Tag Archives: Payments & Commerce News

While it may sound like a story out of the movies or motivational books that many people read today, the story of Bom Kim who is the founder of Coupang, a $9 billion electronic commerce company has been inspiring through an through. Coupang has been described by many to be South Korea’s “Amazon”, an appellation that hasn’t been accorded to any other company; at least not yet. Coupang has been one of those companies that have had a history of disruption and reinvention which has helped make it...

Consumers in the United States made it again. The record for Cyber Monday was hit and it amounted to $9.4 billion spent or 18.9% year-over-year growth, according to preliminary data by Adobe Analytics.However, most of the buyers didn’t wait until Monday to start shopping since retailers started sales earlier in the month, just after Thanksgiving and Black Friday. As we have already reported Black Friday online consumers spent $7.4 billion.Among the winners of this holiday season are Best Buy,...

Online shoppers in the United States seem to have made a new name for themselves as the last Black Friday event produced the second-largest sales in history next to last year’s Cyber Monday. Sources indicate that while the Black Friday Sales have been the biggest so far, “small business Saturday” has also gone up by 18% as against last years’ figures reaching $3 billion while Black Friday sales reached about $7.4 billion. But let’s not forget about the last year’s Cyber Monday sales that were...

Two of the biggest shopping events in the world are Black Friday and Cyber Monday. On both days, merchants and retailers considerably crash their prices so much that it causes such a frenzy among shoppers. In many cases, people wait till any of these days to make purchases they could have made at other times in the year, taking advantage of significant price slashes – sometimes up to 90% on selected items with selected retailers. As Amazon’s Cyber Monday begins and people begin to shop,...

On Sunday, December 1, crypto exchange Huobi along with other Chinese telecom players joined the country’s state-backed popular blockchain consortium Blockchain Services Network (BSN). Huobi has joined as one of the first members of BSN which is an industry alliance initiated by the State Information Center (SIC).The BSN was just launched in the last month of October by the SIC with an aim to boost the blockchain sector growth and further encourage the development of smart cities in the...

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving y’all. Be thankful for your life, your family and, hopefully, your wallets. Hope you had a nice dinner and it prepared you for the Christmas holidays.  However, today is Black Friday and even though it should remind us on the awful things done to the slaves in the U.S. back in time, it should remind us that, except this should never happen again, we could use this date to do something good – for someone, or for us (‘cause you have to love yourself,...

Swedish fintech firm Klarna has become the undisputed champion in the fintech space. Sources indicate that the gains made his year alone has put the firm light years ahead of its peers and competitors. The e-payments firm has indicated that about 60,000 merchants have been added to its network and that it has created linkages with about 190,000 retail partners in addition to 16 million new users of the service as well.Moreover, it has emerged that the fintech firm is now worth about $5.5...

Popular stock-trading startup Robinhood has decided that it is no longer interested in becoming a federally insured bank. Months ago, the company applied for a bank charter with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), in an effort to become a fully-fledged bank but has now decided to shelve said plans.According to the statement, the company has taken this step to shift its attention away from banking to its own core business directed at improving the efficiency of the financial...

Vinted has recently finished its funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, previous backers Sprints Capital, Inside Venture Partners, Accel and Burda Principal Investments. The startup raised a total of $141 million and reached a total valuation of $1 billion. Since the startup is from Lithuania, it is now the second unicorn startup coming out from the Baltics. Previously, an Estonian startup Taxify, which now has rebranded to Bolt had reached a valuation of $1 billion.The company...

Banking app Revolut has introduced a new feature that will allow many users to use the app just like any other bank account. The introduction of the direct debit feature for the UK pound has enabled users to be able to pay for goods and services with direct debit as it is becoming the norm for many businesses at the moment. Already Euro direct debit services were started last year. Many businesses prefer direct debits as card transaction fees and chargebacks are usually more problems than...