample of 750 online merchants, which collectively represent 70 percent of online commerce sales, excluding Amazon.

50 percent | The higher end of the reduced manual investigative timeframe, which averaged 40 to 50 percent declines. Cost-savings can be material in internal healthcare, according to Anil Sawrup, chief commercial officer of Cambridge Global Payments. Clients have reported a reduced manual investigative timeframe — the typical back-and-forth of gathering information about beneficiaries — helping to ensure claims get paid on time.

40 percent | The current level of SMB loan origination as compared to pre-financial crisis levels, with the total number plummeting by nearly three-quarters during that event. While there is evidence of recovery, the Small Business Administration (SBA) found levels remain significantly below pre-crisis levels. Further, large banks saw a more pronounced decline in the number of originations during the financial crisis than smaller ones.

20 | U.K. SMB’s average number of cross-border transactions of $1,300 per month that result in them being forced by their banks to pay more than $1,400 a month in fees alone, according to a report released in 2016 by international money transfer service Covercy. Analysts have described those fees as largely unnecessary.